Or a different kind of commotion comes with the arrival of the police checking the gold diggers’ licences, with whistling and calls of Joe! Joe! travelling up the gully, and diggers diving down to hide in their shafts or scrambling out and running through the trees with the constables fast after them. It is amazing really that any kind of order is preserved; but then most diggers are so obsessed with seeking a chance trace of the precious ore that they have no time, and no energy at the end of the day, for fractiousness.
What I soon noticed in my first weeks on the diggings was that I was looking at the world from under a canopy of trees. What an altered spectacle from the open skies of South Australia, and especially from the over-exposed gardens of Prospect. At the goldfields, even where the trees have been chopped down—and so very many of them have been, anywhere near the diggings—the clouds and the ranges seem to close in on us. The trees hereabouts are mostly ironbark, their dark trunks scored with deep slowly twisting furrows, and such a contrast to the massive smooth white trees on the Adelaide plains. These ironbarks, with their dense grey-green leaves, eat up the light. In the other colony I had trained myself to sketch rural scenes very quickly, to wash in a lightly coloured background, a touch or two of foliage, a hint of the native shrubs. Here, though, is a different kind of subject, and it calls for a different approach.
All the nations of the world are present on the goldfields. In Adelaide, everyone except the Germans was from England. Here by contrast is God’s plenty. The Chinese keep to themselves on the whole, but you can see them working at the tailings of abandoned diggings in their short floppy thin blue cotton trousers and big wide conical hats; and you cannot miss the new arrivals trotting along silently in a single file with their blue padded jackets and a long balancing pole over their shoulder, and a great sack of possessions at each end bouncing gently at every step. The Italians and French and Irish are much more vocal, whether singing to themselves or singing out to each other; the Germans given to great bellows from time to time, the Danes and Scots industrious to the exclusion of everything else.
There are diggers from Sydney-side, but as they have goldfields of their own up that way you have to wonder why they would come so far for the same chance. They are suspect characters. Even more so are those from Van Diemen’s Land, grim-faced as I have said, and every one of them fancied to be an old lag.
Here, I have begun to see that the real colour is in the life, and the way of life, all around me. Everything is a revealing picture. A butcher’s tent, a shambles, for example. At the front is a lean-to, not much more than a mia mia, with a haunch of mutton hanging under the thin shelter and attracting the disgusting attention of swarms of flies. By it stands a big fellow with an unconvincing smile and wiping his hands on his bloody apron; and next to his feet is his mining cradle for sale, a tell-tale detail. He is another who has recently given up digging on the river flats, and has taken up what he hopes is a more lucrative trade, though with very little to invest in it. You can read the fortunes of the field in that little tableau. Or in another place a young digger in cleaner clothes than is commonly the case, dips water from a creek and sluices it over several shovelfuls of clay and gravel, while his wife, who is undoubtedly responsible for his laundry, sits and rocks the cradle—and holds her baby on her lap. Another poignant vignette.
And that is how the idea formed itself in my mind to compile a series of sketches of life on the goldfields, and to publish them as a book. If I were to show the passing parade at the diggings it might look something like a turn on Mr Thackeray’s new book, Vanity Fair, which I have just been looking through; though taken down a notch or two of course. I could draw the sketches on to stone myself, and hand-tint them, and I could sell individual pictures from the collection also. I had any amount of material to hand, or rather in my sketchbook, for I have been busy you may be assured.
I confess that I abandoned my companions, left it to them to dig and delve to their heart’s content. I found no excitement in that, and opted to mind the tent and prepare the meals, such as they were. I spent my time roaming across the diggings, leaving Gyp to stand guard in my place, and making quick sketches, which I worked up in more detail when I got back to our camp.
Indeed, once it was known, and seen, that I was a capable artist, there was a steady stream of requests for me to draw a camp, or a tent, or a store or a view of an ingenious sluice, just as the farmer settlers in Adelaide had wanted pictures of their cottages to send back home. I could earn with my pencil as much as my friends with their picks and pans, and more reliably.
And something else was emerging from these studies: it was the diggers and their associates who were my new interest, more than the landscape about them. I was drawing the near at hand, rather than the long view. It was a return to my old interest in portraits and profiles. Better still, I realised, I did not have to endure the awful conditions of the goldfields if I did not wish to. I could decamp like the diggers, but back to Melbourne Town, and find me a studio; and when the weather improved I could easily return to the diggings, to different diggings, to wherever the next surge of interest was.
And I was confident that I would compile a much more interesting book than that stilted thing of Flute’s.
So I turned again to Melbourne Town, thinking this was like Dick Whittington after all, though Gyp with his long legs was no ratter. The way back was much like the way up, just as muddy and if anything wetter, the heavy skies much lower. It was chilly and unpleasant; bitter and miserable, but so it would be if I had stayed at our camp. I did not mind so much though, as my spirits were high, and I had notebooks full of sketches, as well as all those pictures in my head, and fresh ones as I met new chums labouring on their way up to the diggings.
How Melbourne has changed! The main roadways have been macadamised, and are much safer for passing traffic—though the unwary pedestrian is still liable to be splashed. Many of the little wooden shops and houses have been replaced by stone buildings of considerably grander aspiration. It is like the transformation I had seen taking place in Adelaide, but in a much briefer interval. I found out adequate accommodation for the time being, and immediately set to work, to put together a sample of what I proposed for a publisher to look at. It pleased me that I was successful almost at once in attracting a publisher’s attention. He was taken with some general views of the diggings at Forest Creek, and more particular views of some of the little villages, so to speak of them, that were forming, and then several of the characters I had observed. It felt like my fortune might be in the making, though I had no aspirations to becoming Lord Mayor. Or acquiring a cat.
Within three months I had completed the first of the two sets we planned. I transferred my drawings on to the printing stone, and you may be sure that I have been careful to write in my initials on each sketch; I am not going to get caught out that way again. We agreed to pull off extra prints for colouring and individual sale, and some of these were displayed in the publisher’s shop window, and some in a hotel nearby, the fashionable Criterion Hotel, looking very substantial with its face of squared stone and tall formal windows, and I have to say the outcome has been most satisfactory.
One in particular, of Forest Creek, sold very well indeed. We agreed on a price for subscribers to the projected album, and at my suggestion the price for non-subscribers should be the same as a digger’s monthly licence. For no apparent connection. It just pleased me as a provocative echo. It was my version of working on the diggings. And it was no hardship to make my appearance at the Criterion from time to time, with its elegant little balconies at each window, its saloons and splendid long marble bar, and its slick Yankee barmen conjuring up drinks like a line of jugglers.
The reviews were very kind; and not long afterwards a second series was published. In a very little time I had agreed to terms for a printing in London. There now, thought I, you are not the only fish in the ocean, Mr Flute. The publisher was so well pleased with my work, and its immediate success, th
at he offered a room above his shop for me to work in, and this is a most convenient arrangement. The printery is just along the street a little, and with an inviting hotel adjacent. I can rework all my sketches there, above the shop I mean, transfer them to the stone and tint the lithographs when they come back from the printer.
The one difficulty is Gyp. The publisher will not accept such a large dog in his premises. He imagines Gyp bounding past his customers and frightening the ladies I suppose. He is adamant about his decision. So I have a crisis of conscience on my hands, and I do not see my way clear about this. I shall take Gyp with me when I go back to the diggings as I plan to do, to find fresh material; perhaps my former associates will look after him for me. They would welcome his presence, though Gyp is temperamentally a hunting dog, not a watch dog. But it is true, he is too large for town life.
To announce myself to the good people of Melbourne Town, I have arranged to exhibit a collection of my South Australian paintings in the auction rooms of the hotel, and I have sent several goldfields drawings to a new newspaper just commencing; and all this activity has monopolised my time. And I have a publisher to push my case for me. He has a vested interest.
So, more rapidly than I could have dreamed, I am becoming a commercial gent. I walk up and down Collins Street in a check suit, and a cream waistcoat, and with a proper tall hat. I have abandoned my old blue cap after all this time, the cap given me by the crew when I first came out to Australia—to Port Misery!—and which I wore on Mr H.’s fatal expedition, and to the Burra Burra mines, but not, as I remember, to the Governor’s ball. I am striking out with a vengeance now, with the world at my feet. And that is a very welcome alteration from being bankrupt.
Though just as rapidly as I have felt myself rise in the world’s esteem, I am now brought crashing down again. Those sketches published in London have been too attractive to resist, apparently, for a book has just been published about the goldfields, another among many, but this one illustrated by a gentleman nobody has heard of before, a gentleman with Esquire attached to his name, a gentleman in his self-estimation then, who has provided the engravings taken from drawings made on the spot, as the author advises. Yes, engravings taken indeed and drawings made on the spot; but made by me! So much for his being a gentleman! My initials have been deleted from the engravings, and the captions have been changed, but these are the very pictures published in my London book.
He has stolen my designs too. The man is no better than a bushranger I think. His blatant dishonesty is as shameless as Flute’s perfidy. Besides them, Mr Eyre and Captain Strutt appear no more than thoughtless. Which reflection does not warm me to any of the elevated species. I am not at all sure that I want to meet a gentleman, or have anything to do with any of them.
Better, I think, to be a journeyman artist.
Sketch 10
In which I eat humble pie
I QUITE LIKE THIS NEW LIFE. I have felt more assured than I did in Adelaide, where the cold hand of the bailiff seemed ever to be hovering over me. Here, it feels as though I fit in, or at least that I am on the way there. Or better again, that I blend in, like one of the figures in my paintings—and it would not be the first time that I have figured in my own record, my paintings I mean, for I fear I am too much in these jottings. In Melbourne I feel that I am just one among the many, and that suits me very well. I do not call attention to myself, and I am not ill at ease in my surroundings. I am finding a place that is in keeping with the way of life here; I am acquiring the colour of it.
And how that phrase speaks a story. The diggers are all looking for that elusive speck of colour in the clay and gravel washing about in their pans. They do not see that on the diggings they themselves are the colour. They are unaware of themselves, so absorbed are they with what is under their feet. Whereas I have found what promises to be my own little pot of gold, and all the scratching around I have to do is with my pen or pencil. I do not endure the bitingly cold wet nights, and I can keep out of the mud, well more or less, for Melbourne’s roads still leave somewhat to be desired.
The general public continues its very welcome fascination with pictures of the diggings, and the rumbustious ways of the diggers, preferring to view them at an aesthetic distance. They do not require portraits of themselves, apparently, or not from me. Diggers are still about the streets, showing off, but they now tend to hold their wild horse races in the streets at the upper end of the town; whereas those who pretend to gentility confine themselves to the elegances of Collins Street, and avoid as best they can any unfortunate encounter with the turbulent tearaways. That is not always possible, for the successful diggers like to parade their new wealth about the town, to impress the world that they are now every whit as good as their betters—which means they go seeking those they insist on impressing. Fortunately, their loud huzzahs announce their approach, and appropriate evasive action can be taken.
Such clamour sometimes announces the spectacle of a bridal party. A digger who has struck it rich might celebrate by getting married, and driving around the streets in the grandest carriage he can hire, even a landau, with coachman and four matching horses. Some young wag will have drawn a pair of hearts in the dust with his finger; or a prestigious coat of arms apt for the occasion in drying mud on the carriage door. A naughtier young fellow may improve it with a bend sinister. The proud new groom, the bridegroom that is, does not always remember to dress up in appropriate finery, nor his best man neither.
They lurch and sway about dangerously, waving their bottles of champagne, and the bride’s cheeks have a jolly flush. She is making the most of it; she has been made available for the occasion too, and her devoted hubby of the current few hours will be off back to the diggings at the end of the week. She will return to her work at a hotel until the next whiskery swain turns up, flushed with success, brandy and ardour. The digger is boasting that he is as good as the Nobs, and he has the money in his pocket to prove it, but alas, the effect is rather spoiled when his mate insists on offering the coachman a swig from his bottle. The driver knows how you are meant to appear in public, he knows the distinction between finesse and display.
And if he were so fortunate as to have another stroke of luck, the digger might well decide to get married all over again next time, not necessarily to the same young woman. Who is to say? Stranger things have happened.
The largest majority of those who have tried their luck at the diggings have had to come to terms with disappointment. The goldfields have not served them well, and they have had to make whatever kind of accommodation they can to altered circumstances, for the prices of everything have soared beyond all reason. With the great throngs of newcomers arriving on every tide, as it seems, food and lodging are expensive and difficult to come by, as is casual employment. And that makes for an undercurrent of anxiety and restlessness.
The pattern is that those who arrive first on a new field have the most success. The gold quickly becomes more and more difficult to find, the diggings more and more difficult to work, and so no field lasts long—there is always another rush to the newest strike, but those fresh discoveries are themselves becoming less frequent. The South Australian contingent has begun to abandon the fields in droves. They made the most of the early months and have taken their gold back to Adelaide with them, to pick up their old lives again. Yet another beginning for them. I wonder how many more times that will happen in the story of that young colony.
Whereas Melbourne seems to be bursting to get ahead. What a difference from when I first arrived, a year and more ago. The difference between then and now is like the change of stage scenery in one of the theatres. It has happened in such a short interval, and you almost cannot believe you are in the same place. In a manner of speaking it is not the same place. Then all was draggle-tailed, ramshackle and makeshift; not so very different, when you think about it, from the diggings. But now Melbourne town is intent on consolidating, or one might say solidifying, at much the same rate as the diggers are i
ntent on undoing the countryside. Town and country are like the two ends of a balance: as one goes up the other goes down.
In the town, the main roads now have at least a properly formed central way, and a path on each side for pedestrians. There is still a sufficiency of mud to splatter crinolines and trousers; boots might set out clean but they never arrive in that condition, regardless of where they are going. The point is that there are now in fact a number of elegant destinations—dining rooms and exhibition halls, churches and theatres, superior shops and large commodious hotels, all in well-appointed buildings. Building is going on everywhere at a prodigious pace. The foundation stone for a new public library was laid on the same day as the foundation stone for a new university, very convenient for the governor’s coachman, as the one is just further up the road from the other. And, come to think of it, convenient for the spectators, as much the same group might be expected to present themselves at each occasion. A new hospital building has been commenced, a town hall, a steam railway with a railway station for it to start from and to return to.
Which is all well and good for those of us who live in the midst of this marvellous consolidation; all paid for from the splendid profits of the gold boom. But that does not wash well with the prospectors and the diggers, and the new chums who are left to make their own way up the country as best they can, over roads still unmade, and across rivers where there are no bridges, almost never a ferry, and no access down the steep banks. When the diggings start to form into little villages, there are still tree stumps in the middle of the main thoroughfares, the roads in and out are very often undermined by surreptitious tunnels, if the gold vein looks to pass beneath, and what with one thing and another, the diggers themselves see little in return for their monthly licence. Yet pity help them if they neglect to purchase it! Melbourne has no comprehension of their bitterness at the Governor’s neglect. Out on the diggings they never get to see him in his fancy uniform, laying a little mortar on a squared and polished foundation stone. He doesn’t come anywhere near them, not if he can help it.
The Profilist Page 16
