Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  One upsetting problem for the indentured Chinese labourers, as for the Indians, was that they had signed contracts stipulating rations of rice, and in many cases flour or even readily available meat rather than the more expensive rice was supplied. By not providing rice, employers were effectively breaking the Chinese contract, though the English-language contract may well have been different. Another problem stemmed from the lack of reference to clothing in the contracts, which meant that labourers had to purchase new clothing from station stores where prices were infamously high. As well as that, pastoralists were willing to take a sizeable portion of the exchange rate between Amoy dollars and sterling, downgrading what the Chinese men received.

  The indenture system came to be called the ‘truck system’. It was essentially a system of thraldom, making the Chinese labourers a captive labour force—in getting employees to chalk up purchases from the station store against unearned wages, employers were forcing their coolies into a situation of debt peonage, which could be enforced by recourse to the law. The coolies were unable to accumulate money to buy their way off the station they were indentured to.

  This was the case of Kang who signed with TML Prior of Logan River near Brisbane in November 1851 to work for 12 shillings per month. Kang cleared out on the rough track to Brisbane when his master told him that he had a debt of £2 18 shillings and tuppence. Labourers often absconded or turned themselves in to the magistrate—the same thing, since both involved leaving their work— when they found that through technicalities or the hard bookkeeping of the master they owed money. Kang, when confronted with the bill, told Prior he would shoot him. Absconding brought Kang a sentence of three months work on the Newcastle breakwater. He was also sentenced to keep the peace for twelve months and enter sureties totalling £80 or undergo twelve months imprisonment for the threat to Prior. The Attorney-General overturned this last sentence, which had been imposed by a magistrate sympathetic to Mr Prior.

  Two men named Pekie and Chiok Kaon absconded from their station similarly owing amounts of more than £3. The magistrates always returned the workers to their masters after they had served their hard labour, and the masters retained the men’s contracts. Fortunately for the Pekies of the back blocks, the masters did not usually bring charges for absconding because they knew they would lose three months hard labour from the coolie they had invested in. But they tried to use locking them up in the cells at regional police stations as a chastening tool, after which the owner would not turn up to court. The lock-ups were harsh. The Tenterfield one was described as ‘a wooden box for prisoners in the centre of a common hut’, and was capable of causing ‘all but the most recalcitrant labourers’ second thoughts.

  Sometimes, Chinese labourers would set out on their way to the magistrate to press charges against their master for being ill-used or having wages withheld, but would be charged with a countersuit of absconding for this brief absence. Such was the case of Huey Bow, who was charged with absconding after requesting that he be discharged by his master given that his five-year term had been completed the previous month. He had not been willing to re-hire himself for a further twelve months. When he claimed his wages, he was told that he owed the station £29 8 shillings for lost sheep. His employer obtained a warrant for Huey Bow’s arrest for absconding, on which charge the labourer was found guilty and fined £4 pounds 4 shillings with costs of £1 pound 4 shillings. In this case Huey Bow was charged only with absconding and not with losing sheep or destruction of property, a prosecution that would have meant a longer gaol term. He had no choice than to drag himself back to labour for his master to pay off his debts.

  Barteong, who had been employed by Dr Barton of Brisbane and left requesting his wages, was arrested not for absconding but for vagrancy. Though the magistrates did not order Barton to pay the wages he had withheld, they believed that Barteong had been justified in leaving Barton’s employment, since Barton was paying wages on a yearly basis which the contract did not permit.

  One coolie named Sang was charged with assault and battery on his master Robert Fleming, for which he was found not guilty. Sang stated that he was still owed £10 for the past year’s work.

  When facing the benches and courts of the colony, Chinese labourers generally suffered from a lack of legal representation. A number of Chinese labourers acted as interpreters, notably Zuan Zing in Goulburn and Tinko, Isim and Gan Som in Brisbane. But Gan Som, or Ganson, was deterred from continuing because of threats from his countrymen. In a few cases, employers acted as interpreters, particularly in a case of assault brought by one coolie against another.

  The greatest abuse of Chinese labourers within the court system involved a master, PJ Bertelson of Boonerah near Shellharbour and two labourers named Tong Chou and Ke Tiam, who had been charged with assault of their master. They were eventually pardoned on the basis that they had not understood the charges laid against them, nor were they able to offer any defence due to the lack of an interpreter. Bertelson had himself offered to act as interpreter for the accused, an untenable situation.

  The affinity between ‘the merino magistrates’ and the employers of indentured Chinese reached a peak with the bulk signing of warrants by magistrates for employers, who then needed only to fill out the necessary information whenever a warrant was required. This saved the pastoralists going to the magistrate every time they wanted to charge a coolie, and quickened up the time within which the recalcitrant employee was admitted to the lock-up.

  Overall, despite many misunderstandings and deliberate abuses on the part of employers, the Chinese were considered ‘good shepherds, yet they are difficult to manage’. A lot of problems ceased as understanding of the English language and laws grew amongst the labourers. As their contracts expired, they often found they were able to demand wages closer to what white labourers earned.

  CHAPTER 28

  GOLDEN EPIPHANY

  One sultry night early in 1851, on a trans-mountain farm near Orange, New South Wales, a devout Methodist farmer’s son William Tom, Cornish-born, was working in a shed by lamplight, hammering together a wooden box shaped like a child’s cradle, but with compartments inside it and an upright handle attached to it. Once it was completed, a party of men placed the cradle on the bank of the creek below the Tom homestead, under the command of a hulking, black-moustached 34-year-old Englishman, Edward H Hargraves. They shovelled in gravel and rocked the cradle so that heavy grains of gold would remain in its tray. When they did not have much luck, they put the cradle on a horse and moved it some 16 kilometres to Lewis Ponds. Here, where Hargraves and the local publican’s sons had already found grains of gold by panning, they ended with sixteen grains of gold in their cradle.

  Hargraves, a proud Orangeman, took to his horse and headed east for Sydney to announce the find. He believed from American experience that there was more reward in announcing the discovery of gold in workable forms than in digging it. While in San Francisco the previous year, he had written to a Sydney merchant: ‘I am very forcibly impressed that I have been in a gold region in New South Wales, within three hundred miles of Sydney.’

  To go to California, he had left his wife and five children behind in the coastal New South Wales town of Gosford, but he had not relished the drudgery of fossicking, especially not in the blizzards of winter or the slush of the Californian spring. Until he could get home again he knew he was in danger of being beaten to what he thought would be a world-altering and life-transforming discovery of Australian gold. In the first month of the Californian rush, February 1849, a young man called Chapman had brought 38 ounces (1.08 kilos) of gold from Glen Mona station near Amherst, 160 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, into Brentani’s jewellery shop in the city. The superintendent of Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, had to send black troopers to disperse the men who quickly gathered with pick-axes and shovels at Chapman’s find. Later, realising the effects of the California rush more fully, La Trobe regretted having acceded so easily to the station owner
’s demand that force be used to stop miners trespassing.

  In January 1851 Hargraves returned to Australia and told people in Sydney he would find a goldfield in the interior. He had heard from the Colonial Secretary, Edward Deas Thomson, that gold had been found in quartz in Carcoar, near Orange, but when Hargraves, on the way there, stopped at the settlement of Guyong, west of Bathurst, he saw in the local inn specimens of copper, pyrites and quartz, of the kind he had seen in Californian goldfields, from a nearby copper mine. Hargraves borrowed a tin dish, a hand pick and a trowel and headed north-west with the publican’s son, John Hardman Australia Lister. It was a warm day in the bush, a day when the ancient landscape seemed set in its ways and resistant to sudden revelations. In the valley of the Lewis Ponds Creek, a creek which did not run in dry weather, they found a waterhole and made the usual pannikin of tea, and then Hargraves announced he would attempt to pan for gold. He saw the gleam of a gold grain at the bottom of his pan. He washed, in total, six dishes for six grains. Others might consider it a nugatory amount—certainly the drinkers at Guyong’s Wellington Inn ignorantly did that evening. But having been in California, Hargraves knew what it meant. These grains of gold were mere scrapings from the lode. By the waterhole in the bush that morning, he had made a famous speech, with only young Lister to listen. ‘This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baron, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put into a glass case and sent to the British Museum.’

  Britain’s minor criminals often had lusted for gold, and the flashy pickpocket George Barrington had extracted it from the pockets of gentlemen and nobles. Yet in outcrops all around the huts of convict shepherds and in the alluvium of creek beds lay undetected grains and lumps. By the very nature of geology, the Spanish reefs of solid gold were an impossibility. Nonetheless many Europeans were ready to indulge dreams of El Dorado.

  The Toms and Lister were anxious not to draw in a rush of diggers. To reassure them, Hargraves, before leaving for Sydney, devised on a sheet of paper under the presumptuous words ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ a deed allowing them to mine the richest point of the creek. Hargraves named the area Ophir in honour of the biblical goldmine, and gave Lister and the Toms the exclusive right to the gold, though he probably guessed the paper was worthless. But to the young Australians, it meant they were possessors of their own Ophir, their own King Solomon’s mine, their own biblical vein. If others came to claim it, they had Hargrave’s document to establish their prior ownership.

  In fact, Hargraves knew that by a set of ancient statutes all gold belonged to the Crown. That was why he had gone to Sydney—to seek a reward. The government had been worried about the number of young men who had left the colonies for California. This discovery would reverse things. In his red overcoat he waited three hours for another interview with Deas Thomson. Thomson was not at first impressed. Hargraves expediently forgot about the baronetcy and asked him merely for £500 as compensation for the expense of his expedition. Meanwhile, Lister and William Tom found nuggets of fine gold at Yorkey’s Corner near Bathurst. Lister picked up a 2-ounce (57-gram) nugget on the ground. Back at the Tom homestead they balanced gold on the scales with sixteen new sovereigns borrowed from the widow Lister. They had found 4 ounces (113 grams) of gold.

  Secretly, despite his undertaking to Lister and the Toms, Hargraves wanted to attract crowds of men to Ophir, since the richer the goldfield the greater his reward from the government. After making his claim to Deas Thomson, who, like many an official, seemed a little bemused as to its significance, Hargraves returned to Bathurst, where he lectured on his discovery, displayed pieces of gold and told his audience where they could find it. As a result, the local Commissioner for Crown Land rode fast out to Ophir to find eight or nine men digging there. They showed him the deed Hargraves had written out. Hargraves himself left Bathurst with a group of mounted horsemen to whom he pointed out good places to dig and wash.

  The fifty kilometres of track to Ophir were soon marked by dray wheels and horses hooves. When Hargraves escorted the government’s mineralogical surveyor Samuel Stutchbury, an English mineralogist and biologist, to Ophir in May 1851, the diggers, in the throes of gold fever, barely noticed their arrival. They felt they were a long way from authority. Ophir was, after all, 275 kilometres from Sydney and the contact was via mail coach over a slippery and boggy mountainous road, its last stretch only a horse trail.

  Back in Sydney Deas Thomson showed Hargraves’s specimens to a man newly arrived from California. The man laughed and said that the gold obviously was found in California and had been planted at Ophir. The official reaction to Ophir was thus confused and delayed. Gold was not mentioned when the Executive Council met in Sydney on 13 May. Yet hundreds were coming up the bush track from Bathurst to Ophir, inflamed by headlines which declared Ophir ‘a second California’. By the time the government reacted, it was too late to ban the digging of gold, since hundreds were at it and could not be stopped. The local Crown Lands Commissioner, a loyal servant who knew his law, served the diggers at Ophir with notices to desist, but they ignored him.

  When this disobedience was reported to Sydney it became clear there were not enough policemen and soldiers to suppress it. There was also the perceived risk that policemen and soldiers would themselves join in the frenzy. James Macarthur suggested martial law, but Deas Thomson thought that too extreme.

  On 22 May, Sir Charles FitzRoy, the governor, wrote his first dispatch to England concerning the new discoveries and suggested that Hargraves was exaggerating. But before this dispatch was put on board a ship, a pencilled report arrived from Stutchbury saying that many men were panning an ounce of gold or even two every day with only a tin dish. Stutchbury apologised for using pencil: ‘There is no ink yet in the City of Ophir.’

  FitzRoy now proclaimed the Crown’s right to all gold found in New South Wales, declaring no man could dig it up without buying a licence. The charge would be 30 shillings a month. Naturally the miners resisted the first attempts to impose licences, and soon the inspector of Sydney police was preparing to take reinforcements to the goldfields. A detachment of troops was also readied in Sydney. No one could decide if beyond this initial crisis lay an enlarged world or the decay of everything they knew. Fever struck all, in the sense that no one had a calm opinion of what was happening.

  JD Lang, in his prison cell in Parramatta, where he was serving a criminal libel sentence under the Darling laws, believed the immigrants attracted to New South Wales, along with the independence and wealth associated with digging, would ensure the colony’s political vigour. He wrote: ‘The announcement of this wonderful discovery in our land is tantamount to an authoritative proclamation . . . that Australia henceforth shall be free . . . through the resist-less influence of her coming democracy.’

  An experienced but hard-up magistrate, John R Hardy, former Cambridge blue in cricket and a man to reckon with, was appointed the new Commissioner of Crown Lands for the gold district. He had an escort of ten deputies armed and mounted, and between them they were to issue licences, administer the diggings, arbitrate between diggers and, in Hardy’s case, sit as a justice in the Court of Petty Sessions. By the time he reached Ophir in early June 1851 there were a thousand men camped along the creek. Hardy behaved sensibly, allowing diggers to work for several days until they had enough gold dust to pay for a licence. All went peaceably, and Hardy thought Ophir as quiet as an English town.

  Deas Thomson, however, now insisted that all men buy a licence before they lifted their first spadeful of gravel. Hardy protested, but went along. He thought it unfair, but the system was meant to be unfair, in the hope of forcing the agricultural labourer or the farmer back to his normal work. Policemen were instructed to smash the cradles and tools of unlicensed men. The licences were still fairly readily paid, however, Hardy estimating that at least half the now 1500 men at Ophir found on average £1 worth of gold each day. Jewish merchants moved from tent to tent buying g
old. Everyone was doing well, and there was little disorder.

  Within three months the number of diggers at Ophir had begun to ride home. Governor FitzRoy, who had grown fond of the licence revenue, was suddenly anxious that a new field be found. He appointed Hargraves a Commissioner of Crown Lands and sent him to find new Ophirs in southwestern New South Wales. His journey was not productive. Next FitzRoy asked the help of the Reverend WB Clarke, a formally trained geologist. Clarke had not been surprised by Hargraves’s discovery—he already knew some of the geology of New South Wales was gold-bearing. He did not want to leave his parish of St Thomas’s in North Sydney, but in the end he undertook the trip into the bush, being able to preach to miners and pastoralists on Sundays, since one of the conditions of the gold licence was that the Sabbath be observed. His journeyings were exhaustive, and he found sites from Omeo, south of the Alps in the Port Phillip area, all the way up into the Darling Downs. God had put the gold there, he knew, but its results tested his faith, since the goldfields seemed to generate drunkenness, were driven by a worship of Mammon, and the chance of violence hung over them.

  On top of Hargraves and Clarke’s explorations, the miners themselves were searching northwards from Ophir to the Turon River. Gold was sprinkled thirty kilometres along the Turon—‘as regular as wheat in a sown field’, reported Hardy, who despite his own wages being sequestrated to pay his debts, was not tempted to leave his post and harvest those ears of precious metal. On the Turon, he recorded meeting a group of sixty unlicensed diggers who had all found at least £3 worth of gold for the day. ‘I was beset by a crowd all thrusting their pound notes into my face, and begging me to mark the boundaries.’ The Turon would have a population of 67 000 during 1852, centred on the instant town of Sofala, whose hotels and lodging houses had calico walls not even decorated to imitate brick, as was the case with the canvas hotel walls of San Francisco. In Sofala, most men wore the long, curved throwing knife which enabled them to prise gold from cracks and wedges in the bedrock, and they carried arms to protect their gold. Yet the murder rate was low.