by Clare Wright
By the time Charles Evans began his final descent into Ballarat on 16 November 1853, he had been in Victoria for just over a year. On his arrival at the ridge overlooking the diggings, after his week-long walk, he had but one shilling to his name. The great tent he and his brother George had purchased to start an auction house was safely loaded on the bullock dray, along with a few items to start knocking down. The night before, he and his companions had camped in a swamp, sharing a damper for their supper. Everything was damp, Charles wrote in his diary, considerably damp—the ground, our beds, our bodies and our spirits.
He and George had started many enterprises over the past twelve months: a confectioner’s store, a coffee-roasting business, pie making, boarding house keeping, carting. All had failed to produce more than a hard day’s work. He had been to the Ovens diggings and come back starving. He had seen men grow fat and others go mad. He should have known a thing or two about how this colony could turn pumpkins into carriages and just as readily change them back again. But still, when he at last walked onto the Ballarat digging, Charles was nothing short of flabbergasted.
We were astonished, wrote Charles, to see the immense number of stores—every fourth or fifth tent was either a store or a refreshment tent. He couldn’t fathom how they all made a living until the riddle was in a great measure solved…nearly all sold grog. This was only the first revelation. Contrary to our expectations, Charles lamented, there were several auctioneers carrying on business. How would they ever sell their wares, and thus get a meal that was more sufficient than damper and tea? The Evans brothers took a punt. Asking some miners as to the probable course of the diggings for the ensuing summer, they chose a locality with very few tents; a quiet spot near the bridge on Commissioner’s Flat. If the underground rivers of gold flowed their way, Charles reasoned, it will soon be the busiest quarter on the diggings.
Eugene von Guérard’s famous painting Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853–54 hangs in pride of place at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Austrian-born von Guérard painted his masterpiece in 1884 or ’85, some thirty years after the time he spent living on Golden Point in Ballarat. His memory was surely encrusted with a sugar coating of nostalgia or, along with his own yellowing notes and sketches, he had a copy of James Bonwick’s AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR at hand. Von Guérard, with his scene of verdant hills and corpulent sheep, draws on the same ideological palette as Bonwick, who, in January 1853 penned a profile of a typical diggings home in the Ballarat valley.
Amongst the deep shade of the towering Eucalypts… [reside] the rosy cheeks of the little one, the contented smile of the matrons of the camp…the fret and fever of life have little place in the quietude and salubrity of this Diggings station…[there are] fuel and water for fetching, with no fear of a rent collector…privacy and security.
Bonwick could see nothing but associations of the picturesque and beautiful. Von Guérard’s view of Golden Point depicts the same pastoral idyll: there are flocks of sheep being steered by a lone rustic, a scattering of whitewashed tents, a humble matron pegging out the wash, a solitary puff of smoke from a chimney. Green is the dominant tone; tranquillity is the message. The composition bears no resemblance to the many descriptions of Ballarat on the brink of that crucial moment between 1853 and 1854—when Charles Evans walked into Ballarat—or indeed to the many doleful sketches that von Guérard completed when he actually lived there. Von Guérard’s painting is remarkable for its lyricism and elegance, but as history it’s a sham.
Close up, newcomers who had heard Ballarat before they saw it were more shocked than awed. Diarists and letter-writers recorded their first impressions of the sheer ugliness of the diggings. To Mrs Elizabeth Massey, the goldfields had the appearance of one vast cemetery with fresh made graves.23 Uncovered mine shafts pock-marked the surface, with mounds of earth heaped beside. By the beginning of 1854, Golden Point was, in the words of William Westgarth, an upturned, unsightly mass. There was not a tree or blade of grass to be seen. John James Bond travelled to the diggings after disembarking from the three-parts-starved Lady Flora in August 1853. [Ballarat] is an immense circular plain of mixed yellow and red earth, he recorded, every bit had been turned topsy-turvy. Alexander Dick, a Glaswegian teetotaller, was most struck by the Flat, that expanse of Ballarat East and its hub, the Eureka Lead. The Flat was covered with tents and ‘flies’ over mine shafts. Looked at from Golden Point or Black Hill the Flat was a perfect sea of calico and canvas.24 This description is more benign than most, but all emphasise the conquest of culture over nature, the bulldozer urgency of conquest.
The turnover from ancestral homeland to pastoral runs had happened quickly, but the transformation of Ballarat from sheep station to thriving frontier town struck like lightning. In October 1851, only a few months after the discovery of gold, one visitor described Ballarat as being like the encampment of an army. That is to say, it was orderly and peaceable, a neatly contained collection of simple tents with diggers methodically working the gully creeks.25 Before long, it was a riotous jumble of holes and mullock heaps.
One of the primary reasons for the sheer visual transformation of Ballarat by late 1853 was a shift in mining technology. In Ballarat, the shallow alluvial gold was quickly exhausted. But riches were still to be found below the deep basalt veins that followed ancient riverbeds under the surface. In fact, these deep lead deposits were larger and richer than ever found anywhere else in the world, but technological innovation was required to extract the exceptional nuggets. Deep sinking was the answer: a process by which ‘a forest was taken under ground’, as Weston Bate evocatively puts it. The subterranean shafts needed to be shored up, which meant great investments of time and labour, particularly to cut the timber slabbing for shaft supports. But the rewards could be magnificent. At some leads, an average of £2000 per claim was achieved for a period of several weeks running in 1853, and this was enough to entice punters to stick with the gamble of hand-digging shafts up to 160 feet deep for at least a year to come. But the whole pastime was costly in every respect, not least to the physical environment.26
Only at night, under the cover of darkness and after the ceremonial gunshot, did the pulse of activity gradually subside. A vast city hushed in the arms of night, the poetically inclined bureaucrat William Westgarth wrote from his vantage point at Bath’s Hotel on the township hill. Especially if it was a Sunday night, for on the Sabbath, a truce was called with the demonic striving.
Sunday in Ballarat was washing day. Scores of men could be seen in front of their tents with tin dish or bucket washing their weekly shirt and flannel, recalled Henry Mundy. As a rule Sunday mornings were bathed in a reverential quiet, the time, noted James Bonwick, consecrated to cookery. A roast joint or plum pudding might be enjoyed, damper almost certainly baked. It is here that the skill and economy of a woman are seen to advantage in a tent, wrote Bonwick.
And by the summer of 1853, women were thick on the ground. I did not fail to observe that the fair sex had ventured now on a large scale, wrote Italian miner Raffaello Carboni on his second trip to Ballarat, at Easter 1854. On Sundays, some women put on their finest shawls to promenade around town or prepared picnics to enjoy in the bush. In the afternoon, stump preachers would be out, walloping bibles and singing hymns. The tents that accommodated the Catholic and Wesleyan congregations were full, the only Christian denominations to gain a toehold by 1854. Jews mustered a healthy quorum at the Clarendon Hotel for their Friday night Shabbat.
Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold fields? asked Mrs Massey, and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised places. The Sabbath: a day of rest, a cessation of industry, a time to reflect on the spiritual and indulge the domestic. Maybe von Guérard had a Sunday in mind when he immortalised the calm and stillness of a Ballarat summer.
Von Guérard’s pai
nting is accurate in at least one respect. Rising out of the ground like a flare was a remarkable circular tent, unlike any other structure on the diggings. This was Jones’ Circus.27 If weary travellers had left loved ones, crossed stormy seas and walked miles along a crooked road, surely here, finally, they would see the elephant. The Circus was both truth and metaphor. A fair dinkum illusion. For a shilling, you could be serenaded by a band of blackface minstrels, smudging their lily-white English skin with burnt cork. You could meet Signora Zephyrina, a Hobart girl, daughter of a housekeeper, who chose the free and easy vagabonding life [of] bohemia. (She borrowed her exotic name from a character out of a Madame de Staël novel.) You could see waxworks, wild beast shows, marionettes and dancing boys. You could watch a lion be tamed. You could ask Archie the Clown what it was like to be in Ballarat in the summer of 1853. He’d tell you it was a blast.
The tents, theatres, bowling alleys, dancing saloons and hotels, all filled with a noisy, rough, restless crowd, feverish with the excitement of the great battle with the earth for her treasures, and the feeling that something was going to happen. There was a general presentiment of impending danger. It was, to use a hackneyed simile, as if we were sleeping over a volcano that we knew must, sooner or later, burst forth.28
In Ballarat, it was all spangles and sawdust, old circus terms for good business and bad. On any given day, life could go either way.
TWO
DELIVERANCE
It had not been a good year for the Nolan family of Monivea County, Galway. In 1846, the odds were stacked against carpenter Patrick Nolan and his wife, Margaret, a devout breeder of a dozen steel-eyed babes. First an old woman warned them the Nolan farm was built on a fairy path, then the cow died; by August, five-year-old James had suffered the same cruel fate. But still the pins kept falling. By 1849 eldest son Martin had taken the Queen’s shilling and although the British army kept him in hot meals, he couldn’t stomach his own rising gall. Martin soon deserted and fled back to the family farm, then gave himself up, fearing the repercussions if he were found. He was sent to India as penance.
These were the hungry years, the years of the Great Famine, and the Nolan family seemed as vulnerable to affliction as the mealy potatoes rotting in the ground. By 1851, nineteen-year-old Michael was on the run from the law for a different reason: he had refused to pay the family’s English landlord his crushing rent on the farm. In a frank discussion, the landlord’s agent had wound up with the prongs of Michael’s pitchfork lodged in his backside. Aided and abetted by twenty-year-old sister Bridget, eldest of the remaining Nolan clan, Michael weighed up his chances with the courts and took to the road.
That’s how, on 26 January 1852, Bridget and Michael Nolan found themselves standing on the docks at Birkenhead, about to board a ship bound for Geelong. On board the Mangerton, they met twenty-two-year-old Thomas Hynes, a farmer from County Clare, and thirty-year-old Patrick Gittins, a blacksmith and pike maker in his native Kilkenny. Less than two years later—on a honeycombed patch of dirt so remote it now seemed mythic—Bridget, Thomas and Patrick would forge a bond in blood.1
To comprehend what happened in Ballarat in the explosive year of 1854, we must first understand the tumult going on across the seas in the decade before that. It wasn’t simply greed or poverty that pulled so many people away from the centres of their known universe—whether Pennsylvania or Paris, Limerick or London—and thrust them into uncharted waters. There were many reasons to join the exodus to the New El Dorado, as Victoria soon became known.
The 1840s had been a decade of extreme economic, political and social turmoil in Europe. In Ireland from 1845 to 1852 over a million people died in an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger). At least another million refugees fled, sparking an unprecedented mass migration to the New World. The famine had wreaked most of its havoc on Ireland, but the potato blight that triggered the catastrophe also caused crop devastation throughout Europe. A subsistence crisis drove peasants and the urban working poor to join the rising tide of middle-class political reform across Britain and Europe.
Campaigns for a variety of political reform measures culminated in 1848, which has been called the Year of Revolution or the Springtime of the Peoples. Motivated by ‘a chronic state of dissatisfaction’, as British historian Jonathan Sperber has termed it, popular mass uprisings swept through France, Germany, Britain and Russia, ousting monarchs and fracturing the customary accord between church and state. In Paris, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe ushered in the Second Republic. In Munich, revolutionary uprising culminated in the storming of the Zeughaus in March 1849, forcing the abdication of Ludwig I. Chartism, an English mass movement for social and political reform that demanded a widening of the franchise to include working people, saw thousands take to the streets. In July 1848, just five months after Louis-Philippe had been removed from the French throne, the British Government so feared a popular uprising from Chartist demonstrators—six million of whom had recently signed a petition—that Queen Victoria was evacuated to the Isle of Wight.
The extent of the crisis was summed up by an editorial in the London TIMES on 23 October 1851: England is threatened by two revolutions, the one political, the other social. The socialist, the extreme radical, are your true political bloomers. Just two months after gold was found beneath the pastoral runs of central Victoria, the British press was talking up the prospect of mass civic upheaval. But despite the widespread nature of radical discontent, the victories of 1848 were mostly short lived; the forces of conservatism successfully restored the political status quo.
Yet the TIMES editor was expressing another topical anxiety in his carefully chosen bloomer metaphor. 1848 was also the year that a group of middle-class women, headed by an indefatigable mother of six named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in Seneca Falls, New York to address the problem of women’s social and political oppression. Together these ‘doctors’ wives’—many of whom had cut their political teeth in the abolitionist movement, fighting to end slavery—penned the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, based on the American Declaration of Independence.
First and foremost, the document claimed the right of women to have a say in determining the laws that governed them. The women’s suffrage movement was born. (Early Chartists in England also endorsed equal voting rights for men and women in their push for universal electoral representation. By the late 1840s, however, leaders had lowered the bar in favour of the more politically expedient goal of manhood suffrage.2)
At the same time, women’s rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic began a campaign of dress reform, advocating that political freedom should be expressed by emancipation from the sartorial constraints of corsets and crinolines, fashion items that not only distorted women’s bodies but also ruined their health. A Seneca Falls woman devised a new ‘rational dress’ outfit, comprising a long tunic worn over billowing pants that were gathered at the ankle. The outfit became known as the Bloomer costume, after editor Amelia Bloomer, who publicised the costume in her magazine, THE LILY. Bloomers became an international smash, with women’s rights advocates parading the costume in lecture tours across American and England. One such activist was English-born, French-educated, independently minded Caroline Dexter. Dexter became known as London’s ‘apostle of Bloomerism’ when she began lecturing to packed audiences in 1851.
Just at the moment the TIMES editor summed up the dual crisis facing England, news of the riches at Ballarat began to trickle into the press. In the eyes of many, Victoria would provide a place of social and political renewal where the stains of old-world enmity could be washed away. In 1852 Caroline Dexter’s idealist husband, William, left for the goldfields and two years later, Caroline too migrated permanently to Victoria.
For reform activists like the Dexters, Victoria was a political tabula rasa on which they might inscribe fresh ideas for the future, free from institutional and ideological impediments to progress.3 For renegades like Bridget and Michael Nolan, here now was the chance for a clean
start, free from economic hardship and ethnic prejudice. By the time newspapers in London and New York began carrying daily reports of the material riches to be found in Victoria, a restless generation of young men and women was united by one great notion: liberty.
In London, the headquarters of radical activism was Clerkenwell. It was at St James Church in Clerkenwell, hotbed of Chartist unrest, that a Hampshire poet named Ellen Warboy chose to marry her beloved, Frederick Young, a chemist from Shoreditch, in 1837. In the same church, Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer in 1844, their marriage witnessed by Sarah’s four-year-old daughter, Julia. These urban professionals and artists—with the exception of Henry, parted from the newly respectable Mrs Sarah Hanmer—would be in Ballarat by the beginning of 1854. A politically minded young Cornish man named Stephen Cuming and his wife, Jane, would join the caravan of progressive nonconformists. On 1 July 1848, the Cumings had christened their first daughter Martineau, after the liberal poet, writer and women’s rights campaigner, Harriet Martineau. All of these women—Ellen Young, Sarah Hanmer and Jane Cuming—would play a vital role in the political future of their adopted homeland.
It was not only the English middle class who were dissatisfied with their lot. Anastasia Hayes (née Butler), who travelled to Victoria on the same ship as Charles Evans, was a devout Catholic from Kilkenny who, despite being educated and capable of holding her own against institutional oppression, was tired of treading water. At the age of thirty-four, she and her husband Timothy—a Wexford-born engineer and oil merchant who had been prominent in the Young Ireland movement—bundled up their five children and left for Victoria. The Irish dissidents had already fled their homeland as early as 1847; two of their children were baptised in Staffordshire, England. From her position of maternal and cultural authority within the Catholic community in Ballarat, Anastasia would become critical to the events at Ballarat.
