From her tent on Golden Point, Ellen Young could see what was coming. At 44, she was a community elder thanks to the unusual demographics of gold-rush Victoria. She was also a woman of keen intellect who had been a prolific poet since the age of thirteen. Today, you can find her lifelong collection of hand-written poetry bound in a leather volume in the Ballarat Library. But it was on the first day of the miserable winter of 1854 that Ellen decided it was time to go into print, publishing her first truly political poem in the local newspaper, the Ballarat Times.
She had written the poem the previous week, during a flood. At the height of the storm, Ellen later recalled, she rescued her mattress and then her spleen evaporated. ‘Ballarat’ is a sixteen-verse commentary on the community’s woeful living conditions and depressed emotions. It begins ominously:
If you’ve not been to Ballarat
Then stay away from there;
I would not have my worst foe’s cat
To have such sorry fare.
Ellen describes the poor state of the roads, the lack of fresh food, the famine prices, the endless mud, the futility of complaining to the resident commissioners, the non-existent gold and the burdensome memories of times and places past. She is trapped, they are all trapped, caught between the distant rock of ‘home’ and a hard place of ceaseless toil. The gold I promised still is hid; The past is all a sham, wrote Ellen.
Ellen describes the conditions, but she also introduces a new note into the public discourse: indignation. A communal sense of grievance. A positioning of good men against bad, heroes against villains.
The floods were out, the mail-man drunk,
What matter the delay?
That though the hearts of many sunk—
They’re diggers!
Who are they?…
They’re men—high tax’d, ill log’d, worse fed
Of strong and stalwart frame
Better was ne’er by hero led
Or earn’d a hero’s name.
This was a position that would later be increasingly taken up by other organs of public opinion. The Geelong Advertiser did not begin to echo Ellen’s sentiments until 27 September, when it represented the diggers as hard-working, taxed, unrepresented members of the body politic, hamstrung by absurd, insulting regulations. Ellen Young’s public intercession on behalf of the Ballarat community was a game-changer.
No one disputed her authority, or her right to become the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat. In fact she was actively encouraged by Henry Seekamp, the 25-year-old editor of the new Ballarat Times (who was by now Clara Duval’s de facto husband). He published Ellen’s increasingly political poems and strident letters to the editor in the spring of 1854. And, unlike later Australian female writers who made their opinions public, Ellen didn’t even write anonymously. She flamboyantly ruffled her feathers and signed herself Ellen F. Young, the Ballarat Poetess.
It’s not that there wasn’t a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on the scene. The short-lived Gold Digger’s Advocate was a newspaper with a broadly democratic agenda. It argued strongly on behalf of the disenfranchised diggers on all the diggings, predicting dire consequences if the diggers were forced to submit to political slavery.
What Ellen Young did was different. Ellen spoke for the people, as one of the people, about what it was like to be among the people. Her husband was a digger. She was a digger’s wife who had decided to toil with a pen instead of a pick.
The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they now had a free press and a bold, outspoken public advocate to call their own.