by Clare Wright
The white woman may have considered this would be the end of the affair, but to the Buninyong woman, initiating a new ‘country woman’ joined their families in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual obligation.
During the period of pastoral expansion, many ngurungaeta (elders) formed kinship alliances with squatters in order to gain permanent access to their ancient ceremonial and hunting grounds. With the sudden surge in population into their territory, Wathaurung quickly translated the principal of bilateral transactions from complex socio-political associations to a more purely economic function. One way to do this was for local Indigenous guides to point diggers in the direction of a new ‘discovery’ in exchange for money or goods.13 Another was to supply the rapidly growing demand for dallong, heavy thick rugs or cloaks, made from wollert (possum), goin (kangaroo) or tooan (flying foxes). Dallong were prized by white fortune-seekers not only for warmth on frosty nights in a flimsy tent but also as a sartorial status symbol, due to the majestic appearance afforded to the wearer. A dallong could fetch as much as £5, and some indigenous makers sold enough to buy horses, as well as rice, sugar, bread, tobacco and alcohol. Other objects and consumables useful to the digging life, such as biniae (baskets) and karrup (spears) were also traded or sold. As historian Fred Cahir argues, Wathaurung were ‘not outside the landscape in the development of modern economic institutions’; rather they successfully adapted to and exploited the commercial opportunities presented by the open, unregulated market of the early gold rush.14 Ballarat’s early residents soon came to rely on Indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship.
By Christmas 1852, a year after Thomas Hiscock’s ‘discovery’, the luxuriant lands of the Wathaurung had been stripped of vegetation to become ravaged earth, honeycombed by holes and studded with calico tents. As Henry Mundy noted, the gullies were so crowded with people laying their small claims to river frontage that there was not a shadow of a chance to edge in.
But this was nothing compared to the avalanche of human endeavour that was about to descend.
It wasn’t until early in 1853 that, as one early settler put it, a huge tidal wave…the memorable rush from England and everywhere else began in earnest.15 If the first flood of inter-colonial gold seekers wasn’t enough to change Victoria’s fortunes—and alter things irrevocably for the land’s first inhabitants—this inpouring of the world’s schemers and dreamers was without doubt an immutable turning point.
News of Victoria’s seemingly infinite supply of alluvial gold permeated the newspapers and market squares of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw, Munich, Washington, Toronto and Shanghai. Entrepreneurial American George Francis Train was eager to volunteer as the Australian correspondent for the BOSTON POST. He wrote from New York on the eve of his journey in February 1853 that the Australian fever seems to be raging here as well as Boston. Twenty-four-year-old Train would later become a flamboyant presidential candidate, profligate financier and inveterate world traveller. But now, staring out over the wharf at Ellis Island, the dapper Bostonian was consumed by a singular mission: to capitalise on the mercantile potential of a wonderful country where in a single hour the poorest beggar is worth his thousands, by a happy freak of fortune. Train would not dig, but buy and sell.
By his side on the dock stood his new bride, Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis. The couple were an odd match. Willie was ten years George’s senior, and the daughter of Colonel Davis of Louisville, Kentucky—a slave owner and unlikely confidant of Abraham Lincoln. George was a voluble supporter of progressive causes, from Fenianism to women’s suffrage; Willie was a southern belle. They were united by love and the grim memories they shared.
Willie and George were married in October 1851 and they had a new baby girl when they made the decision to reap the commercial rewards of what Willie termed England’s El Dorado. But shortly before their departure tragedy struck, and it was with a grief-stricken heart that Willie hauled herself on board the Batavia.
Many and sad the changes through which I have passed, she wrote to a friend:
our beautiful babe was too fragile to stem the current of life—and only a week before we were to sail for Australia we were called upon by God to ‘render up to him the being that was his’ and instead of a pleasant voyage with our little daughter to while away the weary hours we lied her in Mount—and turned our faces towards ‘the Southern Cross’ with hearts crushed almost to the earth.
For the Trains, a cruel twist of fate had turned a thrilling adventure into an odyssey of despair.16
If the Australian fever was raging across the globe, it seemed destined not to break. Reports of the continuing success of the early diggers confirmed that the gold in the hills of Victoria wasn’t a mere flash in the pan. It would be worth it—well worth it, said correspondents like Train—to uproot families, dismantle homes, flee employers, abandon villages and join the mass movement of people to Australia. Gold was ‘the lubricator of world trade during a period of great industrial and commercial expansion’, as historian Weston Bate puts it.17 As fiscal capital, gold was a pure currency, unsullied by the usual monetary trappings of borrowing, regulation and control. With gold, there was no middleman. The seemingly insatiable demand for the yellow mineral meant that prices remained high and stable. As social capital, gold symbolised the alchemic possibility of personal transformation. Anyone with the Midas touch was instantly master of his own domain.18
The viral spread of enthusiasm for gold’s life-changing potential is most readily apparent in the population statistics for this era. In 1851, Victoria had a population of 77,000 people. That number skyrocketed to 237,000 by 1854 and 411,000 by 1857. By 1861, the population of Victoria was 540,000—half the total population of Australia. About a quarter of this meteoric multitude lived in Melbourne and the rest were scattered across the goldfields. In his official account for 1853, Victorian Government immigration agent Edward Bell reported that 77,734 unassisted immigrants had arrived that year: 33,032 from the United Kingdom, 35,834 from other colonies and 8868 from other countries. In addition to this, 14,578 people had arrived through the government assistance schemes that had been introduced in the late 1830s to rid Great Britain of its surplus labour and supply the colonies with an economically advantageous mix of settlers.19
A comparison with the population flows to the United States shows just how the tide of human ambition had turned towards Australia’s shores. In 1845, 518,538 people emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. In the same year, only 830 found their way to Australia. By 1853, the number of people going to America had only increased by 21,183. Australia had received 87,424 new souls.
The glowing reports of the rivers of gold flowing through central Victoria couldn’t have come at a better time for the world’s fortune hunters: by 1853, the Californian gold rushes of ’49 had buckled under the law of diminishing returns. The imagination of the world, ignited by the romance and adventure of gold seeking, now had somewhere else to blaze. In New York, according to George Francis Train, Australia was the only topic on the street, on ’Change, at the club, or in the counting house. The Victorian gold rush was nothing short of a commercial revolution. As Train breathlessly reported after his arrival in Victoria, nowhere else in the world did such a go-aheadative place exist.
What is most striking about the profile of gold rush immigrants is their youth. It was the world’s young people who most readily grasped the opportunity to seek the wider horizons of Victoria’s golden frontier. Going ahead—getting ahead—became the motto of the mid-1850s, as if the old world was a glutinous bog, dragging down aspirations and suffocating dreams. Now there was an empty land far from home where one could break free of the quicksand of economic stagnation and the mire of tradition. George Francis Train, at twenty-four, was typical. Not an upstart or an ingénue, but genuinely representative: young, newly married, starting out, getting ahead. He was also a man who would not be fazed by cataclysmic change. At the age of four, George had been orphaned when his parent
s and three sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans.
Charles Evans too felt the primal tug of new beginnings and was young enough to make the transition. Charles James Evans was born in 1827 in Ironbridge, Shropshire, a town that calls itself ‘the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and takes its name from the famous thirty-metre, cast-iron structure that was built across the River Severn in 1779. Charles was the second in his family of four boys: brother George Bassnet was senior by two years. Charles and George’s father, Charles, worked as an excise officer, postmaster and printer. He was a learned man who raised his sons to value education and their Wesleyan faith.
But when Charles Sr died prematurely, the family’s fortunes plunged. His widow Jane took her youngest sons and set up shop as a milliner in nearby Wellington. At fourteen, Charles was working as a farm labourer and sixteen-year-old George was down a coal mine. The Evans boys spent their adolescence in and out of the homes of relatives and friends: drapers, printers, stationers. On learning of the discovery of gold in Victoria, Charles and George were ready and willing to exchange a life of hard labour in the English midlands for the opportunity, as George recorded in his diary, to make mother independent of others assistance. The brothers were twenty-five and twenty-seven when they arrived in Melbourne on the Mobile in October 1852. Statistically, they were right on the money.
The Victorian Census of 1861 shows that approximately forty per cent of the population of Ballarat was between twenty and thirty-four years old. Another forty per cent were children aged under twenty. Visitors to Victoria often commented that there were no old people to be seen. Merchant Robert Caldwell noted that the gold rush cohort was one of amazing energy, young, impulsive, generous and restless. Leaving New York with his brother Davis in April 1853, twenty-two-year-old Dan Calwell assured his sisters back home in Ohio that they could not imagine how our hearts bounded in anxious anticipation of soon overstepping the long limited boundaries. Even in the Land of the Free the impatient Calwells felt the weight of family expectation and middle-class convention. We are young, reasoned Dan, and must do something to give ourselves a start in the world. We have human hearts.20
The restive hearts of the impetuous new arrivals remained buoyant in the giant open-air camp grounds of the early diggings. In 1851 there were 3851 births recorded and 2724 marriages officiated in Victoria. By 1855 these figures had more than trebled to 12,626 and 7816 respectively. In Ballarat, there were five babies born in 1851. In 1857 there were 1665 recorded births. Approximately one-fifth of the babies born in Ballarat in 1854 were ex-nuptial.21 ‘Boundary riders of modernity’ is how historian David Goodman has characterised the Victorian gold diggers, a neat encapsulation of the mobility, vigour, liberalism and confidence of a generation of rule-breakers. For them, no barricade was too solid to penetrate.
Thomas and Frances Pierson, late of the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, were, at thirty-nine and thirty-two years of age, swimming against the demographic tide. But surely they were not too old for an adventure. In fact, Thomas would write in his diary, something novel was just what they needed. In any case, the Piersons had always been a bit peculiar: only one child, fifteen-year-old Mason. And Frances with her photographic equipment and talk of setting up a daguerreotype studio in Victoria. On 30 September 1852, the 480-tonne clipper Ascutna left Staten Island to shouts of hurahs, cheers, waveing handkerchiefs, hats tc tc fireing of pistols and farewell music. With little else but news of Australia in the American papers for months now, Frances and Thomas were lucky to get a berth. One hundred and seventy other passengers and a mountain of merchandise joined the Piersons on the Ascutna.22
But as Thomas Pierson noted, even on the ships departing from New York, the passengers were not all of one hue. Nearly every nation of the world is represented on our ship, wrote Thomas.
One way or another, the racially and ethnically diverse bunch had all come for one thing. We are beginning to see the elephant, reported Pierson with pride, as land became a distant vision and the chill of a New York fall gave way to the untimely heat of the Caribbean. Frances and Thomas understood now why, in the Californian gold rush, it was said that prospectors went to ‘see the elephant’. In the early nineteenth century, the arrival of a travelling circus in a small American town was a singular occasion. Folks would come from all parts to sample the bizarre attractions: wild beasts from Africa, fabled creatures like the Wolf Boy and other sideshow freaks. The major drawcard at these carnivals was the elephant: an animal larger than any native to North America.
By the 1830s, to ‘see the elephant’ had come to mean ‘to experience all that there is to see, all that can be presumed, known and endured’. It spoke of deprivations, but also rewards. ‘Did you see the elephant?’ parents would ask their prodigal son. Did you go where you set out to go? Did you see what you set out to see? In time, the catchphrase acquired a military usage, suggesting a loss of innocence with first combat: a ritual transition from naivety to experience.
In the mid-nineteenth century—a time before passports, credit cards and rigorous records—innocence came in many guises. It could be refabricated too. Many of the women who came to Victoria had already lived a thousand colourful, capricious lives.
For Sarah Hanmer, the gold rush offered the chance to move back the hands of time. Born into a Protestant Scots–Irish farming family in County Down, Ireland, twenty-three-year-old Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer at St James, Clerkenwell in 1844. Henry Hanmer was a widowed surgeon; Sarah was a single mother. Four years earlier, her affair with a London accountant, Frederick Ford, had produced a child but no ring. It’s unclear how her marriage to Henry concluded, but by 1850, Sarah was living in Albany, New York, and possibly working as an actress. She appears to have gone to America without her daughter Julia, who perhaps lived with Sarah’s brother William McCullough. Sarah may also have worked for a time at the Adelphi Theatre in San Francisco, which was located near to Rowe’s Circus. She later returned to London, booked a passage on the Lady Flora for herself, Julia and William, and sailed for Victoria, arriving in August 1853.
John James Bond, a fellow passenger on the Lady Flora, noted in his ship journal that the voyage had been discomfort from beginning to end. There was no fresh meat, the coffee was burnt, the sea biscuits musty and all passengers staggered out at Port Phillip three parts starved. We have been taken in, Bond lamented.
But thirty-two-year-old Sarah Hanmer had her own conjuring trick up her sleeve. As if by magic, she took six years off her age, reporting to the immigration agent that she was twenty-six. Julia was twelve. Nobody stopped to do the maths. Mrs Leicester Hanmer, acclaimed London actress, had arrived, and her adopted home of Ballarat would soon know all about it.
Clara Du Val was another woman who could make husbands and birthdays disappear. Irish-born Clara Lodge was a tearaway from an early age. Popular legend (a story that Clara herself might have propagated) has it that Clara’s ambitious father held a ball in her honour when his daughter turned seventeen, at which Clara appeared in a belt studded with seventeen sovereigns to wear around her seventeen-inch waist. After the ball, the story goes, Clara was presented to Queen Victoria but instead of moving smoothly into a good marriage, she eloped with French artist Claude Du Val. Together the love-struck couple sailed in 1847 for Victoria where, Claude having died, the grieving widow du Val provided for herself as an actress. It was a tale that no doubt played well when Clara began treading the boards in Ballarat’s theatres. Shipping records reveal, however, that Clara arrived in Victoria on the Marco Polo in May 1853. She gave her age as twenty; she was in fact thirty-four. There is no evidence of a Claude Du Val arriving or dying in Australia. In fact, Clara had eloped in 1830 with her dancing teacher, George William Du Val, the brother of renowned portrait painter Charles Allen Du Val. Clara and George ran into trouble with the law in the Isle of Man and later Liverpool, where George was arrested as part of a gang involved in a botched kidnap. Moreover, when Clara
sailed to Victoria, she brought two of her three children with her: nine year-old Oliver and one-year-old Francis. Francis’s twin sister, Clara, was left in Ireland. Whether Clara Du Val had ever met Queen Victoria or not, she had certainly seen the elephant.
Margaret Brown Howden was one of perhaps few real innocents going abroad. As she stood on the wharf at Birkenhead in May 1854, twenty-three-year-old Maggie was thinking of one thing only: her fiancé, dear Jamie. The farewell dinners in her native Scotland, the last calls, the settling of accounts, the shopping and packing and getting of gifts, being driven to the station by tearful relations—these things were all behind her now. Maggie was sad, but stoic: we cannot know what changes may take place, she wrote in her diary, [but] never shall I forget my dear home. Margaret was reared among the god-fearing gentility of the Scottish borders, the third daughter of Francis and Sophia Howden. There is a touch of exotica about her belied by her sheltered upbringing: Margaret’s mother was born on the Prince of Wales Islands, later to become Penang, to a Chinese mother, Ennui, and a Scottish planter father, David Brown. But this was Maggie’s first time at sea. Oh dear! she wrote when the sails had been hoisted, the vessel was rolling and there was no turning back. I wish things would go on well to take me to my Jamie.
James Johnston, older brother of a dear friend, was waiting for Margaret Howden in Melbourne. James Johnston, Assistant Gold Commissioner at Ballarat: appointed in November 1853 with a salary of £400. James Johnston, nephew of George Johnston, famous in Australia for helping to arrest and depose Governor Bligh. Assistant Resident Commissioner James Johnston. Jamie. My Jamie.
