by Clare Wright
All the mashing up and breaking down was but a prelude to the foremost conceptual navigation: crossing the line. The line-crossing ceremony, steeped in maritime tradition and still practised today, is a customary initiation rite celebrating a sailor’s first crossing of the equator and welcoming him into the Kingdom of Neptune. There is often an appearance by Neptune (Poseidon) and his wife, Amphitrite, a pantomime that provides an opportunity for sailors to compete for the accolade of being ugly enough to go in drag. The celebration is a ritual of reversal in which the inexperienced crew are permitted to take over the ship from the officers. If the full traditional fiasco is played out, a transition is made from the established order of the captain’s regime to the controlled mayhem of the Pollywog Revolt, followed by a return to order as the ‘Wogs’ pass certain physical tests and earn their right to enlistment in Neptune’s realm. Though the line-crossing ceremony is still honoured today, some of the more violent forms of ‘testing’—such as beatings and sodomy—have been outlawed.
On immigrant ships, the line-crossing ceremony was practised as a rite of theatrical observance rather than brute harassment. Many journal-writers noted some aspect of the colourful proceedings. It took most ships at least five weeks to reach the equator, but a slow passage through the doldrums could delay that milestone by a month. Crossing the line was a symbolic mid-point in the journey, and crews and passengers alike enjoyed marking the occasion. On Sarah Hanmer’s ship the Lady Flora, there was a Grand Procession. Neptune and his wife were drawn in a car with attendants dressed in unique costumes, carrying tridents and accompanied by dolphins. The event concluded with a hornpipe, much drinking, fist fights and squabbling, as occurs on most days. On James Menzies’ ship, passengers were included in the ritual. Neptune hailed the ship, he recounted, the water began to fly about, a great many got a wetting as all who went on deck copped a bucketing. What came next was strictly for the sailors. Lathered with tar and muck, their heads shaved, they were festooned in pills and wigs and fine gowns. As the passengers looking on in delight knew by now, crossing the invisible lines of conformity, propriety and erstwhile identity could take many guises.
During those first weeks at sea when all that was solid melted into air, there were only two things the unmoored passenger could use for ballast: the watery horizon and the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which everyone did, before electricity) kept passengers in touch with a familiar reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations to orient oneself, to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. And then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even that stellar certainty was stripped away. At the equator you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set, giving access to the entire celestial sphere: another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched further south towards Australia, it would provide a new reference point: passengers began to fix their mental compass on the Crux Australis. Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the equator on 15 July 1853: Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different to an English sky.
The Southern Cross was a beacon in more ways than one. It told of a new political identity, divested of old allegiances. But as a symbolic object—what Kleinian psychoanalysts might call ‘a good object’—the Southern Cross offered new immigrants the reassuring embrace of affective belonging. Though the constellations ranged across the night sky, and the moon waxed and waned in primordial rhythm, they were permanent anchor points on an otherwise shifting shore. As the horizon is for disoriented seafarers, the Southern Cross became a hitching post for existential certainty when all else was in mortal flux. Before long, that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.
After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into the South Atlantic, following the natural circulation of winds and current, heading towards the Cape of Good Hope and the roaring forties. The dancing and music making on deck came to an abrupt halt as ships entered the arctic trade winds of the Southern Ocean. Heavy seas and strong winds buffeted the ship. Passengers were forced to find their sea legs all over again. On a day that was blowing a perfect hurricane, Fanny Davis stayed below but one of her cabin-mates fell over trying to get on deck and knocked several teeth in. To avoid getting out of bed, Fanny and her friends huddled together under mantles and coverlets, telling fortunes in teacups to pass the time.
It was the little ones who suffered the worst in this final leg of the voyage. One boy on James Menzies’ ship had a shocking fit. The doctor worked quickly to extract five worms from the lad’s gut, each measuring eight inches long. On Fanny Davis’s ship, one pregnant woman had lain in the hospital since departure. She delivered her baby in the middle of a fearsome storm only a week out from Port Phillip. It was a night of terrors, with waves flooding the berths and snow blanketing the deck. The baby died as soon as it was born; the mother followed not long after. Another traveller, Mrs Graham, witnessed the sea burials of a baby and toddler from the one family, dead within two days of each other, and wrote: the body fell with a splash and all was over but the cries of the Parents who felt deeply the loss of the child.14 Four children died on John Spence’s ship. The babies, he wrote pragmatically, were nursed on the spoon, always more easily injured than those who nurse on the breast.
Sarah Raws witnessed another morbid scene. A lady died this morning in our cabin. Her death came as a great shock; she had only been confined to bed for one day. The woman left ten grieving children. She was much respected in our cabin and had become very intimate with Sarah’s mother and father. The woman’s husband was a Baptist deacon, already settled in Australia. Sarah attended the funeral. They sewed her up in canvas, and it was an effecting [sic] sight to see the bereaved family. The woman’s son offered £200 to the captain to bring the body to land, but the law prohibited this and so she was consigned to the deep. They had only three days left to sail.
It was grief and fear, not elation, that accompanied many passengers as they sailed into their dizzying futures.
When Louisa Timewell’s ship docked at Sandridge wharf (now Port Melbourne), she was dumbstruck by the jetsam of prosperity. Passing down the Yarra Yarra, she wrote, we saw thousands of bullocks’ and sheep’s heads lying at the edge of the river a little way from the slaughtering house, rotting in a heap. I thought how many poor families would be glad of them in England. What an extraordinary land that would discard good meat as so much waste. As the anchor dropped from Sarah Raws’ ship, shouts of joy rang out. It appeared like coming out of Sodom into Paradise, she remarked. Fanny Davis swore that her ship had experienced the worst passage in years: We are all totally worn out in mind and body and want of sleep. On the morning of the Ascutna’s arrival in Port Phillip, Mrs Dunn gave birth to a son in the stateroom adjoining Frances and Thomas Pierson. The ship’s unassuming captain, George Pepper, named the boy George Pepper Ascutna Dunn.
The hours leading up to Margaret Howden’s reunion with her dear Jamie prickled with tension. At just eighty-two days, the Hurricane’s voyage had been lightning fast, spared serious illness and blessed with agreeable company and generous conditions. But for Margaret the day of reckoning—the much-anticipated meeting that had kept her spirits buoyant all these weeks—was about to be realised. Was dear Jamie craving his young Maggie as much as she ached for him?
July 29 Saturday
A beautiful awakening at 4 o’clock. Saw from my porthole Cape Otway lighthouse, a most cheering sight, and at 6 o’clock saw land of the country we had so longed for weeks to behold. At last that comfort was granted us. My feelings were more than can be described. To think that my own beloved Jamie was residing in that land. I saw the sun rise for the first time on my new place of abode. Oh! I sincerely trust that the hour, God willing, is not far distant when I shall meet my Jamie again, in perfect he
alth, and all I could desire.
It had been, after all, more than six months since the last communication with James. Anything could have happened since then. He might have been struck down by that fearful colonial fever. He might have left his government post. He might, God forbid, have found a currency lass to love. Margaret, for all she knew, could be alighting in a land where she knew no one but her shipmates—and they, surely, would scatter on the winds of their new destinies.
July 31 Monday
A memorable day. All the forenoon, walked on deck with Mr Robertson feeling very unsettled at the prospect of a termination to our voyage…Came down, then I put the cabin in order in fond expectations. We anchored at 5 o’clock. Oh! How thankful I feel. Several Scots came, but alas! my own Jamie was not among the number.
Margaret ran from one porthole to another trying to get a glimpse of her fiancé, but it was no use. He was simply not at the docks. So she returned to her neat berth and the routines of ship life: tea, walking, prayers, staring at the horizon.
August 1 Tuesday
A most anxious day as I was looking out for my beloved but alas! did not come.
By Wednesday, Margaret was compelled to leave the Hurricane. She packed up her own dear cabin, said farewell to new friends, and stepped onto the wharf at Sandridge. Margaret bravely walked to the Bedford Hotel. Once again on dry land.
August 3 Thursday
Oh! I long for my Jamie.
August 4 Friday
Thought of my Jamie first thing. In very low spirits. Another day passed.
Then, miraculously, mysteriously, Margaret’s diary is missing the pages for August 5 to August 10. So we know nothing of how, where or when the day of reunion with James Johnston happened—but happen it did. Margaret and James were married on Wednesday 9 August 1854 at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Eastern Hill. They were about to endure the honeymoon from hell.
The Lady Flora, carrying Sarah Hanmer and her daughter, Julia, cruised through Port Phillip Heads on 13 August 1853. We have been taken in, complained Hanmer’s shipmate J. J. Bond. Nothing but discomfort from beginning to end. The captain spent most of his time drinking below. The first mate was mad with ill temper. The steward and attendants were insolent fellows who laughed at our misery. The passengers were three parts starved. The salt beef was inedible, the sea biscuits musty, the coffee burnt. Dirt, confusion and noise have prevailed in place of order and regularity, Bond lamented.
How much more acutely must William Timewell have felt this sense of injustice, of being royally duped? His wife Louisa would contract colonial fever only months after their arrival, leaving William with a clutch of motherless children and a sourdough leaven in need of constant feeding.
For Sarah Hanmer, about to shed six of her thirty-two years when the immigration agent at Port Phillip asked for her age, the performance of grievance was poised to find a new and very public stage.
FOUR
THE ROAD
When the Lady Flora sailed into harbour in the spring of 1853, it was less than three short years since the Port Phillip District had been separated from its parent colony of New South Wales. Victoria officially became an autonomous colony on 1 July 1851, a month before gold changed its fortunes forever. Charles La Trobe was Victoria’s first lieutenant governor, overseeing a town of fledgling institutions, a hinterland squired by a self-selected landed gentry (the ‘squattocracy’) and a measly 23,143 inhabitants.
Compared to sin-city Sydney, which had more than double the population, Melbourne before the gold rush was a country cousin. The inter-colonial influx following the discovery of gold, with a tsunami of immigrants hot on its heels, started an overnight boom in Melbourne. The mantle of inferiority was quickly thrown off, and Melbourne revelled in a carnival-like upheaval. According to John D’Ewes, a civil servant whose name would be forged in the fires of Eureka, the streets wore a very holiday appearance.1
By the census of April 1854, the city of Melbourne and its neighbouring seaport towns (Sandridge, Williamstown) recorded a population of some 65,000 males and 45,000 females. That represents a near five-fold increase in a mere three years. Just imagine if Melbourne’s present-day population of 3.8 million quintupled to almost twenty million in less time than it takes to build, say, an Olympic stadium. Add to this phenomenal explosion the 52,000 males and 14,000 females packed onto the goldfields, which did not even exist when the census was taken in 1851, and the 49,000 males and 30,000 females in inland towns and districts including Geelong: this was a colony heaving under the weight of its own success. By August 1854, there were over 115,000 men, women and children on the goldfields alone. The official figures did not include the ‘dying race’ of Aborigines (estimated to be around 2500, a fraction of the 25,000 likely to have occupied the Port Phillip district prior to European occupation) or the Chinese, neither of whom were considered worth counting.
Like other cities that grow by magic, wrote American gold seeker Dan Calwell to his sisters at home in Ohio, most of the buildings are temporary and they are already giving place to more capacious and costly ones. Dan and his brother Davis had spent almost five months sailing from New York, arriving in the spring of 1853. The quietness of ship life, wrote Dan, was superseded by the noise and confusion of a second Babel. Melbourne reeked of wide-open possibilities, and the Calwell boys, only twenty and twenty-one years old, couldn’t wait to cross the line that separated the mundane from the electrifying.
Nothing stayed still for long: taking a census at the feverish height of a gold rush was like trying to herd cats. The only piece of empirical data that refused to budge was the disproportion of the sexes: 193 males to every hundred females—a fact, said the statisticians, that can scarcely fail to attract the attention of the legislature. There was one demographic detail that was universally acknowledged. The proportion of people in the prime of life, aged between twenty and forty, was substantially higher than in Great Britain or in any other colony. Victoria’s population was overwhelmingly young, male and mobile.
It was also surprisingly cosmopolitan, with all the associations of excitement and glamour, the sinuous interplay between cultures this sexy word conjures. Here is British merchant Robert Caldwell’s pen picture of the populace of Melbourne:
a most curious and picturesque exhibition of the people of all nations…the swart Briton walks shoulder to shoulder with the flat-faced Chinaman, the tall and stately Armenian, the lithe New Zealander or South Sea Islander, the merry African from the United States, the grave Spaniard, the yellow-haired German, the tall, sharp visaged Yankee, and the lively Frenchman. Every state in the world has its representatives
Among the religious denominations represented in Victoria, the 1854 census recorded three thousand Mahometans and Pagans. By the end of the year that figure had risen to ten thousand, about half of whom were Chinese.2 On the other hand, noted Caldwell with little sense of alarm, the wild animals and native inhabitants seem to have almost melted away.
Commentators often noted the degree of dissimilarity, if not overt hostility, between the diverse ethnic groups, particularly the English and the Americans. Robert Caldwell believed the most troublesome part of the population came from America while the most depraved hailed from Britain via the Californian goldfields, where they had picked up the worst of American vices. The Americans’ political creed, said Caldwell, was to condemn everything British and with ignorant effrontery on British soil, to uphold as perfect everything American. American Silas Andrews noted that the populace was a mixture of all nations, mostly English of the lowest class, possessing none of that activity and capability of turning their hands to anything, which the ‘Yankees’ possess. At the boarding house where Thomas and Frances Pierson, from the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, eventually found a place to stay, there were three tables set up in the dining room: one was the Britishers table, another the Yankey table, and a third the Experienced Colonials table. We are accustomed to understanding anglophone ethnic tensions in Australia as an imme
morial turf war between the English and Irish, but there was more than a hint of the Boston Tea Party about the parlours of 1850s Melbourne.
Where did Sarah Hanmer seat herself? Born into the McCullough clan in Scotland, Sarah was Anglo-Celtic. But like another actress of her generation, Lola Montez, Sarah had travelled to America during the Californian gold rush. In 1850, she was living in Albany, New York, raising enough capital to put herself in pole position when the magnetic pull of gold exerted its southward traction. Later, in Ballarat, Sarah would show that her allegiances were surprisingly Yankey.
Gold rush Melbourne—gateway to the diggings—was a city reeling. In the year following the first gold discoveries it became a virtual ghost town. The reports in the papers drove every one mad, wrote Henry Mundy, who had emigrated to Australia as a boy in 1844, every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz. Crews (and even captains) abandoned their ships in the harbour, leaving nothing more than a forest of masts, as Alexander Dick described the Port of Melbourne. Construction sites were frozen in time, primed with potential but no labour to see it through. Postal services were disrupted. The police force was gutted. Roads could not be built for the lack of navvies. Schools closed and the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. And husbands notoriously deserted their wives, creating the legendary grass widows of the gold rush, the discarded victims of male caprice. Some women expected their husbands to reappear with a pocketful of gold; others knew they were gone for good.
