In 1867 the Queensland government offered a reward of £3000 for a big gold discovery. In October James Nash found gold at the place he modestly called Nashville (later Gympie), on the Mary River.
One miner found a 906-ounce nugget at Nashville!
Gold was also discovered at Cape River, inland from Townsville, and gold prospector Ernest Henry also found copper at Sunday Gully on the Cloncurry River, 480 miles inland from Townsville.
DAINTREE RUSH
When Richard Daintree found gold at the Gilbert River in April 1869, adventurers flocked to northern Queensland—even though Daintree had warned them not to come because the gold would probably need deep mines, not mere pans.
Many diggers were so broke they didn’t have the money to get a ship home and people down south donated the money to help them get back.
Then explorer James Venture Mulligan found gold on the Palmer River in 1873. Miners from the other goldfields abandoned their claims to race to the Palmer River.
GETTING THERE
Drays charged sixpence a pound to take people’s swags, cradles and other equipment to the Palmer River. Storekeepers nabbed the bullock trains bringing goods to Georgetown and took them to the Palmer River instead.
But within a month diggers were leaving the Palmer field too, put off by the lack of food and stores. It was hot, dry and there were few horses, so miners mostly had to walk to get there, gradually dropping their goods along the way as they became too exhausted to carry them all.
The Aboriginal people mostly attacked the miners or fanning families at about 4 in the morning, because they knew everyone would be asleep then.
Even worse, the local Indigenous people attacked the would-be miners—and the miners attacked back, so terribly that there was even a government enquiry.
But for those who stuck it out, there were riches to be had on the Palmer River. Most men made at least a pound a day. The gold was easy to get at, too. Miners only needed a pan and cradle.
Then the wet season came and the diggings turned to mud. It was almost impossible to bring food to the area. Miners killed and ate their horses, or chewed the leather from their saddles. Thin as skeletons, they worked in mud up to their knees.
But at least the floods uncovered more gold.
By 1874 ‘Palmerville’ had become a town. There were about 6000 miners and about 40 per cent of them were Chinese.
The Chinese had built their own townships, but they also laid out market gardens and, thanks to them, the food supply improved.
But Palmerville didn’t last long. By 1875, just about everyone left it to head for Maytown, where good reef gold had been found. Maytown soon became a town of bark, galvanised iron, one pub for every 20 men—and lots of police to keep order.
The assistant gold warden, whose job it was to collect licence fees in the north, travelled with a packhorse carrying 75 sets of handcuffs—and they were often needed.
The north was really opening up. Each gold rush brought more prospectors and, even when they failed to find gold, many of them stayed.
In 1876 James Venture Mulligan found gold on the Hodgkinson River. Now miners flocked there instead. There were no land routes to the Hodginson River, so all supplies had to come by sea—and the gold had to be taken out by sea, too.
Beche de mer fisherman William Smith and his companions set up a camp at nearby Trinity Bay. The settlement grew into what we now know as Cairns.
THE PROBLEM OF RACE, AGAIN
Just as it had in the south, the number of Chinese on the gold fields made the European diggers edgy—and on most of the Queensland goldfields Chinese outnumbered Europeans by as many as twelve to one. In 1876 the Queensland government passed a law to make Chinese diggers pay a poll tax. They also had to pay a higher licence fee than other miners.
By 1877 Hodgkinson River was thriving and there were about 18 000 Chinese. Would there be riots and killings here as well?
When the Chinese businessmen opened up the Canton Reef mine, the European reef miners went on strike. The battery owners promised not to crush ore from Chinese mines, and the Canton Reef mine had to be sold.
Things settled down. The Chinese now mostly stuck to panning for alluvial gold. They opened stores, butcher’s shops, and started many market gardens.
The Chinese butchers dried their meat in the sun to preserve it in the hot weather.
By 1880, though, there were no longer easy riches to be had from gold. But the north had found another source of wealth—sugar!
WHAT SHALL WE GROW?
So far most of the farmers in Queensland got their money from cattle, after having found out—however slowly—that sheep in their woolly coats didn’t take the heat well. Fruit and vegetables were being grown in many places to supply the towns and miners, and wheat was being grown on the Darling Downs. Cotton was being grown, too, fish and oysters harvested, and rich timber like kauri was being cut.
But what else would grow and make money in Queensland?
The settlers on Norfolk Island off the New South Wales coast had managed to grow some sugar cane, but had never milled it to turn the juice into sugar. Cane had also been tried at Port Macquarie, but it had died in the frost.
Now in April 1862, a sugar boiler from Barbados, John Buhot, crushed some of the sugar cane that had been planted in Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens and made sugar from the juice.
Maybe sugar would be the go …
WHO’S GOING TO DO THE WORK?
But how could European farmers grow sugar—or lots of cotton—without labour to plant and harvest it?
In 1863 Captain Louis Hope, the son of an English nobleman, the Earl of Hopetoun, and John Buhot produced three tons of sugar from his farm on Moreton Bay, using Polynesian workers.
Growing sugar cane was hard work. The land had to be cleared in searing heat, ploughed, then the cane planted by hand. The weeds had to be chipped out by hand, too, then the cane slashed and loaded onto horse-drawn tram carts and taken to the mills.
Most settlers thought the work was far too hard in that hot climate for Europeans. After all, it was black slaves, not white masters, who already tended the sugar cane in Brazil and the West Indies.
Labourers from India? They were British subjects, so they were entitled to stay in the colony and bring their families with them. That wasn’t what many of the existing settlers wanted.
In August 1863, Captain Robert Towns brought in 67 men from Tannas Island in the New Hebrides to work on his cotton farm on the Logan River as ‘indentured labourers’—workers who could work for that master only, and who would be sent back home with their wages when their contract was finished.
Towns sent his schooner Don Juan with orders to tell the missionaries in the Pacific Islands that the men would only work for a short time, and be given comfortable huts and good food—rice, meat, potatoes, pumpkins and yams.
Towns’s 67 workers were treated well and taken home at the end of their three-year contracts—even if they were paid just £6 a year, instead of the £3-£4 a week that a white man would have been paid. But other people got into the act—and they weren’t as honest.
Towns’s employee Ross Lewin set himself up in business and sold workers to other employers for £7 a head.
Many people were horrified, especially down south. Some thought that indentured labourers were pretty much like slaves. And others thought that the farmers would start to use island labour rather than pay proper wages to Europeans.
Most of the ‘kanakas’, as these labourers were called, were aged 15–25. The term is thought to have come from a Hawaiian word for ‘man’. The kanakas were brought to Australia to work for five years, with almost no wages.
Such cheap labour was too tempting for many farmers to resist. By March 1868, 2107 islanders had been brought to Queensland, mostly from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and the Solomon Islands, to work on the cotton and new sugar plantations.
Often the workers were tricked into boarding the ships, and were told t
hey were just going for a sail, or were being taken on as crew.
Just like the convict workers earlier, many of the Pacific Islanders died on the voyage. Those who survived were often treated brutally by their new masters and left stranded in a foreign country.
Others willingly signed contracts to come and work. Their wages meant that they could buy steel axes, guns and knives that they couldn’t get back home.
They were not allowed to take guns or knives home to the islands, but many tried to smuggle them past the customs officers and onto the ships taking them back.
The kidnapping of labourers was called ‘blackbirding’. The term came from the earlier kidnapping of black Africans from the African west coast who were sold as slaves in America and elsewhere.
LIFE FOR THE KANAKAS IN AUSTRALIA
Life was hard for the kanakas at first—especially for those mourning the loss of family and home. They were mostly given salt beef and damper to eat—not the fresh fish, fruit and vegetables they’d eaten at home. They had to live in barracks, too. Many of the islanders believed that sleeping with enemies made you vulnerable to their magic.
But disease killed more than magic. The islanders had no immunity to new diseases like measles or influenza, and the cramped barracks and poor diet meant that infection spread.
But things did improve. Many built their own grass huts on their one day off a week. They planted gardens and fruit trees, fished, and sang their songs from home. Some married Indigenous women, or women from their own islands who had been kidnapped too.
When their indentures came to an end, many chose to stay in Australia.
THIS MUST STOP!
The Queensland government tried to regulate the number of labourers arriving in 1868. But no-one took much notice of the new laws.
In 1869 Captain John C. Daggett of the schooner Daphne was charged with slave trading, after 100 kanakas were found on his ship instead of the 50 he had a licence for. Daggett had a reputation for cruelty and kidnapping. But he was still given a licence.
He was let off the slave trading charge, after the court in Sydney decided the Pacific Islanders weren’t slaves.
How could Queensland law stop men kidnapping islanders outside Queensland? And how were the kidnapped men and women to get back home, with little money and few words of English?
The crews of ships like the Carl not only kidnapped people, but murdered anyone on the Pacific Islands who objected. In 1871, the crew even disguised the Carl as the ship of missionary Bishop Patterson! When Bishop Patterson finally did arrive in the New Hebrides, the islanders thought he was a kidnapper—and killed him.
To make matters worse, those sailing on ships like the Carl also pretended to be trading for things like mats, shells and baskets, with tobacco.
The kidnappers also took women—not for the men they’d blackbirded, but for themselves. Other women were sent out to work in the fields, or to work as servants for farm managers.
One of the most notorious kidnappers was William ‘Bully’ Hayes. He’d been a slave trader on the coast of West Africa. He was enormous—six foot two inches, and almost as broad—incredibly hairy, with both ears cut off and an enormous scar across his face. Hayes robbed other ships, as well as kidnapping.
Ships from the British navy were sent to try to curb the kidnapping. But the British seamen also punished villagers who had attacked trading ships and murdered their crew, thinking that they were slavers.
Sir Samuel Griffith, who became Premier of Queensland in 1884, tried to stop the practice and had two seamen sentenced to death for the murder of workers from New Guinea. But the men were released when Boyd Morehead became premier. He was a grazier, who wanted cheap workers, too. Like many European Australians he believed that white workers just couldn’t—or shouldn’t—do hard work in the tropical heat.
And the problem continued.
CHAPTER 11
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
By the 1850s the farms in Western Australia had spread from Geraldton in the north to the southern port of Albany and across the Darling Ranges in the east. The country was rich and fertile, but Western Australia was desperately short of people to work on the farms, or build roads to get to them—let alone build houses or public buildings.
THE (FINAL!) END OF THE CONVICT DAYS
It was the farmers who really pushed for convicts to be sent to Western Australia.
The first batch of convicts for Western Australia arrived in July 1850. The Controller-General of convicts was Captain Henderson. Unlike many of the superintendents in the east, he made sure the convicts were fairly well looked after—at least by the standards of the time.
Some convicts lived in the long, white convict barracks in Fremantle, with its view of the sea. They worked in chain gangs, constructing roads or public buildings. Others lived in convict depots in Perth and other towns.
Sweet scented sandalwood was first exported to Singapore and China in 1845 to be made into joss sticks. Many farmers cut sandalwood to sell and make a bit more money.
All convicts worked for the government to begin with. But if they behaved themselves they were given a ‘ticket of leave’ after they’d served just over half their sentence.
Ticket of leave men were still serving their sentences, but could move around the colony freely and work on low wages for the settlers.
In Western Australia a curfew bell rang at 10 every night in the towns. All convicts or ticket of leave men had to be indoors by then. Police would ask anyone they met, ‘Are you bond, or free?’
But in 1863 the new governor, John Hampton, made his son George Controller-General. Punishment became much harsher.
Even so, convicts were only lashed now for really bad crimes, like brutal assaults. They weren’t lashed for trying to escape—western Australia was so isolated by deserts that the government thought it was really one big prison.
Governor Hampton insisted that the roads be paved with thick rounds cut from the tall trees and bedded in the sand. They were known as ‘Hampton’s Cheeses’.
Convicts really did help Western Australia grow to become a prosperous colony.
Western Australia had about 1500 convicts at any one time working on government projects.
In 1858, the Western Australian government asked Britain for at least 1000 prisoners a year, because they were so valuable. The government also asked for money to feed and look after them, as well as to pay for the materials the convicts used in construction projects. They did get more convicts (about 600 a year)—but they didn’t get much more money.
In the 1870s the Western Australian government paid for labourers to come out from China.
But the eastern states weren’t happy. When the Western Australian convicts were freed, they travelled east! Who wanted even more criminals to become thieves or bushrangers?
They worried that sending convicts to Australia might make people in Britain remember the bad old days, too, instead of thinking of Australia now as a land of gold and opportunity.
The British government wasn’t happy, either. The Western Australian convicts cost Britain about £100 000 a year, and it was getting more expensive all the time to send them across the world.
Almost exactly 80 years after the first convicts had landed at Sydney Cove, the last convict transport landed at Fremantle.
By 1868, when transportation ended, 9968 convicts had come to Western Australia. The last convict ship was the Hougoumont, carrying 229 convicts, including 64 Irish rebels who wanted independence from England.
Six of the rebels would be rescued by associates on the ship Catalpa, which the Irish rebels had bought in the United States with money donated by sympathisers there. Two other Irish rebels pretended to be rich Americans. One managed to get into the prison to tell the rebels there what was happening—and even had dinner with the prison governor.
In April 1876 the six rebels escaped in a carriage down the coast to the Catalpa’s whaleboat, then tried to get to the Catalpa, which was wa
iting for them off Rottnest Island. But the whaleboat became lost in the fog and the police were chasing them on the steamer Georgette.
The police fired at the whaleboat, and demanded that the prisoners be returned. But the Irish said that they were an American ship and refused, despite further threats from the police.
VERY DIFFERENT HEROES
The Georgette was wrecked on a rock in mountainous seas that December, while carrying timber from Fremantle to Albany. The ship’s boats capsized in the raging waves. But many of the passengers and crew were saved by two very different heroes.
Grace Bussell was the 16-year-old daughter of a rich pastoralist. Sam Isaacs was 31, an Indigenous stockman who worked for the Bussells. His tribal name was Yebbie. His mother was an elder of the Wardandi people, and his father was a Native American whaler, who left before his son was born.
Sam saw the tragedy. He ran back 7 miles to the Bussell homestead to get help. But the men were all away, and the women were in the kitchen cooking for Christmas.
Sam and young Grace Bussell galloped back to the coast. It should have been impossible to get horses down the rocky shore, but Grace and Sam were determined. Both were good swimmers—and both skilled riders.
For the next four hours Grace and Sam plunged their horses time and time again 65 yards out into the raging surf, calling out to the survivors to jump from the stricken ship and grab hold of the horses.
Gold graves and glory Page 7
