The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Destitution, lack of access to land and inadequate public services made a formidable backdrop, but the focal point of daily complaints was the method of checking licences. Nothing, wrote William Howitt, could exceed the avidity, the rigidity and arbitrary spirit with which the licence fees were enforced on the diggings. The police, charged with the task of enforcing compliance with the monthly renewal process, were uniformly despised. If the military presence was made up of the simpering sons of insolvent gentry, the police were drawn largely from the flotsam of ex-Vandemonians and other layabouts.

  The Victorian Government paid peanuts and got the inevitable monkeys. The police force was young, ill trained, inexperienced and frequently shickered. A more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found, was Thomas Pierson’s summation of the ‘traps’ who gave Frances ‘a call’ in her store on St Patrick’s Day, a sure sign she was selling sly grog.

  The Ballarat community expressed outrage that their licence fees were used to support a police force that did nothing to check crime, but was more likely to be embroiled in corruption. Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police. (Frances Pierson didn’t sustain a conviction, so she may have been one of the many paying hush money.) Meanwhile, many miners disappeared down shafts in the black of night, either through mishap or misdeed, never to be seen again. Claim jumping was rife, and more often sorted out by fists and bowie knives than police investigation and arbitration. If a policeman deigned to turn up when a digger was killed in a mining accident, reported Thomas Mundy, Yes he would say he’s dead right enough before thrusting his hand into the dead man’s pocket and extracting what money or valuables he had. Chained dogs and pistols under pillows were the preferred means of safeguarding against crime. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria’s finest.

  The arbitrary and heavy-handed method of licence hunting was intimately connected in the hearts and minds of the more educated, politicised diggers with the affront of destitution. Very few like to have their poverty exposed, assessed the GEELONG ADVERTISER. Public disclosure was precisely what the practice of indiscriminate licence checking achieved: the licence law makes poverty a crime. Exposure led to imprisonment, which turned a loyal subject into a broken-spirited man. The crowning insult was for an unlicensed digger to be arrested in front of his wife and children and dragged away at the point of a bayonet. James Johnston was singled out by the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER as being on a crusade against unlicensed miners, a mission that exceeded the limits of his office. Margaret Brown Howden could have no idea how profoundly her dear Jamie was despised in her new home town.

  Foremost among the howling gale of protest against the authorities was that the police lorded it over a population that was more highly educated and civilised than the supposed guardians of decency and order. Beardless boys just pitched-forked into assistant commissionerships, wrote digger John Bastin, would not leave the camp unless arrayed in uniform and gold lace.18 Thomas Mundy pointed out the diversity of the digging community, as fine a class of men as anyone could wish to see; many of them well educated, doctors, lawyers, merchants sons; in fact all trades and professions. The problem was that the rag-tag police were continually taunting the diggers with their mule like subjugation. The insult stung. These were men of pluck and spirit and intolerant of injustice, wrote Mundy, indignant at the impervious and corrupt administration of the law.

  Different nationalities saw the problem of governance from a different point of view, but the landscape was the same. The Irish knew all about the cant of British justice; the atavistic pulse of harassment and discrimination at the hands of the British throbbed in their veins. To Raffaello Carboni, it was the hated Austrian rule, which was now attempted, in defiance of God and man, to be transplanted into this colony. American George Francis Train had no argument with the licence fee; he thought it a perfectly reasonable trade for wood, water, a gold escort, police protection and the privilege of driving a spade into the earth. What Train deplored was the Legislative Council, an institution he called a burlesque on free representation. It was absurd that the miners had no representation. Citizen George, who would later run for the US presidency as an independent, could patently see there is a strong Australian feeling growing up, rooted in the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny.

  It was never a long-term option to bully those who had themselves been at the top of the literate, entitled, bullying professions at home. Penury was shame enough. Being antagonised by stroppy British boy scouts was salt in the wounds.

  Towards the end of June, Ellen Young’s beacon of hope appeared on the horizon. Sailing on the Queen of the South, Sir Charles Hotham and Lady Jane Sarah Hotham arrived in Victoria on 21 June 1854. Their advent was greeted with rapturous relief. The colony had been in a state of leadership limbo for eighteen months since Governor La Trobe’s resignation on the last day of 1852. More than that, a black cloud shrouded his departure, which did not eventuate until May 1854. While La Trobe waited for his replacement, his beloved Swiss wife, Sophie, died in her home town of Neufchatel. She had left prior to La Trobe with their two daughters, anticipating his speedy return. La Trobe was brokenhearted, and though his body remained in Victoria through to the autumn of ’54, his heart and soul were long gone.

  William Kelly witnessed La Trobe’s physical departure. I saw the man in deep mourning, wrote Kelly, attended by a small cortege of attached friends, endeavouring to hide his sadness and dejection as he returned the parting salutes of those who at least esteemed him as a man if they could not extol him as a viceroy. Whatever La Trobe’s achievements—he had seen Victoria progress from a political satellite of Sydney to a prosperous gold-driven self-governing colony—all hint of success had been subsumed in a general public reproach for his perceived economic mismanagement and political ineptitude. On 28 June the GEELONG ADVERTISER reported on the quiet departure of La Trobe: the lonely, bereaved man…the yells and hootings of his savage persecutors salute him as he goes. It would be cold comfort to learn that, unlike his successor, La Trobe at least got away with his life.

  Victoria Welcomes Victoria’s Choice read the banner strung across Princes Bridge for the grand procession to lead Governor Hotham and his lady from Sandridge Pier to Flagstaff Gardens. Sir Charles proceeded on horseback. Lady Hotham and Mrs Kaye, wife of the new colonial secretary who had arrived on the same ship, followed in a carriage and four. They were greeted by the flags of all nations and sects, miles of bunting, brass bands and wild cheers for the official welcome parade through the streets of Melbourne. An installation ceremony was held at the government offices. Hotham swore his oaths before the Bishop of Melbourne, Church of England clergy, the Rabbi of the Melbourne congregation and the heads of other denominations. A proclamation was read. The Union Jack was hoisted. Artillery fire sounded from Flagstaff Hill. Hotham made an impromptu speech to the rejoicing crowd, promising to do his duty as an honest, straightforward man should do.19 Such frank, liberal speeches, as Charles Evans noted, won Hotham the goodwill of the people.

  The press were sympathetic towards the herculean task ahead. The GEELONG ADVERTISER recognised that Hotham had to bring to heel a whole army of lazy and incompetent hangers-on, indolent, careless, incorrigible; men given jobs on the goldfields simply because they could not be kept sober in town. There was also the matter of the massive public debt accrued by La Trobe’s administration. Hotham was a slightly built man, with a long nose and mutton chops stretching down his thin face, but he wore his burden gallantly. Born into nobility, the eldest son in a family of eleven children, with a distinguished naval and diplomatic career behind him, Hotham had been expecting to command a ship in the Crimea. He took his gubernatorial appointment to Victoria as an unwarranted slap. Imperial duty alone fuelled his passage.

  But there was some cause for exuberance, for Sir Charles Hotham, at forty-eight years of age, had recently married for the first time. As for so many other gold rush immigrants,
the Hothams’ voyage would be their honeymoon. And Sir Charles’s new wife was a formidable consolation prize. Jane Sarah Hood was the daughter of Samuel Hood, the 2nd Baron Bridport and a Tory MP, and Charlotte Nelson, Duchesa di Bronte, niece of Horatio Nelson. The third of seven children, Jane moved between court commitments at Windsor and her family’s lands in Somerset. Petite, beautiful and accomplished, she had married for the first time in 1838. Her husband, Hugh Holbech, died eleven years later; they had no children.20 On 10 December 1853, aged thirty-six, and four years a widow, she married Sir Charles Hotham, who had been appointed lieutenant governor of Victoria just four days earlier.

  She knew what she was signing up for. Lady Hotham’s new life would take her far away from Somerset garden parties and court appearances routinely noted in THE TIMES. In April, the Hothams sailed for Victoria, accompanied by three servants, Mr and Mrs Kaye and a cargo of furniture to fit out the newly acquired Government House at Toorak. The ARGUS reported that when the new first lady of Victoria arrived at the dock, her sweet face was illuminated by a huge smile of genuine excitement. She has a very amiable countenance, sketched the ARGUS journalist, her complexion is fair, with light, soft blue eyes…unaffected in her manner and very prepossessing. The journalist was impressed that, at Hotham’s induction ceremony, Lady Hotham showed evident satisfaction in so cordial a reception, her pleasure beamed in every glance. She showed plainly that she enjoyed the whole affair and went through a rather protracted ceremony with nerve, cheerfulness and unmistakable gratification.21

  You’ve got to admire the buoyancy of the people too. All their great expectations smashed to smithereens, and now reassembled by faith in a viceregal second coming: a human mosaic of optimism, with child-like trust as the glue. The people of Melbourne are looking for the arrival of Sir Charles Hotham as religious enthusiasts might look forward to the millennium, wrote the editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 8 June. The Messiah. Father Christmas. Any old patriarch would do. But the editor was guarded in his praise. It would not be wise for Hotham to remain on the poop; he must acquaint himself with the poor devils of the third class and the sooner he went tween decks the better. George Francis Train was similarly cautious. I hope [Hotham] is equal to the times in which he lives, wrote Train in his weekly despatch to the BOSTON GLOBE on 23 July, for if he is not, depend upon it his official reign will be painfully brief, for our people have begun to think. Train conjured a sticky prophecy: Our politics are in their infancy, but their manhood will be reached ere they touch their youth. They’ll burst out in all their glory when it will be least suspected. Which sounds, at the very least, messy.

  But in those early days of Hotham’s period in office, more people shared Ellen Young’s confidence than Train’s doubts. Hotham was expected to be all things to all people. Shopkeepers thought their trade would increase. Landowners thought the value of their property would rise. Diggers thought their licence fees would be reduced and their grievances sympathetically heard. He is certain to arrive with inflated notions of his importance and ability, warned the GEELONG ADVERTISER, but the people wanted to believe in this new new beginning, this fresh fresh start. It seemed a good sign when Hotham began reducing the wages of public servants and sacking others outright. The icing on the cake of such fiscal discipline was Lady Hotham’s decision to cultivate her own garden at Toorak, reducing the need for groundsmen. She would be a gratuitous labourer, the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE reported with satisfaction.

  The decision to house the new governor in the lofty hills of Toorak (La Trobe had lived in a modest home by the river in Richmond) and to undertake an expensive renovation and furnishing of the home, rented from a prosperous merchant, was not without controversy. La Trobe had been hounded for the stupendous amount of public debt he had accumulated, despite his own personal frugality. And these were anti-aristocratic times. The Hothams would soon encounter the perverse collective psychology of their new home town. ‘Downstairs’ thought it right that everyone should live as one. As Martha Clendinning had realised to the benefit of her business, it was politic to dress down. Yet those who had managed to climb to higher social ground were affronted to find muslin where they expected silk. When the Hothams threw a viceregal ball, the press had a field day with the penny-pinching in the drinks department. Hotham served colonial beer instead of champagne and was forever after known as the Small Beer Governor. When one of the guests later got sick, supposedly from the toxic alcohol, and Hotham sacked the public servant who ordered the beer, there was an uproar. What a despot! The fine line between viceregal authority and populism was proving difficult to identify.

  So when Sir Charles announced that he and his wife would leave the comfortable confines of their Toorak mansion to visit the goldfields and personally take the temperature of the restive people, the news was taken as a sure sign that restitution was imminent. Ellen wrote another poem, the first of her offerings to be published in the BALLARAT TIMES. Henry Seekamp also had ten copies of the poem printed on a pale pink silk, one of which Ellen later pasted into the front of her poetry volume. The title: Visit of Sir Charles Hotham, K.C.B., Lieut. Gov. of Victoria, To Ballarat. The by-line: by Ellen F. Young, the Ballarat Poetess. The gist:

  The man of upright heart and daring deed,

  Comes to relieve us in our urgent need…

  Our future guide to happiness and peace,

  To us securing all true wealth’s increase.

  Ever mindful of purist Chartism’s aims—companionate marriage, equality of purpose and valour between the sexes—Ellen also includes Lady Jane Hotham in her salutation.

  For the great good Victoria will gain—

  Let us all honor on Sir Hotham rain,

  And let his fair, accomplish’d, gentle bride,

  Her equal due, —share in his fame, world-wide.

  To her we’ll give an equal meed of praise

  (As one Heav’n-sent, our moral worth to raise)…

  And soon may Ballarat, Victoria’s pride,

  Be honor’d with Sir Hotham and his bride.

  Despite Ellen’s tribute, Sir Charles’s bride has been anything but honoured with an equal measure of history’s attention. Whole biographies have been written about Governor Hotham, but there is not one extant image of Lady Hotham to place beside the official portraits of His Excellency. No photos, paintings or sketches exist. Lady Hotham did keep a diary of her time in Victoria, but only snippets survive. However, there is enough information in other fragmentary sources to know that Lady Jane Hotham was no puffed-up princess.

  Of the two Hothams, it was ‘her ladyship’ who proved more adaptable to the new circumstances. Journalists noted that she was gracious and open, perpetually cheerful and appeared to greet every new situation with wide-eyed enthusiasm. She intuited the need to shed aristocratic pretension when mixing with the hoi polloi, but to stroke the plumes of the nouveau riche who flocked to Toorak in their finery. She threw dinner parties every week, and invited both all the best people in the colony, as William Kelly described the squattocracy, as well as those who, before striking gold, never trod on a carpeted floor. Such stalwart dames and strapping girls wore low evening costume for morning engagements, but were always accepted graciously by the lady of the house. When Mrs Massey attended her first ball at Toorak—which she describes as a large handsome place, which the winding Yarra almost surrounds by her silver girdle—there were so many guests it took two hours to get the carriages up the drive to the front entrance. Lady Hotham’s affability was often contrasted to the unbending nature of her husband.

  She also took to the streets. Before leaving for their tour of the diggings, Sir Charles and Lady Hotham attended a tradesman’s ball at the Criterion Hotel. There, described Kelly, they met an assemblage of hard-brushed, shiny-haired operatives, publicans, corporations and small shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, girthed in silk or satin, and moist with mock eau-de-cologne. It was a tough crowd: common, aspirational, monied, star struck. Lady Hotham, with the co
nsummate tact of her sex, merrily drank a low-rent brandy cocktail at the urging of one of the guests. Charles bristled. Lady Hotham was the belle of the ball.

  Lady Hotham took her tact, her joie de vivre, her kindly yin to Charles’s dour yang—whatever it was she possessed that her husband didn’t—all the way to the diggings. Their goldfields tour took them to Bendigo, Ballarat and Castlemaine, bumping along in a Yankee Telegraph carriage, a grotesque article, according to William Westgarth, built for strength not comfort. First stop: Ballarat. They arrived at 5pm on Saturday 26 August, Sir Charles on horseback, her ladyship in the carriage. It had been raining steadily all afternoon. Their appearance elicited little fanfare. In fact, they saw the advantage in entering the stage unannounced and unrecognised, the better to take in an undoctored scene. The couple slipped quietly into the Government Camp, where they were staying in Police Inspector Robert Evans’ quarters (into which we managed to convey almost every piece of furniture to be found in the Camp, griped Police Magistrate D’Ewes). On Sunday they walked together through the diggings, stopping to ask questions of the diggers.

  In a despatch to Lord Grey in London, Hotham later wrote that for some time I was enabled to walk undiscovered amongst them, and thus I gathered their real feeling towards the Government, and obtained an insight into some minor causes on which they desired redress. He concluded that the digging population was generally orderly, loyal and having among them a large proportion of women and children…there was an appearance of tranquillity and confidence. He concluded that it was through the influence of women that this restless population must be restrained. Hotham predicted that where a militia would fail to tame the more restive diggers, the wives would succeed. I would rather see an army of ten thousand women arrive, than an equal number of soldiers, he ended his despatch.22