by Clare Wright
All you needed was a readiness to work: For all willing hands there is labour, and for all labour there is liberal reward. And the bright southern sun, Mossman promised, would make a weak man strong: like a young Hercules.
Becoming a young Hercules might not have appealed so strongly to most women, but for them there were other opportunities for transformation. In an era before passports and credit cards—before ID checks of any kind, really—the gold rush offered the chance to move back the hands of time. Single mother Clara Duval arrived in Victoria on the Marco Polo in May 1853 with two children. She gave her age as 20. Clara was, in fact, 34.
THE LONG GOODBYE
Standing on the docks at Liverpool in May 1854, 21-year-old Maggie Brown Howden was thinking of one thing only: her fiancé, dear Jamie. James Johnston, Ballarat’s assistant commissioner. Her farewells from her native Scotland were behind her. The last calls, the settling of accounts, the shopping and packing and being driven to the station by tearful relations. Maggie was sad, but stoic: we cannot know what changes may take place, she wrote in her diary, [but] never shall I forget my dear home.
Despite the fact that hundreds of ships were setting sail for Victoria, departures for the three-month ship journey were cause for intense emotion and grand ceremony. The decision to emigrate to the other side of the world was never taken lightly, for it was often the last time that loved ones would ever see each other.
The departing McLeish family was surrounded by weeping friends who all believed they were bidding us a final good-bye, which indeed they were. Anxious relatives would hear no news of their kin for at least six months; that is how long a return letter would take to arrive.
MARGARET JOHNSTON (NEE HOWDEN)
A HAPPY CAMPER
* * *
THE HONEYMOON FROM HELL
BORN Duns, Scotland, 1833
DIED Buninyong, 1888
ARRIVED August 1854, on the Hurricane
AGE AT EUREKA 21
CHILDREN Pregnant at Eureka with first of fifteen children.
FAQ Married Assistant Gold Commissioner James Johnston in August 1854 and went straight to Ballarat Camp. Lived in Camp during Eureka. Kept a diary.
ARCHIVE Diary, SLV MS 13610
Thomas and Frances Pierson left Staten Island, New York, to shouts of hurahs, cheers, waveing handkerchiefs, hats tc tc fireing of pistols and farewell music. Frances took her photographic equipment aboard; Thomas took his characteristic bad mood. There had been little else but news of Australia in the American papers for months, and Frances and Thomas were lucky to get a berth. Nearly every nation of the world is represented on our ship, wrote Thomas.
Merchant Robert Caldwell described the cosmopolitan flood of immigrants onto Victoria’s shores:
The swart Briton walks shoulder to shoulder with the flat-faced Chinaman, the tall and stately Armenian, the lithe New Zealander or South Sea Islander, the merry African from the United States, the grave Spaniard, the yellow-haired German, the tall, sharp visaged Yankee, and the lively Frenchman. Every state in the world has its representatives…
The passengers came in every hue and occupied every station in life. From the poor farm girl, her passage paid by the government, to large families with money and discontented spirits. As their ships finally pulled away from sobbing relatives and fading band music, they set their sights on one thing: a far off land of Promise, where they may find wealth, social distinction and domestic happiness.
THOMAS PIERSON
THE WHINGER
* * *
IF THERE’S SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT, COUNT ON THOMAS
BORN Philadelphia, 1813
DIED Ballarat, 1911
ARRIVED February 1853, on the Ascutna
AGE AT EUREKA 41
CHILDREN One son, 15 years old.
FAQ Married to Frances Pierson. Freemason. Book binder. Worked as a digger while Frances ran a store. Kept a detailed diary from the ship voyage through the early years on Ballarat diggings.
ARCHIVE Diaries, SLV MS 11646
Well, that was the plan anyway.
THE WILD WORLD OF WATER
These days it’s hard to believe that a journey could completely transform you. Today we can cross the globe so fast we might never even speak to the strangers in the seats around us. Unless disaster strikes, the voyage itself leaves us unchanged.
But by the time the gold-rush immigrants reached Ballarat, they’d already endured a colossal, epic journey. And it was an experience many of them found life-altering. A new era, as one shipboard journal proclaimed grandly. Men, women and children who had hitherto hugged the land now committed their destinies to the wild world of water.
But first they had to get over their seasickness—which was, like war and childbirth, a truly democratising experience. Few first-timers escaped it, and even old hands felt the effects as the land disappeared astern and the body lost its bearings. With nothing fixed to focus on, the balance between eye and ear was disturbed. The ship would pitch and rock and yaw, and even when that ceased there was still a constant nauseating motion in the head.
It helped to keep busy and concentrate on mechanical tasks, as Louisa Timewell discovered. Although the ship swayed like a hammock in the breeze, she and the other women still needed to go about their daily business. They held their babies on one hip while washing out clothes, trying to keep the basin steady. It’s very laughable to see them pitching about so, wrote Louisa. Fortunately for her, babies are strict taskmasters. I got on deck all day with the children, Louisa wrote, and the time passed off very pleasantly.
Céleste de Chabrillan was the wife of the new French Consul to Melbourne. She described a less pleasant scene on the Croesus as it headed for the open sea in 1854.
It jolted and tossed about on the waves so much that passengers and objects all came tumbling down on top of each other…The famous line ‘hare you sichowek’ (are you seasick?) went from one passenger to the next, some escaping to their cabins, others leaning over the side. The only reply one hears is moaning, groaning and retching.
Céleste herself felt the initial effects of this horrible sickness, but she refused to yield to its power: I am fighting against it. She stayed on deck—alone—while her husband Lionel remained in their cabin for three days with his head between two pillows. I was distressed to see him suffer so, she lamented. But the headstrong Céleste, a former dancer and courtesan, declined to stay by his side in their dark, cramped cabin: I prefer to face the enemy and I go back up on deck.
SARAH HANMER (NEE McCULLOUGH)
THE LEADING LADY
* * *
AIDING AND ABETTING REBELS WHILE SINGING FOR HER SUPPER
BORN Drummadonald, County Down, Ireland, 1821
DIED Adelaide, 1867
ARRIVED August 1853, on the Lady Flora
AGE AT EUREKA 33
CHILDREN one daughter, Julia, aged twelve.
FAQ Actress and single mother. Had toured America before com
ing to Australia with her brother and daughter. Manager and proprietress of Adelphi Theatre, headquarters of American leaders of Eureka, and a financial benefactor of diggers’ cause. Lent costumes and props to miners in the Stockade.
Brave-faced Fanny Davis was mortified to find that defiance alone was not enough. It was a great mistake me being ill, she wrote, as I did not mean to be. It offended her dignity that crewmen needed to come down with mops and buckets to clean out her cabin.
Agnes Paterson was, by her own admission, reduced to a most pitiful condition and Charlotte Spence was a pitiable mess, refusing all nourishment for days. On the Lady Flora, the ship carrying the actor Sarah Hanmer and her daughter Julia to their new home, the doctor prescribed wine and porter for the invalids. Another passenger, John James Bond, thought that might explain why some of the ladies are again disposed to faint.
With heads reeling and stomachs churning, many immigrants prayed for death to put them out of their misery. But when they finally crawled out of the putrid stinking belly of the ship to face the light again, it was as if they were born anew. The first challenge had been overcome, and they were away. In time I might make a brave sailor, wrote Fanny Davis, marvelling at the new possibilities that suddenly seemed to arise before her.
OUR FLOATING WORLD
The vast majority of gold-rush immigrants were travelling from British ports. For them, the early part of the journey proceeded in a southwesterly direction down the east Atlantic Ocean. The ship’s route would descend past the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the lumpy knob of West Africa, through the Tropic of Cancer towards the equator. Sometimes, if conditions were poor and ships made slow progress, the English coastline could still be visible for weeks. But eventually, all familiar markers disappeared from sight.
The journey from Britain to Melbourne
Now there was only the vast rolling ocean.
Just six days after her departure, English schoolgirl Jane Swan noted it was getting perceptibly warmer but, she complained to her diary, we get quite tired of having nothing to look at but the sea. Passengers with more serious grievances were also quick to make them known. After all, most of the gold-rush immigrants had paid for their passage, or at least they were there of their own free will—not as convicts or naval conscripts.
On the Lady Flora, J. J. Bond said, the ’tween deck people think they are living too much like pigs. These disgruntled passengers petitioned the captain to land at the nearest port so they could acquaint the owners of the ship with the condition of facilities that were unequal to her crowded state.
The passengers’ objection to living like swine was fair enough. They would all have heard of the Ticonderoga, the famous ‘plague ship’ that arrived at Port Phillip in November 1852 after a hell voyage in which one hundred of its 795 assisted migrants died—over half of them children. A report by the Immigration Board in Melbourne later stated that the ship:
did not appear to have been cleaned for weeks, the stench was overpowering, the lockers so thoughtlessly provided for the Immigrants’ use were full of dirt, mouldy bread, and suet full of maggots, beneath the bottom boards of nearly every berth upon the lower deck were discovered…receptacles full of putrid ordure, and porter bottles etc, filled with stale urine, while maggots were seen crawling underneath the berths.
Jane Swan’s family, on board the William and Jane, also signed a petition. This one was about a bad water supply, and it worked. They were supplied with good water from the tanks.
Petitioning was something the English emigrants would have been quite familiar with. It was part of a longstanding tradition in which people got together to complain about and combat local grievances. The journey to Australia, being long and crowded, made getting together to complain quite straightforward. Since nobody liked the idea of hostile crowds in confined spaces, most ship captains were at least willing to hear petitions and delegations without taking offence.
By the time most gold seekers arrived on dry land, they had already made friendships and alliances: strong bonds based on shared space and sometimes common grievances. Many passengers referred to shipboard life as being like one well regulated family. The Marco Polo Chronicle put this clannish feeling down to the depression that associates with ‘goodbye’ followed by the vast amount of physical suffering to be surmounted through seasickness. Our floating world, they called it.
This intense bonding, coupled with the sense of having endured an ordeal together, would later make an important contribution to solidarity on the goldfields.
A DIRTY DISAGREEABLE LOT
The ‘floating world’ might have been novel but, as many ship diaries reveal, it still had plenty of pride, prejudice and plain old snobbery.
Englishman John Spence considered the third class rabble to be the scourge of the ship. These Irish poor are the greatest nuisance we have on board—worse than vermin, stale biscuits, wild children or rank water—and a dirty disagreeable lot. Spence assumed the frequent robberies to be the work of the Irish mob. I expect before we reach Melbourne we shan’t have a spoon left on us, he complained. They are such expert thieves.
CATHERINE BENTLEY (NEE SHERWIN)
THE BIGGEST LOSER
* * *
THE HIGHER THEY COME, THE HARDER THEY FALL
BORN Sligo, Ireland, 1831
DIED Neerim South, 1906
ARRIVED 1850
AGE AT EUREKA 23
CHILDREN One boy born September 1853. She was pregnant at Eureka; five children were born subsequently.
FAQ Irish Protestant. She and her sister arrived in Victoria as free emigrants. Married James Bentley, November 1852. Proprietor of Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, burned down by rioters 17 October 1854. Tried for the murder of James Scobie, and acquitted; James was found guilty and jailed.
What a literate Irish Protestant lass like Catherine Bentley might have thought of such blatant bigotry is not clear. At any rate she quickly climbed the ladder of social mobility once she reached Melbourne.
Religious intolerance surfaced too. During a fierce storm, James Menzies had a gripe about his Methodist shipmates who went to prayers, thought they were going to the bottom, they were all oh Lord have mercy on my soul enough to give any one the belly ache. Menzies wasn’t much for the Brotherhood of Man. Later in the voyage, he confided that he’d sooner be among a lot of Irish for they are all Cornish people except two or three and a more ignorant set I never was with in my life. Bear in mind that in the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Scots were just as likely to communicate in their native languages as in English. Prejudice against non-English speakers was common.
So was disapproval of women, and it was often based on their sexual conduct. As ships sailed towards the tropics and temperatures rose, women stripped back their layers: corsets were unlaced, stockings removed. On clear nights there might be dancing on the high poop deck. In stormy weather there was always a dark corner for a liaison.
Of all the places of iniquity my eyes ever beheld, wrote one shocked passenger sailing on the Star of the East in September 1853, an emigrant ship is the worst, men and women packed indiscriminately together, married couples and young girls, and I am
sure some of the girls will have cause to remember the STAR OF THE EAST. A shipboard romance could leave a souvenir that needed feeding and changing several times a day.
Women were technically free to move about the ship, but they were expected to conform to nineteenth-century standards of respectable femininity. This was particularly true for the single ladies. On James Menzies’ ship, there was a disturbance in the women’s quarters and the ship’s doctor told them that he would have a prison made for some of them. It wasn’t a bluff. The carpenters were called in to install wooden uprights—like prison bars—across the berths of the offending women. Menzies, who for some reason was a witness to this, chuckled that it put me in mind of the wild beast cages at the Surrey Zoological Gardens.
CROSSING THE LINE
It isn’t particularly surprising if there were moments of passion on this long journey. The migrants were young, hard-drinking thrillseekers, mostly unchaperoned. But sometimes the steamy encounters took unexpected forms.
The Sir William Molesworth stopped at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal in 1853. As the Scottish teenager Alexander Dick tells us, there was no pier or landing place, and one of the primary industries of the natives—who were of mixed African and Portuguese descent—was carrying passengers from boats to the shore.
