by Clare Wright
The idea was especially attractive to family men, who longed for a home base where they could leave their wives and children while they continued to follow the rushes, chasing new leads to golden success. Gypsy life was initially fun and adventurous, but uprooting a large family time and time again became tiresome and humiliating. Set up on a farm, the missus could grow a garden and feed the kids wholesome food; perhaps even send them to school. It was not just the starving diggers who envisaged this redemptive possibility. Prosperous diggers who felt an affinity with the Australian landscape and social outlook (not to mention the speculative potential of all that fertile pasture) also fancied themselves as landed gentlemen. For this emergent middle class, access to land was not about subsistence but accelerating social status. Here was the yeoman ideal of independence and mastery combined with the launching pad to upward mobility of a land boom.
There was one big hitch. 1n 1851, when the Port Phillip District was granted political separation from New South Wales, the new colony was divided into about one thousand unfenced and unsurveyed sheep runs. The squatters who controlled these runs produced the wool that accounted for more than ninety per cent of Victoria’s exports. Only some 400,000 acres had been sold—in the towns of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland and in the ‘settled’ areas near them, tiny agricultural outposts such as Bacchus Marsh and Kilmore.10 The ‘land question’ was both ‘bewilderingly complex’, as Geoffrey Serle has ably demonstrated, and crystal clear. Through a tangled legal web of long leases and pre-emptive buying rights to the squatters—many of whom sat in the Legislative Council—the lands were effectively ‘locked’. The land question was an A-grade political battleground, contested by urban radicals, cautious moderates and extremist aristocrats alike. And this was before the land-hungry gold rush immigrants began clamouring for a piece of the pie.
In late 1852, Governor La Trobe began making promises that town allotments and agricultural plots near the diggings would be sold. A deputation representing the wishes of over seven thousand people, recruited in part by James Bonwick, had convinced him that the bulk of the working population and most of the married men wish to become landholders. La Trobe made good his pledge, and for eighteen months from early 1853 more than half a million acres were sold. But there was another snag: as squatters and wealthy speculators outbid each other to gobble up the new allotments, the price of land skyrocketed. In 1850 the average price of rural land was 25s per acre. By 1853 the price had more than trebled, to £4. The immigrant married men and workers who thought to exchange shovel for scythe had been dudded. It didn’t help matters that much of the land sold around the goldfields was bought by employees of the government camps—the gold commissioners, police inspectors and magistrates—with money borrowed from prosperous local publicans and merchants. James Johnston, Margaret’s Jamie, on a salary of £400 a year, started buying up land almost as soon as the two of them arrived in Ballarat in the winter of 1854.
The capitalist land-grabbers did nothing to improve the lands, let alone cultivate them, so there was still no agricultural produce flowing to the goldfields, and diggers were no closer to their pastoral idylls. Food prices remained high, especially in winter when the roads became impassable. Unskilled workers could find no alternative employment at a time when public expenditure on roads, docks or other infrastructure was negligible. Thus most miners, concluded Harry Hastings Pearce via his grandmother’s tales, were condemned to the hopeless search for gold.
Land reform. The concept became a pernicious irritant precisely because it was also a palpable remedy. Three little words formed a potent mantra. Unlock the lands. Unlock the lands! UNLOCK THE LANDS. Public debate was on the side of the diggers, and even conservative merchants like Robert Caldwell, who was still touting the myth that there was no such thing as poverty in Australia, advocated land reform as an antidote to intemperance. Cannot the government come into competition with the publican, and, instead of presenting the means of a debauch, put before the eyes of the returned digger a sweet little corner of fifty acres, he wrote. How many a wife longs for this bait to be hung out!
Certain diggers agreed. Locked lands meant spare money was spent in pubs rather than on homesteads. American Seth Rudolphus Clark thought it was sheer bad management on the part of the government…to encourage low dissipation and drunkenness when family farms might be built, and fruit and vegetables grown. Creating a means for miners to buy small plots of agricultural land had long been the subject of anxious attention, as one goldfields official put it, but the issue increased in urgency as the proportion of women and children on the diggings increased.11 This fundamental shift from pure industry to entrenched domesticity had reached its undeniable zenith by the winter of 1854.
It’s not that there wasn’t a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on the scene. In February 1854 two English Chartists, George Black and H. R. Nicholls, began publishing the GOLD DIGGER’S ADVOCATE from their HQ in Melbourne. The ADVOCATE drew on arguments and emotions that had been in circulation at least since the Bendigo anti-licence protests of mid-1853. Its self-proclaimed charter was to please all true lovers of liberty of conscience and freedom of action. (At one shilling and sixpence it was more expensive, as well as more political, than Bonwick’s journal and lasted about as long; the ADVOCATE folded in September 1854.) Like Chartist newspapers in England, the ADVOCATE advanced a number of causes with a broadly democratic agenda. It argued for an amendment to Victoria’s Constitution to extend electoral representation to (male) diggers, and railed against the petty tyranny of the goldfields officials over the disenfranchised diggers. The ADVOCATE commented at an urban remove for all diggers on all diggings. It predicted dire consequences if the diggers were forced to submit to political slavery.
What Ellen Young did was different. Ellen spoke for the people, as one of the people, about what it was like to be among the people. Her husband was a digger. She was a digger’s wife who had decided to toil with a pen instead of a pick. But this was no drawing room dirge: there was no drawing room, just a leaky tent. Ellen, you could say, was an early fan of the notion that the personal is political; that personal grievance can and should amount to political utterance.
Given her association with Clerkenwell and the sophisticated references to democratic traditions in her poetry and letters, she may well have been an activist in Chartist struggles in England, the popular democratic movement that drew in many radicalised women, particularly in the early 1840s. Certainly, Ellen’s poetry bears all the hallmarks of classic Chartist melodrama: a redemptive narrative based around a golden age of autonomy, present misery and oppression, an enemy outsider, liberation by heroic Chartist manhood, and a radiant future based on citizenship, chivalry and domestic harmony.12 Ellen may even have come to Victoria with hopes of fulfilling the early Chartist promise of political equality for men and women, a platform that by the 1850s had been pragmatically dumped in favour of manhood suffrage, perceived as a more achievable goal.
Ellen would have found like minds in some of the other women steeped in Chartist heritage who also found their way to Ballarat. Twenty-nine-year-old Cornish-born Jane Cuming (née Sweet) arrived in Victoria in 1852 with her husband Stephen and their first two children. The Cumings were deeply influenced by Chartist and liberal philosophy. Their daughter Martineau, born in the revolutionary year of 1848, was named after the English feminist writer, political economist and abolitionist Harriet Martineau. Jane Fryer was another active Chartist who went to Ballarat with her husband in 1854. At twenty-two years old, Jane was buzzing with the reformist zeal of the young. She was one of the first to marry in a British registry office, eschewing a church wedding in favour of what she saw as the more equitable vows of a civil ceremony. Jane went on to become a prominent socialist, co-founding the Australian Secular Society and working tirelessly for the Eight Hour Movement, the women’s suffrage movement and anti-conscription and peace campaigns.
Ballarat was overflowing with budding politica
l radicals and religious nonconformists in the winter of ’54. Hunched over in their tents, warmed by brandy and outrage as they watched their children sleep, couples like the Cumings and the Fryers applied careworn dreams of liberty and justice to their beleaguered lot. Victoria promised a tabula rasa for their utopian visions.
Ellen Young spoke directly to these people. In her poem ‘Ballarat’, she offered an explanation for her protesting the plight of the diggers. Emblem of hope the poets sing, she writes, And I’ve the fancy caught. She makes it sound almost light-hearted—impulsive—but as Ellen would have known, a form of ‘militant domesticity’ was part of the Chartist tradition, with some women writing themselves into the melodramatic narrative as crusading heroines. They were champions for the right to suitable housing, decent food and companionable marriages. Such crusaders argued the need for women to be independent, not subservient to men, slaves to neither the workhouse nor their husband’s dominion. Educated women from Britain to France to Germany took a leading role in the revolutionary movements that swept across Europe in 1848, raising awareness that the struggle for political sex equality was also an economic and social struggle for a better standard of living for working people.13 Participatory democracy started at home.
There was also home-grown Australian precedent for the political evangelism of Ellen Young’s poetry. Adelaide Ironside is best known as the first Australian woman artist to study overseas; however, she also did a smashing line in political poetry and published at least twenty of her fiery, patriotic poems in the pro-republican PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE in 1853 and 1854. Other members of the Australian League, the circle of young radicals in which she moved, encouraged Adelaide in her actions. It’s quite feasible that copies of the PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE were in circulation on the Ballarat goldfields. George Lang, the twenty-two-year-old son of the group’s spiritual leader, Reverend John Dunmore Lang, was in Ballarat in 1854. He was working as the manager of the local branch of the Bank of New South Wales and also wrote for the BALLARAT TIMES. Adelaide had worked as a governess to the younger Lang children and George would have known her. He may even have drawn attention to Adelaide’s rousing poems; possibly he encouraged Henry Seekamp, who shared Lang’s republican fervour, to publish Ellen Young’s work. Seekamp was certainly prepared to accord Ellen a prominent space in which to forge her own identity as an intellectual leader in the local struggle for democratic reform.
Together, Ellen Young and Henry Seekamp became the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat in late 1854. He was the hothead; she was the calm but deadly serious moral conscience of the community. Good cop, bad cop: tag-team political advocacy.
Ellen’s cadence was remarkably upbeat in early months of that glacial winter. She saw reason for hope. She rallied the flagging troops. Her optimism was pinned on the new governor, due to arrive in Victoria at any moment. She published a new poem in the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 1 June 1854:
For much I hope a change is near;
New brooms, they say, sweep clean;
We soon shall have Sir Hotham here,
He’ll make a change, I ween.14
Ellen felt her literary role was to raise the spirits, to find a way out of the emotional morass that had settled upon Ballarat’s diggers like a moorland fog. She employed homespun images—cats, brooms, fancies—to convey ideas of historically mutinous significance. She entreated the diggers to each one join in joyous song/The song of liberty.15 She wished good luck to every man. She blessed the Queen, our Queen, and all who nobly toil. In the last line of the poem she added an unconventional but apposite flourish: God bless their babes and wives. Ellen’s words were intended to unify: to strengthen the bonds of a collective spirit in crisis. To find a common enemy.
The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they had a free press and a maverick poet to call their own.
British and Justice were the two words on everyone’s lips in the winter of 1854. The words generally carried a question mark. This? You call this British justice? There were many ways to illustrate the hypocrisy. Thomas Mundy winced every time he saw the soldiers pass by. It wasn’t because he was afraid they’d find the illegal alcohol stashed in his cart (he knew sly grog was tacitly approved) but because of the aristocratic pretensions of lords and duke’s sons, friends of La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country. The indignity of educated professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops stuck in Mundy’s craw, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Things will not remain long as they are, he predicted. The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed to, British justice.
English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by heavy-handed, arrogant treatment from the police. The arbitrary, Russian sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities, he wrote, was especially galling for gentlemen. Weren’t the British at the very moment fighting a war against the Czar in the Crimea for failing to honour enlightened standards of diplomacy?
Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day, burgeoning on the grapevine of community outrage. Prisoners could be left manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full or if the turnkey took a set against them. Honest but poor licence defaulters were chained together with hardened thieves and assorted ex-cons from Van Diemen’s Land. Women were incarcerated with men, nothing but a flimsy partition between them. Other inmates were forced to draw water and hew wood for the camp. After a sick man died in the Ballarat lockup because there was no hospital in which to receive proper care, Thomas Pierson cried Oh! How humane is Brittish [sic] law and Brittish freedom. Since he was an American, Pierson’s lament took on an even more divisive bent. His condemnation of seemingly local offences spiralled out into critique of transnational significance. Thomas and Frances went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning and witnessed several licence cases. One man had borrowed another’s licence. He was gaoled for two months in Geelong. A still more heathenish part of the matter, Thomas later reflected in his diary, is that the man had a wife and six children in his tent in Ballarat. The poor woman had just been confined with the sixth. The English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation, concluded Thomas. Government oppression and negligence were beginning to be a factor in the struggle for survival. Another word was added to the lexicon of complaint: tyranny.
Ballarat society was mired in complaint. To add to the administrative quagmire, Ballarat was dealing with a new top dog. Robert Rede was appointed resident commissioner of the Ballarat goldfields on the eve of the winter deluge. Whether he was sent as a punishment or a peace offering is unclear. English-born Rede was the son of a Royal Navy man, but pursued a career in medicine before tossing in his studies and sailing to Victoria in November 1851. He soon entered the public service and, with his excitable nature, quickly came to the attention of the Gold Fields Commission. Promoted to resident commissioner on a salary of £700 a year plus accommodation and rations, the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor immediately realised the Eureka diggings was the place to be. At Eureka more activity is to be seen at present both amongst Miners and Storekeepers than on any other portion of these Fields, Rede’s benign predecessor reported to his superiors in the Melbourne HQ of the commission. It now forms the most important section and contains a larger population than anywhere else. In the first of his weekly reports, Robert Rede described Eureka as the most populated and unruly part of the district.16 His reports tend to be loquacious and colourful, perhaps the better to show up his immediate junior, James Johnston, whom the colonial secretary had previously dressed down for being very curt with his reports, so deficient in information that he might as well have sent none. (The colonial secretary expected Johnston to be more communicative in future, but Rede took over the filing of weekly returns altogether.17) Rede used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order at his new post. When a prisoner was rescued
from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident but assured HQ the incident arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against the authorities. Johnston had probably been smart. Sometimes no news is the best news.
Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the subterranean civic impulses would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, magistrate John D’Ewes wrote to the colonial secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat:
The painful impossibility that at present exists of affording relief to sick aging and destitute persons here at this inclement season of the year, and of which I am sorry to say a large number exists in this daily increasing population, owing to the nonexistence of any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted to Government servants.
The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported. A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took subscriptions for a new hospital. The well know liberality of the diggers when it came to public subscriptions meant that £270 was donated by twenty-four persons that night. D’Ewes thought it ill-judged for the government not to be seen to be contributing in some way to this fund. He came up with the canny idea of auctioning confiscated sly grog and donating the proceeds to the hospital, instead of ‘destroying’ the cache, a thinly veiled euphemism for handing it out to police. While Ellen Young was rallying the forces of cohesion among the diggers, D’Ewes was trying to ameliorate the toxic sense of ‘us and them’ that was ever creeping into the Ballarat populace.
