Gold graves and glory

by Jackie French

Ned Kelly’s bravery, sense of drama and his fight against the squatters made him a hero while he was alive. He is still a hero to many people more than 100 years after his death.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE INDIGENOUS NATIONS ARE DEVASTATED

  The gold rushes were great for just about everyone—that is, with the exception of the Indigenous people of Australia.

  A squatter settled on land that they later leased. A pastoralist bought or leased land legally from the government.

  Many of them had been forced off the land, both around the towns and further out, as the squatters and pastoralists arrived with their sheep and cattle.

  Although many Indigenous people who were not forced off their lands were killed, some farmers allowed others to stay. Even though many of their traditional hunting and food gathering areas were destroyed by cattle and changed by clearing, at least they were still on the land that meant so much to them. After all, a squatter might have claimed many acres of land and had only about 10 or 20 men to help him work it. In many places there was potentially still room for both cultures.

  But the 1850s brought tens of thousands of people to the gold rush areas—not 10 or 20. And even when most of them moved on as the gold supply dwindled, they left behind them such an incredible mess of ruined, muddy waterways and treeless, bare hills and eroded gullies that any traditional Indigenous life was impossible.

  MORE PEOPLE, MORE LAND

  More people coming to Australia, too, meant more land being turned into farmland and towns.

  Many Indigenous people left their homelands and became refugees in the tribal lands of their neighbours. Now nations who had lived peacefully with their neighbours began to fight each other as the sheer number of newcomers overwhelmed the areas still relatively untouched by white settlers and miners.

  What now?

  The Indigenous people survived as best they could in this new world of white people with their dreams of gold. They traded or sold possum-skin cloaks, fish or possum, wild duck or kangaroo meat. Several Djadjawurrung families near Bendigo started a farm in 1852, where they built themselves houses and sold produce to the miners.

  FINDING GOLD

  There are many stories, too, about Indigenous people finding gold. The Wardy Yallock people knew a source of gold, and even showed it to a white man, Charles Ferguson, at the Linton diggings. Ferguson organised some men to go and look for the gold. They found it, but decided that the area was too hot and too far away to bother with. This area would become the rich Ararat goldfields within the next two years.

  Gooch wrote a letter to the Geelong Advertiser telling the story—but he didn’t mention the name of the man or who his people were.

  And in 1852 the miner Paul Gooch sent an Indigenous man out to find a lost horse—and the man found gold as well in an area of Ballarat that later became the rich Eureka diggings!

  The Indigenous people sometimes showed miners how to find bush food, like wild fruits or the sweet white ‘sugar’ from insect droppings on gum leaves. They were also employed as guides to take miners to the goldfields.

  As gold fever lured so many able-bodied men to the goldfields, farmers were desperate for people to work for them and some Indigenous people were able to become stockmen, farmhands and shearers—and many were paid reasonable wages for the times.

  Many miners made guayas or mia-mias to live in instead of tents. They used interlaced leafy branches, like the Indigenous people did.

  Indigenous people were becoming known as highly-skilled horsemen. In 1852 the Commissioner of Crown Lands said they were much better shepherds than Europeans, because they took better care of the animals.

  But there was the issue of what the farmers called ‘walkabout’. For reasons connected with their responsibilities to the land and their family members, staying in the one spot wasn’t possible and the Europeans just couldn’t understand it. Aboriginal women worked as servants, too, but they weren’t used to the European idea that servants had to work almost every day of the year and do only what they were told.

  Indigenous children were often taken from their families by white people to be trained as servants. The white people didn’t think of this as kidnapping—they thought it was better for the kids to learn to be servants, even if they had to be chained up at night to stop them running back home.

  Other Indigenous people did odd jobs or traded fish or game for European food and old clothes. Still others became beggars or prostitutes.

  Early European settlers had commented on how strong and healthy the Indigenous people were. But now their children starved in the streets of the gold rush towns and adults turned to alcohol in despair.

  CHAPTER 9

  A NEW IMAGE FOR VAN DIEMEN’S LAND

  Australia was getting to be known as the land of gold and sunshine. But one colony was still suffering from its reputation as the most hellish prison in the British Empire—Van Diemen’s Land.

  In the 1830s anyone born in Van Diemen’s Land was called a Vandemonian. The convicts were called ‘demens’ or ‘demons’.

  But how would Van Dieman’s land attract new settlers when transportation ended, if people thought it was a place of convicts and bushrangers?

  Simple. Change its name.

  By the 1850s many people like Rev. John West, who wanted the British to stop sending convicts to the island, thought that a name change might help people forget some of the past. In a history of the colony he wrote in 1852, West used the name ‘Tasmania’, after Abel Tasman, who had been the first European to see the island in 1642.

  In 1851 the Melbourne Herald complained about the ‘Van Demonian villains heading to the goldfields’.

  The last convict ship to Van Diemen’s Land arrived in May 1853, and on 1 January 1856 Van Diemen’s Land officially changed its name to Tasmania. In 1851 it had been granted a partly elected government, and in 1856 full self-government, elected by the people—that is, male colonists (white men).

  Van Diemen’s Land felt the impact of the mainland gold rushes. So many men raced off to Victoria that by mid-1852 there wasn’t a single labourer for hire in Hobart! Luckily there were still convicts finishing their sentences to do the work—for a while.

  Finally, the last convict in Tasmania had finished the end of his sentence. After 74 years of transportation, Port Arthur penal settlement was closed in September 1877.

  Port Arthur was a place for ‘lunatics’ and ‘paupers’—people who were too mentally ill, or too frail and poor, to survive without care. The harsh life convicts had experienced meant that many ended their days too sick or confused to look after themselves.

  Port Arthur had a name change, too—to Carnarvon. By 1882 about 80 people lived there and the village had a post office, a cricket club and a lawn tennis club.

  Many of the Port Arthur buildings would burn down in bushfires during the decades after transportation ended.

  Many people say they’ve seen—or felt—ghosts at Port Arthur. One guide heard steps behind her in the dark corridor of the model prison. She raced out the door and thought she’d escaped—till cold, ghostly arms grabbed her.

  WHAT NOW?

  By the mid-1860s Tasmania was in a real depression. There’d been no gold rush here. It was a land of thriving orchards, wheat, vegetable or sheep farms. But men who’d found gold or given up all hope of getting rich mostly settled in the areas where they’d been mining, rather than face another sea voyage to get to Tasmania.

  Even the streets of Hobart and Launceston seemed empty. The population was rising slowly, but only because the settlers were having kids. Very few new settlers came to the island—in fact more settlers left than arrived!

  On 1 May 1869 Tasmania was linked to the mainland by an underwater telegraph cable. But this small connection with the news outside made little difference.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE NEW STATE IN THE NORTH

  Australia’s north was missing out on the gold rushes, too. But unlike Tasmania, where most of the g
ood land had already been settled, much of the north still hadn’t even been seen by Europeans.

  There seemed to be unlimited land up there—and the new Australian-born pastoralists were much better able to cope with the heat and harsh dry or flooded weather than ‘new chums’, who’d never seen a snake, or been bitten by a cloud of mosquitoes.

  David and Thomas Archer had sheep runs set up along the Burnett River by 1848, and in 1853 Charles and William Archer had started a sheep and cattle station at Gracemere, where Rockhampton is today. In 1859 George Dalyrymple left Rockhampton to explore new pastureland to the north.

  Another group of explorers, led by John Mackay, battled through brigalow scrub and rainforest, hoping to find a big river north of the Rockhampon area. But they were starving and thirsty and tried to drink the sap of the poisonous milkwood trees. One man died. The others survived by eating goanna stews till another party of squatters looking for fresh land rescued them.

  But these farms were being set up in country that was already inhabited. Sometimes the Indigenous people fought back or killed white settlers in revenge for the loss of their land and hunting grounds, and the death and dispersal of their people.

  How do you kill or control a guerrilla force of Indigenous people, who know the land and can hide in it?

  You send other Indigenous people to find them.

  THE NATIVE POLICE

  The first Native Police force had been set up in the late 1830s in the Port Phillip district. Another corps was started in Melbourne in 1842 and operated till 1853.

  The officers were given horses and smart uniforms, and the corps attracted many men who were respected among the Indigenous nations.

  A group of Queensland trackers were brought south in 1878 to help hunt for Ned Kelly.

  Many white police hated the Native Police. They resented Indigenous people getting any power at all. Many of the Native Police were bashed or insulted by their white commanding officers.

  Indigenous people also worked in the Border Police from 1839–46, in the newly settled areas of the Darling Downs and Moreton Bay in Queensland, and Gippsland in Victoria. The Border Police were supposed to protect Indigenous people as well as non-Indigenous people and their property.

  But the most notorious Native Police force was set up by Frederick Walker, who had been a Clerk of Petty Sessions—a legal official—at Tumut in New South Wales. By March 1849, Walker had recruited 14 men from the Murrumbidgee–Murray area.

  This force mostly operated in what became Queensland, and in 1859 the Queensland government took control of it.

  It worked mostly in the frontier areas, where Indigenous people and settlers still clashed. Like the Border Police, the Native Police were supposed to protect white settlers, and especially their property, sheep and cattle against Indigenous people.

  The Native Police were often commanded by brutal ex-convicts and were responsible for many bashings and massacres of their own people till the force was disbanded in 1900.

  The Barkanji people of the area around today’s Wilcannia stampeded cattle and sheep and then slaughtered them to successfully, but temporarily, drive white settlers from their land.

  They never reported how many Indigenous people were killed or injured in their ‘peacekeeping’.

  Commandant Walker and 24 of his infamous Native Police went to Fraser Island on Christmas Eve, 1851, to arrest 35 Indigenous people for whom they had warrants. They spent eight days on the island and engaged in a series of massacres of the Dalungbara people.

  In Queensland, Indigenous criminals were offered a choice between going to jail and joining the Native Police. It was a brutal choice either way. In 1875, ex-convict Sub-Inspector Carroll of the Native Police whipped two Indigenous troopers till they died, to punish them for disobedience. He was said to have whipped white troopers as badly, too.

  South Australia had a Native Police force between 1852 and 1856, and there was a force for what would become the Northern Territory in 1884 until the Territory police came under the administration of the Commonwealth in 1911. This force, too, was known for its atrocities. Under changes made later, its troopers were used only for tracking.

  AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST MASS MURDERER

  The Fraser family lived at Hornet Bank Station in the frontier Dawson River basin of central Queensland during the 1850s. European settlers had come to the area in the mid-1840s. But it was the home of the fierce Yiman people.

  There are many reasons why the Yiman may have attacked Hornet Bank. The Native Police in the area had killed Yiman people, and there had been fights over women. Yiman people had been fed Christmas pudding laced with the poison strychnine. The Fraser men were said to kidnap and rape Yiman women, too, and the station overseer had shot a Yiman man, who he said had been stealing.

  In the middle of the night on 26 October 1857, an Indigenous shepherd who worked on the station clubbed all of the station dogs to death. Then about 100 Yiman men attacked. They clubbed Martha Fraser and seven of her children to death, as well as their tutor and two farm workers. They raped the mother and the girls first. Only one, 14-year-old Wessie, survived—because they thought he was already dead.

  Wessie staggered 10 miles to a nearby station, bleeding and terrified. After his family was buried, the boy rode 320 miles in three days down to Ipswich, where his only surviving brother, Billy, was droving.

  Billy and other Dawson River settlers formed posses and hunted down as many Yiman people as they could.

  The Hornet Bank Indigenous stockmen were rounded up and shot too, although they were innocent.

  There are few records of how many Yiman men, women and children were killed, but it appears to be around 500. Billy Fraser embarked on a relentless vendetta against the Yiman and killed at least 30, probably closer to 50 or 100, but maybe far more. He became a hero of the frontier and stories were told about his exploits that may or may not be true.

  When a group of Yiman people were brought before white magistrates the magistrates decided they were innocent. But Billy and his posse gunned them down as they were leaving the station where the court hearing had just been held.

  Billy shot an Indigenous woman in the main street of Rockhampton because she was wearing a dress that looked like one his mother had owned.

  In 1858 Billy, Wessie and a posse of ten police invited a family of Yiman to a hunt and feast. Halfway through the feast they shot the father and seven of his sons.

  By the end of 1858 between 150 and 300 Yiman people had been killed. Most of the Yiman moved away towards the coast, but the posses followed them and the killings continued. Other Yiman stayed and fought back, killing and raping just as the white men did, even though a conference of elders had agreed that there was no point killing white people—more would simply follow.

  More Indigenous people were to die from disease than murder or revenge killings. There were plagues of influenza in the winters of 1851–54, 1860–63 and 1865. Some Europeans died, but the Indigenous people had no resistance to the new diseases. Many hundreds, or even thousands, died.

  By the 1880s there were no Yiman in the area. They had all been moved away or killed.

  A NEW STATE

  The far north of New South Wales separated from the rest of the state on 10 December 1859 and was named Queensland, after Queen Victoria.

  This brought the total number of colonies to six—each with its own capital city.

  The New South Wales governor, Sir William Denison, had been against it. Why should a colony of only 420 squatters have self-government? But the British government thought that since the north was growing so fast, it might as well be done sooner than later, and appointed Sir George Ferguson Bowen as the first governor of Queensland.

  The first telegram told Queenslanders the result of the Melbourne Cup!

  By 9 November, 1861, the telegraph had reached Brisbane.

  TORRES STRAIT

  The first people probably came to the Torres Strait islands from what is now Indonesia about
70 000 years ago. In the 1850s the Torres Strait clans still lived in small communities in their round houses. They fished or made fish traps, spoke their own language, fought wars and blood feuds, hunted dugong and turtles, collected turtle eggs, and grew crops like yams, cassava and many kinds of banana. They had strong trading and gift-giving traditions that involved pearl and turtle shell, feathers, canoes and tools.

  In the 1860s Europeans discovered the pearl shell, too. The islands had a small pearl shell ‘rush’ of Japanese, Malays, Filipinos and Micronesians, as well as Europeans. Thursday Island (Wyben) became the main settlement. By 1877 about 700 people were employed in the industry on over 100 pearl luggers.

  On 30 May 1872 Queensland annexed the Torres Strait islands. More islands were added to the group in June 1879, as the Queensland government said that criminals were taking refuge there.

  GOLD FOR QUEENSLAND!

  Now that most of the easily-found gold had been taken from New South Wales and Victoria, prospectors increasingly looked for gold up north. It was discovered at Clermont, in 1862, but the big rush soon died down when the yield turned out to be disappointing. Crocodile Creek, near Mount Morgan, had the next gold rush in 1865, but within two years the easy-to-get surface gold seemed to have run out.

  Crocodile Creek, too, had clashes between European and Chinese diggers in early 1867.

  A quartz-crushing operation started on the new Hector Reef nearby. But that was run by a company employing miners—not by men working for themselves.