Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  At a sheep station 80 kilometres north of Bathurst, an Aboriginal minding the sheep of Dr Kerr, his master, cracked an outcrop of white stone with his axe and saw a reef of gold. He told his master and overseer. Some gold-studded quartz was packed into a trunk and taken to Bathurst by wagon. Dr Kerr kept the gold taken from the site, since Aborigines were not eligible to apply for a licence.

  William Charles Wentworth was worried that his workers would desert his estate at Camden, and even some of the Chinese coolies were leaving their masters and clearing out to the Turon. Governor FitzRoy expressed his amazement to Deas Thomson after the Government House porter took the road to the diggings, carrying a government-owned shovel with him. Thomson, the husband of Anne Bourke, the former Governor Bourke’s daughter, was something of a calming influence. He had discussions with the American consul in Sydney who told him that the rush could bring good results for the colony if a licence system was maintained and if there was adequate policing. By planting some good press in Europe and the United States, said the consul, the authorities could expect a boom in immigration and the spread of wealth amongst ordinary folk.

  The authorities remained locked between dread and hope. The population of the diggings dropped off that cold winter of 1851, and then in the springtime, to the relief of Thomson, many diggers left their claims to shear and take in the harvest. Meanwhile many residents of the Port Phillip area—since November 1850 the newly created colony of Victoria—were clearing out to the New South Wales goldfields. It was the turn of the new Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, and his thirty-member Legislative Council (twenty of whom were elected) to worry about an exodus of working men. As representative government began in the new colony of some 18 000 population, the place was aflame with gold fever as well as unmanageable and devastating bushfires.

  GOLDEN VICTORIA

  In granite hills at Ballarat, 110 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, an elderly man named John Dunlop found gold, and so in early August 1851 did the blacksmith Thomas Hiscock at the village of Buninyong under the mountain of that name, just south of Ballarat. The squatters in the area included a former sea captain named John Hepburn, an early promoter of the Port Phillip District. They were all men who had come to the area in the late 1830s and the 1840s, and lived in slab timber with their ticket-of-leave stockmen, often Vandemonians. They had survived the burning seasons of drought and the biblical floods, and the downturn of 1842. They had in their way dealt with the Kulin people, whom they considered a further force of nature, driving flocks away and needing to be pursued by Captain Henry Dana and his native border police recruited from the tribes of Gippsland. In an attack on a shepherd in May 1844, the Kulin natives were able to drive off 780 sheep. Dana’s black police and some police regulars were quickly on site, and chased them northwards, shooting dead their leader Lillgona. La Trobe warned the regular police to proceed with moderation, but the pastoralists did not like such pussyfooting forbearance, and the extent of both good and bad which occurred in the land of the Kulin before gold manifested itself remains unknown.

  Despite the cold winter of frosts and snowfalls on the hills, diggers came up the road from Geelong, 60 kilometres to the south on the western edge of Port Phillip Bay, walking and pushing barrows loaded with cradles and pans, food and tents, or riding on carriages or with hired bullock teams, with all their gear wrapped in canvas and a California-style cradle on top, all making for Ballarat and the Yarrowee Creek which cut its valley. At the new-found field the Gold Commissioner, Doveton, and his Aboriginal troopers recruited from throughout the region, and even from beyond the Murray River in New South Wales, found eight hundred to a thousand men digging in the area.

  A journalist from Geelong witnessed a meeting the diggers, summoned at eight o’clock one night by gunshot, held to decide on the miners’ attitude to licence fees. A group of as ‘picturesque-looking individuals who ever ornamented canvas assembled around a large watch-fire kindled beneath the gloomy stringy-bark trees’. There opinions were uttered which would come to bedevil the Crown in future years. One man described himself as free and hard-working, willing to pay a fair share to government—but not 30 shillings a month. Another asked, ‘How can I be expected to pay a shilling a day to the Commissioner? It’s a burning shame.’ Perhaps more significantly, another said, ‘It’s more than the squatter pays for twenty square miles.’ Another: ‘I spent all the money I have fitting myself out for the diggings, and now I am to be taxed before I have been here a week.’ Another: ‘This is Port Phillip, d’ye see? Here is a specimen of independent government. I should like to know what right the government has to tax us £18 a year.’ Another: ‘I’ll ding my cradle first.’ Then: ‘That would only be serving yourself out. I propose we get up a memorial to Mr La Trobe and that we all sign it.’

  So Ballarat goldfield politics began. The memorial told the government that the 30-shilling monthly fee was ‘impolitic and illiberal’, that the gold in the Buninyong field could not support such an impost, that the new Executive Council (of four members, appointed by La Trobe) should in any case give diggers a period of grace to work their claims, and that if these sane propositions were not acceded to, the miners would move to Bathurst in New South Wales.

  A few men came to the commissioner’s tent to buy their licences and when leaving ‘were struck and pelted by the mob’. But under the protection of the black troopers others paid, and by afternoon the commissioner ran out of licence forms. In the Legislative Council in Melbourne, Dr Francis Murphy, a member of the Irish and colonial bar, condemned the licence fee as ‘unproductive, unequal and vexatious’. He asked that it be replaced by a duty on gold. Murphy was a conservative lawyer trained at Trinity College, Dublin, yet for his motion to succeed he needed the diggers to resist paying the fee, but in the end they did not, because the field was rich enough to make the 30-shilling monthly charge seem a minor expenditure. Once men found how much gold there was beneath the pastures they began to pay up. But their opinions remained as expressed in that first meeting—especially the complaint that in lean times they were being billed more than squatters.

  For each had a mere 2.4 metre square to dig in, unless they formed a team and combined the leases. Once alluvial gold had all been panned or was considered an inadequate return, the miner had to dig down through soft earth and gravel, using local timber to line and support the shaft. Next he met layers of clay, red and yellow, sticky and heavy to dig. Then harder clay still, studded with gravel, then a seam of blue clay rarely more than 13 centimetres thick in which the gold lay. Sometimes this blue clay was 3 metres down, sometimes 9 metres, sometimes not there at all. That kind of hole had a name—a shicer.

  The impact of all this displacement of earth and felling of trees on Ballarat’s bosky valley was prodigious. The forest disappeared, the landscape became a maze of clayey holes. The miners did their best to wash the clay and mud off at the end of each day, but it penetrated their skin.

  La Trobe was aware that the Colonial Office in Whitehall wanted him to deal with the new state of affairs without spending imperial funds. How to cope with the expense of new emigrants and new townships? ‘The gold revenue must be charged with it,’ he jotted in pencil on a letter from his Auditor-General.

  La Trobe made a significant visit to the Ballarat field after it had been open a month. He talked to the diggers, stood on heaps of clay above the shafts, and glanced down into the pits into which Mammon would draw them, even at the risk of cave-ins, six days a week. He got the impression that a great deal of lucky wealth was emerging from the shafts, and was aware of the pressure these fortunate fellows were imposing on government. For example, he talked to a team of five men who had dug 136 ounces (3.8 kilos) of gold one day and 120 ounces (3.4 kilos) the next. He heard of one digger washing eight pounds weight (3.6 kilos) of gold from two dairy-maid dishes of clay, and of a partnership of diggers finding 31 pounds (14 kilos) of gold in one day. His impression was that the diggers could very easily
pay for the government’s new expenses.

  There were very soon 5000 diggers at Ballarat, though the number dropped off towards the end of the year, many having gone to Mount Alexander, near Castlemaine, 65 kilometres north of Ballarat. Chris Peters, a hut-keeper on a sheep station at Mount Alexander, had broken off a piece of quartz from a reef in the pastures and seen gold. He and a companion resigned and worked at the rock, but were spied upon by a number of squatters. A Melbourne Argus journalist reported the location of the find wrongly. By the time corrections were made, the gold commissioner had arrived and taxed Peters and his offsider 10 per cent of the six pounds (2.7 kilos) of gold they had in their hut.

  The diggings at Mount Alexander were spread across creeks, gullies and outcrops. The gold dug up was often hidden in concealed purses, in saddlebags and elsewhere, so an estimate of its wealth became impossible to make. But an eloquent symbol of how topography was variously prized was the placement of the Mount Alexander cemetery on Pennyweight Hill, a hill of little potential value, where, amongst the dead, the wives and children of miners were numerous, victims of childbirth in some cases, sudden fevers in others.

  North of Castlemaine, in Bendigo Creek, gold was visible at a glance. One of the first to notice it for its value may have been Margaret Kennedy, wife of the overseer at Ravenswood Station, while she rode about delivering rations to the convict shepherds’ huts. With the wife of a barrel-maker, she made a tent from a linen sheet. The women were the first diggers at Bendigo, soon joined by three male prospectors.

  Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe was trying to manage the burgeoning fields with only forty-four soldiers. He also had fifty-five constables in Melbourne, but fifty of them wanted to resign and go digging. William Lonsdale, the Colonial Secretary in Victoria, told Doveton, the first Gold Commissioner, to be discreet in demanding fees and to take the money only from men who had it to pay from their earnings. Other diggers were to be given a card signed by the commissioner which would permit them to search till such time as they found gold. Doveton was also told to exact no fees for September, given that the month was so far advanced. But Doveton’s behaviour does not seem to have been as lenient as instructed. Doveton and his notorious sergeant, the former blacksmith, Armstrong, behaved with that petty authoritarianism which was one of the sins of minor Britons, and corrupt ones at that. Armstrong would quickly penetrate every area of wealth and exchange on the goldfields. A Quaker visitor to Ballarat, William Howitt, described the appalling ‘Hermstrong’ as a monster who took money from diggers by illegal means, including blackmail. Armstrong was one of the initiators of the police practice by which men found without their licence, even if it were just metres away in their tent or spare shirt pocket, were chained overnight to trees. Liquor sales were banned on the goldfields, so sly grog shops abounded, and only the ones police were taking money from were permitted to survive. Police often confiscated liquor from the competitors of the Armstrong-sanctioned shops, and broke kegs, or mockingly poured out bottles in front of the men who had invested in them. When Armstrong retired to Melbourne after only two years, he boasted that he had cleared £15 000 by speculation and bribery and extorting miners. When the miners found that one of the streets in the new town of Ballarat, designed by the surveyor Frederic Charles Urquhart, was to be named in Armstrong’s honour, they saw yet another sign that the authorities were making a mockery of them. The streets and cross streets were all named after commissioners, police functionaries or magistrates. A town where every laneway was named for a Peeler was to the diggers a questionable town.

  As well, the diggers saw little civic improvement for the taxes they paid. The roads got worse, there was no hospital, the mails were unreliable, and the police, some of them ex-convicts from across Bass Strait who had learned corrupt habits as overseers, were grossly untrue to their charge.

  But at least there could be no more transportation now. The escaped Irish political prisoner Thomas Francis Meagher, waiting on Waterhouse Island in Bass Strait for an American ship which was to leave Hobart to rendezvous with him and take him to the United States, one morning saw an eight-oared boat arriving from the direction of the Tasmanian mainland. It was full of escaped convicts from Hobart—they had stolen the cutter and were on their way to the gold rush in Port Phillip. They were well equipped with the contents of the cutter’s chest, and with other gear including a tent. They stayed with Meagher for three days and when his American ship arrived, which would take him to Civil War glory and assassination in the United States, they rowed him out to it. Clearly, transportation had become an absurdity. Why would government bother sending prisoners for punishment to places that men were now willing to pay a high premium to reach?

  CHAPTER 29

  HOW GOLD MAKES ALL NEW

  William Charles Wentworth, by now the consummate Tory, saw gold as an inconvenience to the pastoral princes, and was working as chairman of the New South Wales Select Committee to formulate a Goldfield Management Bill to limit the rights of miners and hold labourers in place on pastoral lands. In the proposed bill was a clause reserving any gold found on squatters’ leaseholds to the squatter himself. Goldfield commissioners were to be empowered to tear down the homes of unlicensed residents. And while the miners’ licence fee was to be reduced for locals to stop them going to Victoria, the fee was to be doubled for ‘foreigners’.

  Henry Parkes mocked the legislation. ‘This is not the way for our legislature to vindicate itself in the eyes of the British nation . . . Men with brains, men with ambition, men with a ha’penny’s worth of gumption and tuppence worth of nous were not going to sit in some shepherd’s hut for the benefit of some big absentee shepherd king. No sir. And even an imbecile knew that to discourage the gold interest was a great public wrong.’ Wentworth’s bill was passed in modified form.

  But busy with politics and his shop, Parkes himself did not go looking for gold. He was more interested in exalting Australia in the eyes of the imperial centre, a not uncommon Australian impulse.

  Miners’ associations existed on many goldfields, and the native-born and British were as one with newcomers in seeing the act as destructive (despite the token reduction in their own licence fees), and intended to make everyone return to being serfs of the pastoral interest. So passionately was this felt that at Sofala on the Turon, at Bathurst and elsewhere, mass meetings were held by the red-shirted miners, and there was talk of resisting the new Act by armed force and the old Irish Croppy weapon of the pike. On the day before the new licences were to be introduced, 7 February 1853, 1500 armed miners, aggrieved storekeepers and other traders who feared the goldfields being depopulated, marched on Sofala—there were speeches, and WC Wentworth, once the tribune of the populace, was burned in effigy.

  Next day at Sofala the commissioner was nervously shifting in his saddle on the far side of the Turon waiting for troops of the 11th Regiment of Foot to arrive and restore order in the sprawling canvas town. Before they did, fourteen men crossed the river and defied him to arrest them, since they would not purchase a licence. They were arrested and charged. Waving pistols and shillelaghs, a furious crowd of miners then crossed in the face of the Gold Commissioner’s troopers and the lately arrived redcoats. But a clergyman spoke up and managed for the moment to soothe the miners. The question was not finished with, however.

  Gold, said the clever little Corkman Justice Therry, brought to the colony a state of society which combined the minimum of comfort with the maximum of expense. House rents rose 100 per cent when the diggers came back to town with their money. Hay quadrupled in price. Couples who had worked for an annual wage of £50 as domestics now demanded more than three times that. The salaries of all government officers had to be raised nearly 50 per cent to keep them from leaving for the Turon. At first, just before the discovery of gold and just after, Sydney looked tenantless, given that so many had gone to the diggings in California and others to the new ones near Bathurst. So the first fortunes of the gold rush derived, in the continuing
spirit of Sydney, from a real estate killing made by men who remained in town and bought up rows of empty houses, banking on the inevitable coming demand. Within twelve months such men were selling the houses at twenty times their previous value. Similarly, those speculators who bought livestock from farmers and squatters when herdsmen and shepherds decamped for the diggings would soon make a fortune from them.

  But the Victorian goldfields threw all former discoveries in any country and in New South Wales into the shade. The population of Victoria in 1851 was already 77 000. In the next three years it grew to 250 000. In spite of the difficulties of administration, La Trobe was comforted by the deposits made to the Government Savings Bank which implied the growth of settled life.

  Roger Therry in New South Wales, where the phenomenon was not quite as intense as in Victoria, was nonetheless aware of the way fortunes were really made from gold. He met in Sydney an old friend, ‘a lollipop maker’, who was in steerage on the same ship on which Therry had returned to Australia in 1848. ‘ “Then,” I said, “You seem to have had good luck at the diggings?” His answer was, “I did not go near them.”’ The man had owned a pub on the high road to Ballarat from Geelong and had earned an enviable £6000 a year, and was going home again with £20 000, an improbable fortune for an ordinary immigrant.

  Therry also entered a very elegantly fitted-out shop in Sydney and saw there that ‘a red-shirted fellow, face hidden in hair, was smoking a large pipe that filled the room with smoke’. Therry mentioned the roughness of the man to the shopkeeper. ‘ “Oh sir!” was his reply. “That gentleman has been just buying £70 worth of goods for the lady near him, so, you know, we must be civil to such a customer.” ’