Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  The next day, an even more important visitor arrives, with a name more than merely familiar to the diggers. Though in this rustic scene the signs of faraway Melbourne are few, for weeks now government notices warning of penalties for such offences as not having a fully paid license on you at all times have been pinned up and pasted all over the goldfield, always released by authority of ‘His Excellency’ Charles Joseph La Trobe.

  And now, here is the man himself. Here is Lieutenant-Governor Charles Walter Joseph La Trobe, come on his first visit to the diggings and dressed in a frockcoat and tall hat for the occasion.

  ‘Joe!’ cries out a digger upon first sighting him, to the general merriment of all - with the exception of the Lieutenant-Governor, who stiffens at this presumption. But it is too late.

  Joe! Joe! Joe! JOE! Somehow this nickname seems so perfect for Charles Walter Joseph La Trobe that it sticks, and soon it will become not only the sobriquet for La Trobe but indeed all those who represent his authority, from the Gold Districts Commissioners to their retinue of Assistant-Commissioners and clerks and assistants; from the captains who represent the armed might of the British Empire in these parts to their subalterns, sergeants and soldiers; from the police inspectors to their constables and native police who are charged with keeping Her Majesty’s peace on the goldfields. The Joes are the officials, the authorities, the stuffed shirts, those who, without ever lifting a pick in anger or picking up a shovel, presume to rule over the diggers. By defining them, the diggers are also helping to define themselves, the valiant souls who have come here from all over the world to try thier luck. The diggers come from all walks of life, from all classes and levels of education and from many countries. And they’re all equal here - no-one is better than anyone else, so don’t try it on, because no-one cares.

  On this day, though, the Joe in question - the original - goes for a walk around the diggings accompanied by some native police and their white commander, Captain Henry Dana, and is largely ignored by the diggers.

  Still, it is instructional for him. The level of enthusiasm that the diggers have for their task is quickly apparent, and he can see why. He roughly counts 500 cradles being worked by about five times as many men, with another 500 or so men arriving every day - and just about all of them are making huge amounts of money! When he comes to the first shaft, that of William Brownhill, and observes the way he digs for the gold, La Trobe says to the miner pleasantly, ‘Your mother did not think when you came to Australia that you were going to dig gold out of the ground in that manner.’21

  What worries His Excellency, though, is where this labour is coming from, and who is doing the work they have left behind? He even raises with the diggers themselves the possibility of revoking their licenses for as long as two months, until such times as the harvest can be taken in, at which point they would be able to resume. But not to worry, La Trobe assures them, ‘During that time, each man’s allotted space would be carefully guarded, and returned to you.’22

  Very kind of you, Joe. But do you not understand? We are neither convicts nor slaves, but free men. It may well suit you to have us return to the farms to bring in the harvest. But it does not suit us.

  Like Westgarth, La Trobe is quick to notice how well the diggers are doing and at one point witnesses just two tin dishes of dirt producing a staggering eight pounds of gold, while he also hears of a party of diggers who find 16 pounds of gold in the morning and another 15 pounds in the afternoon!

  La Trobe leaves the diggings with much to consider and, upon his return to Melbourne to find it even more abandoned, a growing sense of desperation. On 10 October he writes to the Secretary of State in London, Earl Grey, to update him on the situation:

  ‘It is quite impossible for me to describe to your lordship the effect which these discoveries have had upon the whole community … Within the last three weeks the towns of Melbourne and Geelong and their large suburbs have been in appearance almost emptied of many classes of their male inhabitants … Not only have the idlers to be found in every community, and day labourers in town and the adjacent country, shopmen, artisans, and mechanics of every description thrown up their employments and in most cases leaving their employers and their wives and families to take care of themselves, run off to the workings, but responsible tradesmen, farmers, clerks of every grade, and not a few of the superior classes have followed; some, unable to withstand the mania and force of the stream, but others because they were, as employers of labour, left in the lurch, and had no other alternative. Cottages are deserted, houses to let, business is at a standstill, and even schools are closed. In some of the suburbs not a man is left, and the women are known, for self-protection, to group together to keep house. The ships in the harbour are in a great measure deserted … Even masters of vessels, like farmers, have made up parties with their men to go shares at the diggings … Both here and at Geelong all buildings and contract works, public and private, are at a stand-still.’23

  For his part, Earl Grey - though perhaps drinking some calming tea with his famous father’s name to it - is nothing if not alarmed to read the missive. Apart from everything else, the wool provided by the colonies is the staple that the British textile industry depends upon. Without it, that industry would struggle.

  The solution for Charles Joseph La Trobe right now? Well, if it is not to revoke the licenses - both his experience on the goldfields and subsequent advice received concur that the resistance to such a move would be overwhelming - then perhaps at least they should be more expensive? Perhaps even doubled in fee? That would simultaneously limit the number of would-be goldminers deserting to the fields and ensure that those who are mining generate more revenue for the government’s coffers, which are becoming ever more depleted by the steadily increasing expenditure necessary to administer the goldfields and the steeply rising wages that must be paid to those civil servants decent enough to remain in their workplaces and keep Victoria functioning. Compounding La Trobe’s financial problems is the insistence by the Legislative Council that none of the colony’s general revenue be spent on ‘any services for anything which in its opinion is consequent on the discovery and search for gold’.24 The heavy cost of administering and policing the goldfields, thus, can only come from the license fees themselves.

  24 October 1851 The Melbourne Morning Herald reports …

  A HOAX

  Yesterday Mr George Say amused himself in cooking up a cock and bull story about gold being found in the gutter at the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston streets, and very near his late public house, the ‘St George and Dragon’. He had the impudence to bring a specimen of it (as he called it) to our office, and told all manner of lies to induce us to perpetrate the hoax on the public. It appears that he procured a piece of quartz from some place or another, and over this lie had sprinkled some gold-beaten leaf, and had rubbed some of the leaf into the crevices of the ‘sample’ to form the delusion. If Mr Say gets his window smashed in some fine night for carrying on such vagaries, we will not pity him one bit.25

  James Daley, the long-dead convict who had first faked the discovery of gold for his own ends to try to fool Governor Phillip would have been proud - and unsurprised that the ruse did not work.

  1 November 1851, Melbourne, La Trobe worries

  It is not quite that Victoria has fulfilled Governor Gipps’s warning of 12 years before - that if gold fever takes hold then ‘we will all have our throats cut’26 - but things are still worrying Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe. For the general madness that has taken hold of Victoria is now so strong that, on this day, Charles La Trobe writes to Governor-General FitzRoy to request an increase to his small military force in Victoria. He later informs Earl Grey in the London Colonial Office of his hope that this action proves sufficient, ‘happen what may’, to safeguard the gaols, banks and public buildings.27

  For its part, The Melbourne Morning Herald is quick to express the common mood among those of the better classes. ‘It is sad,’ it opines wearily, ‘t
hat the gentleman should change places with the lucky blackguard.’28

  Early November 1851, the Ballarat goldfields widen, deepen … and rise

  Meanwhile, the stream of people heading to the diggings continues to swell, to the point that it becomes first a river of humanity heading to specific spots and then nothing less than a flood as those people spread across the land, frantically fossicking for the treasures they know abound there, if only they can be the first to find them. On those goldfields, where there had been complete wilderness only months before, there are now entire tent cities, with some solid structures even sprouting among them.

  Look there, now, at what used to be Yuille’s Run. From the hilltops looking down into the valley at night, the hundreds and hundreds of fires make the new arrivals look like an occupying army, and in many ways that is exactly what they are. The diggers sit around these fires, warming themselves and smoking their pipes, even as they cook their meals of damper and mutton chops … and damper … with perhaps a little more damper after that, and boil their billies of tea.

  The blackfellas, who had been in these parts for thousands of years, have almost all left for parts unknown, having been hunted off the rest of their traditional lands, with only the occasional group to be seen here and there on the fringes of the encampments, living in their ‘humpies’. These structures consist of two forked sticks placed upright in the ground, with one horizontal stick perched between them, and upon that the Aborigines rest tree branches and large slabs of bark to give themselves partial protection from the weather.

  ‘They lie all around their fires at night,’ writes one digger to his family at home, ‘and all the covering they wear is a possum rug or a blanket thrown around them. Their principal food is the possum which they find out by knocking on the trees, and where they find a hollow sound they cut open the tree and so catch the opossum. They also kill Turkeys, pigeons and parrots with the boomerang which they are very expert at throwing.’29

  In truth, the diggers themselves are only marginally less nomadic than the natives, as the vast majority of them remain in calico tents and are capable of moving on short notice should news arrive of some other goldfield where the pickings are even greater. (Already, many have gone to try their luck at the new diggings at Forrest Creek.) True, a very few have constructed rough huts using split logs - known as ‘slabs’ - of eucalyptus trees and bark, but these are rudimentary shelters at best, and actually closer to rude.

  Still, by now the settlement at Ballarat is starting to be established enough that some canvas saloons are even opening up for those who can afford a bit of fun. And many tents are in fact by now like small houses, frequently built around the solid structure of a large fireplace with a chimney, and a large hearth for cooking on.

  The vast majority of diggers don’t mind the Aborigines who remain around and about. As recorded in the diary of one digger, Thomas Pierson, ‘They are given to theft otherwise inoffensive if not put up to be otherwise by whites, the bushrangers get them for guides.’30

  The diggers mostly want what is in their land, not this particular bit of land itself, and that is a crucial difference. Many of the Aborigines manage to survive by trading with the diggers. They give the diggers the amazingly warm and light possum skin cloaks that only they know how to make; in return, the diggers give to them grog and some of their strange food. And sometimes the diggers will pay to see them get all painted up and perform corroborees or show how they throw their boomerangs, something they are also asked to do for visiting dignitaries.

  From late 1851 onwards, there are even - and this is an enormous breakthrough when they first arrive - a few white women. At first, when a woman very occasionally appeared on the diggings, the cry would go up, ‘There’s a woman!’,31 and instantly the tents would empty and head after head would pop up from the mine-shaft to gaze longingly upon her fine form while the suddenly self-conscious lady walked past, usually behind her suddenly protective and glowering husband.

  ‘There was no man, having the heart of a man, who did not bless the vision [of a woman],’ one of the first chroniclers of the times, William Bramwell Withers, would record, ‘while many an eye was moistened with the sudden tear as love, hope, disappointment, fear, struggled all at once in the homeless digger’s bosom.’32

  And, sure enough, where those women settle, the immediate area is soon brightened and practised eyes can spot her influence. The tins outside the tent are suddenly brighter; a suspended rope soon appears, on which is hung freshly washed laundry, including actual sheets; ‘a pet cockatoo, chained to a perch, makes noise enough to keep the “missus” from feeling lonely when the good man is at work’;33 and, of course, that good man is seen to have a smile for the first time in weeks - even a gleam in his eye - as he heads back to his tent after a long day’s digging.

  As to grog, well, that is a little more problematic … but only a little. In an effort to keep good order, the government has placed a strict prohibition on the sale of liquors, but that is easily got around. For sly grog sellers are everywhere. They are men who either buy up big in Melbourne and smuggle it to the goldfields in the middle of drays carrying other supplies, or they have their own stills and make it themselves. Either way, if it is grog you want - nearly always hard liquor because wine and ales are far too bulky and expensive to cart - there is never a problem.

  A nearby visitor noted, ‘No official supervision could prevent the smuggling of liquors, mostly of the vilest description.’34

  But it is still alcohol!

  Drink up, lads, for tomorrow we may find gold!

  6 November 1851, Geelong gets along

  On this day a gold buyer in Geelong - an admittedly new occupation in this city - is just walking along, minding his own business, when a rather rough-looking character (who still can’t be as bad as he smells) suddenly heaves into view, looking right at him. Is he about to be assaulted? Robbed?

  ‘Mr …’ the fellow addresses him. ‘I hear you’re a gold buyer.’

  ‘Yes,’ replies the Geelong man carefully, his nostrils twitching.

  ‘What are you giving?’

  Ah-hah! The fellow only wants to trade gold! Relieved, the buyer replies, ‘Oh, if it’s a good sample, PS3 per ounce, but I don’t care about buying very small lots. How much have you?’

  ‘I suppose pretty handy - 60 pounds.’35

  11 November 1851, The Argus reports …

  It is not pretty reading. For this report, coming from Ballarat, informs the readers of Melbourne and wider Victoria what happens when a freshly arrived digger jumps into an abandoned hole to try his luck. Two government troopers arrive and ask him why he is in this hole. The digger, something of a ‘larrikin’, answers, ‘To wear out my old clothes’.36

  For his trouble, the unfortunate digger finds himself handcuffed and chained to a tree until the next morning! And now the correspondent of The Argus plaintively asks the question: ‘Now I ask Mr La Trobe if this is conduct to be tolerated. Is this the way to secure the goodwill of diggers who have plenty of arms and ammunition with them? Was this man a slave? Was he a wild beast? What was he? A free man, and to be thus treated.’37

  The reaction of the diggers themselves is reported to be equally savage, as placards soon appear all over the goldfields exhorting the diggers:

  DOWN WITH LA TROBE! - - THE COMMISSIONERS! PAY NO LICENSES. ATTEND THE MEETING TONIGHT. THE GOVERNMENT OFFICERS ARE - - - SCOUNDRELS.38

  Such protests are deemed to be a good thing by The Argus correspondent, for, ‘Where is the man who will try to vindicate the conduct of the Government officials? They have been charged with partiality, imbecility, fraud and ignorance from the commencement of their career, and there they still remain. Whose blood would not boil at such a disgraceful stretch of authority as is here exhibited! Or who would not rather support the man thus shamefully ill-treated, than use his tongue, much less his arm, in defence of this mockery of a Government!’39

  The journalist goes further
and takes direct aim at the irresponsible man who is most responsible for the coming disaster: ‘If Mr La Trobe is courting future fame, he will very soon have the honour of having his name handed down to posterity as the man who [severed] the few remaining links that still bound Victoria to the Parent State, for no man will sanction such acts of tyranny as this and when the diggers once resist his authority, that moment he may take ship, and flee the country.’40

  22 November 1851, the glad gold tidings spread to London and beyond

  The news of the goldfields in Australia, particularly the staggering account of the finding of the Kerr Nugget, continues to spread throughout the world. On this day, The Illustrated London News has the headline story ‘The Gold Discovery In Australia’, and is beside itself with enthusiasm: ‘We have accounts of the progress made at “the digging” which shows that Australia is likely to surpass California in the wonderful productiveness of its fields. We learn, for instance, by the present advices, that in one hole lumps of gold weighing altogether 106 lb were picked up by an individual.’41

  Typical is the reaction of an 18-year-old Scotsman by the name of William Craig, whose entire soul comes alive as he reads the thrilling news from Australia.

  ‘YES, that’s the land for me!’ he would later describe his feelings. ‘A continent in itself, inhabited by only a few civilised beings and wild aborigines, while millions of acres of good land are waiting settlement by people of the right stamp.’42

  Another who is impressed by the things he reads in The Illustrated London News is none other than that red-headed Latin man of action, former Italian revolutionary Raffaello Carboni.