by Clare Wright
Mary Ann Tyler, five years a gold diggeress, said:
You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should one day discover more gold.
A TAX BY ANY OTHER NAME
No one, however, could have described the licensing regulations as enchanting.
This is how the system worked: while the gold was in the ground, the Crown (the British government) owned it. For a licence fee of 30 shillings per month, you could stake a claim to mine for gold and keep what you found. Each claim covered a patch of ground 3.5 metres by 3.5 metres; the claim also gave you the right to take wood and water from the land. Commissioners were appointed to collect the fee, and to check licences.
From the very beginning the licence system was unpopular and unmanageable. The main problem was that every person resident on the diggings (with only a few exceptions such as ministers of religion and servants) was required to pay the fee whether or not they found any gold. The licence fee worked like a poll tax, falling most heavily on the people with the least ability to pay. To add insult to injury, the licence was ruthlessly enforced, with gold commissioners ordering the mounted police to perform snap licence checks, often at the point of a bayonet. Anyone caught not holding a valid licence was fined £5, a huge sum. If you didn't—or couldn't—pay, you went to jail.
POLL TAX
A poll tax, also known as a head tax or capitation tax, is a fixed amount payable by those included on a census. Everybody pays the same amount regardless of income level or whether they have the right to vote or not.
Poll taxes have been used throughout history to raise revenue by governments, often in time of war or severe financial crises. It is what's called a regressive tax: which means the burden of taxation falls more heavily on the poor than the rich.
Poll taxes are generally resented by most ordinary people and have led to some famous riots, including the Roman Revolt of 780, the Peasants Revolt in England in 1380 and the Poll Tax Riots in Britain after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replaced council rates with a fixed tax per adult person in 1989.
There was an exemption: All females not mining or trading and children under fourteen years of age who shall only reside but not mine any Gold Field. Women didn’t need to carry a licence, nor apply to the commissioners for the ‘exception ticket’ that priests and servants had to get. But this meant, by implication, that women who did mine or trade would need to take out their own licence in their own name.
No one knows exactly how many women were issued with mining licences, but there were plenty of female storekeepers. And all persons resident upon the goldfields in the practice of a profession, trade or calling, of any permitted kind were required to pay up. Storekeepers were charged the hefty fee of £15 for a three-month licence to run their business.
This charge was just as unpopular as the mining fee, partly because you got so little for your money: simply the right to open for business. (Most stores in 1854 amounted to little more than a family tent with two chambers: one was for sleeping in and one was the shop.)
But the licensing system did lead to one novel situation: as licence-holders, women acquired a legal identity separate from their husbands’ that they hadn’t enjoyed previously. They were not just permitted but compelled to buy a licence.
Bringing miners, shopkeepers and other professionals under the same regulations framework produced another interesting result. All goldfields inhabitants were effectively defined as small-business people. It was a one-size-fits-all system of economic management. This would contribute to the famous egalitarian spirit of the goldfields where, as the balladeer Charles Thatcher sang to packed crowds in the theatres of Ballarat and Bendigo, we’re all upon a level.
And because women became central to the economy of the goldfields, they also became closely involved with the culture of protest that grew in intensity like a summer storm over the tumultuous months of 1854.
POP-UP SHOPPING
Gold digging wasn’t the only way to strike it lucky. By March 1854 there were three hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that women ran at least two-thirds of these pop-up tent shops. Some of these shopkeepers had husbands who mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—often the sly-grog portion of the business. Although it was illegal to sell alcohol on any of Victoria’s goldfields, everyone knew that you could get a dram of whisky or gin at practically any ‘coffee shop’, ‘refreshment tent’ or ‘general store’.
But Martha Clendinning and her sister Sarah had made a pact: even if other storekeepers on the diggings winked at the authorities, they would never sell sly grog on their premises. Though the laws to keep alcohol off the diggings had been a complete failure, Martha reckoned that she must hold to her own standards. They would only sell the best quality tea, coffee and sugar, candles, tobacco (the most important item), jams, bottled fruits, onions and apples and some excellent small Cheshire cheeses.
Martha, doctor’s wife and daughter of a good family, did not want to be too snobbish, however. She knew that she and Sarah needed to tone down their well-bred appearance in the hope that we should not be distinguished as ‘ladies’. We intended to pass as merely respectable women of business; anything more than that would, we felt, expose us to curiosity when we entered on our storekeeping life.
They didn’t want to intimidate the diggers. They didn’t want to lord it over the diggers’ wives. They wanted to blend in. But it was more than the desire to be inconspicuous: We prided ourselves on being careless of appearances. This was the diggers’ way. New chums passed themselves off as old hands by their down-to-earth clothing and easygoing manners.
The Clendinnings chose a tent site at the centre of a treeless field on Commissioner’s Flat, and Martha volunteered to go to the Camp and purchase George Clendinning’s mining licence for him while he put the tent up. The other women residents, Martha observed, were of a very rough class. The licence was delivered to her promptly. Two diggers who had been waiting half the day for their licences were astonished. ‘Well Bill’, said one, ‘the next time I want my licence, I’ll send my missus for it, instead of kicking my shins about here for hours’. ‘All right’, Bill replied, ‘but you must get your missus first, my boy’. Martha had a chuckle at her new-found influence.
Once George Clendinning finally got the tent up, Martha paid for her own storekeeper’s licence. She didn’t approve of the licensing system—Martha had to pay a standard £40 a year quite irrespective of its size and business capacity. My little one was rated the same as the largest in the Main Road—but she was thrilled to be open for business. I never forgot my first sale! she wrote 50 years later: a box of matches for sixpence.
While their husbands got on with the hard and dirty work of mining, Martha and Sarah quickly established a loyal clientele for their humble wares. Martha bought a hen, a rare commodity on the diggings, and sold her eggs to mothers of sick children.
Soon there was more demand, for more goods, than they could supply. We were constantly asked for clothing materials by the women, but didn’t have enough room to store large bolts of cloth. Seeing the birt
hrate skyrocket around them, they decided to venture on a new branch of business: baby clothes. Theirs was the first store on the diggings to sell such dainty little garments and they quickly sold out.
But Martha Clendinning was not attuned only to profit. She was astute enough to realise that the diggings offered her a new freedom, beyond her stifling old identity as a gentlewoman. She took her lead from the working class…to whom all species of employment for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success. Suddenly it was merit, not birthright or breeding, that made all the difference.
Dr Clendinning was most anxious about the changes in his family circle. His plan was to go on with gold digging until the big find, then retire with all the decencies of the home life of a gentleman. But it was slow in coming to fruition.
This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her excessive folly, despite her husband’s concern that he might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it. While she was making money and George wasn’t, Martha would do as she pleased.
EVERYTHING THAT COULD BE WANTED
It is possible to live in most cities of the world and not have a clue how the other half lives. Usually the poor don’t live anywhere near the rich. But in the tent city of Ballarat, an unlucky digger could see very clearly that his neighbour was feasting on German sausages and Cheshire cheese while his own family ate damper and maggoty mutton—yet again.
Advertisements for stores reveal the astounding range of goods available for sale: red herrings, fresh salmon, Chilean flour, Havana and Manila cigars, fresh oysters and lobster, preserved partridge, grouse, woodcock, lark, plover and hare.
Mrs Willey ran the Compton House store on Bakery Hill. She advertised parasols, china crape and French cashmere shawls, Irish linen, widows’ caps, ladies’ and babies’ underclothing and French kid boots. Refreshment tents sold ginger beer and cordials over the counter, and whisky and porter under it. You could get a dozen bottles of French Champagne if you could afford it. The stores were astonishingly well stocked with everything that could be wanted, wrote Mrs Massey, [with] the most conspicuous display of dresses, bonnets and quantities of china. The wife of any digger who hadn’t struck it lucky knew exactly what she was missing out on.
Not that the storekeepers were happy either. Their taxes were going up. On 1 March 1854, there was a monster meeting of disgruntled storekeepers protesting against a new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. In late February, 60 storekeepers had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was extortion, railed Thomas Pierson, who by now had joined the throng in Ballarat and ran a shop with his wife Frances.
The storekeepers resolved to stick together and refuse to pay the licence fee. By the end of March they had all caved in.
But if the government officers up there in the Camp were on their toes, they’d have realised that the short-lived protest was a sign of things to come.
MATES
Some historians think Australian mateship began on the Victorian goldfields. Russel Ward, for example, talked about a ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist morality’ and thought it had something to do with teamwork—the fact that one miner often acted as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine. This group solidarity was reinforced when the authorities bullied and harassed miners in the hated practice of ‘licence hunting’.
But Ward did not explore another unusual fact: this companionable environment included women. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them.
And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour’, in which both the pay and the status of the job go down), the goldfields women found themselves highly prized.
I have become a sort of necessity, remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to the diggings with her brother and quickly became a helpmeet to his single buddies. Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect for her conversation and companionship too. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields: I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end!
THE SERVANT PROBLEM
For working-class women on the goldfields, being paid for domestic work without having to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a revelation. It was like going freelance. Many women found regular employment as tent keepers for single men; some older women, often widows, set themselves up in business as boarding-house keepers or licensed victuallers (running legitimate pubs).
As a result, women in droves left their positions as servants in towns and on stations and headed to the diggings. (Eliza Darcy was one such woman. She ditched her job with Mr Jeffreys and walked to Ballarat.) They may have wound up doing the same work—cooking, childminding, wet-nursing—but they did it on their own terms, informally aligned to a team rather than bonded to a single master or mistress. The pay was good, too, because demand for domestic services was so high.
It was all part of the servant problem—which was part of the startling new social order in this startling new world.
THE MARRIAGE GAME
There was something similar going on in the marital stakes, where women also felt a power that they had never experienced before.
Ellen Clacy arrived in Victoria with her brother in the winter of 1852 and departed in April 1853 on the arm of a new husband. On her return to England, she wrote an advice manual for women desiring to emigrate. Do so by all means, she counselled, the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England. The reason for this unusual situation? According to Ellen, the imbalance of the sexes meant we may be pretty sure of having our own way.
Englishman Henry Catchpole, who arrived in Melbourne in February 1854, wrote home to encourage his sisters to emigrate and get a Golden Husband. Tell them that it is a first rate opportunity for them, wrote Henry. After six months in the colony, he was still on message. There are many young chaps looking out in Melbourne when the ship comes in, wrote Henry.
And a cartoon from London Punch called ‘Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off to the Diggings’, shows women thumbing their noses at offers from decent, upstanding gentlemen and heading to the goldfields on their own. A cottage! Fiddle de dee Sir! exclaims one pretty lass. Bother yer Hundred Pounds and House in the Public line, says an imperious woman with head held high. The women help each other to disembark from the ship, to the consternation of the men who thought they could prance in as shining knights and wander home with a full-time cook free of charge.
Catherine Chisholm, a 33-year-old single woman from rural Scotland, was constantly chided by her family for not sending more news of her comings and goings in Victoria. That included her marriage in 1857, four years after her arrival. We are greatly astonished at you for not mentioning anything concerning your husband, scolded Catherine’s brother Colin. Even what is his name, is he a native of the colony, or is he a native of Britain and what is he at for his daily bread.
For some gold-rush women, immigration was clearly a matter of what goes on ca
mp, stays on camp.
GIRLS ON THE GROG
Thousands of people from every corner of the globe, all living in tents, working hard and playing hard, young and free. Early on, the government took one look at the situation on the goldfields and realised the only way to prevent complete carnage was to regulate the sale of alcohol. Publicans’ licences would be granted in the townships surrounding the goldfields, close to the government camps, but no alcohol was to be sold on the diggings.
So how did that work out?
Every storekeeper sold sly-grog, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes wrote later. There were also what Henry Mundy called regular grog shanties. These places had a large square shutter hung on hinges at the top of one gable of the tent, facing the road. Inside, a rough counter with big kegs of booze was retailed out at sixpence a mug. Jugs could be filled up and taken home, to be shared among friends and family.
Mrs Massey called sly grog this most hateful traffic, but since she knew the sale of alcohol was the most lucrative activity on the goldfields, she took its presence for granted like everybody else. In fact, every traveller to or resident on the diggings remarked on the presence of sly-grog sellers. Ellen Clacy had a theory: that the privacy and risk created an excitement which the diggers enjoy as much as the spirit itself.
There were an estimated 700 sly-grog outlets in Ballarat: approximately one venue for every 30 adult residents. Contemporary illustrations and accounts show that most of the ‘refreshment tents’ on the diggings were run by women.
