by Clare Wright
Not only were women selling the grog, they were drinking it too. Some women delighted in having a whisky or a shandy gaff—pale ale mixed with ginger beer—telling racy jokes, which were none of the choicest as far as language was concerned. This is Henry Mundy’s assessment of a Mrs Charlton, who saw no reason to be squeamish. She could see no harm in her talk nor cared if others did.
Charles Evans also noted that women tended to feel liberated from more polite behaviour on the goldfields where drinking was concerned. It is painful to contemplate the horrible havoc which drunkenness makes on the diggings, he wrote in his diary, even women feeling themselves relieved from the salutary checks which society in civilised life lays on them fall into a view bad enough in men, but disgusting and repulsive beyond expression in women.
Some women were dead-set alcoholics, of course—either before they arrived at the diggings or in response to its harsh realities. But others were merely joining in the carnival. Some may even have felt a drink at the end of the day was a just reward for their hard work.
Certainly, women expected to be included in the humming social life of Ballarat. Mrs Massey attended a ball on the diggings and described the scene in detail. The venue was a large tent with smaller refreshment tents and ladies dressing-room tents scattered around it. Gentlemen diggers and their wives, along with Camp officials and their wives, attended the evening. The ‘ball-room’ walls were covered with pink and white calico, the pillars supporting the roof were adorned with garlands of pink and white flowers. There were glowing Chinese lamps, carpets, divans and sofas. The band was excellent and there was dancing until sunrise. The whole thing, thought Mrs Massey, was charming.
She also commented on the childcare arrangements. Women were hired to care for the babies, aged from newborn babies to toddlers. As Mrs Massey explained, the mothers were not able to leave them at home, and wishing to join in the evening’s amusement, brought them along and put them to sleep on beds and sofas, popping in to visit between dances. During the evening, she said, I saw several ladies walking about, in full ball dress of course, nursing and hushing their dearly beloved infants. Here was another goldfields innovation: paid childcare at social functions, so the hard-working, bread-winning mothers of Ballarat weren’t left holding the baby.
THE CHINESE PUZZLE
Not all diggers were invited into the tent of goldfields sociability. The Wathaurung were on the fringes but tolerated. The Chinese, on the other hand, were strategically marginalised.
The fraught relationship between Europeans and Chinese on the goldfields is a well-worked claim in Australian history.
Students are typically taught about the Lambing Flat riots on the Burrangong goldfields in New South Wales in 1861. In this incident, long-held anti-Chinese animosity spilled over into a brutal massacre. Thousands of miners actively rallied against the Chinese diggers to drive them off the field, and the police were called in to put down the riot.
In traditional accounts of the gold rush, the chief complaints made against the Chinese were that they muddied the waterholes through their tendency to work over the discarded tailings of European diggers; that they worked on Sundays, when all the good Christians knocked off to go to church, that they were thieves and gamblers, and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive everybody else’s wages down too. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was this: they didn’t bring their women with them. As one Royal Commission reported in April 1855, Even if the Chinese were considered desirable colonists, they are unaccompanied by their wives and families, under which circumstances no immigration can prove of real advantage to any society.
People didn’t like the fact that the Chinese kept to themselves. Though they seemed harmless, they came to Victoria in great numbers—thousands at a time, wrote one commentator—and stuck together, walking in long files to the goldfields then setting up separate camps. There were estimated to be 3000 Chinese in Ballarat alone by early 1855, among a total of 5000 on the goldfields.
They ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical hats instead of the usual digger’s cabbage hat; loose gowns that looked like women’s attire and long pigtails—the kind of get-up thought to be more suited to a schoolgirl than a working man. They practised their own medicine—acupuncture was readily available at the Chinese camps, and some Europeans gave it a go. They opened their own restaurants. They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their earnings home to family members in China, where their wives were looking after the old and the young in the community, in line with Confucian tradition, rather than blowing it on a spree.
All this marked the Chinese out as different and peculiar. But who might actually be hurt by John Chinaman? Why, European women. This is what Mrs W. May Howell was warned when she went to the diggings. Oh the diggers would not annoy you, she was told by a friend, It’s those brutes of Chinamen; but they’d better not begin to insult white women, or they’ll find it rather dangerous. Although Mrs Howell’s friend admitted he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder what might a man be capable of, when he had none of his own kind of woman about?
Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the suspicion of the Chinese diggers and their womanless ways. Police discovered a set of foul and wicked prints. The pictures, which were evidently of naked ladies (whether Chinese or European is not clear) and were said to bring the blush of shame and indignation into the cheek of respectable men, were being sold on the sly to Europeans.
One journalist wrote an article on ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ in the Melbourne Monthly Magazine. He was a lone voice in publicly defending the Chinese, pointing out their industry and energy, their impeccable credentials as citizens, their intelligence and cleanliness. But ask a Britoner on the street what objection they have to the Celestials, he wrote, and they will answer: Morals, sir, morals. Pagans, you know Pagans. No Mrs Chisholm at the Chinese Ports…no wives for the Pagans, sir, Prints, sir, improper Prints.
As the writer of ‘The Chinese Puzzle’ duly noted, the only argument against an otherwise intelligent, educated and industrious people was the absence of their wives. The rest was blind prejudice. We are afraid of the Chinese, he wrote, and we have not the moral courage to say so.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.
It was May 1854, and Ballarat was a raft of tents in a sea of cold mud. The summer of 1853–4 had been dry, the wet season had arrived early and now the rain had come. Mining had practically ceased. John Manning, the master at St Alipius Catholic School on the Eureka lead (where Anastasia Hayes was now working as a teacher while Timothy mined), complained that few of the 74 children on his roll were in attendance owing to the severity of the weather. Abandoned mine shafts which the diggers had used as latrines became putrid cesspools.
Sarah Skinner lay in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain howl as she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. For Sarah, everything burned. Near the end of labour, her brow ran with sweat and her tender, swollen skin stretched like taut canvas around the baby’s head. A final push and a tearing of flesh: she screamed; the baby wailed. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as Sarah gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy.
Two weeks later, an inque
st was held into Sarah’s death. Midwife Jane Julian testified. She was not a regular midwife, she said, but had attended a few females in their confinement. She’d done her best. On the day after the birth Sarah was well, sitting up, nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane, the new mother was seized with cold shivering. The doctor, William Wills (father of the famous explorer who died in the desert with Burke), attributed Sarah’s fever to her milk coming in.
Over the next week Sarah became sicker. Now Dr Wills diagnosed puerperal peritonitis, a terrible killer of nineteenth-century women. He ordered the standard treatment: turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two hours.
Sarah’s baby fell ill too, and died by the end of his first week without ever being named. Dr Wills gave weakness as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like; she had already put two other babies in the ground.
A distressed William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered the baby’s death to have been caused by the mother’s milk. Dr Stewart observed Sarah’s deteriorating condition and, though he continued her enemas and blistering, claimed it was beyond human skill to save her life.
Almost two weeks after the birth—two days after his son’s funeral—William Skinner held his wife’s limp, clammy hand for the last time.
At Sarah’s inquest on 25 May, the Coroner pronounced that the woman had died from natural causes. A jury of William’s peers added a rider to the verdict: We consider that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man her days might have been prolonged.
The widowed William Skinner was, in a strange way, one of the lucky ones. Although his wife’s body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had finished with her, he had at least managed to get a doctor. He could console himself, perhaps, that he had not failed her completely…
Another miner, Patrick Carey, was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son died from the fever that had racked him for days. The Coroner asked Patrick why he hadn’t sent for medical assistance. His reply: Because we had not a blessed sixpence in the tent.
SEPSIS AND ANTISEPSIS
In the mid-nineteenth century, very few women faced childbirth free of the fear of death. Infection of the reproductive tract following labour often led to ‘puerperal peritonitis’—what we would now call postpartum infection. And that led, more often than not, to an early grave. As recently as the 1940s, maternal death was the second-biggest killer (after tuberculosis) of Australian women aged fifteen to forty-nine. It is not even in the top ten leading causes of death today.
Lack of medical knowledge was the problem. For over two thousand years, doctors believed that ill health was caused by an imbalance of ‘humors’: a build-up of bad fluids in the body. Cures therefore depended on extracting the excess humors through primitive methods like bleeding, leeching and cupping.
In the 1860s Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough discoveries in the ‘germ theory’ of disease changed things, and medicine began treating the growth and spread of micro-organisms in the body. But in 1854 doctors and midwives didn’t understand the concept of sepsis—inflammation caused by infection—and antisepsis—preventing infection by keeping hands and surgical instruments scrupulously clean and free of bacteria.
People therefore died gruesome deaths, suffering from both the symptoms of infection, such as fever, and the pain of treatments that today sound more like tortures than medicine.
RAW COLD AND UNFATHOMABLE MUD
It was to be a winter of untold discontent. By June, plummeting temperatures amplified the cruelty of weeks of driving rain. With the benefit of modern meteorology, we now know that it gets colder in Ballarat than just about anywhere else in Victoria outside the Alpine regions. It is only 115 kilometres from metropolitan Melbourne, only 435 metres above sea level, yet it has a mean (very mean) winter maximum temperature of 10.7 degrees Celsius. And then there’s the cunning wind chill factor: a biting southwesterly that blows down off the escarpment.
No one was immune from the surly blast. Those perched up in the Camp and those nestled down on the Flat all shivered in their tents, imagining what family and friends at home were doing in the northern summer sunshine.
Many diggers slept on the bare ground, noted Thomas McCombie, with a canvas fly for protection from the rain and wind. According to McCombie, a great number of single men lived under the eucalypt branches they made into miams or wigwams. Frances Pierson, on the other hand, had made a cosy tent home for herself, Thomas and their son Mason. She had transported feather beds, bedsteads and a mountain of covers to the diggings. The Piersons had been warned that you needed as many blankets in Ballarat on a spring or autumn night as you would in a frozen American winter. Thomas was thankful for the advice, and felt nothing but sympathy for the 99 out of 100 people who had but two blankets to sleep on under and over. Those who were lucky enough to find a little gold that winter went straight to the waiting Wathaurung and bought a possum-skin cloak.
Charles Evans, never one to whinge, was compelled to note the frigid conditions. He woke each morning half perished with cold and was amazed to find ice crusting the drinking water in his buckets. Thomas Pierson, who seemed never to stop whingeing, recorded in his diary that 25 June 1854 was the grimmest day since he and Frances had arrived eighteen months ago. A strong, damp wind and cold as could be without freezing, wrote Thomas.
He had just cause for his crabbiness. Incessant rains, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes later recalled. A raw cold atmosphere and unfathomable mud. The fair-weather campers left.
But 44-year-old Englishwoman Ellen Young was in it for the long haul. She’d first pitched her tent on Golden Point in the spring of 1852. Now, burrowed in for another cold season, she burned as much wood as she and her husband Frederick could cut and carry back from Black Hill.
Woodcutting was an entitlement of Frederick’s mining licence. This, thought Ellen, was an enlightened idea. It was just a shame the monthly renewal fee was so high, and the penalty for non-compliance so harsh. Ellen could see the frightened, dejected look in the eyes of the men who had to choose between paying 30 shillings for a valid licence (and lawful timber collection) and buying a loaf for their hungry children.
This winter the whole town seemed out of joint, as one journalist put it. Even Mother Nature appeared to have turned the tables. The rainy season was supposed to be the harvest of diggers, providing plenty of the water you needed for puddling and washing gold.
ELLEN YOUNG (NEE WARBOYS)
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
* * *
THE PROTEST POET OF THE GOLDFIELDS, DISSING THE GOVERNMENT AND SUMMONING THE PEOPLE TO ACTION
BORN Hampshire, England, 1810
DIED Ballarat, 1872
ARRIVED 1851
AGE AT EUREKA 44
CHILDREN One son, already deceased.
FAQ Educated, middle-class English Chartist. Married to a chemist turned digger. Assumed the role of ‘The Ballarat Poetess’, publishing inflammat
ory poems and letters to the editor in the Ballarat Times. Rallied and mobilised the community.
ARCHIVE Smiles and Tears, collected poems. Held in the Ballarat Library.
But by 1854 that wasn’t the way most miners were working. It was all deep lead sinking now, great long shafts yawning into the ground. And the water was a terrible menace. A shaft could fill with water faster than you could say Joe, loosening the timber supports that held back the great weight of earth, engorging the hole, ruining months of backbreaking labour.
Or worse, drowning the poor wretch whose turn it was to bucket. If eight men were in the digging party and each of those men had three children, that was two dozen children who would go hungry. Hence the endless bucketing, day and night, night and day, to keep the shafts clear.
Water was supposed to be the solution, not the problem. The water, after all, wrote Bonwick, is the true philosopher’s stone; for by its touch the gold is brought to view. But Ellen Young was a perceptive woman, as well as an educated one, and she knew if there was a magical substance that could turn base survival into blissful perfection, it was not water or gold. It was bread.
POVERTY POINT
In the winter of 1854, a profound dissatisfaction mushroomed in the damp, putrid fields of Ballarat. The main complaints of the goldfields community was poverty: crushing, irrefutable, seemingly unending poverty.
Thomas Pierson wrote that in Ballarat he had seen examples of great wealth but few other places could produce the same amount of destitution poverty and want. Henry Mundy, who carted illegal alcohol to the diggings rather than dig himself, saw it every day. People arrived at the goldfields with a few shillings or no money at all. They pitched their little calico tent thinking to pick up gold as soon as they land.
