Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  Many policemen also forced diggers to give them a share of their gold. By now, Carboni’s contempt for colonial authority was complete. For a Gold Commissioner, Carboni’s advice was, ‘Get a tolerable young pig, make it stand on its hind-legs, put on its head the cap trimmed with gold lace, whitewash its mouth, and there you have the ass in the form of a pig. I mean to say a “man”. With this privilege, that he possesses in his head the brain of both the abovementioned brutes.’

  There were many Irish on the goldfields whom the police liked to rile. The new priest for the Irish was Father Patrick Smyth, who had a crippled Armenian servant, Yoannes Gregorius. Ministers of religion were exempt from having to purchase licences, but Gregorius was beaten by a policeman for not having one. The Acting Commissioner of Victorian Police, Evelyn Sturt, brother of the explorer Charles Sturt, arrived at the scene, and so did Father Smyth who had to pay £5 bail to get Gregorius released from a prison which, a few months later, would be crammed with digger prisoners. Gregorius was charged with assault upon a trooper. The Ballarat Catholics, whether Irish or otherwise, drew up a letter to the authorities.

  When Governor Hotham saw the petition, he was impressed by its articulateness. ‘The conduct of Mr Commissioner Johnston towards the Reverend Father Smyth,’ the petition said, ‘has been calculated to awaken the highest feelings of indignation in the breasts of his devoted flock; and they do call upon the Governor to institute an enquiry into the character and do desire to have him at once removed from Ballarat.’ But the commissioner was not removed— in Hotham’s mind he was keeping the lid on the pot—and the Irish and others remained aggrieved.

  On 16 October 1854, four men in blue shirts, corduroy trousers and caps with black crepe veils held up the Ballarat branch of the Bank of Victoria and departed with £15 000. No one would ever find out, at least officially, who they were, but this robbery carried out within a stone’s throw of the Camp might have given the miners the idea of the impotence of the Camp against, not a gang of men in crepe masks, but a mass of men who exposed their faces to the sun and spoke of greater freedom.

  There had been an infuriating murder amongst the miners’ ranks that helped fuel their resentment of the Camp. Earlier in October, two young Scots diggers had gone into town on the tear, and on the way back to camp tried to get a drink at Bentley’s Eureka Hotel. Words were exchanged at the pub shutters, and the two were then pursued along the Melbourne Road by one of Bentley’s servants who killed young James Scobie with a shovel.

  Immediately the police network sprang into efficient action to save Bentley. But the miners called a meeting at the place where Scobie was killed. Because that was not far from the Eureka Hotel, there was a certain threat attached to the meeting. Bentley asked for police protection, and both the police and a number of soldiers turned up. Those who spoke at the protest meeting were Thomas Kennedy, a former Scots Chartist and a Baptist preacher; a man named Hugh Meikle who had been a juror at the Coroner’s inquest into Scobie’s death; one Archibald Carmichael; and Peter Lalor, the Irish digger.

  Next to the hotel was a bowling alley of canvas owned by John Emritson, a Bostonian, and he watched as mounted police advanced a short distance from the meeting place to the hotel. Cries broke out from the crowd demanding Bentley show himself. Some boys in the crowd began throwing stones, windows were broken, and then suddenly the crowd was pulling wooden boards from the walls. Lieutenant Broadhurst and some more men of the 40th Regiment arrived and lined up on the right of the building.

  Robert Rede, the Gold Commissioner, also turned up, and mounted the windowsill to address the crowd, hopeful that his presence would remind men of their civic responsibilities. Eggs splattered him. All at once the bowling alley was alight. The winds were blowing as only the winds of the internal Australian desert, bearing down on central Victoria, can. The military refused to attempt to extinguish the flames, as their lieutenant thought it beyond the ambit of their duties. The police were left trying to beat the flames down while the military marched back to the Camp.

  Later, Carboni would vividly recall the fire: ‘The redcoats wheel about, and return to the Camp. Look out! The roof of the back part of the hotel falls in! “Hurrah! Boys, here’s the porter and ale with the chill off.” Bottles are handed out burning hot—the necks of two bottles are knocked together!—contents drunk in colonial style.—Look out, the roof, sides and all fall in! An enormous mass of flames and smoke arise to the roaring sound—the sparks are carried far, far into the air, and what was once the Eureka Hotel is now a mass of burning embers. As she burns the crowd calls, Hip Hip Hurrah!’

  Later that afternoon hail and rain fell on Ballarat and the rumour in the Camp was that an attack would be made on them to capture Bentley. The women and children resident in the Camp were moved out and 1000 rounds of ball cartridge were issued. A small number of diggers were arrested that night but were quickly rescued from the police, who galloped back affrighted to the Camp. ‘The people ask for justice, not bullets!’ wrote Humffray. He declared that the Eureka Hotel had become ‘a bundle of crayons with which to write the black history of crime and colonial misrule’.

  A diggers’ committee made an eight-page submission setting out the facts of Scobie’s death and urging Governor Hotham to look into it. Down in his villa in Toorak, according to his wife an inadequate gubernatorial residence, he replied that he had offered a reward for the capture of Scobie’s murderer, and that if he was to order an investigation into matters on the goldfields, an essential prelude to that would be the gold miners’ obedience to the law of the land.

  In the matter of the fire, Hotham soon found himself the victim of police stupidity, in that one of the accused, Andrew McIntyre, was a man who tried to restrain the crowd, while the other one, Thomas Fletcher, a printer, had not left his office that day. Many of those who had raised bail for McIntyre and Fletcher now wanted to storm the Camp instead and release them by force. Henry Holyoake, a London Chartist, addressed an impromptu meeting on Bakery Hill. He managed to contain the fury of those who were outraged by the indiscriminate arrests of the two men. The accused had been committed for trial at Geelong, since it was clear no goldfields jury would condemn them. A crowd of miners marched along the Melbourne Road, letting their pistols off.

  Commissioner Rede was determined not to let things settle down quietly, since that would lessen the authority of the government. He looked forward to mass arrests and the imposition ‘of a frightful lesson’. Rede, a former surgeon, was calling for blood. He was in unconscious unison with his governor who had been told by the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Britain, the Duke of Newcastle, to bring the issues of Victoria’s goldfields to a head, if necessary. Before Rede followed up, though, he intended to wait upon the arrival of a detachment of the 12th Regiment from Melbourne ‘in sufficient force to punish’. He sent out his troopers the next day to hunt for unlicensed diggers and to ‘test the feelings of the people’.

  CHAPTER 30

  GOLDEN CELESTIALS

  News of the gold discoveries in Australia reached southern China in 1852. The Chinese named the Australian goldfields Xian Jin Shan, New Gold Mountain. (California, its diggings in decline by the mid 1850s, was Jiu Jin Shan, Old Gold Mountain.) Their tickets funded on credit by Chinese merchants, about five hundred Chinese embarked as diggers for Australia in that year and the next, but then, in 1854, 10 000 arrived throughout the year. They came mainly from the Guangdong delta. Their villages were hard up, densely populated, frequently raided by warlords, and now paying English taxes as well. The countryside was involved in guerilla warfare against the Ching government, and rebels, outlaws and bandits sheltered in the mountains above the estuary.

  Each of these miners who arrived in Australia was, as one modern Chinese scholar describes it, connected to his family back home the way a kite is by a string to the hands of its owner. As they walked to the goldfields from Geelong or Sydney, there were acts of petty spite by white miners, including the pulling of c
ues, called ‘pigtails’, by the Europeans, and the upsetting of Chinese diggers’ gear carried, coolie-style, on both ends of a long bamboo pole. In that age, the Chinese miners’ lack of Christianity, the essential marker of human worth, made them a butt of jokes or abhorrence. But it also made them subtly dangerous to the mind of colonial society. Nonetheless the major source of serious, as against flippant and oafish, opposition to Chinese immigration in the years 1856 to 1860 came not from the goldfields, but from politicians and newspapers.

  Though a number of witnesses spoke of good order, sobriety and discipline amongst the Chinese, the Victorian Goldfields Commission of Enquiry would condemn them as practising ‘degrading and absurd superstition’, as being incurable gamblers and possessing other unspecified vicious habits. They were so undemanding of physical comfort that their overall effect was ‘to demoralise colonial society’, declared the Enquiry. These thunderings would have redoubled if the Enquiry had known that many households in China tolerated the idea that a married man who made good—or good enough—might marry also in Australia, and not necessarily to a Chinese woman. These Australian marriages were considered secondary marriages by the man, and a number of non-Chinese wives were shocked when they ultimately ventured to their husbands’ villages and met the primary wives.

  The one thing the Chinese were not accused of was political crime, but they were as political as the Irish. Many of the gold-rush Chinese in New South Wales and Victoria were refugees and had supported the Taiping (or Great Peace) rebellion, a revolt against Manchu rule led by a Christian-influenced seer, Hung-Hsui-Chuan, who attracted huge support and rallied an army from amongst the common people.

  In June 1855, the Victorian Legislative Council passed an Act to make Provision for Certain Immigrants. It imposed a poll tax of £10, payable by the ship’s captain, on every Chinese arrival. Furthermore, captains were permitted to land only one Chinese national per 10 tons of displacement. To avoid the tax, ships’ masters began to disembark Chinese passengers in New South Wales, or at Robe on the coast of South Australia. From there the Celestials—the name commonly used and derived from China’s self-description as the Celestial Kingdom—walked to the Victorian goldfields, a distance of 400 kilometres through hard country. On 8 April 1856, for example, a party of 150 Chinese left Adelaide for the Victorian diggings under the escort of an experienced bushman, Lionel Edwardson. Five two-horse drays carried food, utensils and general luggage. The leader of the Chinese group had already spent some years in South Australia, and had amassed a small fortune as a merchant, upon which he had returned to his native China and induced this large party to migrate with him to the goldfields. The average rate of travel was 19 kilometres a day. The overland route was boggy in winter but was much better than the Guichen Bay coastal route from Robe which suffered still more from heavy winter rains.

  At Robe between 17 January and 3 May 1857, 10 000 Chinese immigrants were landed, from ships which had sailed from Hong Kong. Guichen Bay off Robe was not a very safe harbour, open to buffeting southerlies. So the ships landed their Chinamen and made a quick turnaround. The Sub-Collector of Customs at Robe remembered this Chinese invasion of the 1850s: ‘The Government of the sister state [Victoria] never forgave South Australia for this loss to them of about £20 000. I had great difficulty securing the opium for Judy [his wife, who possibly took it for tuberculosis] and on one occasion Ormerod’s store was broken open by the Chinamen to gain possession of the cases containing it. There were then about 3000 Celestials camping about the townships and Lieutenant Saunders and forty men of the 12th Regiment were sent to keep order.’ He noticed how generally well-behaved the Chinese parties were, but ‘their national vice, however, of gambling accompanies them while upon the road and it is singular, though painful, to observe how intensely the passions of play burn in this effeminate race’.

  South Australia introduced its own poll tax in 1857, and a number of similar New South Wales bills were passed thereafter.

  By 1861 there were more than 24 000 Chinese immigrants on the Victorian goldfields of Ballarat, Beechworth, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Maryborough. The Argus of 4 June 1856 said, ‘The present Act for checking the introduction of the Chinese has proved at all events a partial failure. Like Southey’s rats they seem to come in at the windows, and under the doors, and down through the ceilings and up through the floors.’ At the same time there were 11 000 Chinese on the New South Wales goldfields in places like Armidale, Binalong, Bathurst, Braidwood, Lambing Flat (Young), Carcoar, Mudgee, Tamworth and Tumut. In 1857 there was an outbreak of violence against the Chinese at Buckland River in Victoria and the move to form anti-Chinese leagues spread to other Victorian goldfields and to New South Wales. In part response, Chinese Benevolent Societies, often based on clan or district ties, quickly developed across the goldfields of Australia to support the Chinese population.

  OBJECTS IN A LANDSCAPE, OR ACTORS IN A FIELD

  An observer of the Mount Alexander goldfields, north of Ballarat, near Castle-maine, wrote, ‘The camp grew in regular lines of streets, narrow and primitive, but highly populous and busy, while the whole valley was alive with Chinamen as they swarmed in their paddocks and holds.’ On that field, one in four adult males was Chinese. Contrary to accepted wisdom, Chinese and European miners often worked side by side, mutually dependent on adequate water to work their claims, and mutually subject to its ravages. The mineshafts at Mount Alexander’s Moonlight and Pennyweight Flats, for example, were about 9 metres deep and all diggers of whatever stripe worked furiously to keep water out of them.

  Yet, the full-throated entertainer, Charles Thatcher, very popular on the goldfields, depicted ‘John the Chinaman’ as a thief.

  ’Tis now the very witching time of night,

  Past twelve o’clock and not a star in sight.

  All nature sleeps until the coming morn

  And tired diggers steal a churchyard yawn.

  The thieving Chinaman sees night’s black pall

  O’er hill and gully slowly mantling all.

  With bag in hand he threads his noiseless way

  A visit to the hen woods now to pay.

  ‘John Chinaman’, according to one of Thatcher’s sketches, gradually adopted European habits, wearing a coat and trousers, making love to Irish girls and settling down to enjoy the privileges of an Englishman. ‘John is gregarious, his religion is rather doubtful and consists of going into a joss house and burning fragrant sticks of sandalwood . . . strange to say there are no Chinese in Parliament at present, which is rather unfair, neither has any Chinaman been raised to the Bench.’ Obviously all was not racial concord on the fields.

  Despite social ostracism, there were women who married the Chinese and these were often Irish orphan girls. Marriages were more common than expected and a lot of them were stable and successful. But European women in relationships with Chinese men were described as lazy, degraded creatures, the victims of lewd Orientals and outcasts from European society. ‘A lot of silly girls . . . too lazy to work.’ ‘Prostitutes of the lowest order . . . went to the Chinese to escape incessant beatings’ by their clients.

  It was also often presumed that the women who married Chinamen were opium addicts. Some may have been, and certainly some became opium abusers, but these cases were the notable ones, obvious to the authorities, who might then assume any woman with a Chinese husband or lover was an addict. From 1854 onwards, there had been a number of anti-Chinese riots on Victorian and New South Wales goldfields. Those later in the decade occurred at a time when the colonial legislatures were framing legislation against Chinese immigration. In 1857 and 1858 at Adelong and Tambaroora respectively, and at the Buckland River field in Victoria in 1857, there were attacks on Chinese miners inspired by a complex of emotions on the part of white diggers. These included objections to the way the Chinese worked in gangs, their supposed exploitation of desirable sites, the existence of separate Chinese camps, which seemed sinister to other diggers, and the ethnic hyster
ia they evoked simply by being there. In 1860 a string of anti-Chinese riots began at Lambing Flat near Young, north-west of Goulburn in New South Wales, and would culminate a year later in a riot which destroyed Chinese camps and drove more than a thousand Chinese miners away.

  The Lambing Flat riots are often taken to prove that digger society was endemically racist and that the Chinese were hapless and submissive victims of racial violence, and made their living off poor or abandoned ground. There was no denying the hysteria of the diggers or the savagery of the riots, but Chinese mining was not haphazard and confined to the margins. Chinese miners at Braidwood and Kiandra in southern New South Wales, for example, generally worked in large numbers under the control of a boss, who would have perhaps one hundred and fifty men under him organised into gangs of ten to thirty. The boss attended to the purchase of claims, the supply of provisions and payments, and charged the miners between 23 to 30 shillings a week for board.

  The Chinese were willing to live rough, and that helped white miners sneer at them, but their solidarity also affronted some. Clan loyalty meant more than individual comfort for the men who signed on to come to the goldfields. Even on the goldfields, the Chinese gangs were connected by lineage and the boss came from a high clan family. The individual’s passage from the Pearl River to the New Gold Mountain was probably advanced by Guangdong merchants— the basis for the many complaints that Chinese migrants remitted too much of their money back home and did not spend it in Australia.

  The Chinese diggers indeed lived frugally and acquired whatever wealth they could for an eventual return to the Middle Kingdom. Once the alluvial gold played out many did return home. But from those who stayed came the population of Chinese labourers, market gardeners, cooks and urban businessmen who would beget Australian families and themselves grow old in Australia.