Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Utopian novels were written about the coming Federation, about an Australia transformed by female franchise, just wages and peace. Catherine Helen Spence wrote a novel in 1888, A Week in the Future, in which a woman who is dying is offered the chance to spend a week in the federated Australia of 1988. She finds the working day shortened to six hours, accommodation organised collectively, disease and inebriation conquered, women liberated through equal education, the Empire vanished. Spence was an incarnation of that connection between cultural and political yearning which created Federation. She had been born in Scotland but brought to raw South Australia in 1840 as an infant. She became a leading campaigner for proportional representation in Australian parliaments and would become Australia’s first female political candidate when she stood for election as a delegate to the 1897 Federal Convention. She was defeated in great part by the belief amongst many males that just because women could by then vote in South Australia (though not in any other colony), it did not mean they could necessarily be elected to Parliament. In Western Australia, under the influence of the same nexus of women’s organisations that had won women’s suffrage in South Australia, Western Australia also granted women the vote. Her advocacy for the Hare-Spence form of proportional representation (in part by having a number of candidates per electorate) was supported by the early Labor Party, since it gave them the best chance of penetrating the colonial legislatures.

  Spence was a leader in the fight for female franchise in South Australia, achieved in 1894, and was interested in Federation for its possibility of delivering the franchise for women. Working with her had been the Australian Women’s Suffrage Society, formed in 1889, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Organisation. These bodies would all support Federation, since Federation would create the possibility of giving the vote to women nationally, and reluctant states would have to follow. The Women’s Temperance Organisation throughout Australia believed in far more than mere control of drinking, and thus preventing male brutality and family poverty. Women’s petitions for the vote and equal rights in marriage and property were presented to the 1897 convention, including that of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales, signed by, amongst others, the formidable and eloquent Rose Scott, cousin and soul mate of David Mitchell, from whom the famed library would derive. Another campaigner for women’s suffrage and thus Federation was Maybanke Wolstenholme, who had learned her feminism from being married to a shiftless man. She kept a boarding-house to support her children, many of whom died in infancy.

  A petition from the Women’s Suffrage League addressed to the delegates of the crucial 1897 convention asked that in a new federal constitution the women of all colonies be empowered to choose their representatives ‘so that United Australia may become a true democracy resting upon the will of the whole and not half of the people’. (In the event, the Commonwealth would accede to the franchise demand not in the constitution itself but the year following Federation.)

  There were predictable reactions to women’s activism, not least from the Bulletin.

  Pray, lovely Woman, cease to tease

  The Candidates with tearful pleas

  About your suffrage matter.

  Give us a chance pray, if you please,

  To federate the colonies

  Without your endless chatter.

  There were many at the convention of 1897 in Adelaide who supported female franchise but did not want to see it in the draft constitution for fear that in the coming referendum on the constitution some men would vote no specifically because it guaranteed the female vote. Apart from primitive male supremacists, there were socialists and libertarians who feared that women’s votes would create a society run by clergymen. The compromise was the proposed Section 41, which said that no adult person who had the right to vote in state elections would be prevented from voting federally. At the time South Australian women had the right to vote in their state, and since it would be an absurdity for women of merely one state to be empowered to vote in a federal election, the other states would be forced to introduce women’s franchise. The right of all women to vote federally would be covered by any eventual Franchise Act.

  Rose Scott wasn’t happy with that. In her house in Woollahra, which had been a salon for all the best colonial minds, she let furious ink flow. ‘We don’t want any “ifs” in a matter in which our absolute rights are concerned!’ Not trusting the all-male framers of the constitution, she began to campaign against it, becoming what was called an ‘anti-Billite’. The Golding sisters, Annie and Belle, girls from the bush, schoolteacher and public servant, more socialist and less affluent than Rose and often clashing with her in the suffrage movement, also saw the draft constitution as a men’s plan to ‘rivet chains on generations yet unborn, chains that will gall, chains that will drag them down, and never, never break’.

  GOING FOR GOLD

  Gold still possessed the power to compel men into deserts when it was reported in the 1880s from the Kimberleys, the Pilbara, the Murchison River and Southern Cross. It was a matter of mania and besottedness. Copper seemed a plainer mineral. It did not evoke images of men galloping out of the wilderness to register claims in town, though. The South Australians had nonetheless enjoyed the steady success of copper mining at Moontah, Kapunda and Burra, where Cornish miners considered themselves lucky and prosperous, for decades. In 1871, for example, South Australia produced one-tenth of the world’s copper despite having a settler population of a little less than 200 000. But they were willing to bring to copper the same speculative habits as operated with gold speculation companies. A former Scots opium trader between China and Calcutta, Captain (later Sir) Walter Watson Hughes, had founded the copper operations at Wallaroo on a station of his near the sand dunes of Spencer’s Gulf as early as 1861. Hugh’s mine at Wallaroo had, as happened with most mineral booms, been discovered by a shepherd named James Boor, and the shaft site was chosen for Captain Hughes by Cornish miners, who are said to have used the old Cornish process of standing on likely deposit areas, swinging a pick over their heads and beginning to sink a shaft where it landed. And there was galloping, Hughes sending stockmen on fast horses to Adelaide to register his finds. He also went looking for copper on another property of his, Moonta, south of Port Pirie, inland a few miles from Port Hughes.

  All Adelaide entrepreneurs, including William Finke, patron of John McDouall Stuart, were able with as much panache as any eastern entrepreneur to offload their mining leases in London. Such companies as the Great Northern Copper Mining Company of South Australia appeared. When the governor himself, the difficult, dogmatic and spiky Sir Richard MacDonnell, rode out to see the site of the mine in whose London prospectus his opinion had been falsely quoted, and whose shares were being sold for enormous profit in London, he found an abandoned shaft.

  South Australian wheat and produce fed the Victorian and New South Wales goldfields, but that did not bring in the masses of people gold had brought to New South Wales and Victoria. In 1863 the government had sought the services of Hargreaves, the man reputed to have found gold in New South Wales. Moaning about rheumatism in his hand, he fossicked to little effect in country out beyond Port Augusta.

  South Australia, as mentioned elsewhere, became exuberant and speculative about mining leases in their Northern Territory, and later about the desert finds in Western Australia. The Coolgardie Gold Mining and Prospecting Syndicate was Adelaide-based. Those who raised money by company float to invest in mining had a speculative streak as big as the individual, pioneering prospector. They were often men who loved and gambled on horse-racing. They were often the ones, not the discoverers such as Paddy Hannan of Kalgoorlie and the strapping Arthur Bayley of Coolgardie, who profited from the rushes others began. In many cases, they were profiting not with mineral realities, the only way a prospector could profit, but—as Sir Richard MacDonnell discovered—with rumours and feverish dreams.

  In the
far south of the country the Mount Lyell copper mine in Tasmania had become famous by the 1890s. Mount Lyell was on the west coast of Tasmania and it too had begun as a gold-mining lease. All equipment needed to be brought in by way of the town of Strahan, and the difficulty of moving supplies over that most rugged of terrains kept the original gold-mining company a modest operation. In 1892 two Adelaide immigrants, A.E. Bowes Kelly from Galway and William Orr from Fifeshire, both of them original shareholders in BHP, tried a silver claim at Zeehan, on Tasmania’s west coast, which failed, but then bought out the Mount Lyell lease and began copper mining. Ultimately a railway would be built to Strahan and a brilliant metallurgist named Robert Sticht would build a smelting plant and have eleven blast furnaces operating. An appalling fire in 1912 killed forty-two men in the chambers of the mine, but as the war began in 1914 the company had built its own hydroelectric system to bring power to the mine and settled down to supplying a considerable portion of a murderous world’s appetite for the metal.

  The 1887 gold rush at Croydon, Queensland, south-east of the Gulf of Carpentaria, had found uncertain success in a tropical but water-starved landscape of humpies, desolation, typhoid fever, puerperal fever in women who gave birth there, and dysentery. It survived on the misery of its diggers. But Charters Towers, south-west of Townsville, had become so massive a source that its proud miners and citizens referred to it as ‘The World’. The legend is that in 1871 a twelve-year-old Aboriginal boy named Jupiter Mossman discovered the first nugget while chasing horses stampeded by a flash of lightning. But it was only when commercial mining began that Charters Towers became the second most important town in Queensland, many of its buildings, including its stock exchange, as grand as those of the Victorian goldfields. It would become profitably connected with the stock exchange in London, with the more knowing brokers operating in Charters Towers, whose earth and possibilities they had a sense of, rather than in London where it was merely a promise and a name.

  In 1886, a Colonial and Indian Exhibition was staged in London and was visited by 5 million Britons. The Queensland display consisted of a stamp mill demonstrating the crushing of a hundred tons of gold-bearing rock from Charters Towers. A Charters Towers mine owner named Thomas Mills had raised up above the heads of the visitors to the exhibition a lump of gold worth £6000. He was able to float a new mine on the basis of the investment money he raised from those who stood beneath it and gawped up at it. Charters Towers residents, delighted at the sudden and unreal escalation of their own various shares, could not invent enough companies to satisfy the British frenzy for them. Many owners of useless Charters Towers leases simply took them to London and sold them for massive returns. The stockbrokers of Charters Towers employed large numbers of sales representatives, who went about selling to investors in other cities. Charters Towers was throughout the early 1890s the richest goldfield of all, even more so in that period than Mount Morgan. Its gold was deep, but in entire reefs.

  Many gold rushes began with a short period of secrecy followed by a fevered announcement to the world. News of gold mining at a hill known as Ironstone Mountain, inland from Rockhampton, was kept secret from the 1860s by a stockman named William Mackinlay. It was hard for him to do more than wash the alluvial soil at the base of the hill whose ironstone cap seemed to declare that there was no gold of much worth to be had there. Frederick Morgan, the owner of the Criterion Hotel in Rockhampton, was taken to the hill in 1882 by Mackinlay’s son-in-law, Sandy Gordon. Frederick Morgan had a speculative streak in him and had already received returns from a goldfield at Galawa near Mount Wheeler, and Sandy Gordon had been under threat of sacking from that mine. His wife promised that if the Morgan brothers would keep Gordon on, she would make him lead them to a silver mine near Rockhampton. An alcoholic saving himself from the sack was the trigger for the richest Australian gold mine of all.

  For they did not find silver at the Ironstone Mountain, soon to be renamed Mount Morgan, but there were signs of gold within the crevices of the ironstone cap. After three days’ work, they sent Gordon away on horseback with stones for assay, but he turned in to the Dairy Inn on the way and was not seen again by the Morgans. Frederick Morgan and his brothers, Thomas and Edwin, acquired the lease for the hill and took out a number of nearby mineral claims. The Morgans were, however, uncertain about prospects, and invited in as half-partner Thomas Hall, the manager of the Queensland National Bank in Rockhampton. Capital he provided—was it the bank’s, or was it Hall’s own?—made it possible to begin commercial mining at the hill. Secretly bringing the ten-head battery for crushing stone from Rockhampton by wagons was enormous work for bullocks and men, and once it was erected, the mercury on the battery plates, designed to attract the gold, failed to do so, since much of the precious metal extracted at Mount Morgan had a patina of iron oxide. But what was extracted was a good enough promise of better things.

  And still the gold of Mount Morgan remained a secret. The people of Rockhampton did not know that saddle bags of gold were being ridden into town by the Morgans and their men to be accounted for, sold by telegraphic dealings and shipped out by T.S. Hall at the Queensland National Bank. It was the better part of two years before a reporter came out to the hill and discovered the meaning of all the activity. The Morgans nonetheless always remained dubious about the place. Edwin Morgan, the manager, dug a shaft to see how deep the gold went. He was deceived by the fact that the gold seemed to bottom out at about 500 feet (150 metres), and he did not know it slewed away underground, plentifully and deceptively for an indefinite, rich distance, from his shaft. The Morgan brothers offered to sell their remaining half-share, and this was bought up for £93 000 by a young red-haired Rockhampton graduate of the Westminster School, William Knox D’Arcy, a solicitor in the port. Through D’Arcy, Mount Morgan would have an impact on more than the gold market but also on the geopolitics of the twentieth century.

  It proved to be the deal of D’Arcy’s life, enabling him within three years to return to England and never again lay his eyes on Rockhampton and Mount Morgan. He remained a director of the Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company and chaired its London board, but lived a princely life with a London house, a shooting estate in Norfolk and a stand of his own at Epsom race course.

  Thomas Hall, the Rockhampton bank manager, invited Walter Hall, his brother, to join the syndicate, which by now was having to fight off claims on it by other speculators and hence needed further capital. Two of the claims had to be contested not only in the Queensland Supreme Court but ultimately in the Privy Council in Britain. The new partner, Walter Hall, was a remarkably unpretentious man even after Mount Morgan made him unassailably rich. Like the other members of the syndicate and the Morgans themselves, he was a passionate racing man and would be a committee member of the Australian Jockey Club for nearly forty years. He had married the daughter of a wealthy pastoralist, and after his death his estate was worth close to £3 million. His widow, Eliza, devoted one million of it in his honour to create a Walter and Eliza Hall trust which, in Victoria, would be spent in establishing the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Research in Pathology and Medicine.

  By the early twentieth century Mount Morgan was producing copper as well as gold. In 1907 and 1908 a number of miners died in roof collapses. Others were saved because they were standing in the lift well. But the casualties of the war beneath the earth did not delay D’Arcy from his speculations and the ultimate sinister mineral boom of 1914–18. In the 1920s copper prices fell, and men went on strike when wages were reduced. In the midst of the strike the mine caught fire. The directors dreamed up the idea of running it as an open-cut mine but this was derided, shares crashed and the liquidators were called in 1927. Mining families drifted away to the sugar fields, looking for work.

  In the Alaska gold rushes prospectors died of hypothermia. The prospectors of Australia, particularly of Western Australia, were likely to perish of thirst or, more commonly, of the diseases produced eith
er by a lack of water or the pollution of what water was available.

  In 1890 J.F. Connolly, a draftsman from the New South Wales railways and an amateur ethnologist, had been brought over to Western Australia to work as a prospector for the Western Australian merchant F.C. Monger. East of Geraldton, he split his search party for further reconnaissance. Two of his men became lost and died of thirst, but Connolly safely returned to a station named Annean where some stockriders had pointed out a few traces of gold to him earlier. When he got there, he found others had already pitched their tents and were working the field. They had found the gold there plentiful, and the water supply from the nearby Murchison River more than adequate. It was only when a miner turned up in Geraldton looking for medical attention after a brawl that the word about Mount Murchison really got out.