Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘If we are to be blessed with an Australian aristocracy,’ Deniehy continued, ‘I would prefer it to resemble, not that of William [Wentworth] the Bastard, but of Jack the Strapper.’ He concluded, ‘The domineering clique which makes up the Wentworth party are not representative of the manliness, the spirit and the intelligence of the free men of New South Wales.’

  The next morning, with the air still ringing from Deniehy’s insults, Wentworth spoke in Macquarie Street on the second reading of his Constitution Bill. This was an older, more successful Wentworth, but still rancorous, still haunted by society’s earlier and, in some cases, still existing prejudices against him and his wife Sarah, who was the daughter of a former convict blacksmith and had borne him three children out of wedlock. He admitted that purely on a population basis, Sydney should have seventeen members in the Legislative Assembly instead of the six proposed. But he insisted that as the pastoral industry produced most of the colony’s wealth, it should have more representatives in parliament. He defended the hereditary element of the proposed upper house. He said such a house would be a good and stable bulwark, while lack of titles was a great blemish in the American Constitution, declaring, ‘We want a British, not a Yankee Constitution.’

  A few weeks later there was another constitutional protest meeting on some vacant land near Circular Quay, where Deniehy took up the challenge strongly again. He attacked Wentworth’s ‘claptrap’ about those who opposed Wentworth’s system wanting to introduce American institutions into New South Wales. The Constitution Committee did not want to transplant American institutions holus bolus, he said, but to look at them as models, ‘because the United States bore more resemblance to a new colony, such as Australia, than did the old countries of Europe’. And while the small constituencies of England elected youthful aristocrats, zealous about pointers and spaniels and aspects of the game laws, so ‘we in the legislature of New South Wales saw a goodly sprinkling, nay, a majority of the representatives of bullocks, bunyips, sheep and gumtrees’. Deniehy, applauded again and again, was still talking when the sun went down, preventing journalists from making further notes. The potency of his voice was enhanced by a parody he wrote on the departure of Edward Deas Thomson for two years leave in England, declaring him as being treated to the sycophancy of the pastoral crowd:

  . . . a knot of hirelings, moneyed knaves and those thy hand

  Hath helped to heights that better men should hold . . .

  Despite his gift for oratory, Deniehy was not prospering in business—he had, wrote his friend Miss EA Martin, ‘careless and reckless generosity, and the utter want of business capacity which distinguishes men of genius’. He regretted the hardships to which his wife was thus subjected, believing that if she had not married him she would have had a comfortable position in English society. But if adoration of the public and his peers could have achieved a financial dimension, he would have been rich indeed.

  Charles Harpur was teaching in the Hunter Valley when he read the report of Deniehy’s speech in a newspaper sent him by Stenhouse. He ecstatically devoted a poem to his friend.

  Little Dan Deniehy!

  Brilliant Dan Deniehy!

  Dear is the light of thy spirit to me!

  Dear as a streaming ray

  Out from a gleaming bay

  Is to some weather-worn barque from the sea.

  Harpur’s wife, Mary, had married him in 1850 and their first son was named Washington. He farmed in the Hunter Valley until 1859, when he was appointed a gold commissioner at Araluen in southern coastal New South Wales. There he selected a residence on the Tuross River at Eurobodalla, and established a farm and lived a stable life with Mary and their children.

  Thus his future prospects proved much happier than Deniehy’s, who became gradually and increasingly a victim of alcohol and short finances.

  THE ROOSIANS

  On 8 March 1854, Britain and France declared war on Russia—already at war with Turkey. Nominally the Crimean War was about the guardianship of Christian shrines in Jerusalem, or at least that was what the War Department told the British public. In fact it was a war to prevent Russia expanding as Turkish power declined in eastern Europe. Australia had no pressing reason to be involved, although Russia was a Pacific power. But many Australian Britons were filled with a patriotic desire to fight for the Empire. Harpur, Lang and Deniehy lambasted the war. Harpur asked, as many would ask in later wars in which Australia saw itself involved, ‘What is the eastern war to thee, it’s craft and folly, blame and blunder?’ The cry was that this was a war undertaken to uphold one despotism against another. The Australian supporters of the war projected a Russian invasion of Australia. A Russian naval vessel was said to be at loose in the Pacific. A patriotic meeting was held at John Malcolm’s Sydney Circus, a popular venue even for meetings, in May 1854. Sir William Denison, the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, declared that ‘England is not fond of engaging in wanton wars, but when once embarked on a just war, there are no consequences which the country is not prepared to meet.’ Henry Parkes spoke on behalf of a cause he believed to be so national and so great as to require Australian participation. Dean McEncroe said on behalf of the Catholic community that he hoped no invidious distinctions would be made with regard to the widows and orphans of Roman Catholic soldiers. He was sure that their blood would not be the least copious on the fields of Alma and Inkerman. Daniel Cooper, a former convict and rich merchant, subscribed £1000 to the war fund. With three cheers for Lord Raglan, the British commander-in-chief, and three groans for Tsar Nicholas, the meeting ended.

  This was a question on which Deniehy and Parkes parted ways. ‘He is rather too fond of “his Queen and his country”,’ Deniehy was suddenly writing, ‘and a good deal too much in the habit of acquainting the public with this fondness.’ He declared that ‘Mr Parkes has too much, not of the English man in him, but of “Englishmanism” about him . . . the distinction is subtle. I fear his career as a senator will be a very curious one.’ Such is the spirit of ‘number one’ [self-interest], said Deniehy, which ran through even ‘the best of your imported men’. Dr Lang, though, was a solitary adherent to principle, who towered over the neighbouring attitudes like a cathedral spire. Whatever Englishmanisms was— and Deniehy saw it and disapproved of it as the inclusion of British imperial identity within the Australian one—it was the more common of the brands of Australian sense of nationality prevailing at the time.

  The government announced its intention to send an officer to Goulburn to drill the Goulburn Yeomanry Cavalry Corps, and Deniehy wrote a letter to the Goulburn Herald, signing it ‘Harold Flupsy Buffles’, the name of the supposed officer involved, which declared, ‘I can only say that if that Roosian “Ketchikoff” does land, I only hope he may try travelling upon the Goulburn Road. I have a notion that he would undoubtedly regret such a step.’

  A number of plans were put in place to defend Sydney Harbour, Robert Towns suggesting a barrier composed of the hulls of vessels connected by chains, which could be sunk in a few minutes on a gun signal. The Attorney-General unsuccessfully suggested taxing the people of New South Wales £100 000 a year towards the expenses of war, and Deniehy denounced that idea as ‘the most iniquitous . . . to be found in the whole history of colonial policy, teeming as it is with injustice, wickedness, and crime’.

  CHAPTER 32

  POLICE STATE?

  The conservative fear that the more men sought gold, the more the goldfields would be scenes of blood and brawls and riots initially had proved unfounded. Even James Macarthur had begun to understand this by the end of 1851. Instead, gold was raising prices, property values, rents and incomes so high that the £10 voting franchise threshold would soon be easily reached by ordinary men. Samuel Sydney, an English publicist of immigration, wrote an 1852 manual for potential immigrants, entitled Three Colonies of Australia. Gold, he told his readers, had transformed Australia from a mere ‘sheep walk tended by nomadic burglars’ into the ‘wealthiest off
set of the British Crown—a land of promise for the adventurous—a home of peace and independence for the industrious—an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined’.

  Riches and independence may well have been within the grasp of some lucky diggers, and the merchants who benefited from their largesse. But those left at home were not so enamoured with gold. Janet Kincaid wrote from Greenock in Scotland to her husband in the Victorian gold town of Maryborough complaining that he had embraced the independence of the gold-seeking life to the neglect of his family. ‘You left the ship to better yourself and to get your own money to your self. You never cared much for your family, far less for your wife. You sent £5 two years and a half ago. Would £5 keep you since you left the ship?’ He was, she said, a hard-hearted father who could sit down and eat up his children’s meat. ‘Let me know what you intend to do for the boys. We are still in the same house, 15 West Stuart Street, where you left us.’

  An American digger received a letter from a female friend in California. ‘Oh Chandler, did we not pass many happy hours together? I thought what a pleasant home you had and kind parents. With everything else that one could wish to make you happy and yet you left them all for gold! Oh Chandler, I hope you may be blessed with good health and get enough to pay you for the sacrifice you made in going.’

  Indefatigable Caroline Chisholm, the Catholic promoter of female and then family immigration, also ran a personal family reunion program for the goldfields: ‘I have promised parents to go in search of their children—I have promised wives to make enquiries of their husbands—I have promised sisters to seek their brothers, and friends to look for friends.’ Chisholm was aware of how hostile gold rushes could be to the interests of women, not only those in foreign parts. Destitution and desertion were the lot of many colonial women too.

  Frances Perry, wife of the Anglican bishop of Melbourne, was attracted to camp life when she and her husband visited the government compound on the goldfields. ‘Life in the Camp is most amusing, and was quite a novelty to me. There is a large mess I can attend, where the commissioners, military officers, superintendent of police, etc. etc. take their meals, the Chief Commissioner presiding.’ She was in no doubt that waves of resentment from the encircling miners broke against the ramparts of the Camp, in country another woman described as resembling ‘one vast cemetery with fresh made graves’.

  Jane Prendergast, a woman stuck on the fields with her husband, wrote to her father-in-law in 1853. ‘On one point certain which I will never agree, he likes this country and I do not; I can understand the gentlemen liking it, their lives are so very free and independent, so much the reverse of the strength that society imposes upon them in England, but no ladies like it: the fortunes of their families and a wish to get some gold out of the land of gold have brought them here, and necessity obliges them to remain.’

  Gavan Duffy, a much-tried Irish seditionist but by the 1850s a coming statesman who would ultimately be premier of Victoria, observed that the income of the gold seeker was not so great in the long run when compared with that of ordinary pursuits. ‘But the employment had the unmistakeable charm of not being a servile one.’ After all, said Duffy, ‘It is a blessed land, seamed with gold, fanned with healthy breezes, and bathed in a transparent atmosphere like the landscapes of Guido.’ This was a generation which had not been raised, as later Australians were, to see the threat of the landscape, the threadbare nature of the agricultural possibilities, or the deserts at the centre of the continent.

  Nor was Raffaello Carboni, one of the many to raise the issue of land on the goldfields, deterred by Australia’s shortcomings. From a tree-stump rostrum, Carboni told a meeting of miners at Ballarat in November 1854, ‘I have a dream, a happy dream. I dream that we had met here together to render to Our Father in heaven for a plentiful harvest, such that for the first time in this, our adopted land, we have our own food for the year; and so each of us holding in our hands a tumbler of Victorian wine, you called on me for a song. My harp was tuned and in good order: I cheerfully struck up, “O Let Us Be Happy Together”. Not so, Britons, not so! We must meet as in old Europe . . . for the redress of grievances inflicted on us, not by Crown heads, but by blockheads, aristocratical incapables, who never did a day’s work in their lives.’

  A sense of freedom and male independence characterised even the diggers’ entertainments when they went into Melbourne.

  The audiences for the concerts at Melbourne’s Salle de Valentino and Black’s Concert Room were almost exclusively male, though prostitutes, of course, broke the male solitude. Even the gaoler at Melbourne Gaol, John Castieau, described his own largely male social life as being to ‘lounge about, drink, look at the whores, fool away my money at their homes, by paying for drink’.

  But land would give them families, said city progressives, and turn them into citizens.

  Nonetheless, Governor Charles Hotham was still edgy about law and order. He had a tendency of courting the miners while remaining clearly authoritarian. And in spite of broad popular opinion against mining licences, he would not abandon them. He regarded some of the speeches reported from the goldfields as akin to the Chartist assemblies, and the speeches and marches made in England in 1848, that year of revolution across Europe. RL Milne, a former soldier, wrote that nothing but moral supervision would ‘save Australia from the gambling, stilettoing, vile abominations and desecrated Sabbaths of an assassinating Italy, infidel France, and republican America’.

  In fact, 1848, the year of European revolutions, was coming their way, just a little delayed.

  *

  The police took on a function more akin to that of the Royal Irish Constabulary, attending and reporting on goldfields meetings, infiltrating diggers’ groups and keeping a firm authoritarian grip on mining society. The goldfields essentially became a police state. By mid 1854, with 1639 men in the police force, Victoria was more strongly policed than California. Castlemaine had one police officer for every 46 residents. By comparison, San Francisco, a city with a population of 34 000 in 1852, had a police force that never exceeded eighty men, and was often only around thirty (though ‘vigilance committees’ with plentiful rope took up the slack).

  The pay of police was increased, military pensioners were brought from Van Diemen’s Land, and fifty London Metropolitan policemen were recruited. There was a special mounted cadet corps for gentlemen recruits. A number of respectable young men who were stranded in Melbourne by the gold rush joined up.

  As the Miners’ Reform League called ‘Monster Meetings’ to protest at police tyranny and to appeal to Governor Hotham, diggers were subjected to little daily dramas of arrest, corrupted evidence and a sequence of protection for police favourites and beatings and chainings for honest men.

  By late 1854, meetings were being called on the goldfields every few days, which panicked the Gold Commissioner, Rede, and the Commissioner of Police—in a short period of October Catholic miners held a meeting; the next day a protest was held over the imprisonment of the two diggers arrested for the burning of Bentley’s hotel; and two days later there was to be a meeting of the ‘Tipperary Mob’, that is, men from that Irish county. The police and soldiers at the Camp hoped that a promised detachment of the 12th Regiment would arrive before that meeting, and Rede was beginning to feel that the place could be defended only by cannon. Rede was determined to bring it all to a fight, however, if he could get the personnel in the Camp reinforced, and so it seemed, while ever the miners presumed to strike attitudes, did Hotham. In Ballarat there was an attempt by the authorities to sign up special constables amongst ‘all loyal and respectable inhabitants of the goldfields’. Only three citizens presented themselves. On 19 October, more foot police arrived and then, within a few days, Captain White arrived with a detachment of the 40th Regiment. A number of diggers and other people, especially those with families, pulled out and left for Cressley’s Creek, where the diggers were said to be bottoming out at 5.5 metres, 3.7 metres less than at Ballarat, with 8 ounces (
226 grams) of gold. Two thousand people vanished from Ballarat.

  Rede was planning further arrests and was organising the Camp to take action. Tents which obstructed its line of fire were simply pulled down, houses inside the walls were protected by piled-up bags of grain, loopholes cut in the walls, and barrels full of water placed to extinguish fires. All these preparations were to be made in silence, said Rede. He seemed confident of his power and arrested Henry Westbury, nicknamed Yorkey, a man who had been observed to have struck Bentley’s hotel with his fists.

  On 30 October, Hotham decided to dampen unrest by setting up a Board of Enquiry. The Board tried to get the Ballarat Times to give widespread publicity to its arrival on the goldfields, but the editor, Henry Seekamp, refused to do so. Carboni called him ‘a short, thick, rare sort of man’ with a hatred of humbug and ‘yabber-yabber’. He had bought out the Ballarat Times and married a Dublin widow, Clara du Val, the leading actress in the Camden Theatre on the Gravel Pits, in December 1854. He had served on the Committee of the National Schools and had recently called a meeting to found a hospital for sick and destitute diggers. In early October, before Scobie was murdered, he had said that the Camp would have to behave with more courtesy, but even so he told Hotham in a letter, ‘The corruption of every Department connected with the Government in Ballarat is become so notorious and so bare-faced that public indignation is thoroughly aroused; and though the expression of public feeling be for a time in abeyance, on account of the numerous armed mercenaries lately sent up from town, the fire of indignation is not extinguished; it still smoulders, only to burst forth again with unabashed and unabateable vigour . . . It is not fines, imprisonment, taxation and bayonets that is required to keep people tranquil and content. It is an attention to their wants and their just rights alone that will make the miners content, and that they must have, sooner or later, either given to them soon with a good will, or taken by them later with no will but their own.’ Seekamp’s advice was dismissed by the governor.