The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Every folk tale has its wicked witch. In gold rush Victoria, the washerwoman represented the spectre of a world turned upside down. A new world where wives earned more money than their husbands, working women determined the parameters of their employment, and manual skills counted for more in the marriage and labour market than drawing-room refinement.

  This world is magnificently captured in an illustration by John Leech titled ‘Topsy Turvey—or our Antipodes’, issued as a frontispiece to London PUNCH in 1854. Here on the Victorian diggings is a cast of larks and heroes from an imperial nightmare. A group of ruffians play cards while a Master of Arts brings them beer. At the table sits a pipe-smoking woman. She is being served spirits by a genteel lass who is barefoot and sunburnt, her face blackened by exposure. Meanwhile, an Intellectual Being plays manservant to a bearded miner, while another gentleman takes off the muddy boots of a pistol-toting brute. Behind them, a fat, ugly old hag wearing pearls and self-satisfied smirk—here is our washerwoman—is being given piano lessons by a delicate English rose. It is a charming tableau of class, racial and gender mayhem.

  William Kelly was quick to grasp the figurative dimensions of the washerwoman. His pen portrait has her dressed for the washing tub. Her hair is tied up in knot and fixed with a huge gold pin with a father-o’-pearl head. She’s wearing a satin dress and an apron, a pair of massive bracelets clasped on her bulging wrists and a heavy watch chain around her neck, stuffing a carved timepiece into her virtuous bosom. Here, says Kelly, is a colonial substitute for crochet-work, a contemptible economy. Imagine a mere washerwoman decking herself out in satin and gold instead of her homespun. James Bonwick was positively apoplectic. The sheer muddy filth of mining meant that washing was a necessity, not a luxury. But could a man expect sympathy from a washerwoman? Apparently not. These heartless creatures, wrote Bonwick, the laundresses, treat us in town with perfect disdain, and only occasionally and grudgingly favor us with a stony bosom. And what worse fates on the goldfields! Bonwick had a remedy. He advised bachelors to woo a wife, then she would have no option but to wash his shirts. And, presumably, provide a more welcoming breast.

  The real problem was not the airs and graces or the reluctant favours; it was the equal economic footing in a land that valued wealth above rank or status. MURRAY’S GUIDE TO THE DIGGINGS pointed out that in Victoria carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks and washerwomen make nearly as good a living as the diggers. Most were paid in gold dust, just as an earlier band of Australian upstarts had been paid in the scarce commodity of rum. Like domestic servants, washerwomen could afford to pick and choose their clients and set boundaries on their working lives. Unlike domestic servants, washerwomen were typically older, sometimes married, deserted or widowed, or someone’s mother. They were unlikely to be wooed into marriage and rejoin the ranks of unpaid domestic officers. Washerwomen thus symbolised the social and economic power of working women on the early colonial frontier. They were the allegorical ‘gold-diggers’ of ’54, only they didn’t dig or dance or sing for their supper. The source of their power was external. It was vested in a wafer-thin historical moment when women’s scarcity and indispensible labour coincided with the culture of utilitarian democracy.

  For all those men who didn’t have a wife and couldn’t afford to hire one, Sunday was washing day on the diggings.

  No one expected any different.

  SIX

  WINNERS AND LOSERS

  Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.

  By May 1854, Ballarat was under siege. The wet season had come early. The summer of 1853 had been dry, and now the heavens had opened themselves upon an impermeable earth. Wind blowing hard for three weeks, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary. Charles Evans wrote of the dull cloudy atmosphere and almost incessant rain. Mining operations had practically ceased. John Manning, the schoolmaster at St Alipius, where Anastasia Hayes was working as a teacher, complained that few of the seventy-four children on his roll were in attendance owing to the severity of the weather.1 Abandoned mine shafts used by the diggers as haphazard latrines became putrid cesspools. Miners who had slept rough during the warm months were suddenly vying for beds in the boarding-house tents that had been popping up as a result of the feminine exodus from the township. Bad weather meant good business for entrepreneurial women.

  But Sarah Skinner was not one of those women. Sarah Skinner lay on her own rude cot in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain lash the useless fly as she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. In a delirium, driving rain can sound like fire. For Sarah, everything burned. Her brow ran with sweat. The tender, swollen skin of her vulva stretched like taut canvas. A final push sent a searing tear through her perineum. She screamed; the baby wailed. Their tandem howl floated into the spectral blaze of the night. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as ineffectual as a handkerchief in a tempest.

  On Saturday 13 May 1854, Sarah Skinner gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy. The baby’s lusty cries were music to the ears of midwife Jane Julian, Sarah and William’s neighbour. Two weeks later, Jane testified at the inquest into Sarah’s death2 that she was not a regular midwife but [had] attended a few females in their confinement. She’d done her best. On the day after the birth, Sarah was well, sitting up nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane, the new mother was seized with cold shivering. William Skinner, twenty-seven, son of a Devon miner, sent for Dr William Wills (father of the doomed explorer). Dr Wills attributed Sarah’s fever to her milk coming in.

  Over the next week, Sarah continued to ail. Dr Wills now diagnosed puerperal peritonitis—the grimmest reaper of nineteenth-century childbirth—and ordered the standard treatment for postpartum infection: turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two hours.

  A medical text from 1785 gives us an indication of how Sarah was faring as Wills attended her.

  Child-bed fever…begins, like most other fevers, with a cold or shivering fit, which is succeeded by restlessness, pain of the head, great sickness at stomach, and bilious vomiting…A great pain is usually felt in the back, hips, and region of the womb;…and the patient is frequently troubled with a tenesmus, or constant inclination to go to stool. The urine, which is very high-colored, is discharged in small quantity, and generally with pain. The belly sometimes swells to a considerable bulk…a bilious or putrid looseness, of an obstinate and dangerous nature, comes on, and accompanies the disease through all its future progress.3

  Sarah’s baby also began suffering bowel complaints and bloody stools. He died by the end of his first week, without a name, and was laid to rest five days later. Dr Wills gave weakness as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile herself to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like, having already put two other babies in the ground.

  A distraught William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered the baby’s demise to have been caused by the mother’s milk. Dr Stewart observed Sarah’s deteriorating condition and, though he continued the enemas and blistering, claimed it was beyond human skill to save her life. He denied her the last-ditch treatment of leeching the abdomen, though leeches were abundantly available from the many pharmacists retailing on the Ballarat goldfields. Almost two weeks after the birth, and two days after his son’s funeral, William Skinner held his wife’s limp, clammy hand for the last time.

  At Sarah’s inquest on 25 May, the coroner pronounced that the woman had died from natural causes. A jury of William’s peers added a rider to the verdict: We consider that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man her days might have been prolonged. The now-widowed William Skinner was, in a perverse way, one of the lucky ones. Although his wife’s body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had finished ‘attending’ her, he had managed to secure professional services. In that, at least, he
had succeeded.

  Fellow miner Patrick Carey was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son succumbed to the fever that had racked him for days. The coroner asked Patrick why he hadn’t sent for medical assistance. His reply: Because we had not a blessed sixpence in the tent.4

  The idea that the Australian gold rush produced a classless society, founded on the sort of egalitarianism that only a resources boom can buy, is one of the enduring myths of the Eureka legend. From the beginning, Ballarat was a competitive environment. How could it be otherwise, when its raison d’être was the lucky strike? And in competitive environments, there are bound to be winners and losers. In their classic text The Psychology of Gambling, Jon Halliday and Peter Fuller define gambling as ‘a redistribution of wealth on the basis of chance and risk, an event that always involves loss to one party and gain to another’. The psychological and sociological bedrock of the gold rush ethos was, in fact, the antithesis of egalitarianism.

  Here lies the paradox of diggings society: a world turned upside down, but not levelled. Who wanted to be a millionaire? Everyone. How many succeeded? Few. What was the difference? Chance.

  For most punters on the early Victorian goldfields, successful mining required three things: diligence, stamina and a godsend. It is said by some, wrote Henry Mundy, there is no such thing as luck, that every man is the architect of his own fortune. Such people had never been gold digging. Swiss miner Charles Eberle agreed. It is a lottery, he concluded after a long tour of duty in Ballarat.5 Ellen Clacy called the diggings the lottery fields. In this game of chance, Mother Nature was the house.

  In Ballarat, it was geology that safeguarded her stash. The lines of gold deposits were capricious and uncertain, as one miner put it, following the subterranean maze of buried rivers. On the surface, the creeks and gullies revealed nothing of what lay beneath. Deep lead mining was like recreational fishing, casting a line into a dark pool in the pure hope of a bite. But deep lead mining was also dangerous, costly and time-consuming work, requiring fortitude but little manual skill or technical knowledge.

  You could sink a shaft not ten feet from your neighbour’s claim. You could both dig; both line your shaft with split timbers to hold the loose ground, and bucket out the constant cascade of seeping water. You could both wallow in the cold and dark and wet (or, in summer, hot and foetid) earth for five, six, nine months. And he might hit the gold-infused riverbed while your hole dropped over a bend in the gutter, missing the mark. He wins. You lose. Rock bottom. Duffered out. A shicer. But still you have to pay your licence fee, month in, month out, gold or no gold.

  The deep lead mining of Ballarat, wrote Geoffrey Blainey in The Rush That Never Ended, ‘was therefore more of a gamble than any other branch of gold mining’. Like childbirth, deep lead mining was exhilarating, wildly profitable, completely ruinous, risky business.

  Eberle’s conclusion that mining was a lottery was tinged with disgust, not devil-may-care jouissance. He reckoned he’d been sold a pup. The gilded imagination of European publicists has, with few exceptions, Eberle considered, influenced the general attitude. Expectations of easy pickings were still high, even in late 1854 when Eberle left Lausanne. But it did not take long for the scales to fall from our eyes. For Eberle and so many others, it was a bitter deception. Still, as the experts will tell you, ‘loss chasing’ is an important component in the psychology of gambling, inducing players to persevere longer and raise the stakes higher in an attempt to recoup misdirected finances, time and pride.

  Thomas McCombie was quick to point out that the independent diggers of the early 1850s were not the professional miners of the 1860s. The former were only in the game, he believed, for short-term gain or failure. Mining was not a regular calling, as it would become for the salaried men of the syndicalised mining companies that had already begun taking over operations by late 1854. The amateur gold diggers knew little of science, engineering, metallurgy, chemistry or geology—all subjects that would be taught at the Ballarat School of Mines from 1870. No, the early diggers, said McCombie, were purely individual speculators, anxious about their families, eager to make a killing and go home. That they could not earn enough to buy an egg, let alone a passage, was the hard-luck story told around countless campfires. Young Martin Mossman poured out his tale of woe in a letter to his Aunt Hetty. He went to the diggings three times, but had no success. He was poorer than when he started. I have no good fortune, he wrote, I am not a lucky digger. Martin’s Uncle Charles, on the other hand, went into a speculation and is now worth £40,000. Uncle Charles was coming home, but I am just worth what I carry on my back, wrote Martin.6

  What’s more, 1854 represented a significant turning point in the attitude of many immigrants to rolling the dice. Antoine Fauchery, a French digger and photographer who lived at Ballarat from 1852 to 1854, reflected on the mounting disillusionment with short-term gold mining:

  In 1853 if you took ten emigrants, nine of them would have worked resolutely on the diggings, while the tenth would, with great regret, have gone in for business. Towards the middle of 1855, the proportions were completely reversed. Out of ten emigrants nine were speculating in something or other—tool handles or lemonade at a penny a glass, and the tenth, stripped of all resources, kept to his pick, but with what ill grace.7

  The assumption of easy pickings had put the wind in the sails of over a quarter of a million immigrants between 1852 and 1854. By mid-1854, things were changing. And the longer people—especially family men—spent embedded in unsuccessful speculations, the deeper the hole they seemed to have dug for themselves.

  The conditions of life on the goldfields were to a certain extent ‘democratising’: everyone was in the same leaky boat, regardless of rank, breeding, qualification, nationality or religion. There was only one place you could have a baby and that was in a tent. The rough, raw newness of it all made for a sort of temporal and material parity. But this pioneer equivalence was in itself such a wild anomaly that most everyone felt the need to comment on it. MURRAY’S GUIDE described gold digging as a pursuit open to all who are strong enough…members of the learned profession side by side with the refuse of the earth. Thomas McCombie commented that the many persons of birth and education [were] rather difficult to recognize in their blue serge shirts and cord small clothes. It’s fair to say there was an obsessive focus on the ease with which clothes could disguise caste, a simple sleight of hand overturning centuries of vigilant class-consciousness.

  Why did Sarah Skinner’s placental site turn septic, while the other women attended by Jane Julian survived? Nothing was dependable; everything was a matter of happenstance. The straitjacket of the Old World had not been undone, simply re-laced. It felt like a bitter deception indeed. Who could be made to blame?

  Martha Clendinning didn’t need a demographer to crunch the numbers and suggest a marketing plan for her shop. She could see with her own eyes that Ballarat was experiencing a baby boom. With no hospital or midwifery services, Ballarat’s tent city rang with the cries of birthing. At least one pharmacist advertised breast pumps to relieve the agony of hyper-lactating new mothers. (Milk fever, which we now call mastitis, was a painful and, before antibiotics, a potentially fatal infection. Dr Stewart was not unreasonable in suspecting Sarah Skinner’s bursting breasts as the cause of her delirium.) It also did not take George Clendinning long to realise that he could lay his hands on more reliable sources of profit than his barren mine shaft. By 1856, Dr Clendinning had hung out his shingle as a Coroner, Surgeon and Accoucheur at Bakery Hill.

  In 1850, one birth was registered in Ballarat. In 1851, there were five. That figured doubled to ten in 1852 and leapt to twenty-eight in 1853. Then, in 1854, 404 babies squalled their way into life. Those women not having babies were busy making them. In 1855, there were 756 registered births and in 1856 that figure almost doubled to 1242. You might expect the rate of increase to have remained constant as Ballarat grew into a fully-fledged town with schools and other institutions of prog
ress. But that’s not what happened. In 1860, there were 1652 births and by 1880, 1216. For the rest of the nineteenth century, there was never as much per capita procreation going on as there was in 1854 and 1855.8 In mid-1850s Ballarat, there was not only a resources boom, but also a baby boom.

  How to explain the demographic spike? Most obviously, the population of Victoria was—overwhelmingly—young. In 1854, sixty-two per cent of the population was between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, and the majority of these were between twenty and thirty. The trend was even more pronounced on the goldfields, where the character of the population was seen as inextricably bound to its remarkable youth. Robert Caldwell described the digger genus as young, impulsive, generous and restless [with] amazing energy. To James Bonwick, the demographic profile of Victoria was a metaphor for statehood. Once we were a sheep walk, he wrote, now we are a gold field. So young and yet so celebrated…already the talk of the world. Elizabeth Massey saw nothing but romance in Victoria’s young people of active energetic habits.

  Others saw danger. Excitement can mean enthusiasm, but it can also mean agitation.9 Canadian Samuel Huyghue was employed as the chief clerk to Resident Commissioner Robert Rede at the Ballarat Camp in 1854. He doubted the government was up to the task of responding to the mixed multitude, eager for enterprise and revelling in a sense of freedom and anticipation. Instead of finding constructive ways to deal with the progress of the tide, he feared the government would do its best to restrain these new born impulses. So far, its chosen method of sandbagging was an exorbitant tax enforced at the point of the bayonet.10 Those wielding the weapons, as well as those making the rules, were themselves young men. The average age of the soldiers of the 12th Regiment, permanently stationed at Ballarat, was 21.7 years; the average age of the 40th Regiment, later brought in as reinforcements, was 28.2 years. Huyghue described the soldiers of the 40th as half weaned cubs of the Lion Mother.11 Both Huyghue and Resident Commissioner Rede were positively ancient at thirty-nine years old. Assistant Commissioner James Johnston—dear Jamie—was twenty-eight when he married Margaret Brown Howden in August 1854 and took her to Ballarat as his bride. By the time they arrived, twenty-three-year-old Margaret was pregnant. Her honeymoon conception would soon turn into a nightmare gestation.