The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Ballarat, observed Westgarth, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile exchange, where co-partnering and share-holding—complex forms of interpersonal rather than technological exchange—were required to tap the deep leads that criss-crossed the goldfields. (And as if to flesh out Westgarth’s metaphor, many women were not just miners but active shareholders in the hundreds of mining ventures that were listed on the Ballarat Mining Exchange.10) Westgarth didn’t comment on the implications of such retrograde commercial operations for women; however, there is no doubt that women who wanted or needed to mine for gold benefited from this freedom from science and modernity.

  Once regulations enabled larger-scale mining claims later in the 1850s, technology (particularly steam-driven pumping) quickly appeared. But in 1854, the editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER noted that in the three years since gold’s discovery, little had changed in its mode of extraction. Gold is got by chopping, churning and manual dexterity, he wrote.11 Is this mining or making mince pies? Alluvial mining was indeed a great equal opportunity employer. MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS advised its readers that mining was a pursuit open to all who are strong enough…members of the learned professions [are] side by side with the refuse of the earth. Human garbage. And women.

  Martha Clendinning and her sister had made a pact: even if other storekeepers on the diggings winked at the authorities, they would never sell sly grog on their premises. It was unlawful to sell wine, beer or spirits on any of Victoria’s goldfields, but everyone knew that practically every store, restaurant, boarding house and ‘refreshment tent’ could provide a nobbler on request. Though the laws to keep alcohol off the diggings had been a complete failure, Martha reckoned that she must hold to her own standards. She would only sell the best quality tea, coffee and sugar, candles, tobacco (the most important item), jams, bottled fruits, onions and apples and some excellent small Cheshire cheeses.

  But Martha, the doctor’s wife, Anglo-Irish daughter of a Kings County JP, was not so high and mighty that she couldn’t read the democratic temper of the times. As Englishman John Capper wrote, The equality system here would stun even a Yankee. We have all grades and classes…The outward garb forms no mark of distinction—all are mates. Martha and Sarah determined to follow Mrs Massey’s advice and exchange broadcloth for fustian, toning down their well-bred appearances in the hope that we should not be distinguished as ‘ladies’. We intended to pass as merely respectable women of business; anything more than that would, we felt, expose us to curiosity when we entered on our storekeeping life. They didn’t want to intimidate the diggers. They didn’t want to lord it over the diggers’ wives. They wanted to blend in. But it was more than the desire to be inconspicuous: We prided ourselves on being careless of appearances. New chums passed themselves off as old hands by the unceremonious cut of their cloth.

  The Clendinnings set up their tent site at the centre of a treeless field on Commissioner’s Flat, not far from where Charles and George Evans would establish their Criterion Auction Mart just a few months later. Martha volunteered to go to the Government Camp and purchase George Clendinning’s mining licence for him while he muddled about in a tangle of flaccid canvas. As this was official business, she put on her go-to-meeting clothes: black cashmere dress with two deep flounces and velvet folds on the edges, paisley shawl and straw bonnet trimmed with white ribbon. At the Camp, she admired the commissioners’ firmly tethered tent. I gazed with envious eyes on the erection, thinking of the sad confusion of her own tent. The commissioners were just as admiring of Martha’s appearance, for, according to Martha, the other women residents were of a very rough class. Martha declined a chair, and the licence was delivered to her promptly. Two diggers, who had been waiting half the day for the commissioners to deign to issue their licences, were astonished. ‘Well Bill’, said one, ‘the next time I want my licence, I’ll send my missus for it, instead of kicking my shins about here for hours’. ‘All right’, Bill replied, ‘but you must get your missus first, my boy’. Martha had a chuckle at her new-found influence.

  Once George finally got it up, the Clendinnings’ tent—our first Australian home—was also Martha and Sarah’s store. Martha’s trademark yellow canary sang in a cage outside the tent. Martha procured her own storekeeper’s licence and opened for business. I never forgot my first sale! wrote Martha fifty years later: a box of matches for sixpence.

  While their husbands got on with the hard and dirty work of mining, Martha and Sarah quickly established a loyal clientele for their humble wares. Martha bought a hen, a rare commodity on the diggings, and sold her eggs to mothers of sick children who could keep nothing else down. Soon there was more demand, for more goods, than they could supply. We were constantly asked for clothing materials by the women, but didn’t have enough room to store large bolts of cloth. But the savvy sisters could see that there was something in the Ballarat waters that encouraged astonishing fertility as well as dysentery. They decided to venture on a new branch of business: baby clothes. Theirs was the first store on the diggings to sell such dainty little garments. The delight of the women at the sight of them was beyond description.

  Martha had tapped into a profitable sociological trend. Most of her customers were women, who often shopped together. At home, an English country labourer’s wife could only afford to clothe their babies in unbleached calico, coarse flannel and poor, common print. But now, those same women could delight in Melbourne-made goods, simple, but being all of white material and tastefully made, with little knitted woollen hoods. Such garments elicited the warmest admiration and envy. So while genteel women sought to downplay their class backgrounds by ‘blending in’ with the masses, former commoners were only too happy to distinguish themselves from the pack with dainty fripperies. Martha and Sarah soon sold out their modest supply of upmarket baby clothes and had to send to Melbourne for more stock. The business of frontier egalitarianism was clearly a matter of nuance. Anyone who could successfully negotiate its ambiguities and inconsistencies was onto a winner.

  But Martha Clendinning did not just use women’s social aspiration to turn a profit. She was also astute enough to realise that immersing herself in the cultural landscape of the early diggings would give her a new freedom beyond her stifling old identity as a gentlewoman. If the rural farm girls aped her bourgeois trimmings, so Martha took her lead from the working class…to whom all species of employment for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success. Suddenly it was merit, not birthright and breeding, that made all the difference.

  Dr Clendinning was most anxious about the changes that had taken place in his tight family circle. His plan—persist with gold digging until the big find, then retire with all the decencies of the home life of a gentleman—was slow in coming to fruition. This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her excessive folly, despite her husband’s concern that he might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it. While she was making money and George wasn’t, Martha would do as she pleased.

  She was certainly a trailblazer, but Martha Clendinning was not the only woman to cash in on the diggers’ insatiable demand for supplies and services. Not long after Martha paved the way, twenty-eight-year-old Irishwoman Anne Diamond (née Keane) began retailing out of a large tent at Eureka, while her new husband Martin mined its lead. After meeting on the Star of the East, Martin and Anne had never formally married, but by the time they set up shop in Ballarat, Anne had taken Martin’s name and they were living as a couple. Sometime in early 1854, they had a baby who died. Not ones for paperwork, they registered neither its birth nor its death.12 The precise location of Anne Diamond’s store would prove to have disastrous consequences in the summer of ’54.

  Phoebe Emerson also ran a store at Eureka. Phoebe had grown up in the coal mining regions of northern England. Her father was an engineer and the choirmaster and organist at Durham Cathedral. Phoebe married George Emerson on her twentieth birthday and the couple sailed to Vict
oria the following year. George suffered from a lung infection (which finally killed him in 1857) and Phoebe ran the store to provide the newlyweds with their livelihood. She kept several savage dogs for protection and a loaded gun to deter any foolishness near her store.13

  Twenty-two-year-old Irish immigrant Mary Davison King also slept with a loaded pistol under her pillow when her husband Alexander was away from their store buying stock. Mary had migrated to Victoria soon after her marriage to Alexander and headed straight to the diggings, so they must have had some capital to seed their business. Like Martha Clendinning, Mary acquired hens and made a pile selling eggs to the Ballarat miners at eighteen pence per egg. Mary had her first baby, Henrietta, in her tent in 1854, the second, Emma in 1855, and nine more in the next seventeen years.14

  Mrs Eakin also ran a store at Eureka. Henry Mundy described her as a tall, pleasant looking woman with very engaging manners, a real lady. Henry’s new wife, Ann, took heart from her husband’s respect for Mrs Eakin. After their marriage, Ann was anxious to make herself useful in doing something to make money, so she began a grocery business and circulating library. After the birth of their first son, however, Henry changed his tune. It was his responsibility to provide for his wife and child. Ann wanted to make clothes to sell to a draper’s shop, but Henry wouldn’t hear of it. What nonsense you are talking, of taking in sewing to keep the house, he thundered. By God I’ll get a living for us!

  Older and longer married, Thomas Pierson wasn’t so proud. He and Frances set up a large heavy canvas tent (nine metres by five) for a store, which Frances ran in addition to a slightly smaller tent with a wooden carpet for their domicile. In early 1854, Thomas and son Mason joined a party of Americans in a claim, resolved to extract reward for their sacrifice. Thomas hated Ballarat, considering it a most miserable, disagreeable, unhealthy place unfit for a white man to live in. It was also a place of extremes. The weather was one thing. On 27 February Thomas reported that there were squalls and rain, with the wind blowing hard and a mere fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The day before had been over a hundred degrees. The social temperature was equally tempestuous. There was great wealth, which profited Frances in her storekeeping, but according to Thomas few other places could produce the same amount of destitution, poverty and want.

  It is possible to live in most cities of the world and not have a clue how the other half lives. Ghettos of the poor are geographically isolated from enclaves of the rich. But in the tent city of Ballarat, where Jack was supposed to be as good as his neighbour, Jack could very clearly see that his neighbour was feasting on German sausages and Cheshire cheese while he and his brood ate damper and flyblown mutton—again. Advertisements for stores in Henry Seekamp’s BALLARAT TIMES, which first began circulating in March 1854, reveal the astounding range of goods available for sale: red herrings, fresh salmon, Chilean flour, smoked bacon, fresh ground coffee, Normandy pippins, Cavendish tobacco, Havana and Manila cigars, fresh oysters and lobster, preserved partridge, grouse, woodcock, lark, plover and hare, preserved peaches, apricots, prunes and plums, French jams and jellies, fancy, soda and water biscuits, Cork butter, and the list goes on.

  Apart from such delectable consumables, there was a vast array of merchandise on offer. Mrs Willey, who ran the Compton House store on Bakery Hill (red flag with white ball, for those who couldn’t read her sign), advertised the following wares: parasols, silk, satin, glacé and muslin mantles, china crape and French cashmere shawls, Irish linen and calico, widows caps, ladies and babies underclothing and French kid boots. Refreshment tents sold ginger beer and cordials over the counter, and gin, brandy, whisky, porter and shandy-gaff under it.15 You could get a dozen bottles of French champagne if you could afford it. The stores were astonishingly well stocked with everything that could be wanted, wrote Mrs Massey, with the most conspicuous display of dresses, bonnets and quantities of china. Jill knew exactly what she was missing out on if Jack’s claim bottomed out.

  You can almost see the vindictive, self-righteous spittle fly from the aggrieved lips of Thomas Pierson as he ups the ante on his family’s future: we determined sticking to it a while yet to make something out of this country if we can as we think it owes us something. A dangerous position: to hold a grudge, to feel a sense of entitlement.

  On 1 March 1854, the Piersons attended a monster meeting of similarly disgruntled storekeepers, a show of strength against the new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. There were by now three hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that at least two-thirds of the stores on the diggings were run by the wives while their husbands mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—generally the sly-grog portion of the business.16 In late February, sixty storekeepers, including the Piersons, had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was extortion, fumed Thomas. The fine was particularly unreasonable when residents were being asked to subscribe private funds to build a hospital. The problem, according to Thomas, was this: the English nobility send out their Bastard children to make unprincipled and contradictory laws. But what was to be done? At the meeting, the storekeepers resolved to refuse en masse to pay the licence fee. By the end of March they had all caved in. Mark the independence of Englishmen, wrote Pierson in his diary entry of 25 March, then compare them with Americans who would never quietly submit to illegal taxes and the unjust imposition of fines.

  That night a huge thunderstorm burst over Ballarat and it rained and hailed for a week solid, turning the parched ground of summer into rivers of mud. Frances Pierson packed up her store and moved it to higher ground.

  In his 1958 classic The Australian Legend, Russel Ward commented on the ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist morality’ that existed on the Victorian goldfields. Ward traced the origins of this ethos to the teamwork required for deep lead mining (a line of analysis that also runs strongly through the work of Bate and Blainey) and the common arrangement of one miner acting as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine. This group solidarity, Ward argued, was reinforced by the uniformly despised practice of licence-hunting. Ward pointed out that Victorian diggers called their co-workers ‘mates’, in contrast to the Californian term ‘partner’, signifying a comradely rather than commercial relationship. The close affiliation of the Australian labour movement with the history of mining disputes tends to support Ward’s case.

  But Ward did not explore another unusual aspect of this Australian egalitarian affinity: the inclusion of women in its companionable embrace. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them. And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour’, with concomitant loss of pay and status), the goldfields women found themselves highly prized. I have become a sort of necessity, remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to the diggings with her brother and quickly became a pseudo-wife to his single buddies. Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect for her conversation and companionship besides. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields: I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end! 17

  Being paid for domestic work without having to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a revelation to working-class women on the goldfields. It was like freelance domestic service. Public housekeeping. Many women found regular employment as tent keepers for single men. Some older women, often widows, set themselves up in business as boarding-house keepers or licensed victuallers. As a result, women left their bonded service in towns and on stations and headed to the diggings. They may have wound up doing the same work—cooking, child minding, wet nursing—but they did it on their own terms, informally aligned to a team rather than a single master or mistress. The goi
ng rates were good too, set by a bull labour market for domestic services. Mrs H. Fitchett, who ran the Victoria Labour Market, an employment service, regularly posted the fair price for servants in the GEELONG ADVERTISER in 1854. Housemaids could expect £26 to £30 per annum, cooks £30 to £40, laundresses £30 to £35 and nursemaids £20 to £24.

  These rates were still low compared to male wages—stock riders, bullock drivers and waiters could expect double the amount—but, due to the scarcity of female servants, they were noticeably superior to English wages.18 Moreover, in the golden age of mineral excavation, there was one paid domestic worker for every three miners.19 Australia might have ridden into existence on the sheep’s back—and was then stampeded to international prominence with a resources boom—but in the mid-nineteenth century its prosperity was underpinned by the taxable value of women’s work.

  And women knew it. They had only to look at the latest issue of MELBOURNE PUNCH to realise that everyone knew it. It was called ‘the servant problem’. The social crisis wasn’t so much that unprecedented numbers of women were being paid for their domestic labour, but that such women were calling the shots. PUNCH printed cartoons that illustrated the farcical implications of untutored young women telling urbane old masters where to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has not supplied her with copies of PUNCH to read. In another, the young servant expects her master to chop the wood.

  It was what they call colonial bounce, surmised Mrs May Howell when her newly hired servant couldn’t decide on a suitable starting date. She means to come, but thinks as this is a free country she must show herself independent. William Westgarth summed up the new-found power of domestic servants with wry regard: Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid agreed to a temporary trial of her new mistress. But Westgarth’s dry wit allowed him to make a more intoxicating point about the radical potential for change in a colony which exhibited an equality of consideration for all classes, and by consequence a political and social inclusiveness. He chose a decidedly gendered metaphor to illustrate this transformative process. In Victoria, traditional social gradations were thrown off like a loose mantle in an unabashed disrobing process. A sociological striptease.