Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Curnow, having been released on the plea that his wife was expecting a baby, returned home southwards along the line, collected a red scarf to screen a candle, and bravely signalled the train to stop at the station rather than thunder through to Beechworth. Ned’s idea of taking those on the train hostage was stymied.

  Amongst those held at the Jones inn was Constable Bracken, a local policeman, who when the train pulled up and the bushrangers began armouring themselves escaped and ran to the station to join up with the disembarking party, whose passengers included Superintendents Hare and Nicholson, Stanhope O’Connor, the officer in charge of the black trackers specially brought along, and two women who had come as spectators. In all, fifty-seven police would be involved in the siege.

  Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, confronted by the police, left a bonfire blazing in the open and used Mrs Jones’ hotel as a flimsy fortress. Ned was in the bush nearby. The police fire led to Byrne being wounded in the thigh and bleeding to death. Ned was wounded in the foot, hand and arm. At about 5 a.m. Ned, looming through the early mist in his armour and rapping its steel plates to attract police fire, made his way to join his confederates in the hotel, and on the way took many wounds in the legs. More police arrived half an hour later. Inside the hotel Ned could not find Dan or Steve because they were in one of the back rooms. He assumed they had already escaped on horseback, and walked into the backyard of the hotel to find his horse. It had fled.

  It was dawn when the police at the northern end of the hotel saw Ned emerge from the mist again, a terrible figure in his armour. ‘Come on,’ he called, ‘and we will lick the lot of the bloody police.’ Ned fell with a total of twenty-eight wounds in his extremities, and the police moved in and removed his helmet. Sergeant Steele wanted to kill him as he lay there, but Constable Bracken, who had been Kelly’s hostage, prevented him. Around 10 a.m., by which time the morning passenger train from Wangaratta had arrived by way of the now-repaired rail, civilian spectators were calling on the police to grant a truce and stop firing on the hotel, where there were still hostages. Superintendent Sadleir, who had taken over from Hare when Hare was wounded in the hand and would be demoted for his inflammatory part in the whole Kelly business, allowed a ceasefire.The hostages came out and were forced to lie on the ground until their identity was checked. By now Ned’s sister Maggie Skillion and Father Matthew Gibney, who earlier had given the last rites to Ned, offered to act as intermediaries to get Dan and Steve to surrender, but the police threatened to shoot Maggie if she went near the building. At 2.30 p.m. the hotel was set alight by a policeman under covering fire. Father Gibney protested to Sadleir, ignored his orders and ran into the burning hotel. He found Byrne’s dead body where it had fallen by the bar, and in the back room Dan Kelly and Steve Hart lying side by side, their heads on rolled blankets, their armour by their side, a dead dog at their feet. He presumed they had suicided but in fact it seems they had been laid out in that dignified manner by one of the Kelly supporters who had broken into the inn, a friend known to and ever after cherished by the Kelly clan. Flames drove Gibney out of the hotel, and the police dragged Byrne’s body free and rescued the wounded Martin Cherry, last of the prisoners, who died almost immediately.

  When Dan Kelly’s body, consumed by fire to below the knees, was drawn out of the ruins, Maggie Skillion and her sister Kate Kelly leaned over it keening. Ned, with two dozen or more wounds to the arms and legs, was transferred south to Benalla with the body of Joe Byrne. And so on to the ‘Such is life’ consummation, the trial in Melbourne and the hanging in Melbourne Gaol.

  As far as south-eastern Australia was concerned, bushranger-ism died with Ned. No later outlaws seized the popular imagination in that way and to anything like that extent. When Ned died in 1880, the Melbourne establishment were beginning to develop financial structures which would operate so fraudulently that Ned’s raids on banks would be modest by comparison.

  Charles Rasp had been born in 1846 at Stuttgart and became a chemical technologist in Hamburg. When in 1868 he suffered a serious lung infection, it was decided he should move from Germany to a warmer climate. When he first arrived in Melbourne in 1869 he pruned vines before becoming a boundary rider on Walwa Station and then on the Mount Gipps Station in the Barrier Ranges in the far west of New South Wales. There had been discoveries of silver at Silverton and a place named Daydream and now every station hand was searching for indications of the metal.

  When the shearing season occurred at Mount Gipps in September 1883, twenty shearers worked in the long stone shed and the boundary riders trotted in with the sheep from distant paddocks. Thirty-seven-year-old Charles Rasp, who was fetching sheep in from 12 miles out to the south end of the run, carried with him a book on prospecting and began to chip at the rocks and gather samples at the site known as ‘the broken hill’. The samples were very black and heavy for their size and Rasp thought that perhaps they were tin. On the advice of his station manager, George McCulloch, a syndicate of seven was formed and seven blocks were pegged out across the whole ridge. McCulloch, a university graduate who had tried to farm in Mexico, was a heavy-built Scot, loud-voiced and genial, who delighted in feats of strength and practical jokes, but who was hard up from long drought. The broken hill would transform his fortunes and, like Rasp, he too would live a rich man—in his case until 1907.

  Each of the seven members of the syndicate invested £70 in the Broken Hill Mining Company which was now formed, though without official registration. Each partner also paid £1 per week so that the claim could be worked. An analyst’s report done in Adelaide was disappointing but it was found the analyst had only tested for tin. When the rocks were tested for silver the results were different. Rich silver ore was found and a Broken Hill Proprietary Company was set up, and 16 000 £20 shares sold. Within five years Rasp had made his fortune. When dividends were declared, he was able to move to Adelaide, marry there and buy a house, Willyama, where he and his wife Agnes lived as grandees. Agnes entertained and Rasp amassed a huge library of French and German books. The man with the weak chest would also live until 1907.

  MORE KANAKA SCANDALS

  In 1880, two Queensland government health officers, C.K. Hill-Wray and John Thomson, carried out a full statistical investigation of ten large plantations in the Maryborough district. They found that the death rate of Kanakas was up to twenty times greater than among white men of similar age groups. Nearly 500 native deaths had occurred on the ten plantations in the previous five years, yet not one death certificate had been forwarded to the registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages. When the largest plantation was inspected by the two doctors, twenty-six Kanakas were lying in their huts sick, with four of them close to death, yet no medical aid had been summoned. Some planters were accused of letting Kanakas die towards the end of their indenture, so that their wages were forfeited. One observer, William Thomas Reay, a Melbourne Herald journalist, said that Kanaka women were forced to work late into their pregnancies and then came back to work a few days after giving birth, often with a half-caste baby.

  The Melbourne journalist George Ernest Morrison, who would later achieve fame as ‘China’ Morrison, posed as an ordinary seaman aboard the Lavinia, out of the port of Mackay, when it took about twenty natives who were too ill for further plantation work back to their homes in the New Hebrides. On his first night aboard the Lavinia, he heard someone groaning by the windlass. He found a boy of about fourteen. The boy stood—‘his withered little frame, already in the hands of death . . . and tottered down to his bunk and the first night at sea he died and his body was let into the deep’. Morrison was appalled that a health official in Mackay, Dr Robert McBurney, part-owner of the Lavinia, had let this mortally ill boy undertake an impossible voyage. Morrison’s later article for the Age mentioned amongst other things the impact upon women—‘whose presence aboard turns the ship into a “brothel” and whose experience on the mainland almost invariably transformed a p
retty, chaste girl into a diseased hag within the three years ashore’. Native hospitals were built in some areas and a tax of £1 per labourer was levied to pay for them. Nevertheless, the overall death rate of Kanakas in Queensland was reduced only to eight times that of white men.

  By the early 1880s the profits to be made out of an industry employing islander labour had begun to attract the attention of many of the devout Presbyterian capitalists of Melbourne and Sydney. Pioneer planters now sold out their sugar plantations to the capitalists from the south, the original owner sometimes staying on as supervisor. The 6000-acre Hambledon estate near Cairns, for example, was sold to Thomas Swallow, founder of Swallow & Ariell, the biscuit manufacturer seeking sugar to sustain his industry.

  The blackbirders had by now been driven out of the New Hebrides by the Royal Navy, and so turned to New Guinea as a source of labour. Premier Sir Thomas McIlwraith, who would temporarily annex New Guinea to Queensland, was a partner in the North Australian Pastoral Company, which was at this stage transforming pastoral land into sugar plantations. He needed Kanaka labourers and had the ships to bring them to Queensland.

  The island trading company Burns Philp was also involved in blackbirding in the 1880s. The Heath, the Hopeful and the Minny were amongst the Burns Philp vessels used for recruiting. The Heath was the oldest of the fleet, and had been rejected by insurance companies as unseaworthy, but still managed to bring back several cargoes of Kanakas. Late in 1883, when Premier McIlwraith was defeated at the polls, the new premier, Samuel Griffiths, prosecuted the master of the Heath for recruiting islanders under false pretences. The master served a gaol term. Burns Philp sued the government for the financial loss involved, losing the case only after years of legal manoeuvring. The captain, recruiting agent, government agent, mate, boatswain and two crew members of the Hopeful were prosecuted for kidnapping and murder. All were found guilty on the kidnapping charges, and the recruiting agent and the boatswain were also found guilty of having shot dead two natives. A boy of five had two empty coconuts tied under his arms and was thrown overboard. The crew saw him drown in the surf. Two crew members, McNeil and Williams, were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, and a petition on their behalf was later organised and signed by 28 000 supporters of the Kanaka industry in Queensland. When in 1888 the Griffith government lost office and Boyd Dunlop Morehead became premier, he ordered the release of the two murderers and four kidnappers and they were carried through the streets of Brisbane by cheering crowds. The import of Kanakas was nonetheless suspended.

  As depression hit in 1890, many of the mills and plantations were closing. But in 1892, Samuel Griffith rose in Parliament to announce the ‘temporary reintroduction’ of the Kanaka trade to enable sugar growers to cut their costs and survive. The reformer William Brookes, dying, had himself carried to the Queensland Parliament on a stretcher to oppose the bill in the Legislative Council, and spoke for an hour. The proponents of White Australia opposed the new Kanaka bill too, complaining that imported native labourers worked for fourpence a day, and white men could not compete. The British government also protested. But a further 11 000 natives were recruited.

  The activities of the Queensland government were not acceptable to the Commonwealth Parliament when it met in 1901. A Pacific Island Labourers Act was quickly passed prohibiting the importation of natives after 1904, and arranging for the repatriation of survivors in Australia. Robert Philp, who was now Premier of Queensland—on being offered a seat in the first federal parliament he had declined because he was too busy with trade—warned Prime Minister Barton of the attitude of Queensland people. For the huge plantations were now a vested interest not only for Colonial Sugar Refinery’s many shareholders but for almost every other white resident. Queensland fought a rearguard action, asking the British government to disallow the Commonwealth Act. The final Commonwealth Act allowed natives who had lived in Australia for more than twenty years to continue to do so, as well as those who owned land, and those who were too old and sick to return. Even with these wide exceptions only about 1300 natives remained. So did the unmarked graves of the island recruits to Queensland labour.

  DROUGHT AND BISHOP MOORHOUSE

  The second Bishop of Melbourne, James Moorhouse, born in England in 1826, was a very modern churchman. He did not believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible and, in nineteenth-century Victoria, asserted that the laws of God now operated in the sphere of morals and belief, but could not prevail against natural law. He was enthusiastic and amiable, and travelled the farming areas for two or three months a year.

  A great controversy arose in 1882 over his attitude to drought, and the extent to which prayer could deliver the drought-bullied farmer. Travelling through the Mallee to Kerang, he had been shocked by the desiccated countryside, and by the sight of abandoned and boarded-up farmhouses. When he reached Kerang, a town surrounded by dried-up lakes and lagoons, Anglicans from that region asked him to institute a special day of prayer. From that request came his famous aphorism, ‘Don’t pray for rain, dam it.’ He was aware, he said, that there was terrible distress, but while miracles had been essential in the church’s early days to attract converts, they would not occur now. Climatic laws were what now operated. If God intervened as a result of prayer, it would militate against that foresight, industry and prudence that farming in Australia demanded and which sensible farmers should display. ‘Prayers for rain may indeed be pressed out of my heart by anguish . . . but I cannot say, because I do not think, that such a prayer is that of an instructed and spiritually-minded Christian.’ The aridity of the continent of Australia was not a problem for God but for man.

  His views outraged many, both in the region in which they were uttered and, via a report in the Argus, in Melbourne as well. The bishop’s arguments seemed heartless to some. Dean Slattery, an Irish-born priest in Geelong, argued, with considerable respect for Moorhouse’s reputation and gifts, that prayers against natural disasters existed not only in Catholicism but in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. The bishop was forced to reply to his critics and did so vigorously but stood by his principles. ‘Let a man be ever so righteous and prayerful, if he neglect to comply with the order of nature, he will be unprosperous.’

  THE END OF DICKENS’ ORPHANS

  At the time of this controversy, the stock and station agency E.B.L. Dickens and Company, founded by Plorn and Alfred Dickens in Melbourne in 1882, operated as a realtor for the pastoral industry, but also offered to purchase goods in any city for transportation to stations. Plorn Dickens promised that he and Alfred would personally supervise the buying and packing of these supplies. The Australasian wrote, ‘How the Dickens can I put it? Best plainly. Two sons of Charles Dickens are about to commence business as station agents in Melbourne.’ But the conditions to which Bishop Moorhouse had reacted would continue to shape the fortunes of the Dickens boys.

  Still the ambition to be more than an agent existed. In September 1882 that year, Plorn invested £2000 on leases for South Australian land, 2000–3000 square miles (approximately 5000–8000 square kilometres) in country north of Lake Eyre. Why Plorn would buy into land beyond Goyder’s Line is hard to discern. Despite rumours of a copper find in the near-desert, he would never mine or run livestock in the country. The leases would in any case be cancelled in 1885.

  He returned to Wilcannia in 1883 to begin a Wilcannia branch of the company, leaving Alfred to run the company in Melbourne. He folded his own company into a Western Pastoral Agency he founded with two other Wilcannians, one of whom would soon go south to the emergent silver settlement of Broken Hill, which was the coming town in the region. Shares in the Broken Hill Proprietary Company would rise from a preposterous £175 in January 1888 to £409 in February that year. Within seven years the mining population of Broken Hill would reach 20 000.

  His partners in the agency went under and he was left on his own. The town of Wilcannia en
dured. It had 2000 people and its warehouses and stores withstood both heat and cold. The Athenaeum Club and Library of Wilcannia was opened in a torrid January 1884, and the Druids and Oddfellows and Masonic Lodges honoured it with a procession through town. On that same hot day in January three large stations were auctioned by a larger brokerage, but in collaboration with E.B.L. Dickens and Co. Two of these properties had been put up for sale by Plorn’s father-in-law and one by his brother-in-law, all as an attempt to rationalise their holdings on account of the drought. The April 1884 Jockey Club meet had to be cancelled because of dust storms, which the writer Tom Collins described as ‘Wilcannia showers’. Barges and steamers were stranded at various places along the river as it dried out.

  Before the end of 1884, drought or not, Edward had fulfilled the duty of any robust colonial gentleman, being elected president both of the Jockey Club, though his own fine horses had been sold by then, and the Cricket Club. He also began to take an interest in land legislation made in Parliament in Sydney’s Macquarie Street for regions many of the politicians had never clapped eyes on. Out in this dry country, Edward considered the selectors ‘not farmers but blackmailers’. That is, they selected or threatened to select a farm of 320 acres, the legislatively decreed size of a selection, knowing it could not sustain them, and waited for the pastoralist to buy them off. Edward was elected honorary secretary of the Land Bill Opposition Society and was even involved in a Separation League which threatened to cut the west off from the state of New South Wales and make it its own colony. On the day he attended the first meeting of the Separation League in 1884, the land gave its own comment on the separatist dream by sending a dust storm which enclosed the town in an orb of red dimness. Edward remained a secessionist and moved the proposal that a petition on the matter be sent to the British government.