We Are the Rebels

by Clare Wright

  The result, for 49 out of 50 of them? What privations the most of them had to go through, Mundy wrote, hard living, hard lodging, bad drinking water [which] often brings on Colonial fever or dysentery.

  Average weekly earnings on the Ballarat goldfield in 1854 were £1-13-9 (not quite 34 shillings). That was enough to buy eight loaves of bread—and nothing else at all. Factor in the monthly licence fee of 30 shillings and there was clearly no fat (or fibre) in a family’s weekly rations.

  Jane McCracken wrote home to her mother that for every family that did well in the colony, two or three did not. I have felt more truly sorry for people here than ever I did at home, confessed Jane. Rampant poverty raised another problem: the lack of help for those in need. No one seems to care for the poor immigrant, good or bad, body or soul, echoed Crown Land Commissioner C. Rudston Read. The goldfields were still a frontier, no hospitals, no benevolent institutions funded by the state or friendly societies. Everything was still too new and raw and mobile and undone for that. Martha Clendinning would help establish the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867, but in 1854, welfare was a matter of individual goodwill extended by family if you had any, friends if you had made some or shipmates if you could track them down.

  In this unfinished part of the world, wrote 22-year-old Noah Dalway in a letter home to his mother in Ireland, it is now that I feel the loss of you all and of a home where, had I been what was required of a son, I might now be happy in that home without any care anxiety or laborious work, all of which are now my only companions.

  Wasn’t the Promised Land under the Southern Cross meant to put an end to care, anxiety and unrewarding toil? This Australia, dear mother, is most falsely represented, Noah declared in 1854, after months on the goldfields. So many thousands, what are they doing, barely making a living. According to Noah, only men of capital who could start their own line of business had any guarantee of raising themselves out of destitution. I often grieve, he said, to think that I have not as much as a £5 note to call my own and to send you some.

  Thomas and Frances Pierson’s reason for staying on the diggings was different. They were determined to make something out of this country as we think it owes us something. The perception of failure, mixed with a sense of entitlement, was potentially explosive.

  GETTING SPLICED, GETTING LICKED

  Many female commentators noted that although diggers could be rough in their manners, they would seldom harm a woman. Martha Clendinning recalled that she was never disturbed in her tent at night while her husband was away. One male digger, who was in general not too thrilled with life on the goldfields, wrote in a letter to a friend, There is one thing, however—bad as the diggers are…I must do them the justice to admit that they prove themselves at least men where a woman is the case.

  As long as that woman was not their wife or partner.

  Another Ballarat resident noted that women on the goldfields didn’t have much to fear from strangers, then added ominously: I have heard screaming and rows, but from whom did it proceed? Invariably husband and wife.

  When a woman got spliced, the colonial slang for either legal or de facto marriage, she took her chances that her new other half would not beat, rape or otherwise abuse her. Before the end of the 1850s, it was almost impossible to get a divorce in the Australian colonies. But Ballarat court records from 1854 and 1855 are full of cases of women hauling their husbands before the magistrates on charges of assault, using abusive language and threatening their life.

  In some instances, it appears the woman had tried to leave her husband. Elizabeth Johnson charged Thomas Johnson with threatening to have her back to live with him or he would take her life. The case was referred to the police for further investigation.

  John Williams was charged with beating his wife. He testified that he had not kicked her as she alleged; he had only given her one blow because she would not stay at home. He promised the judge he would not strike her any more but he hoped she would stay at home. Williams’ wife declared that her husband was in the habit of beating her, but had not done so much lately.

  Mary Ann Clay had some words with her husband Elijah, and subsequently charged him with assault. I wanted to reason with my husband but he would not hear. He beat me most dreadfully about my head and face. It was then he gave me the blow on the jaw.

  The prevalence of domestic violence on the goldfields made a big impression on those who witnessed it. Perhaps this was an effect of living in tents, where everything can be heard and most things can be seen. Just as the cries of childbirth rang throughout the neighbourhood, so did the thumps and screams of a thrashing.

  Martha Clendinning witnessed the beating of a butcher’s wife, a horrid looking woman rumoured to be an ex-convict, transported for killing her baby. I saw the butcher fling her out of the tent and kick her savagely till the blood streamed from her face, wrote Martha. Mrs Massey was horrified by what she saw of domestic bliss on the goldfields. Alas! Poor human nature, she wrote, most of the wives in the camp exhibit on their faces the brutal marks of their husbands’ fists.

  Thomas Pierson put the violence down to the demon drink. There are more taverns, he wrote, than in any other place I ever saw and yet they are all full from the time they open until they close. It is very common here to see women fighting each other, men licking [beating up] women and women men. Charles Evans also witnessed the spectacle of a drunken woman staggering along a road on the Ballarat diggings. Her husband tried to drag her home by her wrist. She resisted, wrote Charles, and an interesting struggle took place much to the entertainment of a group of diggers.

  Mrs Massey also blamed the effects of alcohol, to which [the diggers] are tempted by disappointment to resort, in order to drown care. According to Mrs Massey’s theory, drink was a way to alleviate despair rather than just a recreation. Once under the influence, the pent-up disenchantment of some diggers then detonated in violence against their wives.

  Modern commentators tend to disagree. Feminist lawyer Jocelynne Scutt, for example, says that violence against women is not an outlet for frustration and despair (or boredom), but a way to exercise authority over someone—particularly someone who ‘ought’ to be subservient. This is most likely to occur when the man feels powerless in some way, even when it is nature that’s defeated him. Sociologists and social workers report spikes in domestic violence following floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters.

  On the goldfields, it was the social order that was spiral-ling out of control. Did women bear the brunt of men’s need to assert their authority?

  LAND LOCKED

  Harry Hasting Pearce’s grandmother lived on the Creswick Creek diggings, 20 miles from Ballarat, in the 1850s. Later she would tell her family that the number one cause of all the trouble in the summer of ’54 was poverty. But it wasn’t just poor men who felt thwarted in their ambitions.

  The few diggers who made their fortunes often packed their bags and went home triumphant. But many others who had made smaller finds had a more modest ambition: to start a little farm somewhere on the millions of acres of Crown land that surrounded the goldfields.

  The idea was especially attractive to family men, who longed for a home base where they could leave their wives and children while they continued to follow the rushes, chasing new leads to golden success. Gypsy life was initially fun and adven
turous, but uprooting a family time and time again became tiresome at best and humiliating at worst.

  Some saw it in terms of subsistence and independence. Set up on a farm, the missus could grow a garden and feed the kids wholesome food, perhaps even send them to school. Some of the more prosperous diggers, on the other hand, fancied themselves as landed gentlemen and saw access to land as a way to ramp up their social status. Either way, they were powerful motivations.

  There was one big hitch. In 1851, when the Port Phillip District was granted political separation and stopped being part of New South Wales, the new colony of Victoria was divided into about one thousand unfenced and unsurveyed sheep runs. The squatters who controlled these runs produced the wool that accounted for more than 90 of Victoria’s exports. Only some 400,000 acres had been sold—in the towns of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland and in the ‘settled’ areas near them, tiny agricultural outposts such as Bacchus Marsh and Kilmore.

  The ‘land question’ was both ‘bewilderingly complex’, as historian Geoffrey Serle has demonstrated, and crystal clear. Through a tangled legal web of rights and leases a small number of squatters—many of them members of the Legislative Council—had control of almost all the land. The lands, as they said, were effectively ‘locked’.

  The ‘land question’ was a major political battleground. Urban radicals, cautious moderates, extremist aristocrats: everyone had a dog in the fight—and that was before the land-hungry gold-rush immigrants started clamouring for a share.

  In late 1852, Governor La Trobe began making promises that town allotments and agricultural plots near the diggings would be sold. A deputation representing more than 7000 people had convinced him that the bulk of the working population and most of the married men wish to become landholders.

  La Trobe made good his pledge, and for eighteen months from early 1853 more than half a million acres were sold. But there was another snag: as squatters and wealthy speculators outbid each other to gobble up the new allotments, the price of land skyrocketed. In 1850 the average price of rural land was 25 shillings per acre. By 1853 the price had more than trebled, to £4. The immigrant married men and workers who wanted to become small farmers had been dudded.

  On the goldfields there was another source of friction. Much of the land sold in these areas was bought by employees of the government camps—the gold commissioners, police inspectors and magistrates—using money borrowed from prosperous local publicans and merchants. James Johnston, newly married to Maggie Brown Howden and earning a salary of £400 a year, started buying up land almost as soon as the couple arrived in Ballarat in the winter of 1854.

  These deals were seen as ‘insider’ trading—unfair and borderline corrupt. Worse still, the capitalist land-grabbers did nothing to improve the lands, let alone cultivate them. So there was still no agricultural produce flowing to the goldfields, and diggers were no closer to the little smallholding they dreamed of. Food prices remained high, especially in winter when the roads became impassable. Unskilled workers could find no alternative employment at a time when public expenditure on roads, docks or other infrastructure was negligible. Thus most miners, concluded Harry Hastings Pearce via his grandmother’s tales, were condemned to the hopeless search for gold.

  Land reform—it was such an obvious remedy! It nagged at people, until three little words became a powerful slogan that resonated across all social groups on the goldfields.

  Unlock the lands!

  BRITISH JUSTICE

  British and justice were the two words on everyone’s lips in the whingey winter of 1854. The words generally had a question mark attached.

  This? You call this British justice?

  Henry Mundy shuddered every time he saw the soldiers pass by—Lords’ and dukes’ sons, friends of [Governor] La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country. The indignity of educated professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops sickened Mundy, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Things will not remain long as they are, he predicted. The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed to, British justice.

  English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by the heavy-handed, arrogant treatment handed out by the police. The arbitrary, Russian sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities, he called it. (Britain was at war with Russia, in the Crimea, so it was a fairly weighty criticism.)

  Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day. Prisoners could be left manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full, or if the jailer didn’t like them. Honest men, too poor to pay their licence fee, were chained together with hardened criminals. Women were locked up with men—nothing but a flimsy partition between them. Other inmates were forced to act as servants, drawing water and chopping wood for the soldiers up at the Government Camp.

  Thomas and Frances Pierson went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning and witnessed several licence cases. One man had borrowed another’s licence. He was jailed for two months in Geelong. A still more heathenish part of the matter, Thomas later reflected in his diary, is that the man had a wife and six children in his tent in Ballarat, and the poor woman had only just given birth to the sixth. The English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation, concluded Thomas.

  ROBERT REDE

  THE BIG KAHUNA

  * * *

  NEEDED TO CALM THE WATERS BUT INSTEAD STIRRED THE POT

  BORN Suffolk, 1827

  DIED Melbourne, 1904

  ARRIVED 1851

  AGE AT EUREKA 27

  CHILDREN Single at Eureka, later a father of seven.

  FAQ English landed gentry, oddjobber before coming to Victoria as a goldseeker. Appointed Resident Commissioner at Ballarat in May 1854. Married Martha Clendinning’s daughter, Margaret, in 1873.

  ARCHIVE Clendinning-Rede Papers, SLV 10102

  Government oppression and negligence were getting serious—sometimes a matter of life and death. The word tyranny rolled easily off tongues.

  To add to the administrative problems, Ballarat was dealing with a new boss, the incoming Resident Commissioner Robert Rede. Trying to make himself look good with his own superiors, he used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order. When a prisoner was rescued from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident but assured HQ the incident arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against the authorities.

  Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the discontented rumblings would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, Magistrate John D’Ewes wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat. He mentioned in particular the non-existence of any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted to Government servants. The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported. A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took donations for a new hospital. The well known liberality of the diggers when it came to these public ‘subscriptions’ meant that £270 was donated by 24 people that night. D’Ewes worried that there was a toxic sense of ‘us and the
m’ creeping in: he thought it would be a bad look if the government was seen to be contributing in some way.

  The police were uniformly despised. The Victorian Government paid peanuts and, of course, it got monkeys. The police force was young, ill-trained, inexperienced and frequently drunk. When the ‘traps’ gave Frances Pierson ‘a call’ in her store on St Patrick’s Day (a sure sign she was selling sly grog) her husband Thomas said, a more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found. Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police to look the other way (and since Frances Pierson didn’t sustain a conviction, she probably did too). The system simply invited corruption.

  Punishments for sly grog were severe: a £50 fine or four months’ jail for a first offence; a second offence would get you six to twelve months with hard labour. These were mandatory sentences and local magistrates had no power to soften them: only the Governor could interfere. What’s more, when a police officer recorded a conviction he received a portion of the fine—a situation also set up to encourage fraud.

  The cards were stacked in favour of the police. They either pursued known sly-groggers relentlessly or extracted hush money—and no doubt other ‘favours’. Samuel Huyghue, a public servant living at the Government Camp, believed this system of rewards for sly-grog arrests was to blame for the demoralisation of the police force.

  Meanwhile, other aspects of law enforcement were a joke. A miner might disappear down a shaft in the black of night never to be seen again, and the police would be useless. Claim jumping was rife, but it was more often sorted out by fists and knives than police intervention. Henry Mundy said that if a digger was killed in a mining accident, assuming a policeman deigned to turn up at all, he would simply say he’s dead right enough, then slip a hand into the dead man’s pocket to help himself to any money or valuables.