Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Australia’s first ‘gold rush’ had involved sea captains seeking the mythical land of gold. None found it. Only a few would find wealth in this gold rush, too. For most, the riches would remain a seductive myth, luring them from comfort, jobs and families to risk their lives in the hope of finding that useless mineral that gleamed even in shadow. Most gold-panners and miners lived in squalid, starving poverty. There were indeed fortunes to be made but, apart from the relative few who found nuggets or workable seams of gold, the fortunes were made by those who grew or sold food, grog, sex, woollen blankets, rabbit-skin hats and other supplies to the newcomers.

  Gold was panned to begin with, washed out of creeks and from the sandbanks along rivers. As the alluvial gold (the fine gold deposited in the sand and gravel of creeks and rivers) ran out, miners dug for it, at first in the sand and gravel where past floods or glaciers might have dropped it (gold is heavier than sand and collects in pockets where water slows down). Others who weren’t lucky enough to stake their patch of gold-rich gravel claimed land further away from the creeks, where ancient deposits might have been left by long gone streams, digging like wombats deep into the earth.

  Gold was a dream. The reality of the goldfields was poverty, starvation, brutally hard physical work, crippling accidents and disease. A digger had little more chance of making it rich than someone today does of winning the lottery.

  Those who reached a goldfield first had the best chance of making money; in February 1852, maybe five miners in a hundred became wealthy, forty-five made enough to live on and fifty starved. But by December, as the easily panned gold was claimed, perhaps ninety per cent of diggers were unable to pan enough even to eat. Most miners lived on flour and water, made into watery stews with a little meat if they had money or firewood, or into damper or sinkers – lumps of dough wrapped around green branches and cooked over the flames – if they couldn’t afford meat. The scenario was repeated at goldfield after goldfield: wealth for a lucky few followed by poverty for many.

  It was this poverty and desperation that led to the battle that would be Eureka.

  The muddy track to Eureka

  Most history books describe the Eureka Stockade as a scuffle, a protest about gold licences that was over in ten minutes. Yet two weeks before the Eureka Stockade, 10,000 men knelt in the dust and swore to make Australia independent of England. How could 10,000 men lose a battle in ten minutes, when every day more armed men arrived at Ballarat, including the mounted Californian Rangers?

  Eureka, according to popular myth, was doomed to fail. Ten thousand men, many with military experience, doomed to fail? In fact, the Eureka Stockade nearly became the trigger for a rebellion that might have secured Australian independence from Great Britain. But to understand the Eureka Stockade – and why the rebellion almost succeeded – you need to understand the terrain.

  In 1854 the Eureka gold claim was just one of thousands on the Ballarat goldfields in Victoria.4 Ten years before, the land had been a paradise: a river, and lagoons of ducks, swans and waterlilies. Now the lagoons were called the ‘Gravel Pits’ and they were a scene from hell. The water was still there, but brown and bubbling now, forced into hundreds of small channels and pools. Down in the filth of gravel and water, men huddled over barrels, buckets or tin dishes, scooping, lifting, shovelling up the gravel, sifting, swirling, examining. All around the pools was a vast warren of tents so close they almost touched each other.

  ‘The noise would deafen you in an hour. Flies clustered around the faces; not bush flies but fat black ones from well-fed maggots that bred amongst the filth. Nasty, sneaky, cheeky little things of flies got into my eyes,’ wrote Raffaello Carboni, an ex-Jesuit scholar turned failed Italian revolutionary and democrat, who hunted for gold, survived the stockade, then wrote about his experiences. ‘I could see no more, no ways. Mud water one shilling a bucket! Got the dysentery; very bad.’

  Yet over the whole place lay a feeling of excitement, as though the breeze itself whispered the words, ‘Gold … gold … gold …’

  And only the lucky had claims at the Gravel Pits. Squalid as they were, at least they did contain gold. The land sloped down to them, but beyond that slope the land was flat. Once it had been covered with tall trees, a richness of koalas, possums, wallabies and bandicoots. Now every feature of the landscape had been erased except the dirt itself.

  The Ballarat goldfields stank, human waste dropped down abandoned mine shafts. Those desperate enough to reopen old claims dug through faeces, hoping for a gleam of gold. Tents crowded into strangely neat streets, bits of cloth drooping between two poles, though one or two were fancier, with many poles and even flaps for windows. Tents began white and within days they were the colour of mud, the colour of the miners themselves. Most had rough stools out front or fireplaces, and wet trousers hanging heavy on washing lines strung between the trees. By 1854 some had tiny gardens with what looked like leafy vegetables growing in neat patches, or even flowers protected by low rocky walls if their wives and children had accompanied them. There were few fires: nearly all the trees had been use for pit props, and it was a day’s walk or more to gather firewood. A rough township had formed, shanties with bark walls and roof, and even more solid hotels and stores.

  If you had the money, Ballarat could sell you all you needed (except the antibiotics to cure it when you got it), from a two-minute ‘knee trembler’ to a pink lace bonnet or a gander at the dancing girls, paid two pounds ten a week for simply kicking up their legs, more if they held their skirts up for longer. There were few women miners (although some were disguised as men), but respectable women made good money taking in washing for those whose claims gave them the luxury of clean clothes, or selling stew, home-brewed beer or hooch, or lemonade. There was even a lending library, and a theatre.

  At dusk the diggings exploded as miners shot their weapons to check if their powder was dry – or that, at any rate, was the excuse for the daily ritual of machismo.

  A land of sails and wombat holes

  Beyond the tents were massive mounds of dirt, as though a mob of kids had been making forts or giant wombats digging holes, each with a ragged sail above it to direct air down underground, otherwise the miners died of carbon dioxide poisoning. These were the horror pits of Eureka.

  The shafts in the Gravel Pits were dangerous – gravel is not a stable substance to dig through. But at least there was a reasonable chance of finding gold amongst the gravel. The muddy gold shafts beyond the Gravel Pits were as dangerous, but few miners even made enough to pay their licence fees.

  When Governor Hotham visited Ballarat in 1854, the depth of an average shaft was 120 to 160 feet and took six months to a year to dig. Hotham assumed that the diggers must be men of capital to be able to afford to dig such deep shafts, easily able to afford a rise in licence fees. They weren’t. They were simply desperate, living on a dream until death from a collapsed tunnel or starvation intervened, or a breath of sanity.

  But there was unity in poverty. Those who had struck it lucky would ‘stake’ a new chum (lend him money) for a share of any find, or even a few shillings at least to get them back to Melbourne and a job. A man with a newspaper would attract a crowd, the reader announcing the doings of the world beyond and the increasing resistance to authority. For the one thing that unified them all was resistance and abhorrence of the troopers who carried out the licence hunts.

  Joe’s traps

  The cry of ‘Joe! Joe! Joe!’ to warn that the troopers were checking every person had their licence would spread through the diggings. (‘Joe’ was first used at the time of Governor Charles Joseph La Trobe – his troopers were originally called ‘Joe’s traps’.) At the cry of ‘Joe’ the scene of huddled, shovelling men changed in an instant. Crowbars splashed into the water. Men downed tools and began to run. Cradles sat abandoned by the stream. The cry was repeated all along the diggings, like a mob of cockatoos was yelling it overhead. ‘Joe! Joe! The Joes are coming!’

  The ‘Joes’ w
ore the red jackets and long black boots of the British military. But they were colonial troops, deeply corrupt, often violent. That, too, was one of the foundations of the violence that was to erupt. The troopers might take you even if you had your licence, tear it up, grinning. A favourite money-making torture was to tie a man to a bayonet, with his body poised above the point. If he slumped, he died. Meanwhile his friends had to find the money to pay the bribe to free him, running to the bank if they had funds there, or taking up a collection, penny by penny, from other miners. The magistrates were corrupt too, favouring either their friends or whoever paid them the most. The Victorian legislature was comprised of squatters, who made sure that revenue was raised from customs, sale of land and mining licences, not from their own estates, resisting any attempts to widen the franchise.

  The miners lived in a state that was the epitome of tyranny, prone to erratic decisions and with no redress. In once incident, described by Carboni:

  One morning, I woke all on a sudden. – What’s up? A troop of horses galloping exactly towards my tent, and I could hear the tramping of a band of traps. I got out of the stretcher, and hastened out of my tent. All the neighbours, in night-caps and unmentionables, were groping round the tents, to inquire what was the matter. It was not yet day-light. There was a sly-grog seller at the top of the hill; close to his store he had a small tent, crammed with brandy cases and other grog, newly come up from town. There must have been a spy, who had scented such valuable game.

  The Commissioner asked the storekeeper, who by this time was at the door of his store: ‘Whose tent is that?’ indicating the small one in question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ was the answer.

  ‘Who lives in it? Who owns it? Is anybody in?’ asked the Commissioner.

  ‘An old man owns it, but he is gone to town on business, and left it to the care of his mate who is on the nightshift,’ replied the storekeeper.

  ‘I won’t peck up that chaff of yours, sir. Halloo! Who is in? Open the tent,’ shouted the Commissioner.

  No answer.

  ‘I say, cut down this tent, and we’ll see who is in,’ was the order of the Commissioner to two ruffianly looking troopers.

  No sooner said than done; and the little tent was ripped up by their swords. A government cart was, of course, ready in the gully below, and in less than five minutes the whole stock of grog, some two hundred pounds sterling worth, or five hundred pounds worth in nobblers, was carted up to the Camp, before the teeth of some hundreds of diggers, who had now collected round about.’5

  There was little justice for miners on the Ballarat diggings, and Carboni would document it well.

  The rebels of Eureka

  Raffaello Carboni was Italian – or, rather, was a member of the Young Italy movement which was dedicated to overthrowing the Austrian and Bourbon rulers and removing the Pope from his estates in order to unify Italy under one reasonably democratic government.

  When their 1849 rebellion failed, Carboni travelled to Paris, Berlin, Malta, Frankfurt and, by 1852, Melbourne, and then to the Ballarat goldfields. Until about 1850 most of the new Australian settlers had been either convicts or the respectable poor, and almost exclusively British. But 1848 was the ‘Year of Revolution’ with popular uprisings in many European countries against their various monarchies. It was a time when Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Baptists and others demanded freedom of religion from their Roman Catholic monarchies. Revolutionaries in Prussia dreamed of a united Germany; others in Naples or Sicily dreamed that Italy would become one nation.

  The immigrants from Britain, too, often had little loyalty to the British monarchy or government. The goldfields – including the Ballarat goldfields where the Eureka gold claim had been made – were still overwhelmingly British. Anecdotally, perhaps half were Irish, and Irish Roman Catholics were demanding and fighting for freedom from their Anglican monarchy. Many English, Welsh and Scots also identified as nonconformists, that is, English subjects who were not members of the established (Anglican) church. English Chartists demanded the rights of workers to form unions.

  The revolutions of the 1840s failed. But some of the rebels now came to Australia, dreaming of gold but also of freedom. They had rebelled once, and had the experience and temperament to do it again. Many diggers arrived from California, too, a land where the American colonies had successfully rebelled against England.

  The dream of independence

  The Eureka rebellion at Ballarat is often portrayed as simply a protest against the cost of a licence to dig for gold. The cost of licences was a trigger for protest, but the rebels would come to call for complete independence from Great Britain, as well as universal male suffrage – the right to vote for every white man in the colony. (They were not so radical as to think that women, Indigenous Australians or those who had come from China should also get the vote.)

  On 1 January 1852 Victorian ‘mining right’ taxes were raised from one pound ten shillings to three pounds a month. Everyone on the goldfields, from cooks to tent keepers, had to buy a licence and have it on them at all times. Thirty-six pounds a year was a massive amount, equivalent to perhaps $100,000 a year now. A head clerk or an engineer would be lucky to make three pounds a week in 1852. A well-qualified governess could be hired for thirty pounds a year, or a good cook for forty-five.

  Three thousand miners protested at Castlemaine. At Bendigo, the largest mining community at the time, a miners’ protest meeting passed the resolution: ‘We therefore pledge ourselves to resist it in every shape and form and we will aid by every means in our power who would do the same elsewhere.’ The Argus of 10 December reported: ‘[T]here appears to be an extraordinary demand for guns, pistols, powder and ball, and even cutlasses are inquired for.’ Another meeting at Castlemaine drew 12,000 men and declared: ‘[W]hile deprecating the use of physical force, and pledging itself not to resort to it except in self-defense, at the same time pledges itself to release or relieve any or all diggers on that account of non-payment of the three pound licence fee.’6

  On 13 December Governor La Trobe rescinded the increase in licence fees, but they were only a small part of a far wider problem. The diggers got little or no government help despite the fees: no roads, little police protection. Even to get to the diggings you had to pass through the ‘Black Forest’, where ‘demons’ – ex-convict bushrangers from Van Diemen’s Land – failed to follow even the normal courtesy of a highwayman by letting you go free if you offered up your belongings; travellers were killed as well as robbed. Some demons would tie their victims to a tree and leave them to starve or die of thirst.

  The roads themselves were mere tracks through bush and paddocks, with so many bullock and horse tracks wandering off on either side that it was easy for a traveller to get lost. And yet still they came, thin men, hungry from a hundred miles of marching, pushing wheelbarrows or lugging swags and shouldering shovels.

  A grog-fuelled rebellion

  The Ballarat goldfields held an explosive mix: poverty, exploitation, growing anger at the diggers’ political powerlessness, and residents who had previously been part of armed rebellions. There is another element that should not be underestimated – grog.

  Those were the days when a man would think it a reasonable end to a night’s drinking to end up senseless, asleep on the sacks of straw most shanties kept for the purpose. ‘Rum’ was brewed at a thousand illegal shanties, mostly from potatoes or even turnips. It might send you blind, but at least it gave you oblivion. You could get a cup of ‘rum’ for a penny.

  It was cheaper to get drunk than fill your belly, and drink eased the memory of other pains, too: the aching miner’s back, which left most miners hunched over by the time they were forty; the infected fingers from dabbling in sewage-riddled water and mud. But most of all it might erase the whisper that must have come as they gasped for air down their holes: there is nothing here – nothing. You have limped your way to Ballarat and dug into the ground and wi
ll get nothing, nothing in return.

  Alcohol gives temporary peace, but it also makes men belligerent. Being drunk on an empty stomach lowers inhibitions – enough, perhaps, to make you rebel against the Crown.

  Nor could the newly installed Governor Hotham do much to redress the grievances. In June 1854 his government inherited a million-dollar Victorian debt – he was under orders from Britain to resolve the financial situation and had a squatter-dominated parliament unwilling to change the taxation system to reduce it. He was well aware of the brewing rebellions. He also knew that he had little money to hire more men to check them, nor could he call for reinforcements from England or even New Zealand. Hotham cut back all government spending and began rigorous enforcement of all licensing laws, starting with twice-weekly checks of licences.

  One small spark could light a riot.

  Eureka’s spark was James Bentley, who owned the Eureka Hotel. He was a demon, one of the vicious ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, where the worst offenders had been sent, those convicted of murder or aggravated rape and assault while they were serving their sentence in New South Wales. Bentley was short-tempered and violent, but he had also made enough from the diggers to pay his bribes to the police and magistrates. Bentley was a man with connections.

  On 6 October 1854 two drunken Scottish diggers pounded on Bentley’s door, demanding that he give them a drink. Instead he gave them a beating, kicking and clubbing one man to death.

  Bentley was arrested. There had, after all, been at least one witness, even if he had been drunk, and other witnesses would come forward. But Bentley was released by Police Magistrate Dawes.