by Clare Wright
For every miner or merchant in the money, there was another down on his luck. And that very often meant a starving wife and children or a shelved fiancée or a fretful mother at home, waiting for news of a distant son’s good fortune. In the case of Janet Kincaid, her husband’s ledger was definitely in deficit. He had been gone for over two years, following the rushes around Victoria, while Janet was left in Glasgow with six children and a slew of unanswered letters. By the time she at last procured her husband’s latest address from his father, she was heartily fed up. A rare archival find, here is Janet in her full glory:
You left to better your family, you don’t need to write that any more, we have had enough of that talk. You had better do something for them. You left the ship to better your self and to get your money to your self. You never earned much for your family, far less for your Wife, you sent five Pounds, two years and a half ago. You mention in a letter to me that you made more money at the digging than ever you made at home. You might have sent us the half of what you made. You are a hard hearted Father when you could sit down and eat up your children’s meat your self. I was a poor unfortunate Wretch, little did I think when I was young what I had to come through with your conduck. We might have been the happiest couple in Greenock, you got a good wife and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante do well at home is not to be trusted Abroad…poor Duncan [child number five] does not know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for eating…find a proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your deserted Wife Janet Kincaid.6
The ghosts of the past haunted new immigrants, reminding them of their righteous strivings and goading them with the too-often inadequate results.
Some single women fared better on arrival than their male counterparts, often because employment situations had been pre-arranged. When nineteen-year-old Irish girl Eliza Darcy arrived on the City of Manchester in July 1854, she went straight into the service of Mr Jeffries, on the Great Western Road, employed on a three-month contract for £18 with rations.7 Eliza was born in Ennis, County Clare, in the parish of Killaloe, the second largest Catholic diocese in Ireland. Another branch of the Darcy family from Clare had arrived on the Parsee in June 1854: Anthony and Honora Darcy and their six children aged between fourteen and twenty-five. Eliza travelled alone to Victoria, but also sailing on the City of Manchester were members of the Howard family from Dublin. Devout Catholics, the Howard and Darcy lines would later unite in the passion-fuelled summer of 1854.
The Galway tearaways, Bridget and Michael Nolan, also secured employment as domestic servants soon after arriving in Geelong penniless, and, according to family tradition, shoeless. Bridget had a malformed arm and worried it would be counted against her, but the siblings found permanent work at a Mt Wallace grazing station without much trouble.
One girl, employed as a servant, twittered merrily to her sisters at home about her startling new prospects on the marriage market:
I had an offer a few days after landing from a gold-digger, with £600–£700. Since that I have had another from a bushman, with £900; he has gone to the diggings again, to make plenty of money. That I have not decided on yet. I shall have a handsome house and garden and all I wish…I have so many chances, a midshipman for one, so you may guess how different things are here if you are respectable.8
Eligible women had a remarkable new power to pick and choose their mate, a fact that caused significant moral panic about the influence of truculent wives. Other single girls could get themselves an instant breadwinner. Eliza Lucus wrote home, When immigrant ships came in, the Diggers came down to meet them, to try and induce women to marry them and go back to the diggings with them.9 Public servant William Westgarth, one of Victoria’s earliest historians, corroborated Eliza’s reminiscences. As soon as an immigrant ship arrived there was a rush to the docks, wrote Westgarth, the wives for servants and the youth for wives. (In Westgarth’s opinion, the latter should always have taken precedence.)
The offer of marriage and a dray ride to the diggings was not every girl’s idea of a good time, yet for many it was just another form of assisted passage. And single women had an alarming degree of autonomy, able to choose between domestic service and marriage. Even more disconcerting for bystanders, these newly empowered young women were choosing to go it alone and determine their own definition of freedom and independence.
But for married women, the insecurity of an unemployed male breadwinner and its accompanying disillusionment could be debilitating. After Jane McCracken and her husband Alex resolved to take up dairying as a means to self-sufficiency, Jane described her state of mind in a letter to her mother and eleven siblings back home in Auchencrosh in Scotland. People give us great encouragement, of what it will do if we persevere, wrote Jane, but beginners in the world like us and everything new to us we likely have more anxiety than there is any use for. As she suspected, the superfluous adrenaline did not serve Jane well, and her letters reveal a woman on the wrong side of a nervous breakdown.10
If uppity, anxious or aggrieved wives weren’t enough to trouble a man, there was always the weather to complain about. Where is the beautiful climate and the delicious fruits that every book on this country which I saw in the States pictured in such enthusiastic colours? asked George Francis Train. The northerly wind, his wife Willie Davis wrote, is more disagreeable than anything you can imagine. After a full year in Victoria, the Calwell brothers had seen both sides of the seasonal coin. Dan bemoaned summer’s unsufferable heat, tormenting flies and whirl-winds of dust, then winter’s Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain. Surely, he lamented, this is one of the most unpleasant climates in the world.
What the Calwell boys didn’t know was that, in the middle of one of the driest decades in the century, the winter of 1854 was one of the wettest on record. And that the meteorological crapshoot would make all the difference to the deluge of discontent about to prevail.
It was not just Victoria’s barometric pressure that fluctuated wildly. In 1853, Victoria purchased £480,000 worth of British goods—about the same amount as Spain, and a quarter of what was bought by the sixty million people of the Russian Empire.11 In 1851 Victoria imported £122 worth of American goods. A year later, that figure had reached £60,000, a measure of the sort of rapid expansion in American business interests that had George Francis Train jumping out of his long johns. In 1853, 134 ships arrived in Melbourne from the United States, bringing £1.7 million worth of goods. In 1852, bank deposits increased from £820,000 to £4,330,000.12 No such go-aheadative place exists elsewhere, as Train put it. It was the sheer lunacy of the post-1852 market that persuaded contemporary observer John Capper to remark society is to a certain degree unhinged. Commercial transactions, to his mind, were completely deranged.
But by and large supplies were able to keep up with the exploding demand, and there were only two commodities that Victorians couldn’t get enough of: women and alcohol. By the end of 1854, Melbourne merchant Robert Caldwell wrote that 80,000 wives are wanted—one of the few articles of export which is safe, if sent in good condition and warranted sound. As for grog, the statistics are eloquent. In 1851 Victorians drank £23,000 worth of brandy, £5000 of gin, £15,000 of rum, £3600 of whisky and £20,000 of wine. By 1853, these figures jumped to £630,000, £196,000, £149,000, £42,000 and £353,000 respectively.13 You will notice that this jump in imports represents considerably more than the five-fold hike that would be commensurate with the population increase. (There were those, of course, who believed that the dearth of wives and profusion of alcohol were closely connected.)
But even liquor merchants were not doing as well as property owners. Those who had been in the colony prior to 1851, many of whom were now established professionals and merchants, were able to capitalise on the boom in real estate prices, selling for stupid prices land they had bought for next to nothing. Landlords could and did charge phenomenal rents.
Watching over the s
wirling eddies of fortune and famine from the heights of political office was the Victorian Government. In 1854 the government consisted of an Executive Council (comprising the lieutenant governor, the colonial secretary, the attorney general, the colonial treasurer and the collector of customs), the Legislative Council (eight members nominated by the governor and thirty-five by voters) and an understorey of clerks.
To exercise the privilege of a vote, a person had to be a British subject, male, over twenty-one and a free colonist. He had to be a freeholder of £100 or a leaseholder of £10 per annum value, or own a licence to depasture, or have occupied a house worth £10 per annum for six months previous. It was the property qualifications that effectively disenfranchised most of the new immigrant population. Wool had been replaced by gold as the most valuable commodity, but pastoralists lost none of their prerogative because of their entrenched position in the political economy of the colony. Even a gung-ho merchant capitalist like Robert Caldwell could see that volatile Victoria was governed by a system where the squatters had more than their fair share of representation, while the diggers have none at all. At present, wrote Caldwell, the diggers had no constitutional way of calling attention to their grievances, real or fancied. This was a big problem.
The trouble was, times had changed. Rapidly. The Victoria that greeted the arrivals of late 1853 and early 1854 was not the same place it had been in 1852 when people like Bonwick, Capper and Mossman were writing their breathless guidebooks and advice manuals. The sluggish communications of the mid-nineteenth century misrepresented the pace of change on the ground. It could take up to a year for a resident of Ballarat to send a letter home, receive a reply and write back again. In such time, several new rushes would have occurred, one town depleted of its fickle population while another tent city had mushroomed elsewhere. In such time, tens of thousands of new immigrants would be disgorged onto Melbourne’s streets, all competing for the same small stock of housing, the same shallow pool of jobs, the same desire to kit themselves out and get on the road to the diggings.
What made this situation more ominous was the fact that the quantity of gold unearthed peaked in 1852. In that year the value of gold exported from Victoria was £14,866,799. In 1853 this sum fell to £11,588,782 and by 1854 the plummet continued, to £8,770,796. At the same time, the population of the goldfields had swiftly increased, from approximately 35,000 in 1852 to 73,000 in 1853 and 93,000 in 1854. This meant that there was much less gold to go around: from £425 worth per person per annum in 1852, it had dropped to only £87 worth by 1854 This change, wrote William Kelly in 1860, produced a modified panic.14 Despite all the grandiosity, the simple fact was that by 1854, Melbourne was sliding into economic chaos. A glut of cheap imports meant there was no incentive for local manufacturing. An itinerant labour force moving between unemployment in the city and gruelling work for little reward on the diggings made for a fragmented population of disaffected migrants.
Governor La Trobe, who had resigned his commission in December 1852 but had to wait an agonising seventeen months for his replacement to arrive, was aware that he was in way over his head. Yet by mid-1853, the Executive Council had embarked on a spending spree of its own. In 1851 government expenditure on post offices, for example, was £11,165. In 1854, it was over £120,000. In 1851, spending on public works amounted to £32,600. By 1854 it was over £1.4 million. In 1851 policing received £24,000 and education £6000. In 1854 these services received £650,000 and £160,000 respectively.15 A triumvirate of urban landowners, rural pastoralists and an unrepresentative administrative clique ruled Victoria. Buoyed by the land boom, the government borrowed freely.
It also taxed liberally. By the time Sir Charles Hotham arrived in June 1854, he would inherit not only a government deep in debt but also a populace chafing, as the centralised model of colonial government inherited from New South Wales ground up against a worldly populace expecting self-sufficiency and independence. As William Westgarth observed, the Victoria that welcomed the renegade Bridget Nolan, the adventurous Eliza Darcy, the go-getting Sarah Hanmer, the infatuated Margaret Howden and the devout Anastasia Hayes was occupied by a promiscuous multitude: young, restless, indignant, over-invested, underfed—and smelling a rat.
Frances Pierson set out on the road to Ballarat on the first day of summer 1853 with her husband Thomas and son Mason. She had not travelled across the briny deep from her Pennsylvania home to be a grass widow in some flyblown Melbourne lodging house. Besides, she’d tried that once already. Back in April 1853, Thomas and Mason had ventured up to Bendigo to open a shop, and when that swiftly failed they went prospecting at the McIvor diggings. Left alone, Frances twiddled her thumbs for a moment or two, then applied for work at a stationer’s business. She reasoned that if they would employ her to help tend store she would rather be there than sitting in the Boarding House. Frances was also earning a much-needed income, a fact upon which Thomas was reluctant to dwell. Less than two months later, the Pierson menfolk were back. Bendigo was purgatory, proclaimed Thomas, its population rife with disorder and antipathy towards the authorities. In June 1853, an anti-licence association was formed and a giant petition got up, decrying several aspects of the goldfields administration. Thousands of miners were wearing red ribbons as a symbol of unity and defiance.
By 1 September 1853, news of fresh gold strikes at Ballarat—110 feet deep, tens of thousand of pounds worth of gold per hole—came whistling down the wire. These spectacular finds were dubbed the ‘Jewellers’ Shops’, so seemingly effortless was it to reach into the earth and pull out a fortune. The ensuing rush saw thousands of people suddenly throw in their jobs and head straight to Ballarat in the spring of 1853. Sparkling new evidence of Ballarat’s untapped potential prompted a resurgence in intra-colonial travel to the diggings, as people ventured from South Australia and Tasmania to try their hand. George and Charles Evans left Melbourne on 11 November 1853, with John Basson Humffray in their travelling party. After an unsuccessful stint at mining on the Ovens goldfields, Charles Evans had decided that auctioneering, not digging, would be the key to future prosperity. J. B. Humffray was making his first trip to the goldfields—with no inkling, surely, that exactly a year from that date he would be at the forefront of a campaign for justice that would make the Bendigo Red Ribbon movement look like a fancy-dress party.
As for the Piersons, they too decided to go into commerce rather than industry. They planned to open a store at Ballarat, unperturbed by Thomas’s recent failure at Bendigo. Frances carefully packed her camera and photographic apparatus. A daguerreotypist from Liverpool whom she had met in Melbourne assured her that her equipment was of impressive quality. And there would surely be a host of lucky diggers eager to commemorate their pristine nuggets. Frances has some idea of her and the [Liverpudlian] Gent commencing the business, Thomas wrote, with a hint of condescension, in his diary as they prepared to depart. What would the Worshipful Master back home at the Philadelphia Olive Lodge have thought of the idea? But Victoria was not Pennsylvania and Frances knew it.
The Piersons arrived in Ballarat on 6 December 1853. They were greeted by twenty thousand other hopeful supplicants at the altar of rampant ambition.
The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It’s the same route that you would take today, without the tangle of ring roads, truck depots and tilt-slab factories. The modern-day industrial heartland takes advantage of the same topography that departing diggers appreciated: flat, open terrain, a carpet of basalt rolled out by ancient lava flows from the South Australian border to Port Phillip Bay. William Westgarth described these plains as an ocean of grass. Charles Evans saw it the same way: stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean. It was fertile ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that had sustained the region’s Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.
The seventy-mile road to Ballarat—a well-worn track, really—marked the ragged course for a chaotic rush of fortune-seekers. Carts, drays, coaches and thousands of pairs of galloping hooves and plodding feet carried people and goods to the magnetic epicentre of Victoria’s goldfields. The fact is, wrote one man in a letter home to Scotland in February 1852, everybody, old and young, rich and poor, learned and illiterate are off to the diggings. James Bonwick noted that the allure was physically impossible to ignore. The Gold Fields have a most bewitching influence, he wrote after his own visit to Ballarat in 1852, the very name begets a spasmodic affection of the limbs, which want to be off.16 The road to Ballarat was akin to William Blake’s ‘crooked road of prophecy’, a road washed smooth by the salvation that lay at the end.17
Thirty miles from Melbourne, in the low, fertile basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced to navigate a deep cut-out known as The Gap. This jagged landmark provided a lucrative winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king’s ransom to haul out drays piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out. (Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western Highway.) Back on flat land, the road snaked through a thick stringybark forest to Ballan and from there followed a gentle incline towards the only sizable peak on the landscape, Mt Buninyong, rising to the left. Once reaching that acme of achievement, you were almost there. A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding. An average cart trip took three days (and cost £25 in dry weather—a princely sum). On foot, it was a week-long hike.
