LADY LUCK

In these early years of the gold rush, mining required little capital outlay. Small claims could be pursued by individual miners. Technical know-how and even physical strength were not absolutely necessary.

William Kelly was one of the first commentators to note the everyday sight of women engaged in hands-on mining. Out walking around the Eureka lead one morning in early 1854, Kelly spied fossickers of the female sex at work, and these, too, of the diminutive degree both as to age and size. You can sense that Kelly longed to mock these mining maids, as was his inclination, but he stopped himself.

And here I must do the women the justice of remarking that their industry was accompanied with a decency of garb and demeanour which elicited respect and went to prove that becoming employment engenders respectability of feeling and healthy appetites.

Working-class women, of course, had always worked. What Kelly found remarkable was the presence of ‘decent’ women performing acts of industry.

It was just another sign of the adaptability that women needed to be successful in this world turned upside down.

WOMEN’S LEGAL STATUS

In English common law, a husband and wife were one person. A married woman was a feme covert, a woman ‘covered’—or hidden—by her husband in law. She could not incur debts, nor could she sue or be sued in court. She couldn’t enter into a contract. That meant banks would not lend money to women, and therefore it was almost impossible for most women, with no access to credit or capital, to go into business.

Before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, a married woman couldn’t own property in her own name. A single woman, a feme sole, had the same legal and property rights as a man—up until the time of her marriage. Then her money, goods, income and lands became the property of her husband.

Underpinning all this was the assumption that a married woman didn’t need any independent financial or legal status because, being ‘as one’ with her husband, her safe passage through life was assured. The system failed to take into account wife desertion, marital cruelty or domestic violence—not to mention a woman’s desire for autonomy over her own affairs.

Oh, and it was almost impossible to get a divorce. Where her legal status was concerned, a nineteenth-century woman was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself. William Westgarth, writing in 1857, remarked on the strangely old-fashioned state of mining technology in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations, he noted, that can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society’s progress. He meant that the work didn’t owe a lot to science or technology.

Ballarat, he said, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile exchange. It was about partnering, share-holding and other interpersonal relationships. It wasn’t really about machinery, which women had mostly not been taught about, or high finance, which involved bank loans and credit facilities that women could not legally get. Gold mining was more like the family-based ‘cottage industry’ style of work that was the norm before the industrial revolution.

Women who wanted or needed to mine for gold certainly benefited from this freedom from science and modernity. People worked their claims in small groups or families, relying on manual labour for the seemingly endless jobs of picking, panning, puddling and cradling. Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel from a river’s bed was rocked so that large rocks and nuggets were separated from the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement. It didn’t require great physical strength, though, or even wealth. Just patience, perseverance and luck.

Bucketloads of luck. The daily rewards were tiny and took a long time to amount to much unless you struck it very lucky. But for that very reason, the process exerted a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting it every moment. Like playing a poker machine today: every push of the button—every thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new destiny, right there and then.

Mary Ann Tyler, five years a gold diggeress, said:

You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should one day discover more gold.