by Clare Wright
In the mid-nineteenth century, this idea of British justice was a potent force in civic life, shaping codes of behaviour, influencing what was expected both of individuals and of the government. In return for their loyalty to the Crown, British subjects could anticipate justice according to the rule of law, dispensed by an independent judiciary, as well as protection from administrative corruption and abuse, and the right to petition authority about their grievances.
The antithesis of British Justice is Lynch Law, as sometimes practised in America. Lynch Law is an unregulated form of ‘justice’ (often meaning retribution) inflicted by an informal group or mob with no legal authority. Punishment by Lynch Law is often fatal.
Well, perhaps not everyone.
George Francis Train’s wife, Willie Davis Train, wrote to her father: The extraordinary change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year, can scarcely be credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution. For Willie, the rush of change was like medicine, easing her grief at losing her only child just weeks before leaving America. As I advance in years and experience, she wrote to her brother on the same day, I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution that at times I marvel at my own thoughts. An inner riot: a ‘wonderful revolution’ of spirit and circumstance.
But Willie was one of the lucky ones. The majority of newcomers, even other ladies of breeding and education, encountered an avalanche of adversity. It could be a struggle just to keep a toehold.
For every miner or merchant in the money, there was another down on his luck. And that very often meant a starving wife and children or a shelved fiancée or fretful mother at home, waiting for news of a distant son’s good fortune.
Janet Kincaid was one of the wives left behind—in Glasgow, with six children and a steady output of unanswered letters. By the time she at last got her husband’s latest address, she was heartily fed up.
You left to better your family, you don’t need to write that any more, we have had enough of that talk. You had better do something for them. You left the ship to better your self and to get your money to your self. You never earned much for your family, far less for your Wife, you sent five Pounds, two years and a half ago. You mention in a letter to me that you made more money at the digging than ever you made at home. You might have sent us the half of what you made. You are a hard hearted Father when you could sit down and eat up your children’s meat your self. I was a poor unfortunate Wretch, little did I think when I was young what I had to come through with your conduck. We might have been the happiest couple in Greenock, you got a good wife and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante do well at home is not to be trusted Abroad…poor Duncan [child number 5] does not know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for eating… find a proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your deserted Wife Janet Kincaid.
British subjects had expectations of how they should be treated: with fairness and dignity.
Similarly, it seems, some women believed in their own form of marital justice. Husbands who breached such standards of civility could expect their comeuppance.
ALL THE SINGLE LADIES
Deserted wives might have had it tough, but single women could do remarkably well for themselves in their new homeland. In fact, some fared better on arrival in Victoria than their male counterparts.
Australia had always had a problem with gender imbalance—the legacy of starting out as a penal colony—and the gold rush only made it worse. The British government was eager to address the disproportion of the sexes by paying the travel expenses of young unmarried women.
This ‘assisted passage’ scheme was massively successful. In 1853, almost 10,000 single women arrived in Victoria as government-sponsored immigrants.
Some female immigrants already had work lined up. When nineteen-year-old Irish girl Eliza Darcy sailed to Victoria on the City of Manchester in July 1854, she went straight into the service of Mr Jeffreys, on the Great Western Road, employed on a three-month contract for £18 with rations. (Eliza travelled alone to Victoria, but also sailing on the City of Manchester were members of the Howard family from Dublin. Devout Catholics, the Howard and Darcy lines would later unite in the passion-fuelled summer of 1854.)
ELIZA DARCY (HOWARD)
* * *
BORN Ireland, 1835
DIED Geelong, 1920
ARRIVED July 1854, on the City of Manchester
AGE AT EUREKA 19
CHILDREN Twelve, the first born in 1856.
FAQ Irish Catholic, immigrated as a single girl, with members of her extended family. Cousin of Alicia Dunne, who married Peter Lalor. Arrived in Ballarat October 1854. Married miner Patrick Howard in 1855. Descendants include Shane, Marica and Damien Howard (musicians).
There was much to lure young women like Eliza. Victoria had a well-known ‘servant problem’—as in, there weren’t enough servants to go around—which meant firstly that the pay was good, but also that the employee was calling the shots. The comic magazine Punch printed cartoons that showed boisterous young women telling their masters where to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has not supplied her with copies of Punch to read! In another, the young servant waits for her master to chop the wood.
Mrs May Howell found her newly hired servant couldn’t decide on a suitable starting date. It was what they call colonial bounce, she said. She means to come, but thinks as this is a free country she must show herself independent. William Westgarth observed wryly that Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid agreed to a temporary trial of her new mistress.
The marriage market, too, was wide open. One girl, employed as a servant, twittered merrily to her sisters at home about her startling new prospects for matrimony:
I had an offer a few days after landing from a gold-digger, with £600–£700. Since that I have had another from a bushman, with £900; he has gone to the diggings again, to make plenty of money. That I have not decided on yet. I shall have a handsome house and garden and all I wish…I have so many chances.
As well as a gold rush, Victoria was experiencing a ‘wife rush’.
Eligible women had an astonishing new power to pick and choose their mate (a fact that caused a moral panic about the control of defiant wives). Other single girls could get themselves an instant breadwinner. Eliza Lucus wrote home, When immigrant ships came in, the Diggers came down to meet them, to try and induce women to marry them and go back to the diggings with them.
The offer of marriage and a dray ride to the diggings was not every girl’s idea of a good time. But for many it was just another form of assisted passage. And single women had an alarming degree of autonomy, able to choose between domestic service and marriage.
Even more disconcerting for bystanders, these newly empowered young women were choosing to go it alone and carve their own route to freedom and independence. Many found themselves on the road to Ballarat.
THE ROAD
It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9 November 1853, he and his travelling companions dragged a bullock dray
up long, steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became hopelessly bogged on some stretches of the road. On others, it was all they could do to keep the cart from overturning in the potholes created by all the traffic. Thousands of fortune-seekers were walking the same well-worn dirt track.
The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It’s the same route that you would take today. Now there is a tangle of arterial roads, truck depots and grey-faced factories, but under all that it’s the same flat, open terrain it was then.
William Westgarth described these plains as an ocean of grass. Charles Evans saw the landscape the same way: stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean. It was fertile ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that had sustained the region’s Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.
Fifty kilometres from Melbourne, in the basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced to navigate a deep jagged cut-out known as The Gap. This landmark provided a lucrative winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king’s ransom to haul out drays piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out. (Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western Highway.)
A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding. An average cart trip took three days in dry weather and cost £25—a princely sum. But for anyone on foot, like Charles Evans, it was a week-long hike.
There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to the goldfields. Most of them say that, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road was a revelation.
Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was immediately won over by the beauty and healthiness of the country.
Mary Bristow was rendered speechless. I cannot describe the bush, she wrote. It means such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks. She found the scenery beautiful and the black people exquisitely made. To her astonishment, Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of Eden.
Mrs Mannington Caffyn was also rhapsodic but observed a downside. Australian sunlight, she wrote, is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant and bumptious, and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things.
Ten-year-old Lucy Birchall, travelling with her parents and five siblings, did what all young families do to pass the time on a long journey. We were very merry, we sang all the songs we could collect, Lucy wrote. It took their minds off being up to our knees in mud, perishing with cold and soaked by nasty drizzling [rain] that beat in our faces. A pennyworth of peppermints helped.
THIS FEMININE EXODUS
As early as March 1853, contemporary observers like James Bonwick were already commenting that the diggings were attracting women like ants to honey. In just two days he counted one hundred and twenty ladies, going up either with or to their lords of the pick and cradle.
Bonwick called it a phenomenon, this feminine Exodus from our townships. He also noted that some husbands have taken uncommon care to prepare for the coming of their better halves by upgrading their accommodation: moving out of their tents and into log cabins with stone chimneys and floor coverings and, in one case, an iron bedstead.
The diggers’ wives accompanied them not just to keep families intact, or to avoid being left behind, but also in a genuine spirit of exploration. When James Watson determined to go to Ballarat, his wife Margaret, who had already survived several trials with James and their children, decided that this was one more adventure for her. Emily Skinner knew that her husband William would not go if I objected very much, etc. but, she reasoned, what a much better chance we should have of getting on [together]. After thinking and talking it over a little, the couple decided that William would go on ahead, make enough money to build a comfortable tent home, then send for Emily to join him. This all happened surprisingly quickly.
There were hundreds of lone women, too, on the road to Ballarat, some joining (or searching for) absent husbands or connecting with other family, some making their own way in the world.
Emily Skinner met two stout young women on her journey to the Ovens. They told me that they had many offers of a place [in Melbourne], as it was hard to get servants, wrote Emily in her diary, but the girls were determined to go to the diggings, where high wages and easy times awaited them.
Mary Bristow, 42 and unmarried, was keen to go to the diggings as a kind of bivouac (or camping trip) and found three other young women to accompany her. The first night the women slept in a covered dray, but it rained in torrents. I don’t think I closed my eyes, wrote Mary. That first day, they walked 22 kilometres, the next nearly 40. The women wore veils and large bonnets and never ventured out in the middle of the day; it was too dangerous to expose [ourselves] to the sun’s burning rays. Other people, however, were not a threat. Mary was relieved to note that there is always due observance of respect from the men in their travelling company. Ladies could walk or ride long distances unattended and have nothing to fear. I have never been so happy or free from care, she wrote.
Mrs Elizabeth Massey also found a change in herself on the road to Ballarat. Back in England Mrs Massey had been married only a few weeks when her new husband unexpectedly called on her to accompany him to Australia. Disgust, she wrote in her memoir eight years later, indeed is not a word strong enough to express my feelings at the moment. On arrival in Victoria, the Masseys went straight to the diggings to avoid the filth, flies and expense of Melbourne.
But on the road, Mrs Massey felt joyfully off the leash. What had initially settled upon her as a black cloud of misery now seemed like a party of pleasure. In common with other women who started out thinking they were on a highway to hell, she happily discovered herself on a path to unexpected release.
MY GYPSY LIFE
It is often said that escape—more than simple gold-lust—stimulated men’s rush to the diggings. These were, as one writer put it, the days when men broke their bonds and dreamed of marvellous things to come. And it is usually implied that the bonds they wanted to break included nagging women and their bawling brats.
But it’s clear that many women also harboured their own aspirations of escape, not necessarily from spouses and children, but from the tedious restrictions of their lives. In particular, many educated and refined women (in the words of one emigrant who eloped with her brother’s tutor and emigrated to Victoria) thought the ease of their English life well left behind them. Polite conventions—high teas and calling cards and corsets and crinolines—were like shackles for many nineteenth-century British gentlewomen. It cost a lot of effort and anxiety to keep up appearances. Years later Mrs Massey, who spent two years on the diggings between 1852 and 1854, would write I look back with a grateful heart to my gipsy life.
Refugees from convention were joined on the road by fugitives from the law. The goldfields frontier was a good place to disappear in search of a fresh start. The presence on the goldfields of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s
Land (known as Vandies) became a hot political issue after 1853, but there were other kinds of trouble you might want to leave behind. An unwanted pregnancy, for example. A ‘Miss Smith’, with her fatherless baby, could be reincarnated on the diggings as ‘Mrs Smith’, who’d lost her (fictitious) husband in a mining accident or maritime mishap.
For it was no joke to be an unmarried mother. There are reports of many a young woman who killed or abandoned her newborn in an attempt to hide the evidence of ‘her’ sin. On 31 October 1854, for example, the Colonial Secretary was informed that a one-month-old child had been found in the grounds of St John’s School on the corner of Elizabeth and La Trobe streets. The baby was in good health and was wearing a long white frock and wrapped in a blue and green checked shawl. The Government Gazette posted a reward for the apprehension of the mother.
The Police Gazette is also full of reports of female runaways. On 27 February 1854, information was distributed about one Sarah Wilson, who had left the hired service of Mr Smith in Collingwood before her contract expired. Wilson was nineteen years old and just under five feet (about 150 centimetres) tall, with a dark complexion and small, regular features. She has left her clothes behind her and has no relatives in Melbourne, noted the Gazette.
CORSETS AND CRINOLINES
Can you imagine removing your ribs for the sake of fashion? That’s just what some women did to achieve the perfect nineteenth-century feminine figure: a tiny waist and ample hips. You also needed a tightly laced corset. (One woman called corsets those vile instruments of torture.) Over this you wore a crinoline: a hooped frame designed to support skirts in a bell-like shape.
