by Clare Wright
A COFFIN TRIMMED WITH WHITE
On that shell-shocked Monday morning of 4 December 1854 a young printer from Shropshire, England crept from his tent to gaze on an altered reality. Charles Evans had kept a daily diary since arriving on the Ballarat goldfield in November 1853. Now he recorded what he saw.
Amid the smouldering ruins of the Eureka goldfield, horse-drawn carts were solemnly transporting the bodies of those killed in and around the Stockade to the burial ground nearby. This is what Evans wrote:
I have witnessed today, I think, some of the most melancholy spectacles. A number of poor, brave fellows who fell in yesterday’s cowardly massacre were buried… One of the coffins trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowing group was the body of a woman who was mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. The mind recoils with horror and disgust from the thought that an Englishman can be found capable of an act so monstrous and cruel.
Without the eyewitness account of Charles Evans, a young man whose moral universe had just been tipped upside down, we would never have known about the death of this woman.
For the name of the miner’s wife with the white-trimmed coffin was not recorded in the official government lists of those killed and wounded at Eureka. It was not included on the famous list of heroes published by Peter Lalor. Nor has it come down to us through folk history. There are no inquest files. No newspaper reports. You certainly won’t find it inscribed on the monument to the sacred memory of those who fell in resisting the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian government that looms over the Old Ballarat Cemetery.
We know nothing about this woman. Not even whether she was defending the barricade, or just a helpless onlooker, her tent encircled at random when the rebels threw together their defences.
The speeches delivered in Ballarat on the second anniversary of the Stockade in 1856 recalled the day the first blood was shed for Australian liberty. They were talking only about the blood of men.
In countless books, poems, paintings, films and school curriculums, the Eureka Stockade has been portrayed as a violently masculine episode in which male passions were inflamed, male blood was shed and, ultimately, manhood suffrage—voting rights for men of every class—was won.
But one simple line in a young man’s journal helps us to imagine the Eureka Stockade differently. We see that the people there were more than just a rabble of male miners and their red-coated tormentors locked in a David and Goliath–type battle. We are back in the land of the mortals.
And that is a good thing: it’s more interesting there.
Knowing that women were not only at the Eureka Stockade, but killed in the crossfire of new beginnings transforms things. It doesn’t just add colour. It changes the very outline of a story we thought we all knew.
EUREKA!
In August 1851 a blacksmith named Thomas Hiscock went looking for gold in the country of the Wathaurung people, some 110 kilometres north-west of the port of Melbourne. And amazingly—eureka!—he found it.
It’s not really true to say that Hiscock ‘discovered’ gold in Victoria. The Wathaurung, Ballarat’s original inhabitants, had always known it was there. But until they realised that whitefellas were fools for the stuff, the Wathaurung had not considered the medicine earth to be a precious metal.
Within days of Hiscock’s find, news of the strike in the central highlands had spread to Melbourne and Geelong, and nobody wanted to miss out. News of gold at Ballarat, wrote Henry Mundy, who had emigrated to Australia as a boy in 1844, set the Geelong people and those of the surrounding district crazy. Within weeks, eager prospectors were making their way overland from all corners of Australia.
The reports in the papers drove everyone mad, explained Mundy. Every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz. Farms, building sites, ships, police barracks, government offices, shearing sheds—all were deserted. Schools closed and postal services were disrupted. The public service staggered along on a skeleton staff.
The township of Geelong was virtually emptied of men overnight; St Kilda found itself devoid of menfolk. Women banded together to draw water, chop wood, mind children and safeguard each other from the perceived dangers of being ‘without natural protectors’. Not all men wanted to leave their wives behind, and not all women would consent to be left. But the famous ‘grass widows’ of the gold rush existed in plenty—left in the forsaken towns like the soapy ring around a bathtub.
By Christmas 1852, a year after Thomas Hiscock’s discovery, the luxuriant land of the Wathaurung had been stripped of vegetation. It was just ravaged earth, riddled with holes and studded with calico tents. The goldfields were packed with hopeful miners, and you couldn’t elbow your way into a claim along the river frontage. But this was nothing compared to the avalanche of humanity that was about to descend.
In 1853, as one early settler put it, a huge tidal wave…the memorable rush from England and everywhere else began in earnest. ‘Australian fever’ was raging around the world as news of Victoria’s gold hit the market squares of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw, Munich, Washington, Toronto and Shanghai. In three years (1851–4) the population of Victoria tripled, rocketing from 77,000 to 237,000. By 1861 it had more than doubled again to 540,000—half the total population of Australia.
About a quarter of this meteoric multitude lived in Melbourne and the rest were scattered across the goldfields. (Just imagine if this rate of population growth happened today. It would be like Melbourne’s population of roughly 4.5 million jumping to over 30 million in the next ten years. Think of the pressure on roads, housing, transport, food supplies—everything!)
What is most striking about the gold rush immigrants is their youth: it was the world’s young people who grabbed at the opportunities offered by Victoria’s gold. Merchant Robert Caldwell noted the amazing energy of the gold-rush generation. It was young, impulsive, generous and restless. Indeed, visitors to Victoria often commented that there were no old people to be seen. They weren’t wrong: 80% of the population was under the age of 34; 40% of them were younger than 20. And the birthrate went through the roof. Records show that in 1851, five babies were born in the open-air campgrounds of Ballarat. Six years later, in 1857, the number was 1665.
WATHAURUNG
First there was the great surge of pastoral expansion—often violent—into Victoria from the 1830s. Fifteen or so years later, the gold rush amounted to a second wave of dispossession for Indigenous occupants of the land.
Before European contact there may have been up to 3240 members of the twenty-five Wathaurung language groups around Ballarat. By 1861, only 255 Indigenous people remained.
The gold rush certainly intensified the process of colonisation. But the influx of immigrants and wealth also provided economic prospects for the Wathaurung. Their local knowledge of gold deposits meant work as guides. Wathaurung women sold possum-skin cloaks (dallong) to cold diggers. Wathaurung men were paid to hunt for fresh kangaroo (goin).
The Wathaurung successfully adapted to and exploited the commercial opportunities presented by the gold rush—and Ballarat’s early residents came to rely on Indigenous knowledge
and craftsmanship.
GETTING AHEAD
Going ahead—getting ahead—became the motto of the mid-1850s. It was as if the old world was an enormous bog, dragging people down and suffocating their dreams—but now there was an empty land far from home where you could break free from the sticky mud of tradition and economic stagnation.
Charles Evans, aged 25 when he arrived in Victoria, was typical. On learning of the discovery of gold, Charles and his older brother George were eager to go. They hoped, as George recorded in his diary, to make their mother independent of others’ assistance.
CHARLES EVANS
THE SPECTATOR
* * *
DIDN’T TAKE SIDES BUT WROTE EVERYTHING DOWN
BORN Ironbridge, Shropshire, 1827
DIED Melbourne, 1881
ARRIVED September 1853, on the Mobile
AGE AT EUREKA 27
CHILDREN Unmarried at Eureka; later a father of twelve.
FAQ British lower middle-class, migrated to Victoria with brother George.
ROLE Established printing and auction house in Ballarat late 1853. Kept a detailed diary, including events at Eureka. Recorded death of woman at Eureka.
ARCHIVE Diary, SLV MS 13518 (formerly known as the Lazarus Diary)
Twenty-two-year-old Dan Calwell left New York to come to Victoria with his brother in April 1853. He told his sisters back home in Ohio that they could not imagine how our hearts bounded in anxious anticipation of soon overstepping the long limited boundaries. Even in America, the Land of the Free, the Calwell brothers felt the weight of family expectation and middle-class convention. We are young, reasoned Dan, and must do something to give ourselves a start in the world. We have human hearts. Alexander Dick, a seventeen-year-old Scotsman, sought a new, free and better life and deliverance from what I regarded as servile bondage.
Englishwoman May Howell saw her chance to escape the narrow expectations of home. She looked forward to:
An independent life, trusting to yourself, putting forth all your energy, no leaning on others, no one to control, or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law, and chalking out your path in life.
And it was not only single people looking to flee from lives bounded by rules and routines. Irish couple Anastasia and Timothy Hayes already had five children when they decided to try their luck on the diggings of Victoria. They were educated, and devout Irish Catholics. They had already moved to England to further Timothy’s career as an engineer when the Hayes family joined many other large tribes uprooting to follow their dreams.
ANASTASIA HAYES (NEE BUTLER)
THE RED RAGGER EUREKA FLAGGER
* * *
RABBLE-ROUSER AND MULTITASKER, ABLE TO BREASTFEED AND SEW A FLAG AT THE SAME TIME
BORN Kilkenny, Ireland, 1818
DIED Ballarat, 1892
ARRIVED October 1852, on the Mobile
AGE AT EUREKA 36
CHILDREN Five children on arrival, sixth born on Ballarat diggings in 1854.
FAQ Irish Catholic aristocracy from County Clare. Married Timothy Hayes, oil merchant/engineer, in September 1841. Teacher at Catholic school, sewed Eureka flag, husband was Chairman of Ballarat Reform League. Allegedly involved in amputation of Lalor’s arm.
Victoria welcomed all youth of energy, adventure and courage. A restless generation of young men and women united by one great notion: liberty.
If repression was the lock, gold was the key.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Victoria went viral. Newspapers around the world began carrying daily reports of the riches to be found on the diggings. In New York, according to entrepreneur George Francis Train, Australia was the only topic on the street. When Train arrived in Victoria with his wife, southern belle Wilhelmina ‘Willie’ Davis Train, he reported that nowhere else in the world did such a go-aheadative place exist.
The Australian fever was raging across the globe, and it seemed destined to continue. Reports confirmed that the gold in the hills of Victoria wasn’t just a flash in the pan. It would be worth it—well worth it, said correspondents like Train—to uproot families, dismantle homes, abandon villages and join the mass movement of people to Australia.
GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN
THE YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
* * *
AN ECCENTRIC WITH A TASTE FOR TRAVEL (THE BOOK AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS WAS BASED ON HIM)
BORN Boston, 1829
DIED New York, 1904
ARRIVED 1853
AGE AT EUREKA 25
CHILDREN One died prior to Eureka, three subsequently. His wife Willie Davis Train left him in 1872.
FAQ Entrepreneur, merchant, republican, journalist and foreign correspondent while in Victoria. Ran for President of the USA in 1872.
The picture painted of Victoria worldwide was as a land paved with gold. Newspapers printed endless statements of gold returns, laying out the breathtaking value of the gold in private hands and in Melbourne banks. On 8 April 1852, the London Times reported the astonishing results achieved over the past three months: gold worth £730,242—and where it is to end no human being can guess. The field is reported to be illimitable.
1848: THE REVOLUTIONARY SPRING
The 1840s was a decade of turmoil in Europe: economic, political and social. In Ireland from 1845 to 1852 over a million people died in the Great Famine. At least another million fled as refugees, sparking an enormous wave of migration to the new world.
The Irish famine was triggered by a potato blight that also caused crop devastation throughout Europe. Hunger and disruption drove peasants and the urban poor to join the middle-class movements for political reform across Britain and Europe. Campaigns for a variety of reform measures peaked in 1848, which is why it is sometimes called the Year of Revolution or the Springtime of the Peoples.
Popular mass uprisings swept through France, Germany, Britain and Russia in 1848 as people demanded an end to tyranny. European monarchs were deposed or abdicated. In England, a movement called Chartism demanded that workers, not just property owners, be given the vote.
But the victories of 1848 were mostly short-lived. The forces of conservatism successfully restored the status quo. But many people remained dissatisfied with the old world, and with structures where your worth and standing were determined by birth, not merit.
This correspondent encouraged readers to hurry to the land where boundless plenty smiles side by side with countless wealth. Just three months later, in July 1852, the total value of gold thus far found in Victoria had reached £1,647,810.
Letters home from the early gold-seekers also fuelled the enthusiasm for gold. James Green wrote a note to his sister on 24 July 1853, telling her their brother George should also ‘come out’. A few years here and he would be an independent man, he is very simple if he stops at home digging potatoes when he might come here and dig gold.
&nbs
p; The promise of instant wealth is always irresistible—just look at the vice-like grip poker machines and lotteries have on today’s punters. But how much more compelling when there are eyewitnesses telling you all about the Midas miracle: [Gold] lies on the surface and after a shower of rain, you may see it with the naked eye, and a child can put in a spade, and dig that with his little hands in one minute, which many of you in England wear out eyes and heart in getting.
CLARA DUVAL SEEKAMP (NEE LODGE)
THE PETTICOAT REVOLUTIONARY
* * *
FIRST FEMALE EDITOR OF AN AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER, A SERIOUS REBEL IN HER OWN RIGHT
BORN Limerick, Ireland, 1819
DIED Melbourne, 1908
ARRIVED May 1853, on the Marco Polo
AGE AT EUREKA 35
CHILDREN Two sons (plus one daughter, left in Great Britain, who arrived in 1857).
FAQ Irish actress and tearaway. Married artist Claude Duval. Later called herself a widow, but there’s no evidence of Duval’s death. Common-law wife of Henry Seekamp, editor and publisher of the Ballarat Times, which ran out of their home. Clara became the editor when Seekamp was arrested for sedition on 4 December.
That’s from Murray’s Guide to the Gold Diggings, the Lonely Planet of the day, published in London in 1852: gold digging was simply child’s play.
Murray’s Guide particularly encouraged fathers of large families to come, sowing the seed of aspiration in those men who might have failed to bring home quite enough bacon in Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff. Samuel Mossman used the image of a poor British labourer huddled with his family around the embers of a miserable fire, surviving a northern winter, unable to improve his living conditions. Whereas in Australia, said Mossman, there was no snow and fuel was cheap and abundant. It’s the poor man’s country…want and penury is unknown, daylight and darkness, heat and cold, are more equally distributed throughout the seasons.
