* In contravention of Clause 38 of the standing regulations: “No convict shall be employed as clerk in the Commandant’s or any other office, or have access to the records kept therein.”
* Expletive deleted, in the Parliamentary Papers.
* In all, seventeen men were hanged on various charges, some not connected with the July mutiny, over the next week. It was the largest gallows-session ever held on Norfolk Island, and one of the largest in Australian penal history.
* For the gold rush and its consequences for transportation, see the next chapter.
16
The Aristocracy Be We
AMONG THE FORTUNE-HUNTING optimists who set sail from Sydney across the Pacific to San Francisco when the news of the California gold rush reached New South Wales at the end of 1848 was a corpulent bull-calf of a man named Edward Hammond Hargraves. He was thirty-one when he reached California, and with a fellow “Sydney Duck” he trudged, scrambled and panned for two years, not finding so much as an ounce of gold. English by birth, he had lived in Australia and knew the terrain west of the Blue Mountains, near Bathurst. Gradually, the conviction seized him that the Wellington district of New South Wales, 170 miles west of Sydney and about 50 miles from Bathurst, with its tawny hills, quartz outcrops and gullies, was very like the gold regions of California. At the end of 1850, having bottomed out like so many thousands of other Forty-Niners, Hargraves spent his last dollars on a passage back to Sydney. But he took his pan and rocking-cradle with him, and on February 12, 1851, he and his guide, John Lister, rode down Lewes Pond Creek, a tributary of the Macquarie River near Guyong outside Bathurst.
As the horses picked their way along, Hargraves felt—as he put it later—“surrounded by gold.” He got down into the creek-bed with his pick and trowel, and scratched some gravel and earth from a dike of schist that ran athwart the gully. Four pans out of five produced gold. Hargraves was overcome. “This,” he exclaimed to Lister, “is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum!”1
None of these happened, but something of infinitely greater consequence did. Australia was convulsed with gold fever. In April 1851, Hargraves bestowed on his district the biblical name of Ophir, and in May the newspapers announced it to be “one vast gold-field.” By May 24, a thousand diggers were tunnelling, cursing and exulting on the banks of Summerhill Creek, and the road over the Blue Mountains was choked with a footsore, sluggishly winding column of men: clerks and grooms, grocers’ assistants and sailors, lawyers and army deserters, oyster-sellers and magistrates, government officials and ex-convict shepherds, trudging beneath the weight of tents, blankets, crowbars, picks, shovels, pans and billycans hastily bought at gougers’ prices, stumbling toward unheard-of wealth in mud-balled boots under the driving rains of the Australian autumn. It was as though a plug had been pulled and the male population of New South Wales had emptied like a cistern, in a rush toward the diggings. Business, the Bathurst and Sydney newspapers reported, was “utterly paralysed.… A complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community.”2
By June the Ophir district was an impacted mass of clay-colored men, shoulder to shoulder, hacking in delirium at the fickle earth. Prospectors that month moved northeast to the banks of the Turon River and struck gold there, even more of it. An aboriginal stockman, who was not prospecting but idly chipping with his tomahawk at an outcrop fifty miles from Bathurst, found a mass of quartz that yielded 1,272 ounces of gold, the largest reef nugget in recorded history, bigger than anything found by the Forty-Niners in California. “Men … stare stupidly at each other, talk incoherent nonsense, and wonder what will happen next.… [A] hundred-weight of sugar or potatoes is an every-day fact, but a hundred-weight of gold is … beyond the range of our recorded ideas—a sort of physical incomprehensibility.” The Aborigine was not allowed to keep the gold but his employer, a Dr. Kerr, on whose land it was found, gave him and his brother some sheep, two horses, provisions and a few acres as a consolation prize.3
As the gold fever spread, prospectors realized that, geologically speaking, the newly constituted state of Victoria was simply an extension of New South Wales. In July, gold was found at Clunes, a hundred miles from Melbourne; and in September 1851, a septuagenarian digger named John Dunlop discovered the richest field of all, at Ballarat, a mere 75 miles west of the Melbourne Post Office. The word ran back to Melbourne that gold was everywhere. It lay scattered on the rocks and between the wiry tussocks, glistening as it had done for unregarded thousands of years; now the deepest obsessions of a frontier society would clamp themselves to it, and it would transform that society beyond recognition.
The gold belonged to the government, which demanded an exorbitant license fee of 30 shillings a month from the Victorian diggers. Nevertheless, by November 1851 more than 6,500 Victorian licenses had been issued and a cataract of gold was pouring from Ballarat as well as the Turon diggings, into the stout canvas bags, down to the holds of the waiting ships. The first gold shipment to London, on the Thomas Arbuthnot, was a mere 253 ounces. By the middle of 1852, there were perhaps 50,000 people on the diggings and the average weekly shipment on the gold-escorts from Ballarat and Bendigo was more than 20,000 ounces—half a ton a week. The Times declared, in November 1852, that the flood of Australian gold had become “perfectly bewildering”; by then, a single ship (the Dido) was expected with 280,000 ounces, or ten and a half tons, on board. All this was from the Victorian diggings, which in the month of August 1852 alone, despite nearly continuous winter rain and bitterly difficult working conditions for the diggers, had yielded 246,000 ounces of the “yellow stuff.”4
By then, Melbourne was both a ghost-port and a continuous saturnalia. Port Phillip Bay had become a Sargasso Sea of dead ships, rocking empty at anchor through a hundred tides and then a hundred more, bilges unpumped, their masts a bare forest. When a vessel arrived with her gold-hungry passengers and her hold crammed with mining tools and cheap furniture, the crews (and often the captains too) would desert as soon as she was unloaded, joining the thick human stream for Ballarat and Bendigo. Employers, stranded without labor, locked their offices and went on the road. “Cottages are deserted,” reported the lieutenant-governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, In October 1851,
houses to let, business is at a stand-still, and even schools are closed. In some of the suburbs not a man is left, and the women are known for self-protection to forget neighbours’ jars [quarrels] and to group together to keep house.… Fortunate the family, whatever its position, which retains its servants at any sacrifice, and can further secure supplies for their households from the few tradesmen that remain … all buildings and contract works, public and private, almost without exception, are at a standstill. No contract can be insisted upon under the circumstances.5
Shanty towns and bark huts proliferated to house the thousands of emigrants, frantic with hope, who poured off the ships from England and Ireland.
In the grog-shops and hotels that lined the filthy, traffic-jammed streets of the young city, where a man could sink up to his knees in mud and ordure merely by stepping off the curb, a round-the-clock orgy was conducted by “the worst-looking population eyes ever beheld”—the diggers and their hangers-on, their mates and their flushed doxies, drinking the gold away. One man, who had never tasted champagne before, bought a hotel’s entire stock of it and emptied every bottle into a horse trough, inviting all and sundry to suck it up. Miners lurched up and down the luxury shops, jamming huge tawdry rings on their girls’ fingers, demanding the most expensive dresses, lighting their pipes with £5 notes and pouring gold dust into the cupped hands of hackney-drivers. “They are intoxicated with their suddenly-acquired wealth, and run riot in the wildness of their joy,” noted an English gold-seeker, John Sherer. They were “just like so many unbroken horses caught in a desert where they never knew anything but hunger, an
d suddenly thrown into a rich paddock where they find nothing but plenty.”6 They treated their women like crude pashas, even the ones who seemed to have few prospects, like “Biddy Carroll,” fresh from Ireland: “Exceedingly stupid, lazy, and dirty, poor Biddy could make no friends,” and resembled “an unripe potato just dug from the soil with its jacket flying.” But soon she found her digger, and soon after that an acquaintance noticed in the saloon of a steamer
the simple, stupid, potato-like face of Biddy Carroll … the very perfection of a lucky, thoughtless, gold-digger’s bride. Her bonnet was of white satin, with a profusion of the most exquisite flowers, the whole enveloped in the folds of a rich white veil. She wore a superb lavender-coloured flowered satin dress, with a gorgeous barège shawl … a massive gold brooch … a massive gold chain, and her wrists encircled with handsome silver bracelets.7
The Biddies were not just amusing objects of condescension. In their gaudy store-bought finery, they were signs of class rupture. Gold disturbed the order of Anglo-Australian society—from pastoral “aristocrat” down to convict—with shudders of democracy. Gold wealth was not “democratic,” but it did expand the existing oligarchy. It would diversify both Australian markets and Australian production and help create the Australian bourgeoisie. The clay-stained digger, a butcher in his former life, who still carried the grease-stink of tallow in his hair and the argot of the diggings on his tongue, would soon have his Axminster-carpeted drawing room in Toorak. The cash his gold set in circulation would construct suburbia. His spending habits would raise more merchants to comfort. Fortunes were made by diggers—and extracted from them. Gold did respect class. It slightly favored the low: A horny-handed navvy, miner or seaman with muscles hardened by years of manual work could sink a shaft twenty feet to the blue auriferous strata of Bendigo in the time that it took a refined “new chum,” his hands pulpy and blistered, to scratch away three feet of earth. “Everything had assumed a revolutionary character,” wrote Sherer, adding that
all the aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated. Plebeianism of the rankest and … the lowest kind at present dwells in Australia; and as riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position, it is vain to have any pretensions whatever unless you are supported by that powerful auxiliary. It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.8
“We be the aristocracy now,” miners were heard to say as they rollicked in the Melbourne grog-shops, “and the aristocracy now be we.”
ii
THERE WAS, however, a specter at this feast of truculent egalitarianism: the Old Hands, or ex-convicts. Victorians took a considerable, indeed an exaggerated pride in the thought that their colony had not—or at least, not primarily—been a convict settlement. In 1835, the pioneering land-grabber John Batman had “bought” some 600,000 acres in the Port Phillip Bay area, including the present site of Melbourne, from three chiefs (confusingly named Jagajaga, Jagajaga and Jagajaga) for some blankets, knives, shirts and mirrors. Pioneers had gone south from the “Middle District” of New South Wales with their bands of assigned men; and nearly 2,000 Exiles had landed at Port Phillip in the 1840s. But until then, Victoria had no institutions for exploiting convict labor; this helped its free population feel more virtuous than the raffish Sydney-siders and tainted Vandemonians. Some settlers—not gold-seekers, but more sober and conscientious men—had gone there partly because it had no “convict taint,” expecting security and a low crime rate.
They were not merely dismayed but outraged when gold brought a rush of emancipated convicts from Van Diemen’s Land. Thousands of criminals—for in the eyes of the “respectable,” an ex-convict was a felon still—were flooding into Melbourne and fanning out all over Victoria. Nobody knew exactly how many there were, because they were all free and did not have to present passes when moving from one colony of Australia to another. The pessimistic guess was that one digger in ten had been a government man. Soon, every unsolved crime in Victoria (and not a few in New South Wales) was automatically blamed on the “Vandemonians,” or simply the “Demons,” as these undesirables from Van Diemen’s Land were called. And in fact, an unusually high number of offenders convicted for crimes in Victoria between 1851 and 1853 turned out to be ex-convicts who had crossed Bass Strait.
For most of the Vandemonians, the gold rush was their last desperate gamble. The economy of Van Diemen’s Land was so primitive compared to that of the mainland, and the chances of getting enough land to compete against the established pastoral families so remote, that any man with blood in him would rather try for gold across the Strait. The depression was past but the labor market for ex-convicts stayed badly shrunk. On the goldfields, expirees might get rich, and even when poor they carried a certain glamor in the eyes of impressionable “new chums”:
The new chum sits on the logs about the fire listening to the tales of crime and adventure of some “old hand” or convict. Some of these men have now great quantities of Gold and now that they are independent, boast of their former bad deeds. The greater the criminal the more he is respected.9
The Victorian authorities sided with the Anti-Transportation League of Van Diemen’s Land. In February 1851, the mayor of Melbourne had congratulated two of its prime movers, the historian and Congregational minister John West and the pastoralist William Weston—who had come there to form a “League of Solemn Engagement” of the Australian colonies never to accept convict labor again—on their “patriotic exertions.” Victoria, too, the Mayor declaimed, was making “efforts to avert the attempt made by our fair Province with the outpourings of British crime,” and
the proximity of our colony to yours gives us a vital interest in assisting you to stem the tide of convictism now flowing in upon Van Diemen’s Land. Rest assured that the colonists of Victoria will go with you heart and hand.10
Naturally, when Victoria became a separate colony a few months later, anti-convict sentiments rose higher still. In February 1852, the mayor, aldermen and citizens of Melbourne wrote a petition to Queen Victoria, protesting against transportation of “Criminals of the deepest dye” to Van Diemen’s Land, whence, after “a brief period of probation,” they crossed to the colony which bore her own name, contaminating and degrading it:
The unlimited influx of manumitted convicts from Van Diemen’s Land is an intolerable grievance calculated rapidly to alienate the affections of Your Majesty’s dutiful subjects.… [W]e should be guilty of deceit if we withheld from Your Majesty the fact that there is a large and increasing population growing up to maturity amongst us who have no such feelings [of loyalty] towards the Parent State; who feel deeply the disgrace of belonging to a colony which is regarded by other nations as a portion of Britain’s great emunctory of crime.11
There was silence from Balmoral and a perfunctory reply from Downing Street. But the tone of the mayor’s address was not feigned. The grievance ran deep, and it soon produced an obnoxious law, passed with bellows of popular acclaim by the newly formed Legislative Council of Victoria in September 1852: the “Convicts Prevention Act.” It was framed, as La Trobe remarked in forwarding it to London, with “zeal and haste,” and it ignored “many salient principles of constitutional liberty”; but it was so popular, the crime rate was so high and the expenses of the police so ruinous that he had signed it anyway.
Anyone coming to Victoria from Van Diemen’s Land now had to prove he was unconditionally free. The penalty for not doing so was three years’ hard labor in irons. The particular injustice of the act was that it discriminated against holders of conditional pardons, convicts who by law were allowed to go anywhere within the Australian colonies, so long as they did not go back to England. It condemned them to stagnate in the economic backwater of Van Diemen’s Land. In the wide powers of arrest and search it granted the Victorian police, it resembled the hated Bushranging Act of thirty years before. But in the atmosphere of Melbourne in 1852, it bordered on political suicide to speak for the “rights” of e
x-convicts. The fear of a real rupture between the colonists and the Crown made La Trobe think it “highly desirable … to show every disposition to co-operate heartily with the Colonists … under the extraordinary circumstances of the times.”
Not all interests in Australia agreed—especially not the graziers, who had been hardest hit by the flight of labor to the goldfields. The gold rush, even in winter, was draining pastoral labor; by spring, the shortage would be catastrophic. The only thing that could save these northeastern estates from the drain of labor into the “middle districts” of New South Wales was a prompt infusion of felons, who would not be able to quit their assigned posts to hunt gold. “At no previous crisis in the history of this Colony was a large and continuous supply of such a class so much required, or so likely to be productive.”12
The Fatal Shore Page 82
