Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  Of course, locally, Clarke’s story starts the rush to beat them all, with people from all walks of life, including doctors, ministers, merchants and others, continuing to pour into Ballarat. By now there is no more questioning whose side of ‘Black Hill’ - as it has recently become known - is whose, only where the boundary of your claim extends to. And there are many disputes therein, particularly if one claim strikes it rich. Those with experience in California know best where to look for the easiest gold - that is, on the gravelly slopes where quartz boulders are most apparent, and there the gold is so near the surface it is frequently found ‘tangled in the roots of stumpy black-stemmed grass-trees and tough stringy-barks’.7

  Among the first of the new wave to arrive is none other than James Esmond. Though he has been busily pursuing his diggings at Clunes since first discovering gold there two months earlier, he - like everyone - has heard of the better diggings at Ballarat and on 10 September turns up in the company of the brothers Cavanagh. In this game, having had gold-digging experience counts for a great deal - one of the hard-bitten and bushy-whiskered brothers had been digging in California, just as Esmond had - as it helps to guide a sense of where gold is likely to be found based on ‘the lead’, the trace of the ancient creek bed beneath. If gold has been found here and … here … then there is every chance that it will also be found, say … here … and probably, too, right there, at an even greater depth than the others have gone, beneath the barren layer previously felt to be the ‘floor’ and into the blue clay below.

  In the space of just two days, by digging to a depth of 30 feet, the three veterans manage to pull out of the ground a staggering 50 pounds of gold - the equivalent of seven years’ wages for a simple labourer. Much of it is found in the form of nuggets, something that stupefies those who know of California. Over there, they don’t have nuggets; they have grains. Over there, they weigh in ounces. Here, they are weighing their gold in pounds.

  The staggering find by Esmond and the Cavanaghs unleashes even more energy than already apparent - there is now no more leaning on the elbow at ballaarat. Their experience has revealed even more gold here, at greater heights on the hill and greater depths in the ground than anyone had previously thought. So keep digging, Bluey! Did you hear me? Fifty pounds of gold in just two and a half days!

  That amount being - at anything up to PS4 per ounce - a king’s ransom, it is sent back to Melbourne under armed escort, whereupon it becomes the first significant quantity of Victorian gold to be exported to England.

  In Melbourne, only one question and one answer is on everyone’s lips:

  ‘When are you off to the diggings?’

  ‘Immediately!’

  If Bathurst is mad again, Melbourne is now even madder. As recorded by one contemporary Melbourne storekeeper, William Hall, who watches it all close up, aghast: ‘I cannot describe the effect it had upon the sober, plodding, and industrious people of Melbourne … The excitement it created in Melbourne was so intense, so all absorbing, that men seemed bereft of their senses; magistrates and constables, parsons and priests, merchants and clerks, policemen and paupers, all hastened to Golden Point; the ships in the harbour were abandoned by many chief officers as well as by the seamen.’8

  And yet, among these many men of abandoned work in the pursuit of gold, there is one of a newly minted profession who is about to come into his own. Francis Doveton is Victoria’s first duly appointed Gold Commissioner, the man ultimately responsible for collecting the license fees, and it is only a couple of days after he arrives at Ballarat on 19 September in the company of five armed troopers - supported by Captain Dana and a pod of native police, who are delighted to be able to lord it over white folk for a change - that he has his first confrontation with miners on the Brownhill Diggings. They are as angry about the fee now as when the news first broke, and more than happy to tell him so.

  But the 33-year-old Doveton, an Englishman with a ramrod for a spine and an ice cube for a heart, whose father was a Reverend and whose adult life has been spent first as an officer with the 51st Regiment of Foot and then as a police magistrate in Tasmania, gives them no quarter, sir - do you hear? NO quarter!

  The law is the law, and you will obey it.

  Nor is there the slightest relief from Assistant-Commissioner David Armstrong, a former blacksmith who, to follow Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, is wont to beat on miscreants ‘with a vigour only to be equalled by the vigour which he used to beat on his anvil’. As a matter of fact, Armstrong carries a riding crop made of brass for that very purpose. No matter that after his time as a blacksmith he had been a digger himself, trying his luck in California in ‘49. The fact is he did not achieve any success there, and seems to bitterly resent those who are trying to do so here. And so it is on this occasion that Armstrong is every bit as forceful as Doveton, being the one to tell the diggers straight up, ‘The license fee is to be enforced, and … as half of September is still to run, each man is required to pay fifteen shillings.’9 Furthermore, as per the law of the land, each claim will be strictly limited to an eight-foot square of land - barely enough to swing a billy of tea in.

  The diggers’ response is as strong as it is immediate. The following day a particularly large digger by the name of Herbert Swindells - a man with the torso of a tree trunk and upper arms like other men’s thighs - holds court in what will become the classic fashion of the diggings. Standing on the high stump of a recently felled gum tree, the bloody sap still seeping down its sides, he calls for one and all to come hear him speak.

  And so they do, leaving their cradles, their picks, shovels and buckets to gather around.

  Swindells wishes to know, and he wishes to know it at the top of his voice: Are we going to meekly GIVE IN to this cove, Doveton, and pay this license? Are we going to agree to RESTRICT our diggings to a tiny eight by eight feet square? Or are we going to RESIST?

  We’re going to RESIST!

  Likely led by Swindells, as he flourishes a pistol over his head and roars, ‘Before I am done with this business, I will shoot someone.’10

  Two resolutions are passed, one calling for the license to be reduced to just five shillings a month and the other asserting that the men should be allowed a five-times larger portion of Crown land to mine on.

  Alas, when a delegation of two men is sent to the Commissioner’s tent to present these resolutions, Doveton, backed by Armstrong and their armed body of men, gives the delegation something a little shorter than short shrift.

  ‘I am not here to make the law but to administer it,’ Doveton declares baldly, a mini-king in his mini-kingdom. ‘And if you don’t pay the license, I’ll damned soon make you pay it.’11

  The delegation is sent packing. At least, however, the diggers have something of the power of the press behind them. In his own report on the issue in the Geelong Advertiser on 26 September, the redoubtable Alfred Clarke writes: ‘Gold digging is now a regular occupation, and if the Government intends to suppress it - they must raise an army for the express purpose, for the people are fast spreading out in all directions, and as gold digging is an epidemic I should not feel the least surprise if the police were to drop musket and take to tin dishes - Captain Dana to his pick and the Commissioner to his cradle. For … if the truth be told the Government is the greatest Gold Digger after all, and the most lucky - for where they dig they find it in pockets and are saved the expense of outfit or license - work when they please, and sink a shaft in every man’s purse - and, perhaps in his heart too.’12

  One digger who disagrees, however, and is brave enough to say so, is the highly respected James Esmond. Having witnessed terrible lawlessness in California, he believes that, by handing over money for the license, the diggers are paying for the law to be enforced for their own protection and that it will be well worth it.

  When all is said and done - a lot more of the former than the latter - it is of course Doveton and his men who win the fight. The vast majority of the diggers do indeed p
ay up, either the 15 shillings or quarter ounce of gold, as they see fit. Such is the government’s in-built advantage in all negotiations with the diggers, however, that its fixed gold exchange price of PS3 (60 shillings) per ounce in payment for a one-month license always makes a tidy profit when taking a half ounce of gold as payment rather than 30 shillings in currency as, of course, gold may be worth considerably more in the city. And it doesn’t even stop there. As the fresh half-month licenses bear the date 21 September, the government still manages to obtain another six shillings out of every digger.13

  While it is one thing for you to put your hand in the air for something so simple as pronouncing yourself in favour of protesting to the Commissioner, it is quite another to stare down a bevy of armed policemen wanting to see your license when you don’t have one. And this is more particularly so when you know that there is easy gold to be found, and a king’s ransom might be buried just a few inches beneath the surface of your claim. And as most of the diggers have been daily mining gold worth between PS3 and PS5, it is not that hard to come up with the money necessary to get issued with the small piece of paper that allows them to dig legally:

  * * *

  VICTORIA GOLD LICENSE.

  NO.–,

  21 SEPTEMBER, 1851

  THE BEARER _______, HAVING PAID TO ME THE FIFTEEN SHILLINGS, ON ACCOUNT OF THE TERRITORIAL REVENUE, I HEREBY LICENSE HIM TO DIG, SEARCH FOR, AND REMOVE GOLD ON AND FROM THE DISTRICT OF BUNINYONG AND LODDON, AS I SHALL ASSIGN TO HIM FOR THAT PURPOSE DURING THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER, 1851. THE QUANTITY OF GROUND ALLOWED IS EIGHT FEET SQUARE. THE LICENSE TO BE PRODUCED WHEN DEMANDED BY ME, OR ANY OTHER PERSON ACTING UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNMENT.

  F.C. DOVETON,

  COMMISSIONER.

  * * *

  No fewer than 400 of these pieces of paper are issued within the first few days, while within a month there are 1300 and a fortnight after that 2246! It is not long before Captain Dana runs out of the printed licenses and must have new ones hastily written by hand.

  This, at least, is pleasing to the Victorian government as they bring the diggings under their control. Doveton and his hawks are at the prow of how it is to work across all the goldfields. For every newly opened field of major diggings, there will be a government outpost to house a Gold Commissioner, supported by police, to maintain the peace, arrest those who break the law and collect the license fees. Those outposts are to be in clearly defined camps separate from the diggers, replete with many tents to house the police and next to which the Union Jack will, more often than not, be wilting under the hot sun.

  At the beginning of each month there is a crowd around the Commissioner’s tent to get the license, and if some diggers find it onerous to trek the oft four or five miles from their diggings to line up, get papers, trek back and lose half a day in the process - and others simply can’t afford it because their capital is gone and they haven’t found gold yet - then that’s just too damn bad. The lockup, usually no more than the stump of an old tree upon which ‘the prisoners were attached by sundry chains, the handcuff being round one wrist and through a link of the chain’,14 awaits until such a time as they or their friends or family can pay for their license for them. As to the fine, this varies from PS3 to PS10, depending on how long it is judged they have been digging without one. And if they still can’t pay, then they must work out on the roads like a common convict, forfeit their claim and perhaps even be sent to Melbourne to do time in gaol.

  23 September 1851, London, Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx

  The more that Friedrich Engels hears about what is happening in Britain’s southern colonies, the more he is amazed, and he waxes lyrical in his predictions to his friend Karl Marx in London.

  ‘The British will be thrown out and the united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets will startle the world by demonstrating what wonders can be performed by a state consisting of undisguised rascals. They will beat California hollow. But whereas in California rascals are still lynched, in Australia they’ll lynch the honnetes gens [gentry], and Carlyle will see his aristocracy of rogues established in all its glory.’15

  25 September 1851, The Argus asks the question

  Whatever else, however, at least the diggers enjoy the broad support of certain members of the press, and no-one more than the Geelong correspondent of The Argus, Alfred Clarke, who on this day is straight to the point: ‘The full amount of the gold licenses, nay more than the full amount of them, has been exacted; and once more the representative of royalty (I beg Her Majesty’s pardon, for casting so base a slur on her fair name) has unfurled the banner of oppression, and calls on his myrmidons to rally round him, and support him in his attempt to establish a Reign of Terror …

  ‘Mr La Trobe has always been particularly unfortunate in linking himself and the interests of the colony with bad advisers. A man possessed of no mind himself, he has hitherto been ready to confer honourable and responsible appointments on individuals assumed to be gentlemen, and has been in the habit of listening to them, but who are in reality useless foppish whipper snappers; a set of aristocrats reared on a democratic dung-heap; men devoid of common sense, and lost and dead to every sense but that which proclaims their own ignorance, and persuades them that they still are men in form, if not in mind. What would any community of freemen who were working hard for a living think to hear a puppy of an officer talk about “irons,” and handcuffing those who did not pay for the privilege of being allowed to work!’16

  Against such outrages the diggers have appealed to the people. Will the people answer them? That question remains to be answered, but having the press behind them would be a good start.

  September 1851, Mt Alexander region, 50 miles north of Ballarat

  As rich as the pickings at Ballarat prove to be, however, the foraging instinct of the diggers is, as ever, not just to dig down to the riches, but also like ripples on a pond, to spread out to see if there might be even better - or at least less crowded - pickings elsewhere. And it is at this time that the word spreads: some shepherd named Worley has discovered a piece of golden quartz four miles north of Castlemaine in Barkers Creek, lying at the southernmost ridges of Mount Alexander. Within days the first group of restless diggers from Ballarat swoops into the area, and within weeks they move along into the nearby, fabulously auriferous gully of Forrest Creek, which runs east towards Chewton and will give its name to the lucrative Forrest Creek diggings. Always, the search is for the easy alluvial gold, which doesn’t require a great deal of digging.

  Within weeks men are winning up to half a pound of gold per day and by November, ‘two, three, and four pounds per day [is] common amongst the luckies‘ of Forrest Creek.17 Another valuable goldfield has been discovered - one of many soon to be uncovered - that is so strong and so rich, in the early days particularly, that much of the flow of new chums from Melbourne to Ballarat is diverted instead to these Forrest Creek diggings. Just 6000 men had been a part of the first rush on Ballarat, but more than twice as many now race to Mount Alexander’s quartz-covered ranges and what will become 15 square miles of adjoining goldfields centred on Chewton - a number that soon swells to 30,000. Within three months, the Ballarat fields are briefly left all but deserted. These are heady times, and with the growing realisation that it is frequently the first to arrive who get the easiest pickings, there is a constant frenzy to move from one set of goldfields to the next. Only on Sunday does the frantic labour stop, with the Commissioner strictly forbidding any work on the Sabbath.

  The stories - and they are true - soon spread not only to the other diggings, but also, of course, to Melbourne, which is once more agog. One man managed to find 80 pounds of gold in a single hour! Another, using no more than his penknife, if you can believe it, filled a quart pot with nuggets in just one day’s digging!

  Prospectors quickly come to realise that this entire Mt Alexander Range is ‘a prolongation of that of which Buninyong forms a part,’18 and every nook and crann
y of this fresh country, every ridge and gully, every hopeful outcrop of rock - all of it up for grabs! - is now being scoured by hopefuls.

  The net result is that only a few weeks after Forrest Creek has been discovered, the blessed wives of two workers on the Mt Alexander North pastoral property, Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Farrell, find gold while camping next to Bendigo Creek, 24 miles north of Castlemaine. In short order, those diggings are soon opened up. Bendigo Creek proves particularly rich, and in the coming months no fewer than 40,000 diggers will be feverishly working both sides of its banks.

  3-4 October 1851, the Ballarat goldfields receive two visitors …

  Where once was a bubbling creek with no more than an occasional passing shepherd for company, all is changed. Now, a solid mass of men are as busy as ants, trekking back and forth up and down the recently denuded slopes, carrying buckets of dirt, rocking the cradle, ladling water from the creeks to wash it through and spasmodically emitting cries of joy as they gather the gold.

  On this Tuesday, however, the diggers receive a visitor who is not there to join the diggings so much as to have some understanding of them, to inform his future decisions. William Westgarth is a senior member of the colony’s first parliament, which is just about to sit, and the first president of Melbourne’s Chamber of Commerce. He is impressed from the first.

  Conducted to the right spot at Golden Point, he is given a spade and is met with success in an instant: ‘Out of one pound weight of matrix which I removed on the corner of the spade, I picked out 7s 6d worth of gold.’19

  It is a great deal of food for thought. On Westgarth’s way back to Melbourne, he would recount, ‘I mused over all I had seen, and long ere reaching home had concluded that PS10,000 a day was being taken out of Ballarat.’20 It is a staggering amount of wealth coming from a spot that previously produced next to nothing, and clearly the government is quite right to garner its fair share.