by Clare Wright
There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to Ballarat. In most of them, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road is a revelation. Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was immediately won over by the beauty and healthiness of the country. Mary Bristow was rendered speechless. I cannot describe the bush, she wrote. It means such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks. She found the scenery beautiful and the blacks exquisitely made. To her astonishment, Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of Eden. Mrs Mannington Caffyn, in her contribution to the compendium COO-EE: TALES OF AUSTRALIAN LIFE BY AUSTRALIAN LADIES, was also rhapsodic but observed a sting in the tail of Paradise. Australian sunlight, she wrote, is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant and bumptious, and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things. Many women who travelled the roads in summer reported sitting out the midday sun under a stand of trees, taking their lead from the old hands, not to mention the cows and sheep.18
As early as March 1853, contemporary observers like James Bonwick were already commenting on the incontrovertible fact of the women: the diggings were attracting them like ants to honey. Bonwick wrote in his AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE that in just two days he counted one hundred and twenty ladies, going up either with or to their lords of the pick and cradle. Bonwick called it a phenomenon, this feminine Exodus from our townships. He also noted that some husbands have taken uncommon care to prepare for the coming of their better halves by forsaking their tents for log cabins with stone chimneys, floor coverings and even an iron bedstead.19
Some diggers were not so much tearaways as nest-featherers. Their wives accompanied them to keep families intact that would otherwise have fractured, but also in a genuine spirit of exploration. When James Watson determined to go to Ballarat, his wife Margaret, who had already survived several trials with James and their children, decided that this was one more adventure for her.20 Emily Skinner knew that her husband William would not go if I objected very much, etc. but, she reasoned, what a much better chance we should have of getting on [together]. After thinking and talking it over a little, the couple determined that William would precede Emily, make enough money to build a comfortable tent home, then send for Emily to join him. This plan was realised surprisingly quickly.
There were hundreds of single women, too, on the road to Ballarat, some joining (or searching for) absent husbands or connecting with kin or kith from their old lives, others forging their own distinct paths in the world. Eliza Darcy, who left the employ of Mr Jeffries in October 1854, was one of them. Having seen out her pre-arranged contract, Eliza headed to Ballarat, where numerous members of her extended family had gathered. Anthony and Honora Darcy and their five children, probably Eliza’s cousins, had recently arrived on the Parsee. Also sailing on the Parsee were six Dunne children, aged seventeen to twenty-three, and their mother Mary, Eliza’s aunt. Other Dunnes had travelled on the City of Manchester with Eliza, as had several members of the Howard family. By the explosive spring of 1854, all these Darcys, Howards and Dunnes would be in Ballarat. By August 1855, Eliza would be married to Patrick Howard, a close friend of an Irish engineer named Peter Lalor who was engaged to her cousin, Geelong school teacher Alicia Dunne.
Bridget Nolan was also on the road to Ballarat. Life at the Mt Wallace station had been exciting for the Nolan siblings, with a visit from bushrangers and an old black woman coming to stay, but after eighteen months the call of the diggings could no longer be dismissed. Possibly Bridget had got word that her shipmate Patrick Hynes was in Ballarat and a reunion beckoned. Now that they had shoes, Bridget and her brother Michael walked the ten kilometres from Mt Wallace to Ballarat. She and Patrick Hynes would be married in the spring of 1854.
There is no account of how Clara Du Val or Sarah Hanmer, both single mothers of young children, made their way to Ballarat. Unlike Eliza Darcy, neither of the actresses appeared to have a network of family and friends to support them. But there were many women making the journey on their own. Emily Skinner met two stout young women on her journey to the Ovens. They told me that they had many offers of a place [in Melbourne], as it was hard to get servants, wrote Emily in her diary, but the girls were determined to go to the diggings, where high wages and easy times awaited them. Such was the unruly confidence of the times.
Forty-two-year-old spinster Mary Bristow was keen to go to the diggings as a kind of bivouac, and found three young women to accompany her. The party set off on foot almost immediately. The first night the women slept in a covered dray, but it rained in torrents. I don’t think I closed my eyes, wrote Mary. In the morning, the women walked to a nearby brook and completed our toilets. Mary was relieved to note that there is always due observance of respect from the men in their travelling company. The first day, they walked fourteen miles, the next twenty-four miles. The women wore veils and large bonnets against the summer sun. They never ventured out in the middle of the day; it was too dangerous to expose [ourselves] to the sun’s burning rays. But if the sun was hazardous, Mary found that the people of the road were not. All strangers or travellers receive a welcome in this hospitable land, she recorded: ladies could walk or ride long distances unattended and have nothing to fear. I have never been so happy or free from care, she wrote, calling to mind a line of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s about ‘the independence of solitude’. It was on a Victorian bush track that Mary Bristow discovered the sweetness of her own company and freedom from the crowded concerns of others. How curious that Emerson, the American champion of individualism, provided the guiding light for a woman forging a path to the Victorian gold diggings, the fabled home of radical collectivism.
Mrs Elizabeth Massey also found a change in herself on the road to Ballarat. She was not so much pulled by the allure of gold as pushed by the weight of duty. Back in England Mrs Massey had been married only a few weeks when her new husband unexpectedly called on her to accompany him to Australia. Disgust, she wrote in her memoir eight years later, indeed is not a word strong enough to express my feelings at the moment, particularly as I had to wear a calm face and not distress my loving friends by any ebullition of feeling. Mrs Massey considered her journey banishment in place of a honeymoon. On arrival in Victoria, the Masseys went straight to the diggings to avoid the filth, flies and expense of Melbourne. It was on the road that Mrs Massey’s expulsion began to take on a more optimistic quality. On the road, she found that people were more warm-hearted and hospitable than at home in England, more compassionate and forgiving. Her theory? They themselves [have] passed through the fiery ordeal of expatriation and suspense. A haphazard community of wanderers, a band of gypsies, no longer contained by a ship’s hold or a social milieu of formality and diffidence.
Indeed, sudden outbursts of feeling, the likes of which Mrs Massey could not afford to affect at home, seemed the very order of the day in impulsive Victoria. Bonwick described this fashion for spontaneity in the February 1853 edition of his GOLD DIGGER’S MONTHLY MAGAZINE, a widely distributed publication that Mrs Massey may have consulted.
Our gold fields, as a grand focus of moral magnetism, have drawn together a heterogenous multitude of all classes, climes and character. The ardent and impetuous form the vast majority…strong appeals are made to the sordid and animal passions of humanity.
Such unharnessed emotion would later fuel a tragedy, but for now Mrs Massey felt joyfully off the leash. What had initially settled upon her as a black cloud of submissive misery now seemed like a party of pleasure. True to her creed of feminine adaptation, Mrs Massey marvelled at the sights along the road: the gigantic fallen gums, the sweet-scented wattles and correas, a fairyland of magnificent new flowers to behold. She and other (unidentified) female travelling companions camped for the night in the Black Forest, sleeping under the cart with their cloa
ks used to make a barricade against a looming storm. Mrs Massey revelled in the sweet harmony of nature. Every new thunderclap or lightning strike sent waves of electricity down her straitlaced back. All is romance in this most romantic land, she sighed.
Some women initially believed, like Elizabeth Massey, they were on the road to perdition but happily discovered they were actually on a path to unexpected release. Others yearned to be let loose and saw a journey to the goldfields as a credible flight path. Historians have long commented on the escape fantasies that, more than simple gold lust, stimulated men’s rush to the diggings.…[in] the days when men broke their bonds and dreamed of marvellous things to come. It’s always been at least implicit—sometimes aggressively obvious—that among the bonds from which men longed to be free were the harping women with their insufferable demands and bawling brats. There is no doubt that some men did see the goldfields as their ticket out of a domestic rut. Square this fact with all the late-nineteenth-century jingoism about frontier independence, and we have deadbeats like Janet Kincaid’s husband reincarnated as national heroes.
But it’s clear that many women also harboured their own aspirations of escape, not necessarily from spouses and children, but from the tedious and restrictive rituals of the feminine daily round. In particular, many educated and refined women (in the words of one emigrant who eloped with her brother’s tutor and emigrated to Victoria) thought the ease of their English life well left behind them. High teas and calling cards were a subtle form of foot binding for many nineteenth-century British gentlewomen. The price of material comfort was conformity: it cost a lot of effort and anxiety to keep up appearances. Years later, Mrs Massey, who spent two years on the diggings between 1852 and 1854, would write I look back with a grateful heart to my gipsy life. But of course it is the women who disappeared into the slipstream of the nomads—the ones who didn’t record their thoughts or movements for a reading audience—who truly abandoned genteel performance and enjoyed the colonial gift of insignificance.
Refugees from convention were joined on the road by fugitives from the law. The goldfields frontier offered rabbit warrens of protection for women who needed a fresh start. The predominance of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land on the goldfields became a political issue after 1853, but local currency lasses could also find themselves in trouble. Chief among such miscreants were ‘fallen women’, those who had drawn the short straw in the lottery of premarital sex. A Miss Smith, with her fatherless baby, could be reincarnated on the diggings as Mrs Smith, an apocryphal widow who’d lost her husband in a mining accident or maritime mishap.
For it was no joke to be ‘caught out’. Reports of young women who killed or abandoned their newborns in an attempt to hide the evidence of sin are common. On 31 October 1854, for example, the colonial secretary was informed that a one-month-old child had been found in the grounds of St John’s School on the corner of Elizabeth and La Trobe streets in Melbourne. The babe, who was in good health, was wearing a long white frock, white cap and white flannel hood and was wrapped in a blue and green checked shawl. The GOVERNMENT GAZETTE posted a reward for the apprehension of the mother.
The POLICE GAZETTE was also replete with reports of female runaways. On 27 February 1854, information was distributed about one Sarah Wilson, who had left the hired service of Mr Smith in Collingwood before the expiry of her contract. Wilson was nineteen years old, slightly under five foot, with a dark complexion and small, regular features. She has left her clothes behind her and has no relatives in Melbourne, noted the GAZETTE. In March 1854, Ann Plummer escaped from the residence of her husband in Fitzroy Crescent. Ann had been tried for an undisclosed offence at the Central Criminal Court in 1849 and given a fifteen-year sentence, to be served at the premises of her husband. Ann was described as aged twenty-five years, a fancy-box maker, five foot one inch tall, with a fresh complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, native Burnley, nose has been smashed.21 Women had many pragmatic reasons to seek the anarchic embrace of the goldfields.
For Catherine Sherwin, Ballarat would be the place to build a dynasty from ignominious beginnings. Literate and ambitious, Catherine and her sister Mary had sailed to Australia as free immigrants in 1850. At five foot one, of slight build with a dark complexion, black hair and grey eyes, Catherine would have had some capital in the colonial marriage market. If the Sherwins followed typical patterns of Irish family chain migration, it’s possible that Catherine’s elder brothers came to Victoria first, followed by the unmarried sisters and finally the parents, with younger siblings in tow. There were certainly other Sherwins residing in Victoria, with whom Catherine later regrouped when her life course was derailed.
Like other Irish immigrant girls of the Famine generation, Catherine and Mary married soon after their arrival in the colony. Catherine was witness at Mary’s wedding to Everard Gadd at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Melbourne in April 1852. Five months later, Catherine exchanged her vows with James Francis Bentley at St Peter’s Anglican Church. James was a thirty-four-year-old native of Surrey, England, running a confectionery business in Elizabeth Street, North Melbourne. Thirteen years her elder, James had experienced far more of colonial life than his young bride, not least because he had been transported to Norfolk Island on a ten-year sentence in 1844.
Of average height and stoutly built, with dark hair, a fair complexion, a mole on the back of his neck and a slight limp caused by a mutilated right foot, James nonetheless caught Catherine’s eye. According to family oral history, the couple married for love.22 In 1852, newly wedded to a merchant with good connections in Melbourne society—and pregnant within a few months of her marriage—Catherine’s colonial star was only rising. Her first son, Francis Henry Bentley, known throughout his life as Thomas, was born in September 1853 in his parents’ shop. Shortly after her confinement, Catherine and her young family were on the road.
The summer of 1853 brought the predictable fusion of heat, dust and savage episodes of scorching wind. Flies crawled through meat carcasses and into wet, sticky human orifices. Colonial typhus menaced the goldfields populace, just as it did Melbourne’s, with its low fever and high mortality rate. Dysentery was another quiet killer, especially of babies. Rumblings of discontent vibrated beneath the seemingly solid foundations of a tent city built on gold. Christmas was almost here, bringing its celebration of birth, its hope for renewal and its inevitable focus on those who were not invited into the stable.
For the imminent Yuletide revelry, Frances Pierson decided to combat homesickness with generosity. Frances is well and stands it here first rate, wrote Thomas, with a touch of incredulity that his wife had managed to make such a smooth transition to a suntan in December. She had recently purchased a Yankee cooking stove from Melbourne for £8 plus £3 cartage, benefiting from the economical summer transport costs. She baked a load of apple pies, cranberry tarts and sweet cakes. Enough for her small family to enjoy, and to share with some of the many single diggers who would be celebrating the festive season devoid of mothers, sisters and home comforts. Perhaps she would even sell some of her precious wares. Lord knew they could use the extra shillings.
On Christmas Day 1853, Thomas Pierson cast a glance at his robust wife, stoking the campfire, and his teenage son, skylarking with a crew of new mates. Surprised by his own high spirits, he wrote in his diary: Well here we are on the Ballarat diggings. The question naturally occurs: where will we all be the next Christmas of ’54?
Queen Rose of the Wathaurung people in her possumskin cloak, 1876.
Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853–54: the golden vision that Eugene von Guérard painted in 1884.
One of von Guérard’s more realistic sketches of Ballarat, from 1854.
Alarming Prospect: all the single ladies. John Leech, 1854.
Head down, bum up on the road to Ballarat. John Alexander Gilfillan, 1853.
Great expectations: the lucky digger returns. S. T. Gill, 1852–3.
Grass widows: the girls the digge
rs left behind and what they had to do (detail). William Strutt, 1851.
PART 2
TRANSFORMATIONS
FIVE
THE GOLD DIGGERS OF ’54
Martha Clendinning was a woman who knew her own noddle. Like Frances Pierson, she was not content to remain in Melbourne while her husband went to the diggings. When Dr George Clendinning announced his imminent departure to Ballarat in the autumn of 1853, Martha declared her intention to accompany him. She was thirty-one years old; George was sixteen years her senior, but Martha would not be cowed. I had made up my mind, she declared. She would go to Ballarat, and so would her five-year-old daughter, Margaret, and Martha’s younger sister, Sarah Lloyd, despite Sarah’s husband’s objection that there were no decent women there, only a few of the Vandies’ wives. Tom Lloyd repeated the judgment of men throughout the ages when they didn’t want to share their self-proclaimed territory. The goldfields were no fit place for any respectable woman.
The husbands went to scout the fields for the most promising tent site, and Martha and Sarah got to talking. After they had left us women, wrote Martha in her reminiscences, we had discussed our future life at the diggings and we at once came to the conclusion that we never could sit down in our tents there with our hands before us. Martha was pragmatic. Our house work (if I may use the term) would take up very little time, and there was but one child between us to attend to. Martha was also shrewd. Besides finding something to occupy our time, we felt we should much like some way of making a little money to help our husbands in their hard work. The Doctor, as Martha called her husband, was intending to dig for gold, not to practise medicine. Since few people got rich overnight, he might need some help at first, even if he would not countenance the idea now. And after all, at forty-seven he was not a young man. But what could two well-bred Anglo-Irish girls, scions of the Protestant Ascendancy, do to earn a livelihood? Teaching and needle-work, the usual womanly employments, were out of the question; they were not needed on the gold fields, mused Martha. At last the happy thought struck us. We would keep a store! A nice, tidy, little store! We were well pleased with the idea.
