by Clare Wright
The Sir William Molesworth arrived in considerable surf. Dick describes the scene of moral pandemonium that ensued, with the ladies utterly horrified to find that they could only reach the shore in the arms of a Cape Verdean man as naked as the Apostle Belvidere and as black as Beelzebub. Some flatly refused, and returned to the ship. A few daring souls resigned themselves half unwillingly to the adventure, arriving on the beach tousled and tumbled and blushing like peonies.
It was an extraordinary scene. Familiar standards were blurred, behaviours adapted, boundaries crossed. The women who were carried to shore were only ‘half unwilling’. No longer upstanding, but tousled and tumbled and set down arse-about. Wondering, probably, how a precious English rose should act when her knight in shining armour is not a handsome prince but a buck-naked black man.
Not all the women jumped ship when the opportunity presented. But some did grab at the chance to throw off the trappings of convention and surrender to something new. And it would have been only one of the disorienting experiences for the south-bound travellers. For many of them, the ship voyage abruptly shattered old assumptions.
Shipboard, immigrants were neither on land nor of the sea; neither leaving nor arriving. They were neither here nor there. Fanny Davis even observed a Catholic prayer service, below deck, conducted by a young woman. What had possessed this girl to go against the strict traditions of her faith?
Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian, described the scene on the promenade deck of his ship at night, when it assumed the appearance of a dance hall with fiddlers, tambourines, dancers. Folks stood in a ring, clapping and cheering. Had it not been for a sober and quite respectable company, wrote Boynton, one might have imagined himself in an Ann Street gathering: in short, we had a regular break down. (Ann Street was the red-light district of Boston, where the city’s blacks and whites would notoriously intermingle.)
John Hopkins, travelling aboard the Schomberg, enjoyed a silly affair when the lads in his cabin put on a show: the star was a ‘beautiful young lady’ with a beard.
Fanny Davis described one of her ship’s full dress balls where women went to pains to outdo each other’s outfits. Some of the girls, she wrote, dress in the Highland costume as men. It looks first rate. And out on deck she was finding things even more peculiar. An awning had been rigged up on the deck for the ladies, but many did not use it. The sun begins to turn the colour of our skins, wrote Fanny, we shall all be black soon. The Marco Polo Chronicle reported the same phenomenon: fair faces brown rapidly.
For sixteen-year-old Sarah Ann Raws, sailing on the Bloomer in 1854, reaching the tropics was a revelation. Although she and her brother could scarcely sleep in our beds for the heat, Sarah Ann delighted in lying on top of her mattress with only a thin sheet as cover, sweat rolling off our faces. And no stockings.
What a sign of the topsy-turvy times.
SOUTHERN STARS
During their first miserable, stomach-churning weeks at sea when everything solid melted into air, people still had the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which everyone did, before electricity and TV) kept passengers in touch with a familiar reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations that you knew, and could use to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. Those stars seemed a last link uniting us, wrote Mrs Charles Meredith.
Then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even that certainty was stripped away. I do not know one thing that I felt so much, lamented Mrs Meredith, as the loss of the North Star.
At the equator, you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set—the entire celestial sphere. Another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched further south towards Australia, passengers had no choice but to fix their mental compass on the Crux Australis: the Southern Cross.
Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the equator on 15 July 1853: Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different to an English sky.
The Southern Cross said to these voyagers that everything had changed. It told of a new political identity, freed from old allegiances. But it was a symbol of belonging too. The Southern Cross offered new immigrants the embrace of a new community. It represented something shared. Something that became recognisable, habitual, as the voyage continued. Something you could rely on when everything else was slipping away.
And before long that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.
THE DEEP
After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into the South Atlantic, following the winds and current, heading towards the Cape of Good Hope and the Roaring Forties.
The dancing and music-making on deck came to an abrupt halt as ships entered the arctic trade winds of the Southern Ocean. Heavy seas and strong winds buffeted the ship. Passengers were forced to find their sea legs all over again. On a day that was blowing a perfect hurricane, Fanny Davis stayed below but one of her cabin-mates fell over trying to get on deck and knocked several teeth in.
Later a woman delivered her baby in the middle of a fearsome storm only a week out from Port Phillip. It was a night of terrors, with waves flooding the berths and snow blanketing the deck. The baby died as soon as it was born; the mother followed not long after.
Another traveller, Mrs Graham, witnessed the sea burials of a baby and toddler from the one family, dead within two days of each other and wrote: the body fell with a splash and all was over but the cries of the Parents who felt deeply the loss of the child.
On Sarah Raws’ ship, a lady died this morning in our cabin, leaving ten grieving children. She had become very intimate with Sarah’s mother and father, and Sarah attended the funeral. They sewed her up in canvas, and it was an effecting [sic] sight to see the bereaved family. The woman’s son offered the very large sum of £200 to the captain to bring the body to land, but the law prohibited this and so she was consigned to the deep. They had only three days left to sail.
Passengers kept a watch out for land, but it was often the scents of Australia that first alerted immigrants that their journey was almost complete. An aromatic odour, as of spicy flowers greeted journalist William Howitt as he coasted through Bass Strait. A beautiful awakening at 4 o’clock, wrote Maggie Brown Howden on 29 July 1854. Saw from my porthole Cape Otway lighthouse, a most cheering sight, and at 6 o’clock saw land of the country we had so longed for weeks to behold. At last that comfort was granted us.
But the ordeal was not over yet. Ships still had to navigate the Heads of Port Phillip Bay to reach the port of Melbourne. Captains who didn’t know the local tidal and weather conditions could stumble at the final hurdle. At least 50 ships have been wrecked on the Rip.
MARTHA CLENDINNING (NEE HOLMES)
THE DOCTOR’S WIFE, NOT
* * *
PIONEER OF THE POP-UP SHOP
BORN Garryduff, Ireland, 1822
DIED Toorak, 1908
ARRIVED: January 1853, on the St George
AGE AT EUREKA 32
CHILDREN One daughter, seven years old at Eu
reka.
FAQ Anglo-Irish upper class, married to a doctor turned digger. Went into business with her sister as a shopkeeper on Ballarat diggings to support her family. Wrote a detailed memoir of early life in Ballarat, including Eureka.
ARCHIVE Memoir, SLV MS 1010211
Genteel Englishwoman Martha Clendinning, travelling with her doctor husband and young daughter, had a calamitous ending to her voyage, when the St George foundered on rocks just off Queen-scliff. The Clendinnings, in their first-class berth, got off lightly, losing only their brand new digging tools. But all the lower-class passengers in steerage lost their entire belongings. These poor buggers limped ashore with nothing.
It was grief and fear, not elation, that accompanied many passengers as they docked at their new lives.
(NOT SO MARVELLOUS) MELBOURNE
Gold-rush Melbourne—gateway to the diggings—was a city reeling. In 1852, the year following the first gold discoveries, the city was like a ghost town.
Crews (and even captains) abandoned their ships in the harbour, leaving nothing more than a forest of masts, as Alexander Dick described the port of Melbourne. Construction sites were frozen in time: buildings had been started but there were no workers to finish them.
The police force was gutted, schools closed, the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. And husbands (notoriously) deserted their wives. Some women expected their men to reappear with a pocketful of gold; others knew they were gone for good.
A year later, however, many of the original fugitives had returned. Some had made their pile; some had realised they could make a fortune a lot more easily selling goods and services to gold diggers than digging for gold themselves.
Carpenters, stonemasons and other artisans found their skills were suddenly in demand. Shady lawyers and dubious doctors, who had come to Australia to dig for wealth, discovered that their professions paid better—regardless of whether they really were qualified. A publican’s licence was a sure route to prosperity—liquid gold. You just had to be adaptable.
And no one knew the value of adaptability better than women. As Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye wrote in her advice manual for prospective female immigrants, what was needed in Victoria, far more than fine garments, letters of introduction and impeccable manners, was a smiling face, and a firm determination never to look on the shady side of the picture but to make the very best of every cross, accident or discomfort. Melbourne was a can-do sort of a place—and it was growing at a ferocious rate.
Victoria and the goldfields
SETTLING FOR COLLINGWOOD
The explosion in Melbourne’s growth had far-reaching effects. Many immigrants, particularly those with families, were disheartened by what they saw when they left the cosy little floating world of their ship. The search for decent lodgings was the first challenge. Single young men could bed down in any nook or cranny, but fathers struggled to find accommodation for their dependants.
Solomon Belinfante, a Jamaican-born London Jew, had been assured of a room in Melbourne by one of his brethren. He went ashore with his pregnant 21-year-old wife Ada, their infant daughter Rebecca and her nursemaid, after a comfortable 78 days at sea under steam power.
We had lunch in a miserable place called Sandridge, wrote Belinfante (aged 40) in his diary, then walked to the omnibus ankle deep in mud…heartily sick of the Cohen promises to engage lodgings…heartily disgusted with the place. But Ada and Solomon soon settled in Collingwood, where he became a commercial broker and she got on with the business of having eleven more children.
At this stage the suburb of Collingwood had no roads and the stumps of newly felled gum trees poked out of the ground. A metre-high gum stub protruded right at the entrance to Martha Clendinning’s new abode. Martha and her daughter were lucky to find a room to rent in the house of the well known vocalist, Mrs Tester. Martha’s husband Dr George Clendinning stayed at a pub, sleeping on a billiard table.
The housing shortage underlay many of Melbourne’s social woes. All manner of temporary structures were erected to serve as lodging houses. And, not surprisingly, disease spread like wildfire through these unsanitary and overcrowded hostelries.
Colonial fever was a quaint name for a hideous ailment: typhus. It was spread by head lice and characterised by headaches, chills and the foul smell of rotting bodily fluids. It was exacerbated by overcrowding and poor hygiene. It took out young and old alike, and it frightened everybody. Women were known to shave their pubic hair so they wouldn’t get lice.
Influenza, scarlet fever, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough all became endemic in Victoria in the 1850s. All associated with high immigration, high birthrate and congested living conditions.
CANVAS TOWN
Those too poor or too unlucky to find proper accommodation were left with one grim place of last resort. Canvas Town was a tent city located on the south side of the Yarra River at Emerald Hill. It’s now the site of the Victorian Arts Centre. Like the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed with tent dwellings there were tent stores, bakers’ shops, butchers’ stalls, restaurants, sly-grog shops and barbers’ shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.
It sounds like a fine solution, but the eight thousand inhabitants led a squalid existence. The Marco Polo Chronicle called Canvas Town the epitome of misery and costliness. The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer. The only water supply was the fetid Yarra River, into which the tanneries and soap factories of Collingwood and Richmond upstream had already emptied their disgusting waste. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.
Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion’. The begrimed and unrecognisable children who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with firewood, rumbling between the tents with their wretched occupants, horrified Martha. Everyone and everything was covered in dust.
Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack: children squalling, women shrieking and men shouting, the noise was uproarious. The colonial urban jungle of Canvas Town looked, sounded and smelled like somewhere you’d want to escape from, not sail halfway around the world to find.
Unable to get any accommodation at all, Thomas and Frances Pierson pitched a tent at South Melbourne beach where sand flew in clouds thicker than I ever saw it snow. All a Lie that we were told in History or the papers, he fumes in his diary. This is the most God forsaken accursed country I could conceive of.
Thomas, like so many others, felt royally ripped off.
LAW AND ORDER
Mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous diseases and absent husbands. It sounds like the wild west, or at least Hollywood’s version of it. But there is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but loyal satellite of the British Empire: it was firmly based on British institutions.
By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within 30 years, it would become an international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike Dodge City or Deadwood, one expected to be governed by the high standards of British justice. As the Marco Polo Chronicle reassured its readers, the Genuine Spirit of British Generosity, N
obility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city. They would not need to fend for themselves: the mother country had their back.
But British respectability would certainly be tested. Camping life, like ship life, created a community of intimate strangers. Tent living let in more than dust—it could bring unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. As William Kelly said, if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress.
Boundaries were uncertain, like the flicker of candlelight. One female sojourner wrote that Australian conventions were quite an elastic, compressible thing, and give to the touch. William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch a fellow off-guard. Ambition, he observed, writing about the gold-rush population, may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by conventional barriers. It was a ‘downside up community’. And that made everyone anxious—particularly the authorities.
BRITISH JUSTICE
Justice is based on notions of fairness, equity, objectivity and rationality. We think of it as a strong, simple—even self-evident—concept. But it draws on many perspectives, including morality, philosophy, law, religion and culture.
Justice is often symbolised as a woman: Lady Justice or Justitia, a goddess holding a sword, which represents the power of the court, and scales to weigh up competing claims. She wears a blindfold to indicate that justice should be blind to influence, or in other words impartial. However the British Empire’s take on justice was often expressed in masculine terms: a gentlemanly notion of the basis of civilised conduct. The rules of engagement for white men.
