PREFACE
1 A copy of Deegan’s lecture, ‘The Mining Camps of the Fifties’, is held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.
2 Geoffrey Blainey drew the arresting word picture in a discussion with Tony Jones on the ABC’s Lateline on 7 May 2001.
3 Argus, 6 December 1854.
4 The full speech can be downloaded from the Whitlam Institute’s website.
INTRODUCTION: DUST AND RATTLING BONES
1 H. R. Nicholls published his account, ‘Reminiscences of the Eureka Stockade’, in 1890.
2 The number of miners killed during and after the Eureka clash is highly contentious. The conclusion to this book explains why. Twenty-seven men are listed as died from wounds received on 3 December, registered on Ballarat District Death Register on 20 June 1855. At least three bodies are known to have been buried at sites other than Ballarat: Ian MacFarlane, Eureka from the Official Records (Melbourne: Public Records Office Victoria, 1995), 104. Dorothy Wickham has also traced nine other civilians reported as dead of wounds inflicted at Eureka in other sources: Dorothy Wickham, Deaths at Eureka (Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 1996), 48. Peter Lalor listed twenty dead in his published account of the affray: Age, 7 April 1855. In 1892, this list was inscribed on a Ballarat statue in Lalor’s honour, with the words and others who were killed tacked on the end. For the full text of the statue inscription, see Bob O’Brien, Massacre at Eureka: The Untold Story (Ballarat: The Sovereign Hill Museums Association, 1992), 132. Greg Blake has recently claimed that these ‘others’ may number at least twenty-one unidentified casualties. Blake also concludes that there were many more military casualties than the four military officially reported. See Gregory Blake, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart: The Battle for the Eureka Stockade, 3 December 1854 (Loftus, ACT: Australian Army History Unit, 2009), 198–200. Some witnesses later reported up to fifty dead of wounds sustained during the battle. See chapter 12 of this book. The real figure may never be known.
3 The observations of Charles Evans are all drawn from his diary, written between 24 September 1853 and 21 January 1855. Until 2012, this diary was known as the ‘Samuel Lazarus diary’. My research discovered that Charles Evans was the true author of the famous goldfields diary. For an account of the research journey that led to the official change in provenance, see Clare Wright, ‘Desperately Seeking Samuel: A Diary Lost and Found,’ La Trobe Journal 90(2012):6–22.
4 Ballarat Times, 3 December 1856.
5 These population figures are from Public Record Office Victoria (hereinafter PROV), VPRS 1189/95 M55/443, monthly returns of the Gold Fields Commission. Population statistics for Ballarat and the goldfields 1854 are also found in VPRS 1189/95 L55/1734, VPRS 1189/94 and VPRS 1085/09. These figures are sometimes inconsistent with each other, and occasionally change markedly from month to month.
6 This quote is in the Andrew Crowley file in the Montrose Cottage Collection held at the Gold Museum, Ballarat.
7 All observations of Maggie Johnston are drawn from this diary. Ellen Campbell has now lodged a transcript of the diary at the State Library of Victoria. Margaret (Maggie) Johnston. Diary, transcript, 1854 May 18–Oct. 17 1856, 1854. State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts Collection MS 1641288.
8 Ballarat Star, 26 July 1884.
9 Ballarat Star, 28 November 1884.
10 Argus, 4 December 1854, 9. There is no registered death for Catherine Smith in 1854 or 1855. There is a Moyle family still living in Upwey, but my attempts to contact them have been unproductive.
ONE: A VIRGIN COUNTRY
1 Scottish journalist and politician Thomas McCombie had immigrated to Victoria in 1841. These observations are excerpted from McCombie’s later writings, Australian Sketches, penned after his return to England in 1859. ‘Sketching’ Australia was a popular pastime, akin to today’s travel writing, and there are many published Australian Sketches.
2 Henry Mundy wrote his remarkable 730-page memoirs sometime before his death in 1912.
3 William Howitt’s famous work, Land, Labour and Gold, was published in London in 1855, on his return to England after two years in Victoria. William’s wife, Mary Howitt, with whom he co-authored 180 published works of poetry and prose, did not accompany her husband and two sons to Australia.
4 It was quite common for a ship to have its own in-house newspaper, circulated by an enterprising editor who had brought a small printing press on board. Ship’s newspapers contained news of births, deaths and marriages during the journey, shipboard gossip, notices for entertainments, advertisements for items being bought or sold, as well as editorial comments about what immigrants could expect in their new life in the colonies. The State Library of Victoria holds all ten volumes of the Marco Polo Chronicle, published by Francis Whitfield Robinson and edited by Dr Gillespie.
5 It is the conventional wisdom that Hiscock ‘discovered’ gold at Ballarat. See, for example, Robyn Annear, Nothing But Gold: The Diggers of 1852, (Melbourne, Text Publishing, 1999), 10. Note that in The Rush That Never Ended, Geoffrey Blainey attributes the first Buninyong finds in the Ballarat region to John Dunlop and his mate Regan. Geoffrey Serle also gives the guernsey to Hiscock in The Golden Age. All authors agree that small deposits had been found in other parts of Victoria prior to this date, but the Ballarat finds of August/September 1851 were the first significant discoveries. Meanwhile, Fred Cahir has documented the preexisting knowledge of Indigenous people with regards to mineral deposits, including gold. Fred Cahir, ‘Finders not Keepers: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria’, in Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, ed. Alan Mayne (Perth: API Network, 2006).
6 John Capper wrote three guidebooks to Australia, published in 1852, 1853 and 1855. These observations are drawn from his 1855 edition. All three volumes are held by the State Library of Victoria.
7 Sarah Watchwarn’s words are preserved in the 1934 collection Records of Pioneer Women, produced by the Women’s Centennial Council to celebrate one hundred years since the establishment of the first long-term European settlement in Victoria. Note that Ellen Clacy used the phrase ‘grass widows’ in her 1853 account of her sojourn in Victoria. She said it was a mining term. Later linguists consider the expression to have a dual etymology. It can refer to the grass that was used to stuff the marital mattress, which has been abandoned by the departed husband. Or it can refer to the phrase ‘the grass is always greener’, suggesting the husband has left for more promising pastures. Historian Christina Twomey gives an excellent account of the lives of women left behind by the gold rush in her book Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare.
8 Wathaurung language terms were collected and recorded by Charles Griffith in the 1830s. Griffith was an early civil servant and politician in the Port Phillip District. His diaries, including extensive vocabulary lists, are preserved in the State Library of Victoria. My thanks to Ballarat-based historian Fred (David) Cahir for pointing me in the direction of Griffith’s work. Cahir’s own extensive research on the Wathaurung is essential reading for any modern student or scholar of gold rush history. For details about Queen Rose and Caroline, see Dorothy Wickham’s invaluable collection of biographical sketches, Women of the Diggings, Ballarat 1854.
9 William McLeish wrote his memoirs in 1914, when he was almost seventy years old. The manuscript is held by the State Library of Victoria.
10 Samuel Heape’s diary, kept between October 1853 and March 1854, is held by the State Library of Victoria. The observations of J. J. Bond are drawn from his ship diary aboard the Lady Flora, departing Gravesend in April 1853. Bond’s diary is held in microform in many Australian collections through the Australian Joint Copying Project.
11 Newcastle Courant, 9 January 1857, 6.
12 Walter Bridges, Travelogue, The Travels of Walter Bridges, c. 1856, Ballarat Library.
13 American prospector Charles Ferguson makes it clear that using Aboriginal guides was common practice. See Ferguson’s memoir Experiences of a Forty-Niner. Fred Cahir also documents many instances of Wathaurung making the most of immigrants’ ignorance of the land for their own financial benefit.
14 Cahir, ‘Dallong’, 38.
15 The words belong to artist William Strutt, who is most famous for his remarkable painting Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851, which hangs in the State Library of Victoria. Strutt is also responsible for the lovely sketch of Victoria’s grass widows fending for themselves in the pursuit of daily chores ordinarily performed by men.
16 Wilhelmina (Willie) Davis Train’s letters home to America are preserved in the manuscripts collection of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria under the misleading name ‘Miller Davis Train’. George Francis Train’s published accounts in the Boston Globe are compiled in the book edited by E. Daniel and Annette Potts, A Yankee Merchant in Goldrush Australia.
17 Weston Bate, ‘Gold: Social Energiser and Definer’, 7.
18 Or mistress! Mining magnate Alice Cornwell, who owned and operated lucrative gold mines in Ballarat in the 1880s, was known as Madame Midas. Her life is fictionalised in the novel of that name by Fergus Hume, who is credited as the author of the first Australian crime novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. Both novels were extremely popular with Australian and British audiences of the day.
19 Edward Bell, ‘Blue Book’ Report on Immigration, tabled 27 September 1854, Government Printer.
20 Dan and Davis Calwell were the great-great-uncles of Arthur Calwell, who as Minister for Immigration in the post-World War II era, was a staunch defender of the White Australian Policy while advocating the strategy of ‘populate or perish’. Dan and Davis Calwell’s letters are held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.
21 These statistics are gleaned from my own number-crunching of the Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriage registers, 1851–7.
22 The observations of Thomas Pierson are gleaned from his diaries (1852–64), held by the State Library of Victoria.
23 There is widespread confusion about the authorship of the anonymous book Social Life and Manners in Australia by a Resident, published in London in 1861. It is generally attributed to Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, a writer and women’s rights campaigner who wrote two novels about her time in New South Wales, as well as Memories of Social Life in Australia Thirty Years Ago, published in London in 1914. The authors of Australian Autobiographical Narratives: 1850-1900, Kay Walsh and Joy Hooten, conclude that Social Life and Manners was not written by Ramsay-Laye, as the anonymous author came to Australia ‘in 1851 or 1852’ with her husband and never went to New South Wales. Walsh and Hooten do not propose an alternative to Ramsay-Laye as the author of Social Life and Manners, but adding weight to their theory is the fact that the State Library of Victoria’s rare copy of Social Life and Manners is inscribed as being authored by ‘J. Massey or Massary’. My research shows that a James Massey and Mrs James Massey arrived in Victoria in October 1852 aboard the Julia. However, there is no record of a Mr and Mrs Laye (or Ramsay-Laye) arriving in either Victoria or NSW in the 1850s. On the basis of this evidence, I am inclined to agree that Social Life and Manners was not penned by Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, but rather by Mrs Elizabeth Massey.
24 The observations of Alexander Dick are drawn from his exceptional three-volume reminiscences of his life in Victoria between 1852 and 1907. Dick died in 1913. The original manuscripts are held at the State Library of Victoria.
25 This traveller’s account was published in Murray’s Guide to the Gold Diggings, the Lonely Planet of its day.
26 The technology of mineral extraction at Ballarat is ably covered by Weston Bate in Lucky City and Geoffrey Blainey in The Rush That Never Ended. However, my deepest debt of gratitude for understanding the geology of gold mining goes to Tim Sullivan, deputy CEO of Sovereign Hill.
27 Weston Bate calls the Ballarat Circus Jones’ Circus. John Wilson, a Eureka descendant, names the circus’s proprietors as Messrs Jones and Noble in his 1885 account. However, Raffaello Carboni refers to it at Rowe’s Circus in his infamous 1855 eyewitness account. Rowe’s American Circus was certainly in Melbourne in August 1853; Thomas and Frances Pierson rented a house opposite it. Pierson says Rowe made £20,000 with his circus and always played to packed audiences. Joseph Rowe and his wife, an ‘equestrienne’, are known to have cleared $100,000 on their Australian tour. They charged 50c per adult and half price for children and servants. See John Culhane, The American Circus, 80. Joseph Rowe and his family left Victoria in 1854 to return to San Francisco.
28 These vignettes are all drawn from Robert Whitworth’s Australian Stories Round the Campfire, published in the Australian International Monthly in 1872.
TWO: DELIVERANCE
1 Genealogical research on the Nolan, Hynes and Gittens families was supplied by Bill Hanlon. Hanlon was raised by his grandmother, Bridget Hynes, Bridget Nolan’s daughter. Additional information was provided by John Wilson, also a descendant of the Nolan/Hynes family.
2 There is a substantial literature about women and Chartism. Jutta Schwarzkopf’s book Women in the Chartist Movement is the most comprehensive. Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrell’s The People’s Bread also gives an excellent account of women’s political activism in this period.
3 A remarkable collection of letters between William and Caroline Dexter is held by the State Library of Victoria. See also Patrick Morgan’s excellent dual biography of the Dexters, Folie à Deux.
4 A file of cuttings from the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard is held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.
5 The observations of Fanny Davis are drawn from her ship diary, written upon the Conway, 3 June 1858–10 September 1858. The diary is held at the State Library of Victoria.
6 The best analysis of the nineteenth-century concept of ‘manliness’, which is quite different from today’s notion of ‘masculinity’, is provided by Gail Bederman in her book Manliness and Civilization. My thanks to Marilyn Lake for pointing me in the direction of Bederman’s work.
7 This fellow’s words are recorded in Mrs May Howell’s book.
8 These lines are all drawn from the Marco Polo Chronicle, 23 November 1853–21 January 1854. Thomas Evans, brother of Charles and George Evans, was on this ship.
9 For these letters and diaries to be found in Australia, either copies or original items need to have been repatriated to Australian collections. Copies of Lucy’s letters are now held at the Gold Museum, Ballarat.
10 Graeme Davison discusses the English pastoral idyll, transplanted onto Victoria’s rural hinterland, in The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne. Historian Helen Doyle has also written eloquently on this subject in her unpublished doctoral thesis.
11 This statistic is not derived from immigration agent Bell’s reports. It is gleaned from the research of Pauline Rule. See her article ‘Irish Women and the Problem of Ex-Nuptial Conception’.
12 In 1857, popular goldfields balladeer Charles Thatcher penned a song touching on the cultural anxiety about the sexual homogeneity of Chinese immigrants. Called ‘The Fine Fat Saucy Chinaman’, it included these lyrics: Now John, with all his many faults/Leads an industrious life/The greatest drawback that he has/Is that he has no wife …Now as he’s getting lots of gold/I’ve not the slightest doubt/That ultimately Chinese girls/By thousands will come out. For the full song, see Thatcher’s Colonial Songster, 79.
13 On the Chinese regarding Europeans as inferior, see Keir Reeves and Andrew Mountford’s work on the Chinese during the gold rush.
14 PROV, original papers tabled in the Legislative Assembly, VPRS 3253/53.
THREE: CROSSING THE LINE
1 The life of Louisa Timewell, including her first-hand accounts of the ship journey to Victoria, is honoured in the 1934 Records of Pioneer Women. I’ve supplemented the 1934 entry with basic birth, death and marriage research.
2 The Marco Polo Chronicle.
3 Céleste de Chabrillan was a French courtesan prior to her marriage to Lionel de Chabrillan, the French consul. She had written a scandalous memoir of her highly colourful life prior to her voyage to Australia. Her second book was her memoir of her journey to and time in Victoria, based on diary entries and published as Un Deuil au bout du mond (Death at the End of the World) some twenty years later. Shunned by Melbourne society due to her self-publicised shady past, the melodramatic but remarkably modern Céleste came to see her time in the antipodes as a sort of bereavement. An English translation of Un Deuil has been written by Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen as The French Consul’s Wife.
4 Charlotte Spence’s experiences aboard the John and Lucy in June 1854 are captured in her husband John Spence’s diary. Agnes Paterson’s observations are drawn from her ship journal aboard the Lord Clyde in 1859, held by the State Library of Victoria. Henry Nicholls’ observations are drawn from his 1852 ship diary. Henry and his wife Marian lost their baby daughter, Marian, eight days into this ill-fated journey. Marian was their fourth child. The Nicholls had five more children in Victoria. State Library of Victoria holds all of the these manuscripts.
5 The observations of Bethuel Adams are drawn from his ship diary, written aboard the Van Marnix, departing Gravesend in October 1853. The diary is held by the State Library of Victoria.
6 Quoted in Don Charlwood’s The Long Farewell, 88.
7 The observations of Jane Swan are drawn from her Diary of a Voyage from Gravesend to Port Phillip on the William and Jane, 12 August 1853–2 December 1853, held by the State Library of Victoria.
8 An excellent account of the Ticonderoga tragedy and its aftermath can be found at www.mylorenet/Ticonhome.html
9 Henry Nicholls gives us this insight.
10 James Menzies immigrated to Victoria in 1848. His shipboard diary is held by the State Library of Victoria.
11 Beelzebub, alias Lucifer, alias Satan, was sometimes held accountable for the demonic possession of young women. His name also comes up repeatedly in the Salem Witch Trials.
12 The observations of Alpheus Boynton are drawn from his diaries, kept between 1852 and 1856. The diaries are held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
13 Sarah Ann Raws’ shipboard diary, kept between May and August 1854, is part of the Tomlinson Papers, held at the State Library of Victoria. Sarah’s father had owned a cotton mill in England before trying his luck in Victoria. Sarah remained in Victoria after the rest of her family returned to England in 1858. Sarah married butcher John Tomlinson and lived on the Mt Alexander diggings. They had ten children.
14 Mrs William Graham sailed to Victoria on the Marco Polo in 1863. Her account of her journey is held by the State Library of Victoria.
FOUR: THE ROAD
1 John D’Ewes published his account Ballarat in 1854 in London in 1857.
2 These statistics are compiled from the Melbourne Monthly Magazine vol. 1 no. 11 June 1855 and the Colonial Secretary’s Office Inward Correspondence, PROV VPRS 1189/94. For Aborigines as a ‘dying race’, see William Westgarth’s early history of Victoria, Victoria and the Victorian Gold Mines. Westgarth attributed the decline in the Aboriginal population to the practices of cannibalism and infanticide, particularly of first-born females.
3 Solomon Belinfante’s ship journal, penned between 3 April and 21 June 1854, is held by the State Library of Victoria.
4 The observations of Martha Clendinning are drawn from her unpublished memoirs, Recollections of Ballarat: A Lady’s Life at the Diggings Fifty Years Ago. The manuscript forms part of the Clendinning–Rede papers, held by the State Library of Victoria.
5 This lovely phrase belongs to Weston Bate, drawn from his essay ‘Gold: Social Energiser and Definer’.
6 Janet Kincaid’s letter is included in a collection of letters addressed to residents of Maryborough, Victoria, 1851–1902. The collection is held by the State Library of Victoria under the author/creator label Maryborough. The diary of American digger Silas Andrews is also in this collection of records.
7 Information pertaining to Eliza Darcy is drawn from the oral history and records of the Darcy/Howard families.
8 The passage is published in John Capper’s 1855 guidebook.
9 The observations of Eliza Lucus are drawn from her reminiscences, written in 1913 and held by the State Library of Victoria.
10 Jane McCracken’s anguished letters make for uncomfortable reading. From the physical and emotional symptoms she describes to her mother, it is likely Jane was suffering from postnatal depression. Jane’s letters form part of the McCracken Family Papers, available on microfilm as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project. Jane’s brothers-in-law, Robert and Peter McCracken, established the famous McCracken’s City Brewery in 1851. McCracken’s was one of the original six breweries that formed the cartel of Carton and United Breweries (CUB) in 1903.
11 John Capper cites these statistics.
12 Historian Geoffrey Serle relates these statistics in The Golden Age.
13 These are merchant Robert Caldwell’s numbers.
14 William Kelly records these numbers in the 1860 edition of his book. William Westgarth’s offers the same statistical analysis.
15 This forms part of Magistrate John D’Ewes’ analysis of what went wrong in 1854.
16 Bonwick’s Notes of a Gold Digger is the source here.
17 Blake’s vision in turn came from Luke 3:2–6: Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all mankind will see God’s salvation.
18 The observations of Emily Skinner are drawn from her journals and memoir. These were written anonymously, the initials E. S. being the only clue to the woman who had immigrated to Victoria in 1854 to join her husband. Writer Edward Duyker painstakingly traced Emily’s identity and published the manuscript in 1995. The observations of Mary Bristow are drawn from her journal, kept in 1854, and catalogued as Aunt Spencer’s Diary in the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s collection. Mary addressed her journal to her nephew. Mrs Mannington Caffyn’s observations are included in the anthology of women’s writing, Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life by Australian Ladies, edited by Mrs Patchett Martin in 1891. Other contributors to the collection include the well-known writers ‘Tasma’ and Mrs Campbell Praed.
19 James Bonwick, Australian Gold Digger’s Monthly Magazine, March 1853.
20 Margaret Watson’s story is recorded in Records of Pioneer Women.
21 These stories are drawn from the Victorian Police Gazette of 27 February 1854 and 24 March 1854 but any given edition of the Police Gazette in this era will have similar details of runaway women and dead babies.
22 The physical description of Catherine Bentley comes from her prison entry record. Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 521: vol. 2: prisoner no 2818. Descriptions of her temperament are from family oral history. Andrew Crowley, descendant, interview with author, 20 July 2004. Audio and video recorded. Description of James from Victorian Police Gazette, 20 March 1856.
FIVE: THE GOLD DIGGERS OF ’54
1 PROV VPRS 1189/93, monthly returns January 1854.
2 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, A Visit to Australia and Its Gold Regions (London, 1853). This rare book is held in the Special Collections of the Baillieu Library, the University of Melbourne.
3 This is Jo Anne Levy’s number. Susan Lee Johnson cites the proportion of women on the southern Californian diggings as three per cent in 1850 and nineteen per cent by 1860.
4 Susan Lee Johnson makes this point in Roaring Camp.
5 PROV, Colonial Secretary’s Office Outward Registered Correspondence, VPRS 3219, E1483.
6 The quote is drawn from an undated article in the Ballarat Star entitled ‘Reminiscences of 1851–4’. The article is in the Francis William Niven Collection held by the University of Melbourne Archives. MS 74/73.
7 Chris McConville used this expression in his speech at the launch of the collection Deeper Leads, edited by Keir Reeves and David Nichol, at the Ballarat Art Gallery in 2007.
8 Mary Ann Tyler (nee Brooksbank) wrote her memoirs of life as a female gold digger in New South Wales in 1909, six years prior to her death.
9 The Advertiser article is cited in Fred Cahir’s PhD thesis, ‘Black Gold’.
10 Records of shareholders date for 1857. Marion McAdie’s CD ROM, Mining Shareholders Index 1857–1886, is an invaluable data set for tracing the shareholding activities of individuals and families. Her index is extracted from the Victorian Government Gazette 1857–86.
11 Geelong Advertiser, 10 June 1854.
12 Star of the East arrived in September 1853. Depending on whether Anne conceived on board, the baby could have been born as early as April 1854. The dead baby materialises on the certificate for Anne’s second marriage. Anne Diamond (née Keane/Kane) married John Bourke in August 1856.
13 Quoted in Laurel Johnson’s groundbreaking booklet, Women of Eureka.
14 Mary Davison King’s story is relayed in Records of Pioneer Women.
15 Shandy-gaff was a mixture of pale ale and ginger beer, a forerunner of today’s shandy of beer and lemonade.
16 Mr McMillan’s evidence to the Gold Fields Commission, recorded in the Gold Fields Commission Report 1854–55.
17 Harriet’s story is included in John Capper’s guidebook.
18 For Mrs Fitchett’s reports in the Geelong Advertiser, see, for example, 13 February 1854.
19 Victorian Census, 1857.
SIX: WINNERS AND LOSERS
1 PROV, Denominational School Board, Inward Registered Correspondence, VPRS 61/3.
2 All details of Sarah Skinner’s death are drawn from her inquest files. PROV VPRS 24.
3 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; Or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicine, 1798 A. Strahan [etc.] cited in Rudy’s List of Archaic Medical Terms. http://www.antiquusmorbus.com/
4 Jean Edois Carey Inquest. PROV Inquest Deposition Files, VPRS 24/18 (1854/103).
5 Observations of Charles Eberle are drawn from his diary, held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.
6 The observations of Martin Mossman are drawn from his 1853 letters to his Aunt Hetty. The State Library of Victoria holds the letters. Martin told Hetty that he was going to leave the diggings for New Orleans, but there is no record of his departure from Victoria.
7 Antoine Fauchery’s Lettres d’un Mineur was originally published in Paris in 1857.
8 These numbers are drawn from Digger—Victorian Pioneers Index 1837–1888, available online at the National Library of Australia’s eResources website. The figures are by nature conservative, as many itinerant gold seekers did not stop to register their newborns, particularly stillbirths.
9 David Goodman devotes a whole chapter to the concept of Excitement in his exemplary study, Gold Seeking.
10 The observations of Samuel Huyghue are drawn from his unpublished account, The Ballarat Riots, penned in 1884. The State Library of Victoria holds the manuscript.
11 Greg Blake has calculated the mean ages of the soldiers stationed at Ballarat. He does so in order to make a counterpoint: that the men of the 40th had significantly more experience as trained soldiers than Huyghue gives them credit for.
12 See, for example, Paul Kennelly’s unpublished thesis, Wives in Search of Servants. Kennelly has compiled a particularly useful collection of data tables regarding female emigration to Victoria in the period 1848–54.
13 These statistics are drawn from my analysis of the Victorian marriage registers. There were many more common law marriages, like that of Anne and Martin Diamond and William and Sarah Skinner. The fact that wives were choosing de facto relationships over sanctified marriages is another indicator that women were hedging their bets, particularly in an era when divorce laws meant that til death us do part was the legal reality.
14 Henry Catchpole’s observations are drawn from the book Victoria Gold:The Everyday Life of Two English Brothers Who Were Diggers, compiled by Kenneth Kutz.
15 Catherine Chisholm’s brother’s remarks are drawn from a rare collection of letters spanning 1854–75. The letters are all to Catherine from her tight-knit farming family in Scotland. The Chisholm family papers are held by the State Library of Victoria.
16 The Brownlow Medal is a annual award ceremony for Australian Rules football that has become infamous for the bared flesh and glamorous gowns of the players’ wives and girlfriends. The event is held at Crown Casino.
17 Irvine Louden’s extraordinary 1992 study, Death in Childbirth, looks at the evolution of systems of maternal mortality between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and continental Europe.
18 Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering.
19 Henry Handel Richardson based her novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney on her father’s life. Dr Richardson’s statistics are quoted in the MA thesis of Ballarat nurse Desley Beechey.
20 Keith Bowden, Goldrush Doctors.
21 Observations of James Selby are drawn from his diary and papers, kept between 1852 and 1854. The State Library of Victoria holds these manuscripts.
22 Desley Beechey reveals these ghastly details.
23 Details of Mrs Hazlehurst’s case are drawn from court reports in the Ballarat Times, 19 February 1858.
24 Harry Hastings Pearce (1897–1984) left an extensive archive of goldfields’ history and memorabilia to the State Library of Victoria. Pearce’s manuscript, What It Was Like to Be a Miner, provides these details about infant mortality.
25 The anonymous digger is quoted in John Capper’s guidebook.
26 Jocelynne Scutt, Even in the Best of Homes (Ringwood: Penguin, 1983).
27 Isaac Batey referred to the Hobart Town coat of arms in his reminiscences of life on the goldfields. Batey’s manuscript is held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.
28 The Williams case is reported in the Bendigo Advertiser 22 March 1856. Other examples of domestic violence cases are contained in the PROV series Court Records, including Petty Sessions Registers, 1854–1962, VPRS 289, and Court of Petty Sessions Record Book VPRS 5939, both series housed at the Ballarat Archives Centre.
29 Eliza Perrin’s letters are held in the Montrose Cottage Collection at the Gold Museum, Ballarat.
30 The dirty picture scandal is recounted in the Melbourne Monthly Magazine vol. 1, no. 1 May 1855. The Sophia Lewis story is told in exhilarating detail by Melbourne criminal lawyer Ken Oldis in The Chinawoman.
31 See John S. Levi and G. F. J. Bergman’s history of Jewry in the colonial era, Australian Genesis.
32 The first purpose-built synagogue was consecrated in November 1855 in Ballarat East.
33 There was a large Jewish Harris clan in Cornwall, many of whom emigrated in the 1850s. A number of Henry Harrises came to Victoria between 1852 and 1854, making Ballarat Henry difficult to trace. Ballarat’s current synagogue was built in 1861.
34 Stories drawn from Records of Pioneer Women.
35 Keith Pearce and Helen Fry, The Lost Jews of Cornwall.
36 Dyte was so lauded by Nathan Spielvogel, a Ballarat historian who specialised in Jewish history. His lionising of Dyte appears in his article ‘The Ballarat Hebrew Congregation’.
37 Quoted in Marise Lawrence Cohen, ‘Caroline Chisholm and Jewish Immigration’.
38 Levi and Bergman make this point in Australian Genesis.
SEVEN: THE WINTER OF THEIR DISCONTENT
1 Geelong Advertiser, 25 May 1854.
2 Melbourne Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1855, 28.
3 Neither Ellen nor Frederick’s death certificates list any offspring, but it is clear from Ellen’s writing that she once had a son.
4 Note that average life expectancy in the 1850s was less than forty years, but this is largely because the high rates of infant mortality skew what demographers call ‘the life table’. Having survived the first five years of life, many in the gold rush generation lived into their sixties, seventies and beyond.
5 The better-known Mary Fortune, for example, had journalism published in the Melbourne press from the 1860s under the by-line Waif Wanderer or WW.
6 Note, however, that there are Letters to the Editor of the Ballarat Times published from September 1854 signed by Justitia that could have been written by Ellen Young. I suspect, however, that they were penned by Clara Du Val Seekamp. Justitia, Lady Justice, was the Roman Goddess of Justice. She is often represented as a matron carrying a sword—the power of reason and justice—and a set of measuring scales. Justitia is considered an allegorical allusion to moral force within western legal systems. In art, aspects of Justitia are sometimes conflated with the goddesses Fortuna (luck), Tyche (fate) and Nemesis (vengeance).
7 Unsourced quotation in Laurel Johnson Women of Eureka. The Montrose Cottage Collection, now held at the Gold Museum but previously curated by Johnston for her now defunct Montrose Cottage Museum in Ballarat, includes a reference to Clara being interviewed by a journalist for the Courier on 8 January 1902.
8 Mr H. Brown noted these prices in a letter to his sister written in 1854. The State Library of Victoria holds the letter.
9 Noah’s letter to his mother, written in 1854, is held by the State Library of Victoria.
10 Geoffrey Serle provides the figures for this analysis of the land problem in The Golden Age.
11 This observation was made by Reynell Everleigh Johns, who was a police magistrate on the goldfields. The State Library of Victoria holds an extensive collection of Johns’ diaries, papers and scientific writings, as well as a fragment of the Eureka Flag in Johns’ possession at his death in 1910.
12 English historian Anna Clark explains the literary genre of Chartist melodrama in The Struggle for the Breeches.
13 See the work of Jutta Schwarzkopf in particular.
14 The poem may also have been published in the Ballarat Times, but no copies of the Times are extant for this period.
15 The Liberty Song was written by patriot John Dickinson during the American Revolution. First published as a poem in the Boston Gazette in 1768, its lyrics contain the following sentiment: Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
16 PROV VPRS 1189/93 G54/7193.
17 PROV VPRS 1189/93 F54/5371, I54/5194.
18 John Bastin, ‘Eureka: An Eye-Witness Account’, The Australian Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4, December 1956, 78.
19 Hotham’s speech was reported in the Geelong Advertiser on 26 June 1854.
20 Of Jane and her four sisters, only one had any children, suggesting the Hood girls may have suffered from hereditary infertility.
21 The Argus report was widely circulated. See the Hobart Colonial Times, 5 July 1854.
22 PROV VPRS 1085/08, despatch to George Grey no. 112.
23 Ballarat Times, 2 September 1854.
24 The Argus correspondent also guessed that Lady Hotham was less than thirty: a gift, perhaps, of the English sun.
25 Simplex Munditiis—simple, neat attire. Ben Jonson wrote a poem called Simplex munditiis: (Still to be neat, still to be drest/As you were going to a feast…), a telling indication of the much-touted superiority of education and culture of many diggers. Thanks to Barry Jones for the translation and Jonson reference.
26 Geelong Advertiser, 12 September 1854.
27 Ballarat Courier, 3 December 1904.
28 Reported in the Geelong Advertiser, 12 September 1854.
29 See Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The People’s Bread.
30 The petition claimed that coffee drinking caused impotence in men, who came home from coffeehouses with nothing moist but their snotty noses, nothing stiff but their joints, nor standing but their ears.
31 PROV VPRS 1189.245 A53/5241.
32 PROV VPRS 1189.244 L55/254.
33 PROV VPRS 4066.01. See also the letters and petitions contained in VPRS 4066.02/03 and VPRS 1189.244 and VPRS 1189.238–240.
34 VPRS 4066.02.
35 VPRS 4066.03.
36 VPRS 4066.02.
37 Esther McKenzie’s letter was written on 13 January 1855 and Mrs O’Neill’s letter is dated 15 January 1855. Both are found in PROV VPRS 4066.02.
38 Geelong Advertiser, 10 October 1854. When Ellen Young wrote directly to Governor Hotham on 10 September 1854, she made it clear that it was with her husband Frederick’s sanction that she took the liberty. VPRS 4066.01.
EIGHT: PARTING WITH MY SEX
1 Argus, 18 May 1854.
2 Geelong Advertiser, 11 May 1854. A copy of the notice in the Ballarat Times was forwarded to the Geelong Advertiser by its Ballarat correspondent. The Ballarat Times began publication on 4 March 1854, but the earliest extant copies date from September. The Adelphi was a famous theatre in London’s West End. There was also an Adelphi Theatre in gold rush San Francisco. Sarah Hanmer may have worked at either of them.
3 The anecdote is relayed in Ferguson’s The Experiences of a Forty-Niner, written on his return to America in 1888. Sarah Hanmer made enough of an impression on Ferguson to include her in a memoir penned forty years after the event.
4 Geelong Advertiser, 8 June 1854.
5 Ballarat Times, 2 September 1854.
6 PROV VPRS 1189.244 M55/735.
7 Quoted in Alice M. Robinson et al.’s edited collection, Notable Women in the American Theatre (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989).
8 Melbourne Punch, 14 September 1855, p. 65.
9 Howard’s essay is found in the fascinating collection Crossing the Stage, edited by Lesley Ferris. Laurence Senelick’s The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre also explores the themes of subversion, transgression and transformation in the nineteenth-century theatre.
10 Argus, 3 August 1854.
11 For the full lyrics, see Thatcher’s Colonial Songster of 1857. Thatcher himself was a critic of female suffrage. While in New Zealand in 1865, Thatcher wrote to a Dunedin newspaper mocking the idea of women having a legislative role. ‘A female Town Board I should like to see/Oh fancy what fine food there’d be for me’. Thatcher Papers, State Library of Victoria.
12 See, for example, Melbourne Punch, 28 February 1856 and 29 May 1856.
13 Miska Hauser’s letters from Australia have been translated and published by Colin Roderick and Hugh Anderson.
14 Catherine Smith and Cynthia Greig’s extraordinary annotated collection of nineteenth-century photographs of cross-dressing in America, Women in Pants, graphically illustrates these points.
15 It is sometimes claimed that Henrietta Dugdale wore the bloomer costume, but Susan Priestley’s biography of Dugdale sets us straight. She wore a simple divided skirt but not the full bloomer costume, patterns for which could be obtained from Amelia Bloomer’s magazine by women, for women, The Lily, published in Seneca Falls, New York, but readily circulated in England and continental Europe.
16 ‘Females in Men’s Clothing’, Bendigo Advertiser, 20 September 1879, cited in Lucy Chesser’s Parting with my Sex.
17 John Hargreaves gives this estimate in his study of Ballarat’s hotels.
18 For a longer discussion of the legend and legacy of Big Poll, see my 2003 book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge. Folk singer Glen Tomasetti gives a rendition of Thatcher’s song on her 1961 album, Glen Tomasetti Sings.
19 Melbourne correspondent to Mt Alexander Mail, 15 July 1854.
20 A copy of this document is in the hands of descendant Andrew Crowley. Catherine’s signature can be clearly seen.
21 This extract from the Ballarat Times of 15 July 1854 is republished in John D’Ewes’ memoir.
22 In Australia, Raelene Frances, with her ‘hidden history’ of prostitution, and Elaine McKewon, with The Scarlet Mile, have begun this important, if difficult, project.
23 This point is made by Bronwyn Fensham in her MA thesis about women on the Ballarat diggings.
24 PROV VPRS 289.1.
25 Statistics and quotes drawn from Richard Holmes’ masterful book, Redcoat.
26 Argus, 8 February 1855.
27 Ballarat Times, 11 February 1855.
28 Ballarat Times, 3 September, 1858.
29 Raelene Frances makes this point clear in Selling Sex, 42.
30 Fred Cahir documents this experience in his PhD thesis, ‘Black Gold’.
31 The quote comes from Charles Gattey’s 1967 history of the dress reform movement, The Bloomer Girls.
NINE: BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
1 In Scandal in the Colonies, Kirsten McKenzie notes that subscription lists were used as a form of social gesture to divide the respectable from the dishonourable. Who was put on or off the list could create scandal in a community.
2 PROV Original Papers Tabled in the Legislative Assembly VPRS 3253/60.
3 Details gleaned from the Select Committee on Bentley’s Hotel. VPRS 3253/60.
4 Diggers’ Advocate, 16 September 1854.
5 Ballarat Times, 7 October 1854.
6 Ballarat Times, 23 September 1854.
7 Diggers’ Advocate, 16 September 1854.
8 Ballarat Times, 23 September 1854.
9 Geelong Advertiser, 11 October 1854.
10 Diggers’ Advocate, 16 September 1854.
11 Diggers’ Advocate, 16 September 1854.
12 PROV VPRS 1189/94.
13 ‘Col. Vern’s Narrative of the Ballaarat Insurrection’ was published in the Melbourne Monthly Magazine, no. 7, vol. 2, November 1855. It claimed to be the first account published by a miner. Vern accused James Johnston of bribery and said he was the most disliked officer on the goldfield. After the Eureka Stockade battle, Vern was spotted in Buninyong, disguised in female attire viz: black drawn silk bonnet, light shawl and light cotton gown. VPRS 937/10.
14 There is, however, a Victorian marriage certificate for a James Scobie in 1865. Andrew Crowley’s theory is that another miner was killed that morning and a very alive James Scobie was transported in the dead of night, at Peter Lalor’s behest, to the Abbotsford Convent, where he lay low. Crowley swears it was in fact a miner called John Martin who died from a blow to the head earlier in the day. Crowley believes Martin was the partner in James Scobie and others’ gold claim, and that Scobie was involved in his murder. He argues that James Scobie then pretended to be ‘Peter Martin’ when testifying at the inquest of the dead body brought to the Eureka Hotel later that day. Crowley lays out his case on his website www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/History/Bentley.html
15 Coronial inquest into the death of James Scobie. PROV VPRS 5527/01.
16 Court reporters followed the case in both the Age and the Argus from 23 October to 24 November. Witness depositions and petitions are held in the Eureka Historical Collection at PROV VPRS 5527/01.
17 This observation is drawn from D’Ewes’ own account.
18 See John Molony’s Eureka, 55.
19 PROV VPRS 1189/92.
20 Argus, 4 November 1854.
21 Alexander Dick describes the atmosphere of fear and alarm in Melbourne in his diary.
22 Melbourne Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1855, p. 41.
23 Geelong Advertiser, 18 October 1854.
24 Argus, 18 November 1854.
25 PROV VPRS 5527/02
26 Argus, 2 November 1854.
27 PROV VPRS 1189/468
28 McFarlane’s account is based solely on the archival sources held by PROV.
29 Fifty years later, on 5 December 1904, Elizabeth Rowlands published a letter in the Ballarat Courier recounting her involvement in the events of 1854.
30 Riot at Ballarat, Victorian Parliamentary Papers.
31 My account of the burning of Bentley’s Hotel is drawn from evidence given to the Select Committee, which began hearing evidence on 2 November and tabled its report to Parliament on 21 November.
32 Emily’s story is recounted in Records of Pioneer Women.
33 PROV VPRS 3253/60.
34 Catherine sent petitions for pecuniary aid and compensation in late 1854, 17 May 1855 and 14 November 1855. She claimed a loss of £30,000. PROV VPRS 1189/95 M55/912, S55/14.772.
35 Ballarat Times, 2 September 1854.
36 Ellen owes her choice of words to the Great Litany of the Book of Common Prayer.
37 This is the document that Andrew Crowley showed me during our interview. He has since donated it to the Gold Museum, Ballarat. See plate section 3, and transcript, page 479.
38 Argus, 4 November 1854.
39 Argus, 13 November 1854.
TEN: HIGH CAMP
1 PROV VPRS 1189/153, K54/13.392. The submission was not entertained being an anonymous communication.
2 This unofficial census is drawn from the account of John D’Ewes.
3 PROV VPRS 1189/91, G54/6826.
4 Geelong Advertiser, 2 March 1854.
5 PROV VPRS 937/10. The letter is dated 20 March 1854. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and details pertaining to the Camp are drawn from police reports contained in the PROV series VPRS 937/10.
6 PROV VPRS 1189/164 G54/10.805 and H54/10533.
7 Neill’s diary is used in Neil Smith’s book, Soldiers Bleed Too. The diary is in private hands. Smith’s self-published book endeavours to ‘put the case from the Redcoat view’, concluding that ‘these men fought honourably and with courage in what was a difficult and hostile environment’.
8 PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54/14.002.
9 PROV VPRS 1189/153, K54/13.392.
10 PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11824.
11 PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11824.
12 PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11836.
13 Geelong Advertiser, 10 March 1854.
14 All details of Catherine McLister’s case are drawn from the PROV series VPRS 1189/153, K54/12.242.
15 Robert McLister’s death certificate in 1874 lists his profession as ‘constable’, indicating a return to the police force at some time subsequent to his wife’s death.
16 Note that Geoffrey Blainey has made the point that the Eureka story has conventionally been written from the perspective of the miners only in his essay, ‘Eureka: Why Hotham Decided to Swoop’. For an unusual approach to the emotional lives of soldiers, see Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing.
ELEVEN: CROSSING THE LINE (REPRISE)
1 Ballarat Times, 11 November 1854.
2 Ballarat Times, 25 October 1854.
3 Ballarat Times, 25 October 1854.
4 Geelong Advertiser, 28 October 1854.
5 PROV VPRS 12882.1.
6 Gregory Blake puts this case strongly in To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart.
7 Ballarat Star, 6 December 1884.
8 Geelong Advertiser, 3 November 1854.
9 Geelong Advertiser, 28 October 1854.
10 Geelong Advertiser, 30 October 1854.
11 Geelong Advertiser, 30 October 1854.
12 Ballarat Times, 11 November 1854.
13 PROV VPRS 1095 box 2.
14 My thanks to Andrew Vincent for the Latin translation.
15 Ballarat Times, 8 September 1856.
16 See, for example, Edith Thomas’s book, Les Petroleuses, translated in its English edition as The Women Incendiaries.
17 William Howitt reports the incident in Land, Labour and Gold.
18 Ballarat Times, 15 August 1856.
19 PROV VPRS 5527/01.
20 Argus, 1 November 1854. Detective Cummings later commenced legal proceedings for libel against the journalist, declaring that Mrs Bentley had not been handcuffed but rather had sat by the side of her co-accused Hance, who was cuffed.
21 Argus, 20 November 1854.
22 Age, 20 November 1854.
23 Argus, 16 November 1854.
24 Argus, 16 November 1854.
25 PROV VPRS 4066.01.
26 PROV VPRS 1085/08.
27 Argus, 29 November 1854.
28 PROV VPRS 30/P/37.
29 The observations of W. H. Foster are drawn from the letters to his parents held in the State Library of Victoria.
30 PROV VPRS 1085/08.
31 PROV VPRS1189/92 K54/13219.
32 Keith Bowden makes this point in his study of Ballarat’s doctors.
33 Ballarat Times, 18 November 1854.
34 The context in which the word was used was ironic: The rebels, as they are pleased to term us, would not be conciliated while there was still corruption and double-dealing in the judiciary: Geelong Advertiser, 30 November 1854.
35 Geelong Advertiser, 1 December 1854.
36 Geelong Advertiser, 1 December 1854.
37 As reported by Howitt in Land, Labour and Gold.
38 Anne Beggs-Sunter, ‘Contesting the Flag: The Mixed Messages of the Eureka Flag’, footnote 12.
39 Dorothy Wickham et al., The Eureka Flag: Our Starry Banner, 11.
40 There is certainly evidence that in 1854 people visualised the Southern Cross as a star-studded Latin cross. In Hevelius’s influential Firmamentum (1690), the first star atlas to depict the southern skies, Crux was depicted under the rear legs of Centaurus as a curved-edge Latin Cross riveted with a star on each of its four extremities. In Purgatorio, Dante attributed the cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude to the four brightest stars of the Southern Cross constellation. And in Alexander von Humbolt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent 1799-1804, published in 1852, the popular scientist-explorer wrote:
A religious sentiment attaches them [the Spaniards] to a constellation the form of which recalls the sign of the faith planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the New World.
Von Humbolt drew his Crux with five stars contained within an angular cross.
Another sign of faith might have influenced the design of the Eureka Flag. Its five stars are eight-pointed. It is possible that this is because, in pattern-making terms, an eight-pointed star is the easiest to cut out quickly. But it is equally conceivable that the number of points was chosen with a less pragmatic view. In Christian religious iconography, the eight-pointed star is known as the Star of Redemption. Eight traditionally represents regeneration, hence the octagonal base of the baptismal font. (Noah also saved eight people on his ark and Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth.) So perhaps the eight-pointed Eureka stars symbolised new beginnings too: a new home, a new start, and now, a new and redemptive relationship of the governed to the laws that governed them. Early Fenian flags, flown by Irish republicans in the mid-nineteenth century, also employed eight-pointed stars.
41 Kristin Phillips on Youtube, 12 May 2013: ‘2010 Eureka Flag Conservator Kristin Phillips on conserving an Australian icon’. In August 2013 she added this in an email:
It would have taken longer than a couple of nights to make the flag. It is big. The cutting out and pinning would have been difficult without a reasonable space to work in. By my very rough calculation there are approximately twenty-nine metres of seams and the flat felled seam is double—requiring two rows of hand stitching—so that’s effectively fifty-eight metres of sewing. Flat out, with the seam all ready to go and no pinning etc., you can sew at about a metre per half hour. So at best that would mean that the time it would take to hand sew the fifty-eight metres would be twenty-nine hours. But you have to cut it, pin it and work out how to physically fit the people around the flag, as you couldn’t all be doing it at the same time. For example, as you sew around a star you need to move the flag around so your hand is in the right spot, which affects the other people working on it. I would think that this would effectively double the time required, so sixty hours at the very least; and, again, this is not including the time to cut it out and pin it.
42 Artlab Australia, Condition Assessment, Eureka Flag, May 2010.
43 PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54.13.511.
44 Geelong Advertiser, 2 December 1854.
45 PROV VPRS 1085/08.
46 Ballarat Courier, 5 December 1904.
47 PROV VPRS 1085/08.
48 Argus, 11 April 1917. Frederick Vern later wrote that Lalor stepped forward because he was the only public speaker there at the time. Vern and Captain Ross were down at the Eureka.
49 John Molony claims that Kennedy’s words are an old Scottish saying, 93.
50 Anne Diamond née Keane gave evidence to the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry on 26 December 1854.
51 In his essay, ‘Eureka: Why Hotham Decided to Swoop’, Geoffrey Blainey also argues that the Eureka Stockade was a strategic disaster, but for another reason. He argues that if the miners had fought a guerilla war, fanning out among the hills, bush and tents instead of barricading themselves in like sitting ducks, they could have ‘won’. Blainey takes too literal an idea of warfare here. The Stockade was symbolic, not strategic.
52 Vern claimed that although Lalor knelt down and swore to protect each other, he did not ask the miners to swear allegiance to the flag.
53 PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54.512.
54 PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54/13.570.
55 PROV VPRS 12882.3 no. 27.
56 Report of the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser, written at 5am on 1 December 1854.
TWELVE: BLOODY SUNDAY
1 The Geelong Advertiser (1 December 1954) noted that the absence of drunken men was remarkable.
2 Money, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was described at the time as a play which, for pathos, unexaggerated sentiment and elegant sarcasm, stands unrivalled in modern dramatic literature. It premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1840. Hobart Courier, 7 October 1854.
3 Geelong Advertiser, 2 December 1854.
4 Ballarat Times, 3 December 1854.
5 Eyewitness H. R. Nicholls revealed this detail in his 1890 reminiscences.
6 The letter is quoted in Molony, though no source is given.
7 Interview with Stephen Cuming in Ballarat Courier, 3 December 1897.
8 Menstrual synchrony among co-habiting women is widely accepted in the scientific literature. Lunar synchrony is more controversial but has its champions within orthodox science. See, for example, W. B. Cutler and C. R. Garcia, ‘The Psychoneuroendocrinology of the Ovulatory Cycle of Women: A Review’, Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 5, 1979, 89–111. In ‘Menstrual Synchrony—An Update and Review’, C. A. Graham concludes that although menstrual synchrony is widely documented in scientific studies, the precise mechanisms involved and the adaptive function of menstrual synchrony are still not understood. Human Nature, vol. 2, issue 4, 1991, 293–311. There is an extensive literature of women’s health and spirituality devoted to lunar menstrual synchrony. See, for example, Lara Owen, Her Blood is Gold: Celebrating the Power of Menstruation (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
9 Evidence of policeman Robert Tully at the state trials: Geelong Advertiser, 28 February 1855.
10 Blainey makes the point about the strategic benefit of this single hour of darkness for an advancing army in his essay ‘Eureka: Why Hotham Decided to Swoop’.
11 An incident in an 1873 riot in Clunes, a mining town close to Ballarat, demonstrates that women did expose their breasts in times of conflict. William Spence, a miner turned union organiser, tells the story of the riot by striking miners and their families in his 1909 memoir, Australia’s Awakening:
Nearby was a heap of road metal, and arming herself with a few stones, a sturdy North of Ireland woman, without shoes or stockings, mounted the barricade as the coaches drew up. As she did she called out to the other women, saying: ‘Come on, you Cousin Jinnies, bring me the stones and I will fire them’. The sergeant in charge of the police presented his carbine at the woman and ordered her to desist. Her answer was to bare her breast and say to him: ‘Shoot away, and be damned to ye, better be shot than starved to death.’
12 Despatch from Thomas to Hotham, VPRS 1085/08.
13 The observations of Charles Schulze are drawn from his eyewitness account, held by the National Library of Australia. Schulze called the cry of Joe! A kind of Masonic password.
14 Anne Diamond, evidence to Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry.
15 Geelong Advertiser, 25 January 1855.
16 Geelong Advertiser, 6 December 1854.
17 PROV VPRS 1189.101 c55/11.052.
18 Charles Evans’ diary.
19 Geelong Advertiser, 6 December 1854.
20 PROV VPRS 1189/240 54/J14453.
21 Story recounted in Laurel Johnson, Women of Eureka.
22 ‘Grandma hid miner under her skirt at Eureka’, Ballarat News, 15 June 1983.
23 William Withers says James McGill met Sarah Hanmer at The Springs.
24 The observation is noted by Charles Evans.
25 The deposition of Henry Powell was reprinted in the Argus, 15 December 1854.
26 PROV VPRS 5527/P, unit 2, item 9.
27 Evidence of Thomas Millan and John Doherty, state trials, reported in GA 28 Feb 1855.
28 PROV VPRS 1189.101 c55/11.052.
29 The incident is recounted in R. S. Ross’s 1914 account, Eureka: Freedom’s Fight of ’54. Ross was a socialist journalist and trade union organiser, born in Sydney in 1873.
30 PROV VPRS 1189/204.
31 PROV VPRS 1189/240 54/J14433.
32 The story was recounted to R. S. Ross.
33 Geelong Advertiser, 6 December 1854.
34 Martha Clendinning ended up with a piece of the flag. She said it was a gift from Dr Carr. It was among her papers donated to the State Library of Victoria.
35 PROV VPRS 1085/08.
36 PROV VPRS 1189/94.
CONCLUSION: A DAY AT THE RACES
1 The Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry was first instigated in late October 1854 with the purpose of sending men of high standing to the goldfields to hear and enquire into complaints against officials, particularly seeking out instances of corruption or maladministration. Instructions were issued to the chairman, Westgarth, on 16 November and commissioners named. However, no paperwork appointing members was signed and sealed by the governor until 7 December, after events in Ballarat precipitated government action.
2 Thatcher Papers. Thatcher’s misogyny is only surpassed by his anti-Semitism.
3 Thatcher’s Colonial Songster, 7.
4 Desertions were recorded in the Victorian Government Gazette.
5 Quoted in Neil Smith, Soldiers Bleed Too, 21.
6 PROV VPRS 5527/P/2/9. This is Richards’ sworn deposition at the state trials. Anastasia’s words have been quoted differently in many secondary sources.
7 Geelong Advertiser, 28 February 1855.
8 The bill was passed by the Victorian Legislative Council in 1854, leading some historians to argue that the Eureka Stockade played no part in bringing democracy to Australia. This is a view to which J. B. Humffray was himself partial. In 1884 he declared that it was a romantic nonsense to claim, as some did, that the Victorian Constitution was cradled in the Eureka Stockade. The constitution, he corrected, was drawn up by La Trobe and passed by the old Legislative Council, so that it was already nursed, weaned and full grown by December 1854. According to Humffray, it was a complete delusion to think that the Eureka Stockade riots had anything to do with the current Victorian Constitution. (Ballarat Star, 29 July 1884.) It was not a popular view. Geoffrey Blainey was to attract a similar level of public hostility when he proffered much the same thesis in The Rush That Never Ended in 1963.
9 PROV VPRS 1189/244, M55/735.
10 Geelong Advertiser, 3 December 1855.
11 Hobart Courier, 11 December 1855.
12 The extracts of Lady Hotham’s diary are held in the Hotham Papers at Hull University in England. Lady Hotham transcribed these few pages of her diary, plus scores of condolence letters she received from individuals and associations in Victoria, into one neat volume in her precise and elegant hand.
13 Isene Goldberg, Queen of Hearts, 280.
14 Melbourne Punch, 28 February, 1856, 27.
15 Ballarat Times, 8 September 1856.
16 Argus, 5 February 1856.
17 Quoted in Charles Fahey, Heather Holst, Sara Martin and Alan Mayne, ‘A Miner’s Right: Making Homes and Communities on the Victorian Goldfields’, in Alan Mayne (ed.), Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, API Network Books, Perth, 2006, 202. Fahey et al. have interpreted the miner’s right as the most important instrument in the social transformations that occurred in the wake of the gold rush.
18 For examples of miner’s rights held by women, see George McArthur Collection, Special Collections, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.
19 Ballarat Times, 12 September 1856.