The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Here too is where the Chinese congregate, to play at fan tan and to gamble at cards. It is curious to me that while they are such inveterate gamblers, you do not see them at the races—even though vast sums of money are turned over at the new Melbourne Cup day, for example. The celestials have their own chophouses here too, with a row of cooked ducks hanging in the window opening, and opium dens in the remoter lanes. Such a curious mixture of smells here. The street girls escort you down these dark alleys to their rooms. This is the out-of-the-way Melbourne; more concealed than Sydney’s Rocks but otherwise much the same kind of neighbourhood. Lodgings are cheaper here than elsewhere in the city.

  In fact that is a curious characteristic of Melbourne, that everywhere has its concealed after-part—as each of the main streets has a corresponding diminutive lane behind it. The Melbourne Club, for example, has at the back a place called the Crib, where the young bloods can kick up a ruckus, and from which they go on sorties into the rest of the town, to rattle door knockers or even to wrench them off, and to play whatever other tricks come to mind. The more sedate members stay installed in their comfortable seats in the front rooms, and read their papers, and drink their drinks, and plot their own advancement and the downfall of their business competitors. Or so I imagine, for I have never crossed that threshold and doubt I ever shall.

  I have not renewed my acquaintance with the Garrick Club. A new club has just commenced, the Yorick Club, mainly for writers as I understand. A young fellow who writes amusing pieces for the Argus is the leading luminary, a Mr Clarke. They think of themselves as Bohemians. They organise suppers for themselves at a café, and smoking evenings, and goodness knows what else. From what I can make out it is not much different from the kind of entertainment I and my friends made for ourselves in old Portsmouth. We were Bohemians and did not know it; and I have had to come halfway round the world to find it out.

  What with my scenes of Australian life, and my sketches in the Exhibition, and others printed in some of the newspapers, it was very pleasing to me to receive an invitation from the trustees of the Melbourne Library to compile a volume of thirty or forty sketches depicting activities on the Victorian goldfields a decade ago. They required new drawings, but of the past. What that meant was that I should look through my old notebooks and sketch pads; and review some of my earlier pictures to see how I might adapt them or build on the original drawings. It is a handsome commission, fifty pounds no less, and they arrange all the publication details. They will even sell copies of individual sketches from the Library.

  Here, by the way, is another version of what I see in Melbourne, that the façade has a draggle tail. Maybe that is always the case, and Melbourne is no different from elsewhere. Or maybe Melbourne in particular is still trying to pick itself up out of the quagmire of its founding, just as Sydney pretends to have put its convict past behind it. The invitation has come from the chairman of the board of trustees, Sir Redmond Barry, a senior judge, recently knighted and full of public office. He has a lady friend installed in a cottage; sometimes they appear together at the theatre. I wonder if she plays the piano.

  But that is nothing to me. I am pleased to have the commission, with the letter from his secretary. I don’t think judges write invitations. They write judgements.

  It has been interesting for me to revisit my old sketches, as well as the goldfields themselves, briefly. I see now that I have changed my way of looking at this material, though I was not at first aware that such is the case. My new pictures show more light. The bush is not so closed up, the forests not so dark, the ranges not so louring. You can see further into the landscape than I had remembered. Even in the Black Forest itself, you would be able to see from some way off any skulking shifty fellows. The skies, as I have painted them, are not so pronounced; I notice that I have chosen again and again a soft grey or buff wash. The fields are less boggy, even though the weather is in fact just as changeable.

  What my sketches show is that I am now more interested in the individual figures, the character they show—the figures are larger in the composition. I look at them as much as at what they are doing, to decipher, if I can, something about the people themselves. For example, you can see just by looking up and down the streets of Melbourne what it is they have achieved. Most of this town is no more than fifteen years old. Amazing. But what of the people themselves, what have they become? What is it in them that has led them to become whatever they have become? Is it possible to see who will succeed, and who will fail? Do the unfortunate ones carry the mark of Cain? If so, that is hardly to inspire hope.

  And what of myself?

  So many men and women have come to Melbourne, to Sydney, and yes to Adelaide though with somewhat different expectations, but all seeking to make their fortune. To find their fortune. To mend their fortune. How is it that some succeed, like the Baron of Beef, and not others? What is it that decides their lot? Is it all just the fall of the coin? I admit I am anxious about whether this set of my sketches will meet with favour.

  The larger views do not offer the same opportunity to reflect on the people who have come here. It is curious how differently one thinks about them as individuals and as a group. For example, in my picture of the diggers lining up to buy their licences, the men are all inside a holding paddock opposite the commissioner’s tent. It shows how demeaning the process is, the men having to await the pleasure of the officers. Pairs of policemen here and there take up the foreground and middle ground, the diggers are kept further away. That is, a very distinct distance is maintained between the commissioner’s camp and the diggings, between the police and the men. The police are doing nothing, which I suppose is called being on duty; one, reading a newspaper while the pot bubbles away on a fire, has what may be the most consequential job of all. The gold is all safely out of sight. The others are all self-consciously displaying their uniforms; somewhat like Russian sailors.

  In some general views of the diggings, I have designed for two or three particular details to stand out. The early onslaught gives way to a second phase, where instead of a valley pocked with holes, and the tops of ladders jutting above the ground, you notice many more windlasses, some well constructed, some dangerously flimsy, but all indicating deeper digging. The great mass of scavengers has moved on, looking for easy pickings; now the hard slog, as the men say, remains, and that means long sustained effort, and semi-permanent dwellings. So that another difference is in seeing cartloads of planks arriving on the fields, and becoming the cladding for huts. The old hands used to make do with slabs of bark, if they thought to put up anything more lasting than their tents. There is still a good plenty of those of course, almost marquees some of them, especially when they combine a business with living quarters, such as a store or a doctor’s surgery or the like. Boarding houses. You can spot those by the sheets of stringybark leaning against the side of the tent, each one a bed available for hire for the night. Bit by bit the chaos of the goldfields turns into the first makings of small villages.

  Passable tracks now meander across these later diggings, with rough little bridges over some of the more awkward culverts, and those tracks become possible because a great number of the men working their claims has moved on. They have got out of the way, literally. The diggings are somehow more spacious. The bush all around has been thinned out, the valleys and gullies are open country now. Trampled and tossed about, but open, so that you can see how far and extensive the activity is, the numbers of people living and working in the locality. And with those huts you see more women and children, families, and with them perhaps a little plot of vegetables, and a chicken coop, and a cockatoo chained to a perch. The people have organised themselves. The authorities are an intrusion.

  You see the unspoken antagonism whenever a policeman demands to inspect the diggers’ licences. The miner’s right. The digger has to come up out of his claim and produce the required document, and the policeman takes an inordinate length of time to study it. Possibly he is not very
good at reading, or possibly he is making a point of being deliberate, for the effect on the digger is intimidating while he awaits the official nod. Waits so long that he has half finished his pipe before receiving back the all-important piece of paper.

  There is a curious confrontation in this. The policeman wants an opportunity to find the digger in breach on some account or other, as his perquisite is one half of the fine. Yet if the digger has his bona fides the policeman is forgoing valuable time when he might catch out an unlicensed digger on the next claim. He should be getting a move on; the digger wants to get back to his work too. Time is precious. But a bird in the hand is as good as a whole flock in the bush, and if there is the slightest possibility of charging the digger, then that is what the officer will of course do.

  It is no way to establish an amiable working relation. You might have thought the authorities would have learned something from Ballaarat, but no. The makings of a petty tyrant lurk in every officer’s breast.

  I have arranged my album in an obvious pattern, the sequence of a digger’s experiences. So I begin with a couple of new chums, ordinary fellows, camped on the track to the goldfields, travelling light as I had done, and somewhat glum at what they have undertaken. They have lost their way. Their swags are still unrolled, the billy is on the smallest of fires, and their meal is a piece of damper on a tin plate. Their trousers and boots are still clean, their gold-washing pan is as shiny as it was when it left the store; so is their pannikin. They will need to make up a much bigger fire to fend off the chill of the coming evening.

  They look quite disconsolate. Whereas the well-heeled newcomer looks less down in the dumps; but at a loss nevertheless, even though he has arrived. He is neatly dressed, in a good cut of coat and a hat that has yet to be rained on; and he does not know what to do now that he is at the diggings. He has found an old hand waist-deep in a hole, and wants to know where it is best to dig. If the digger had an answer to that, then of course that is where he would be—he wouldn’t be down his own current burrow on speculation.

  The diggers will give advice to the newcomers, but of course it is a different matter when it comes to the physical labour. Not everyone is cut out for that. I wasn’t. Even less so was Coppin. And that clean-shaven look does not last long. Indeed, neither does the well-washed look. Diggers all turn shaggy and unkempt very quickly. A splash is enough for a wash; there is no point in anything more thorough, as in two shakes you are just as dirty again as you were. None of the diggers, nor the bushmen neither, is meticulous about keeping clean, though the married men might be scolded and sent off down to the creek from time to time.

  There is no place for politeness on the fields. The diggers not only have to be prepared to toil hard in uncomfortable conditions, they have also to be prepared to defend their rights—as at Bendigo and Ballaarat—and to defend their claim. While the law is that a claim must be worked each day, a kind of customary understanding among the men is that leaving a tool, such as a pick or a spade, stuck into the ground marks that the claim is in fact owned. It is the means by which a digger can go off looking for another claim, or take a broken wagon to be repaired, or even to go searching for a strayed horse; the means by which it is understood he will be returning.

  Sometimes what the American diggers call a ‘claim jumper’ might sneakily replace the implement by putting his own pick or crowbar into an attractive and unattended claim, and then make a big show that he is taking up his common right—and of course there is an ugly confrontation when the real owner returns. Fists as well as voices are raised, dogs start barking in all the heady furore, neighbouring diggers come running, or start calling out from their own shafts, and soon a crowd has gathered. It might be that general consensus decides the matter; or if more vigorous action is needed, they might combine to drive off an obvious usurper. On the other hand, they might form a ring and let the two parties settle the issue with their fists. That gives rise to cheering for one or the other, wagers exchanged, the crowd growing loud and excited in their encouragement; and the whole turns into a mill.

  Or the fight might be arranged for the weekend, when a much larger crowd again assembles, forming a ring around the assailants, and watches them go at it toe to toe. A few of the spectators bring their sons, carrying them up on their shoulders, so that they can see what it is to be a man. I cannot imagine that is much of an inducement. Some spectators have their week’s supplies from the store in a bag up on their back. And of course there are those who come running so as not to miss the sport, and in their haste fall headlong over tools and barrows. The mill is not just contained at the centre of the crowd.

  It amused me to set such a sketch alongside a different kind of mill, a Sunday preacher at an open meeting, where the assembly is of a different order entirely. Nobody comes racing across the field to attend this, nobody needs to carry his child on his shoulders, because the preacher of the day will be standing on a stump or on a barrel. Those who are in attendance listen quietly enough, but not everyone looks at him. Some gaze out across the camp, others show each other samples of what they have succeeded in fossicking out of what had been cast by the wayside, in my father’s figure of speech. Gleaned, he might have said. They are laying up their treasures in the world near at hand. Not far away, behind the preacher’s back but in line of sight of those who have gathered together, will be a customary ‘coffee’ tent, with a few sinners lining up at the back, seeking their own form of spiritual sustenance. In all my forays into and about the diggings, I do not recollect anyone ever recommending such a booth on account of its coffee.

  The people on the fields are as various as any artist could wish. There are diggers who have come from a comfortable way of life, diggers of high degree I think them. Little gestures mark them out. Their claims are at a polite distance from anyone else’s. One of them might be sitting on an upturned tub, reading a newspaper with close attention. That is a more pressing concern to him than getting on with puddling in the tub. Another just emerging from the shaft wipes his brow with a remarkably clean handkerchief. You do not see many of those on the diggings. And a third member of the party is the same dapper figure who as the well-heeled new chum was asking questions of the old hand. He still has his hands in his pockets, and does not look like he is one to take them out, or not so as to handle a spade. He has his pipe too, wooden not clay. His elegantly bound sketchbook rests on a board just near where the ornate tea kettle and pannikin await the emerging worker of the three. It is all very unhurried; there is time for interesting if not very productive conversation.

  By contrast is what I call diggers of low degree, wild-looking aggressive individuals, unkempt, with muddy trouser legs, always ready to perceive an affront, ever ready to put up their fists. Their faces are frequently flushed, whether from anger or from the empty black bottle lying on its side is of no particular account. They are spoiling for a fight. Axes and hammers have been thrown about their claim and lie where they fall. Their bucket is sprawled over on one side in a dirty puddle. At the first provocation it is off with their hat (which is lucky not to join the bucket) and up with their mauleys. Come on then, here’s havin’ at yer. And up pops a mate, younger but wiser, the very type of bare-faced cheek, his leather cap on back to front, taking up his place behind the fire eater and shouting defiance at all and sundry. They make enough of a racket between them to catch the attention of their neighbours, but nobody comes to see what is the matter. They have heard it all before.

  Not a lot of gold gets dug out of that kind of claim either. Both sorts of fellows are bound to be disappointed, being what they are. No fault of their own.

  Some diggers are successful of course. And not just in the way of those who have scraped away at the bottoms of their shafts with a knife, looking for elusive traces of gold, or little nuggets in the spoil everywhere about the diggings. That is a forlorn way of seeking a fortune; the odds are very much against it. No, a lucky few find a small seam of gold or a heavy showing in the silt alo
ng the creeks, and then they go rushing off cock-a-hoop with their gains, to celebrate their good fortune in the nearest town.

  You can hardly miss them. They race off on recently purchased nags, bobtailed for the most part, hallooing and whooping and waving their bottles of beer about. They are on their way to the best champagne that money, or gold dust, will buy—and the wonder is that they ever arrive, whether in Ballaarat or Geelong or Melbourne. They are half drunk with excitement even as they set out, and before they have travelled far they are weaving about in their saddles. They make such a clamour as is sure to catch the attention of those nefarious characters who trust to a rifle rather than a pick to find their fortune. These foolhardy diggers are every bit as conspicuous as the gold escort, but without the strong defence. It is beyond credit, but in their madcap excitement at striking it rich, there is every chance they have forgotten to take a gun with them. You can only shake your head in disbelief at their absurd wildness.

  Still, enough of them survive the headlong dash to the towns, and there they set about laying waste to their recent wealth. They buy flash clothes, and large rings and jewelled pins for their cravats, though of course they would be more comfortable in their old jumpers. But for the time being they rig themselves out, as they call it, in whatever they imagine is the height of fashion—which is what they remember from before they left England. Their colourful sashes are their own contribution to the sense of style. They are a sight to behold.

  And the publican makes sure they are provided not only with the drinks of their choice, but pert company to which they may find themselves attached fairly promptly. I have amended my picture of the new bride and groom going for a celebratory ride in an open coach, improving on the burlesque of elegance. The bridegroom and his best man now wear much bolder check coats, the bridesmaid’s folded fan becomes a glass of champagne, and the unblushing bride is a much more contained young miss; or was. I have given her a veil, which blows away behind her, and a scarlet dress for allegorical good measure. But chiefly I have made sure that the groom, meaning the driver, is a refined young man now wearing a waistcoat rather than tails; he is the sort of person who may once have been accustomed to riding in a landau and is now in the curious circumstance of having to drive it for the riotous wedding party. For truly, not only the landscape has been turned upside down by the diggings.