Gold digging wasn’t the only way to strike it lucky. By March 1854 there were three hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that women ran at least two-thirds of these pop-up tent shops. Some of these shopkeepers had husbands who mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—often the sly-grog portion of the business. Although it was illegal to sell alcohol on any of Victoria’s goldfields, everyone knew that you could get a dram of whisky or gin at practically any ‘coffee shop’, ‘refreshment tent’ or ‘general store’.
But Martha Clendinning and her sister Sarah had made a pact: even if other storekeepers on the diggings winked at the authorities, they would never sell sly grog on their premises. Though the laws to keep alcohol off the diggings had been a complete failure, Martha reckoned that she must hold to her own standards. They would only sell the best quality tea, coffee and sugar, candles, tobacco (the most important item), jams, bottled fruits, onions and apples and some excellent small Cheshire cheeses.
Martha, doctor’s wife and daughter of a good family, did not want to be too snobbish, however. She knew that she and Sarah needed to tone down their well-bred appearance in the hope that we should not be distinguished as ‘ladies’. We intended to pass as merely respectable women of business; anything more than that would, we felt, expose us to curiosity when we entered on our storekeeping life.
They didn’t want to intimidate the diggers. They didn’t want to lord it over the diggers’ wives. They wanted to blend in. But it was more than the desire to be inconspicuous: We prided ourselves on being careless of appearances. This was the diggers’ way. New chums passed themselves off as old hands by their down-to-earth clothing and easygoing manners.
The Clendinnings chose a tent site at the centre of a treeless field on Commissioner’s Flat, and Martha volunteered to go to the Camp and purchase George Clendinning’s mining licence for him while he put the tent up. The other women residents, Martha observed, were of a very rough class. The licence was delivered to her promptly. Two diggers who had been waiting half the day for their licences were astonished. ‘Well Bill’, said one, ‘the next time I want my licence, I’ll send my missus for it, instead of kicking my shins about here for hours’. ‘All right’, Bill replied, ‘but you must get your missus first, my boy’. Martha had a chuckle at her new-found influence.
Once George Clendinning finally got the tent up, Martha paid for her own storekeeper’s licence. She didn’t approve of the licensing system—Martha had to pay a standard £40 a year quite irrespective of its size and business capacity. My little one was rated the same as the largest in the Main Road—but she was thrilled to be open for business. I never forgot my first sale! she wrote 50 years later: a box of matches for sixpence.
While their husbands got on with the hard and dirty work of mining, Martha and Sarah quickly established a loyal clientele for their humble wares. Martha bought a hen, a rare commodity on the diggings, and sold her eggs to mothers of sick children.
Soon there was more demand, for more goods, than they could supply. We were constantly asked for clothing materials by the women, but didn’t have enough room to store large bolts of cloth. Seeing the birthrate skyrocket around them, they decided to venture on a new branch of business: baby clothes. Theirs was the first store on the diggings to sell such dainty little garments and they quickly sold out.
But Martha Clendinning was not attuned only to profit. She was astute enough to realise that the diggings offered her a new freedom, beyond her stifling old identity as a gentlewoman. She took her lead from the working class…to whom all species of employment for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success. Suddenly it was merit, not birthright or breeding, that made all the difference.
Dr Clendinning was most anxious about the changes in his family circle. His plan was to go on with gold digging until the big find, then retire with all the decencies of the home life of a gentleman. But it was slow in coming to fruition.
This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her excessive folly, despite her husband’s concern that he might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it. While she was making money and George wasn’t, Martha would do as she pleased.