by Clare Wright
Corsets meant you couldn’t breathe and crinolines meant you couldn’t walk—and sometimes they caught fire. There were women who died of their skirt injuries.
In 1848 a group of middle-class women, headed by an indefatigable mother of six named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in Seneca Falls, New York, to address the problem of women’s social and political oppression. As part of their campaign for women’s emancipation, including the right to vote, these women argued that political freedom should be expressed by freedom from corsets and crinolines, which not only distorted women’s bodies but also ruined their health. From this emerged a new ‘rational dress’ outfit: a long tunic and billowing pants gathered at the ankle. The outfit was known as the Bloomer costume, after magazine editor Amelia Bloomer, who publicised it, and it became a must-have fashion item among women’s rights advocates in America and England.
In March 1854, Ann Plummer escaped from the residence of her husband in Fitzroy Crescent. Ann had been tried for an undisclosed offence at the Central Criminal Court in 1849 and given a fifteen-year sentence, to be served at the premises of her husband. Ann was described as aged 25 years and five foot one inch (152 centimetres) tall, with a fresh complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, native Burnley, nose has been smashed. You could make an educated guess about what she was running away from.
Clearly, women had many practical reasons to seek the new adventures offered by the goldfields. There was safety in numbers, and as the travellers—male and female—reached the end of the road, liberation was finally in sight.
BALLARAT
You could hear Ballarat before seeing it.
When journalist Thomas McCombie arrived in 1853, A confused sound like the noise of a mighty multitude broke upon our ears and a sudden turn of the road brought us in full view of Ballarat. I freely confess, he wrote, that no scene have I ever witnessed made so deep and lasting an impression on my mind.
Horse bells jingled, whips cracked, people shouted and parrots screeched. Thousands of dogs chained outside tents and mine shafts barked constantly. One newcomer, schoolboy John Deegan, described the uproarious blasphemy of bullock drivers as their swearing echoed across the basin. Years later he wrote of that vague, indescribably murmurous sound, which seems to pervade the air where a crowd is in active motion. The feeling would never leave him. It was like a genuine fairy tale.
Ballarat, 1854
The bewitching effect was particularly astonishing for travellers who arrived at night. Henry Mundy, then a 20-year-old shepherd, walked from Geelong to Ballarat to find his fortune. Standing on the ridge, he could see only the twinkle of a thousand campfires, like a mirror image of the night sky. Yet the noise, he later recalled, was indescribable.
During the evening meal the talking and yelling was incessant. Later, there were guns and pistols firing, a release of the day’s pent-up emotion, and everywhere the continuous yowling and barking of the dogs. After the ritual gunfire stopped, accordions, concertinas, fiddles, flutes, clarionettes, cornets, bugles, all were set going each with his own tune. The effect, said Mundy, was deafening.
In late 1853 Ballarat was a sprawling tent city. As the travellers arrived they saw before them the vast diggings of East Ballarat, where a creek wound through a valley of low mounds and hills. Bakery Hill rose in the distance. Perched above the diggings was the Camp, home to the officers of the Gold Fields Commission: the police and public servants who ran the place. Thomas McCombie called them the aristocracy of the canvas city of Ballarat. Nestled beside the Camp on a neat grid of streets was a tiny new township of stores and homes. Some of them were even built from timber.
Encircling all this was a ring of green, the last remains of the thick scrub that had once covered the entire basin. The diggers, observed English journalist William Howitt, seem to have two especial propensities, those of firing guns and felling trees.
Most of the timber was used for tent poles and mineshaft supports, but in late 1853 Ballarat was also ferociously burning timber for heat, light and fuel. The blue smoke of ten thousand campfires curled slowly upward, observed John Deegan, and blended with the haze of the summer evening.
DEEP LEAD MINING
An upturned, unsightly mass…every bit had been turned topsy-turvy. This is how newcomers described the Ballarat diggings in 1854.
In the early days of the gold rush, mining was done with picks and pans at the edge of flowing riverbeds. But in Ballarat, this shallow ‘alluvial’ gold was quickly exhausted. By late 1853 there was a shift in mining technology. Riches were now to be found far below the surface, beneath deep basalt veins that followed the ancient riverbeds. In fact, these deep lead deposits were larger and richer than any found anywhere else in the world, but new methods were needed to extract the gold.
Deep sinking was the answer: but it was a long and gruelling process. Deep shafts had to be laboriously dug, then shored up with timber, which had to be cut by hand.
The rewards could be magnificent, or non-existent. It could take up to a year to ‘bottom out’ on a hole. The whole undertaking was costly in every way—not least to the physical environment, which was left scarred and stripped of vegetation.
Though magical, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Numerous diarists and letter-writers remarked on the sheer ugliness of the diggings. To Mrs Elizabeth Massey, the goldfields had the appearance of one vast cemetery with fresh made graves. Uncovered mine shafts pock-marked the surface, with mounds of earth heaped beside. It was, said William Westgarth, an upturned, unsightly mass with not a tree or blade of grass to be seen.
And the place was packed. There were so many people going about their business, remarked Mundy, it was like a lively busy hive. Thomas McCombie said the ground actually appeared as if in motion. He stood for a moment on the hill above town and watched the frenzied bustle. Listened to the din of thousands of cradles rocking gold out of the clay on either side of a creek. Startled as diggers popped in and out of holes like frantic moles. The view was so extraordinary that McCombie could only anticipate a new order of things.
Only at night, under the cover of darkness and after the ceremonial gunshots, did the pulse of activity gradually subside. A vast city hushed in the arms of night, the bureaucrat William Westgarth wrote poetically.
THE CAMP
Rising above the vast ocean of canvas that was the diggings, stood the Government Camp, built on the high ground to the west of the Yarrowee River. High and, in theory, mighty.
On the Victorian goldfields, the Resident Commissioner was the man in charge. Robert Rede, who had abandoned a medical degree to try his luck at gold digging, took up this position of ultimate authority in May 1854. Beneath him were the assistant commissioners, magistrates and other senior civil servants. The police were the grunts: poorly paid henchmen who did the hard slog.
A submission to a commission of enquiry into the Victorian police force, held in late 1854, described the boys in blue like this:
The service generally is so unpopular, that, with few exceptions, only those who are either too idle to do any thing else, or who having failed in all their other attempts to gain a livelihood as a last resource enlist into the Police.
There was also a military presence on the goldfields—soldiers of the 12t
h and 40th Regiments of the British army. This force was separate from the police, with its own leadership and structure. A small number of soldiers were allowed to bring their wives and children with them. Wives were expected to wash, clean and cook, not only for their husbands but also for the unmarried or unaccompanied officers.
In Ballarat, this whole motley crew was housed at the Government Camp: a parcel of land bounded by a high picket fence and identified by the huge Union Jack flying from a central flagstaff. As in the rest of the town, there were only a few (very expensive) new wooden buildings. Most of the living quarters and offices were under canvas.
This ramshackle arrangement of lodgings accommodated the administrative workers stationed at Ballarat, their families and servants (tent keepers, drivers, packhorse keepers) as well as the police force and the military. In total, over one hundred people were crammed into the government ghetto. The architects of the camp may have a method in their madness, wrote the Geelong Advertiser in February 1854, but it is not easily seen.
DIGGERESSES
The summer of 1853–4 was uncomfortable and trying for a community of campers living out in the elements. A tremendous blow of hot wind blew down to pieces a great many tents, wrote Thomas Pierson on 5 January. Living in those flailing tents were 6650 women, 2150 children and 10,700 men—almost 20,000 inhabitants, of whom 45% were women and children. It’s a far cry from what William Withers called the womanless crowds of the first year of the gold rush.
Newcomers to the diggings knew to expect that women and children would be there in numbers. You only had to open your eyes. I did not fail to observe that the fair sex had ventured now on a large scale, wrote Italian miner Raffaello Carboni on his second trip to Ballarat at Easter 1854. The Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser reminisced in July 1854 about the old days when the adventurous ladies who had come to see the diggings were welcomed with three cheers. Now, he sighed, the coach brings up its hundreds of the fair sex, and not a solitary cheer greets its arrival.
RAFFAELLO CARBONI
THE BIOGRAPHER OF THE REBELLION
* * *
DIDN’T FIRE A GUN BUT HE WAS IN IT UP TO HIS ARMPITS
BORN Urbino, Italy, 1817
DIED Rome, 1875
ARRIVED 1852
AGE AT EUREKA 37
CHILDREN Never married. No children
FAQ Italian revolutionary and freedom fighter. Writer and master of many languages. Used as a translator on the goldfields. Was not in the Stockade, but he wrote a full-length book published on the first anniversary.
ARCHIVE The Eureka Stockade, 1855.
When William Howitt arrived at the goldfields in 1852, the fair sex seemed to be doing all right. There are some hugely fat women on the diggings, he wrote, the life seems to suit them. They appeared to enjoy the outdoor existence, adapting to its conditions and dressing in practical clothes fit for hard work. A wide awake hat, neat fitting jacket, handsome dress, observed Howitt: a costume quite made for the diggings.
It needed to be. In the mornings, Howitt saw women and girls hanging out the wash, cooking over campfires and chopping wood with great axes which swung them. They kept chickens and goats. These diggeresses, he concluded, provided a certain stationary substratum beneath the fluctuating surface.
In other words, women had quietly become the bedrock of the Victorian mining communities.
Englishman William Kelly, who had written books about the Californian goldfields, said the Ballarat diggings were remarkable for the large proportion of women. Only 3% to 10% of the Californian ‘forty-niners’ were female, clearly a much smaller proportion than in Victoria. So whereas the Californian digger had to roast, grind and boil his own coffee, said Kelly, the Victorian, who is surrounded with women, would be saved all that bother. Kelly neglected to inform his readers that most women charged for their highly prized services.
On the downside: the most callous specimens of the female creation I ever encountered were mere green pulp in comparison with some of the granite-grained viragoes of the goldfields. Kelly obviously preferred the dewy maidens of the old country to the sun-baked matrons who tried their luck under the Southern Cross.
Other observers also noted that the average diggeress did not much resemble an English rose. Lovely, blooming maidens, as Howitt put it, soon withered in the harsh Australian climate. As their worlds opened up, women’s skin wrinkled, and pale, soft complexions became weathered. Shelter and security were exchanged for opportunity. It was a trade-off that many were only too happy to make.
LADY LUCK
In these early years of the gold rush, mining required little capital outlay. Small claims could be pursued by individual miners. Technical know-how and even physical strength were not absolutely necessary.
William Kelly was one of the first commentators to note the everyday sight of women engaged in hands-on mining. Out walking around the Eureka lead one morning in early 1854, Kelly spied fossickers of the female sex at work, and these, too, of the diminutive degree both as to age and size. You can sense that Kelly longed to mock these mining maids, as was his inclination, but he stopped himself.
And here I must do the women the justice of remarking that their industry was accompanied with a decency of garb and demeanour which elicited respect and went to prove that becoming employment engenders respectability of feeling and healthy appetites.
Working-class women, of course, had always worked. What Kelly found remarkable was the presence of ‘decent’ women performing acts of industry.
It was just another sign of the adaptability that women needed to be successful in this world turned upside down.
WOMEN’S LEGAL STATUS
In English common law, a husband and wife were one person. A married woman was a feme covert, a woman ‘covered’—or hidden—by her husband in law. She could not incur debts, nor could she sue or be sued in court. She couldn’t enter into a contract. That meant banks would not lend money to women, and therefore it was almost impossible for most women, with no access to credit or capital, to go into business.
Before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, a married woman couldn’t own property in her own name. A single woman, a feme sole, had the same legal and property rights as a man—up until the time of her marriage. Then her money, goods, income and lands became the property of her husband.
Underpinning all this was the assumption that a married woman didn’t need any independent financial or legal status because, being ‘as one’ with her husband, her safe passage through life was assured. The system failed to take into account wife desertion, marital cruelty or domestic violence—not to mention a woman’s desire for autonomy over her own affairs.
Oh, and it was almost impossible to get a divorce. Where her legal status was concerned, a nineteenth-century woman was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself. William Westgarth, writing in 1857, remarked on the strangely old-fashioned state of mining technology in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations, he noted, that can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that gr
eat modern creditor in society’s progress. He meant that the work didn’t owe a lot to science or technology.
Ballarat, he said, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile exchange. It was about partnering, share-holding and other interpersonal relationships. It wasn’t really about machinery, which women had mostly not been taught about, or high finance, which involved bank loans and credit facilities that women could not legally get. Gold mining was more like the family-based ‘cottage industry’ style of work that was the norm before the industrial revolution.
Women who wanted or needed to mine for gold certainly benefited from this freedom from science and modernity. People worked their claims in small groups or families, relying on manual labour for the seemingly endless jobs of picking, panning, puddling and cradling. Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel from a river’s bed was rocked so that large rocks and nuggets were separated from the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement. It didn’t require great physical strength, though, or even wealth. Just patience, perseverance and luck.
Bucketloads of luck. The daily rewards were tiny and took a long time to amount to much unless you struck it very lucky. But for that very reason, the process exerted a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting it every moment. Like playing a poker machine today: every push of the button—every thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new destiny, right there and then.
