by Clare Wright
On 24 October, the AGE reported an eventful week at Ballarat: Monday, the bank robbery; Tuesday, rioting; Wednesday and Thursday taken up guessing at what might be next looked for, including brazen anecdotes that Avoca, Maryborough and Creswick Creek had on the same or following day as ourselves set the authorities at defiance; Friday, arrest of the manager of the Bank of New South Wales; and Sunday, a meeting of the Irish regarding the Father Smyth and Johnston incident. The AGE’s Ballarat correspondent revealed rumours that the Avoca Camp had been burned down, that the Maryborough Camp was under siege by diggers, that the unemployed of Melbourne had risen up at the news of the Ballarat riot, and that the Bank of Victoria was broke. Added to the talk about such matters, wrote the correspondent, was an interminable controversy as to the pros and cons of Bentley’s case. You didn’t need a soapbox to be heard in Ballarat. A person couldn’t blow her nose without drawing around them a crowd of sympathisers.
As the ARGUS correspondent wrote, The growth of revolutionary opinion is predicated on such tittle-tattle.39
When James Bentley fled from the flames of his ruined empire to the protection of the commissioners, an insidious rumour started doing the rounds. The government compound was going to be attacked! The diggers were going to come that night. Vengeful miners were going to prise Bentley from his refuge and drag him back to his smoking lair. Justice would be done, even if Judge Lynch had to do the reckoning.
Spies brought the news from the Flat to the Camp. The garrison was put under arms. No one was allowed to enter or leave. The night, according to Camp resident Samuel Huyghue, passed alert in expectation of an attack. The next day, 18 October, the females were ordered to leave the Camp, as it was considered that at such a time they would be safer anywhere than with us. Families split up. Anxious wives abandoned their husbands to the patent fury of the mob. Did pregnant Margaret Brown Howden Johnston leave? Where did she go? Her diary is mute. Some poor souls, said Huyghue, were ultimately permitted to remain on the plea that they had no home or protectors elsewhere. These women and children took refuge in the commissariat store whenever there was an alarm. The walls of the store were partly bullet proof, being formed of roughly hewn slabs. But you could still insert a finger between them, worried Huyghue.
And rumours could slide under doors like shape-shifting vapours in the night. They could waft between slabs. Seep beneath skin. Penetrate the soundest of minds. Gossip and rumour could fuel a fire as well as any kindling and flame.
Shaken to its core by the power of an idea, the Camp would never recover.
TEN
HIGH CAMP
On the ship of the Victorian goldfields, the resident commissioner was captain. His first mates were the assistant commissioners, magistrates and other senior civil servants; the coroner was the ship’s surgeon-superintendent. The police were the ordinary seamen, poorly paid henchmen who did the hard slog. A submission to a commission of enquiry into the Victorian police force, held in late 1854, described the boys in blue like this:
The service generally is so unpopular, that, with few exceptions, only those who are either too idle to do any thing else, or who having failed in all their other attempts to gain a livelihood as a last resource enlist into the Police, the latter, after having accumulated a little money become disgusted with the Service, and either desert or commit some fault in the hope of being discharged. This is more particularly applicable to the Police on the Gold Fields.1
On the Victorian goldfields there was also a military presence, a royal barge with its own hierarchies of power and customs of privilege. There was, of course, no ship’s matron to regulate the behaviour or check the welfare of the goldfields women.
In Ballarat, this whole clamorous crew was housed at the Government Camp. To the diggers and storekeepers, the Camp was a hive of treachery and deceit, a bastion of vested interests and autocratic inconsistency. But what of the Camp’s inhabitants? Were they sitting pretty up in their topographical tower? Enjoying a room with an enchanting view? Living the high life? Alas no. Long before the exoneration of James Bentley made the government’s compound a target of enmity, its residents were anything but happy campers.
When Assistant Commissioner James Johnston’s young bride arrived at her new home on 5 September, this is what she found. A high picket fence bound a two-acre parcel of land on the north-eastern edge of the township escarpment. (Today it is bounded by Lydiard, Mair, Camp and Sturt streets.) A second fence divided off a sloping portion of the hill near its eastern border. Parallel with this fence was a row of tents with sod chimneys. These tents were for the employees of the Gold Fields Department, such as the assistant civil commissioner, Samuel Huyghue. Behind these, more central to the picketed perimeter, were more rows of tents—mess rooms and gold commission offices—flanked by a few wooden buildings that had only recently been erected at substantial cost.
One of these housed the now-pregnant Margaret and her dear Jamie. Another was the domicile of Resident Commissioner Robert Rede. Police Inspector Gordon Evans, a twenty-nine-year-old native of Montreal, Canada, occupied another. At the rear of the Camp stretched a long line of commissariat stores. The military and police quarters—more tents—were on the northern face of the hill. There was a courthouse with a deep verandah and a prison built of logs. This ill-planned, makeshift arrangement of lodgings accommodated the civil force stationed at Ballarat, their families and servants (tent keepers, drivers, packhorse keepers) as well as the police force and military forces, including some wives and children. In total, over one hundred people were crammed into the government ghetto.2 The architects of the camp may have a method in their madness, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER in February 1854, but it is not easily seen. There was little evident cause for pride; nevertheless, a flagstaff ascended from beside the courthouse, its rippling Union Jack marking territory.
Margaret wrote about none of this in her diary. Took possession of our house in camp and was busy getting things put right, she recorded on 8 September.
September 9 Saturday
Still unpacking
September 10 Sunday
Made our first appearance at the church.
September 11 Monday
Received callers.
Then all goes quiet on the Johnston front. Margaret didn’t write in her diary again until 22 November. Two and a half months of blank pages. Why? Did she have nothing to say? Not even Jamie dined at the mess. Had a walk. Took tea with Mrs Lane—all activities she recorded prior to 9/11. Did she have debilitating morning sickness late in her pregnancy? Was she too busy keeping house? Or, on the contrary, was she depressingly bored? Her ship diary reveals a cheerful personality able to revel in the smallest detail of daily living. Had breakfast. Cool breeze. A wet day. A long chat after dinner. As we have seen, spring in Ballarat brought a riot of colourful events. Given the dramas she could have reported, Maggie Johnston’s silence is curiously golden.
But she could have been forgiven for finding her surroundings shamefully lacking. Her fellow inmates had been writing letters to Melbourne complaining about the conditions at the Camp for the best part of a year. In June 1854, the assistant colonial surgeon, Dr Heisse, had stepped down from his position after an enquiry into his conduct. (He had billed a digger after treating him for a gunshot wound in the Camp hospital.) I have much pleasure in resigning a situation which has been one of the greatest discomfort to my family and a personal pecuniary sacrifice, he wrote to the colonial secretary.3
A series of letters from the top dogs of the Ballarat Camp to their Melbourne superiors from February to October reveals the sort of discomfort that the Heisse family may have experienced: overcrowding, poor sanitation, substandard tents, provisional offices. Even the post office was a dark and dirty tent open at both ends to the elements. The mail was sorted on a stretcher. On a blustery day, noted the GEELONG ADVERTISER, letters were distributed on the wind to a grateful public.4 The irony is that one of the letters, penned in March, complained of the great want
of proper accommodation at this Hospital owing to nearly the entire building being occupied by the Assistant Colonial Surgeon and his family, which leaves only one ward for the reception of all classes of Patients.5 Perhaps the only way to evict Heisse was to accuse him of financial impropriety.
Each of the Camp’s three independent power blocs—the Gold Fields Department, the police, and the military—had its own chain of command and own internal codes of conduct. One of the chief gripes of Camp officials was that certain factions had more access to amenities than others. It was, after all, a very small pie, and every division wanted a more generous slice of it. The bickering was fierce and incessant. The Gold Commission occupied the lion’s share of the camp grounds. Its reserve was twice as large as that of the police. Most of the police grounds were taken up by the married non-commissioned officers’ tents. There was not enough room for the foot and mounted constables—mostly young, poorly paid single men—to be accommodated. Apart from overcrowding, the lower-ranked police tents were shoddy and ill kept. The tents of the foot police were unfit for the men to reside in, wrote Sub-Inspector Taylor to his Melbourne superiors in August. The canvas tents were for the most part perfectly rotten, proof against neither rain nor sun, as they had been in use for over two years. Taylor was inspired to alert HQ to the situation after the tents were torn to shreds in a fierce storm. The rain of last night completely saturated the beds and blankets, he wrote in July, so much so that the men were all huddled together in one tent. Just as the diggers on the Flat clung to their accusations of injustice through the frigid gales of a Ballarat winter, so the soldiers anchored their despair with the weight of grievance. There have been frequent complaints of late from the men in consequence of the very great discomfort in their tents, wrote Taylor, and there does not appear any prospect of the Police Barracks being erected. Here was the nub of the problem: over eighteen months of occupation and still no sign of the promised barracks. And now Hotham was in Victoria, cutting a swathe through the colony’s £2 million deficit with razor-edged determination. Taylor knew the best he could do was request some new tents. A roof over his force’s collective sore heads was clearly too much to ask for.
An uninhabitable tent is one thing, but derelict pants are quite another. Yet on 13 July, Police Inspector Gordon Evans had the honour to inform his superiors in Melbourne that much dissatisfaction has arisen on the part of the Foot Police in this District in consequence of the high prices charged for the trousers. The problem was this: they are charged at the same rate as the mounted men whose trousers are made of fine cloth with white stripes whilst those of the Foot Police are made of a very inferior coarse pilot cloth.
Rank and file police were required to purchase their own uniforms, but they couldn’t select a supplier: they were compelled to purchase from the government stores. The snag was that coarse pilot cloth trousers exported from England could be purchased from any shopkeeper on the diggings for half the price of the colonial-made trousers supplied on contract to the government. Hence the foot police either paid a fortune for inferior itchy pants, or wore their old pair till the arse fell out of them. Not an enviable choice, especially in a Ballarat winter with the wind whistling through every crack.
It was not only the human members of the government contingent who suffered. The Camp’s stables were all falling to pieces owing to the damage done to them by the horses. Captive horses kicked at their stabling the world over, but in Hotham’s Victoria the splintered stalls were simply not repaired.
In September 1854, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes (who despite his misleading title was not actually a member of the Victoria Police but of the Gold Commission) and Robert Rede jointly wrote to Melbourne to protest that the original reserved area of the Ballarat Camp was insufficient. More land was needed. In the meantime, they applied to take over a piece of land hitherto earmarked for the police. The land, adjoining the married officers’ tents, was being used as a vegetable garden. The Camp had been unable to persuade Melbourne to appoint a gardener to raise much-needed fresh produce for its inhabitants, so an improvised cottage garden was established. In all likelihood the Camp wives cultivated the unofficial garden, just as women generally tended the home vegetable plots on the diggings. D’Ewes wanted to use the land for his own residence.
Of all the senior officials, D’Ewes was the one who complained the loudest about the inadequacy and injustice of his domestic circumstances. He had missed out on one of the newly erected wooden homes. Robert Rede’s house, completed in September, cost £1,200. Inspector Evans’ house cost £1000. Even the colonial architect had a handsome new cottage. D’Ewes, by stark contrast, was living in the small walled-in verandah attached to the court building, a space that was also used as a jury room for nine weeks of the year. When he couldn’t sleep on the verandah, he had to share someone’s tent.
The affront and the material deprivation of this situation stuck in D’Ewes’ craw like a fish bone. On 3 August he wrote to the colonial secretary that
the accommodation for the Police Magistrate at this most important gold field is decidedly worse than that of any other officer stationed at this place…Good houses are built or in the process of being built at large costs for the heads of all other departments.
He stressed the importance of his position. He complained that he could not offer the hospitality to passing strangers that was expected from one of his station. He offered to pay a portion of the expense of building a residence. The colonial secretary was unmoved. The issue was held over until the spring. When the matter had not been dealt with by late September, D’Ewes tried again, twice, but this time he gave an indication that his distress did not merely relate to his unaccommodated ego: I have sent upwards of £500 of property to Ballarat as well as my wife and family. No house is in process of erection for the Police Magistrate, he wrote, I am totally without quarters for myself and family and an exception to all the officers on the Camp. By now it was 28 September—about a week before Scobie’s murder—and Hotham himself responded to this latest letter. In shirty tones the governor asked, Does Mr Dews [sic] suppose the request forgotten? Can he not imagine that some good cause may exist for the delay?6 But by this stage D’Ewes was simply pleading for a tent of his own, forget a building, so that he could move his wife and child from their expensive hotel into the Camp. As fate would have it, D’Ewes did not get to stay in Ballarat long enough to see even so much as a bivouac come his way. On 4 November, he was dismissed as a magistrate, the first formal victim of the Eureka Hotel affair. The non-commissioned officers’ wives would get to keep their vegie patch.
It is tempting to think that at least the married officers were content, but no. On 14 June, Evans reported to Melbourne on the inadequacy of the married non-commissioned officers quarters being located next to the unmarried commissioned officers quarters. Those tents, he advised, were supposed to be used for the non-commissioned officers’ servants. That they were instead occupied by the unmarried officers led to inconvenience and unpleasantness. There were three grounds for rectifying the untenable situation, argued Evans. 1. The proximity of this building to the officers’ quarters admits of every word that is spoken in one being heard in the other. 2. The servants were too far away. 3. The non-commissioned officers quarters were too small and not at all adapted to accommodate married non-commissioned officers. Married people could not be expected to do what married people do with all the world watching and listening. And then have to stomp all the way across the Camp to fetch a servant to wash the sheets!
It wasn’t just the superior ranks of police who were disgruntled by the conditions of their employment. Some in the lower echelons of police were going completely off the deep end in the Black Hole of Calcutta, which is how Samuel Huyghue described the Camp. In July, Sub-Inspector Taylor had cause to write to his immediate Ballarat superior, Inspector Gordon Evans, about the meltdown of Constable Patrick Hopkins. Hopkins, while searching for unlicensed miners, was getting under the influence of liquo
r. Taylor cautioned him:
A short time after I saw him go into a public house and call for drink. I prevented his being served with any, about a half an hour after this two respectable women came to me saying that he had been into their tents and insulted them, one of the women was crying. I perceived that he was then very drunk I immediately ordered him under arrest, he flourished his baton and flung it from him.
Hopkins then struck another officer and shouted that he wanted to be discharged from the police. The exhibition he made on the Gold Fields, worried Taylor, was calculated to bring disgrace on the force.
It wouldn’t have taken much. The police cohort at Ballarat did not exactly float on a tide of public esteem. Reports from Inspector Gordon Evans to Melbourne throughout 1854 attest to either the low standard of recruits or the effects of the conditions on formerly upstanding fellows. Police constable John Reagan was suspended for being not shaved, dirty, and having all the appearance of an habitual drunkard. Daniel Wright was discharged with bad character as he was frequently under the influence of liquor. Trooper James Butler was transferred to the foot police due to being a very slovenly man who knows nothing of horses. Arthur Shirvington was imprisoned in the Camp lockup for two days after he went absent without leave all night and returned home drunk and fighting in public houses. Acting Sergeant John Dougherty was found in Canadian Gully lying in a state of stupidity from the effects of drink. Thomas Milne was sentenced to three days’ imprisonment for being drunk on guard. In August the lockup keeper requested the sub-inspector to accompany him to the prison to see the state of the Sentry posted there…the sentry was lying on his face and hands insensibly drunk, his arms were placed by the side of the door…the man was in such a state that he was obliged to be carried away on the shoulders of another man. Constable John Regan was given three days’ imprisonment for making use of abusive and highly obscene language to Sgt Rutter while in the execution of his duty. The bench sentenced Constable William Thompson to three months’ imprisonment for habitual drunkenness. Thompson was presently labouring under a very severe attack of Delirium tremens.
