by Clare Wright
If you wanted to safeguard yourself against crime, you kept a dog on a chain or a pistol under your pillow. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria’s finest.
LICENCE HUNTERS
But the biggest grievance—the focal point of daily complaints—was the way these tyrannical vagabonds went about checking licences.
Licences had to be renewed monthly, and nothing, wrote William Howitt, could exceed the avidity, the rigidity and arbitrary spirit with which the licence fees were enforced on the diggings. Cries of ‘Joe’ could be heard around the diggings when a hunt was on, alerting neighbours to the threat. (Joe was the universal slang for police. It was not a nice word.)
WHO COULD VOTE?
In 1854 the Victorian government consisted of an Executive Council: the Lieutenant Governor, the Colonial Secretary, the Attorney General, the Colonial Treasurer and the Collector of Customs. Then there was the Legislative Council, which had eight members nominated by the Governor, and 35 by voters. You could vote if you were: a British subject, male, over 21 years old and a free colonist. There was also a ‘property qualification’. You had to own land worth £100, or a lease worth £10 a year or pay rent of £10 a year—quite substantial sums.
It was this property qualification that effectively disenfranchised most of the new immigrant population. Prior to the reform of the Land Acts in the 1860s, it was very difficult to get access to small parcels of land. Victoria was thus governed by a system where the land-owning ‘squattocracy’ had more than their fair share of representation, while the diggers have none at all, as merchant Robert Caldwell put it. At present, wrote Caldwell, the diggers had no constitutional way of calling attention to their grievances, real or fancied. It was a huge problem.
Licence hunting by the police was heavy-handed and quite random: a form of victimisation that particularly played on the shame of being unable to afford a licence. Very few like to have their poverty exposed, assessed the Geelong Advertiser. But that was precisely what the practice of indiscriminate licence checking achieved: the licence law makes poverty a crime. If you were caught you were imprisoned—which turned a loyal subject into a broken-spirited man. Especially if he’d been arrested in front of his wife and children and dragged away at the point of a bayonet.
To rub salt in the wounds, the police were beardless boys, as digger John Bastin put it, who would not leave the camp unless arrayed in uniform and gold lace—whereas (said Henry Mundy) the diggers were as fine a class of men as anyone could wish to see, many of them well educated, doctors, lawyers, merchants’ sons. He went on: These were men of pluck and spirit and intolerant of injustice, indignant at the impervious and corrupt administration of the law.
For American George Francis Train, however, it was political. He had no argument with the licence fee itself. He thought it a perfectly reasonable trade for wood, water, a gold escort and the privilege of driving a spade into the earth. What Train despised was the Victorian Legislative Council, an institution he called a burlesque on free representation. It was absurd that the miners had no vote, no voice in parliament. Citizen George, who would later run for the US Presidency as an independent, could patently see there is a strong Australian feeling growing up, rooted in the fundamental democratic principle: taxation without representation is tyranny.
ENTER ELLEN YOUNG
From her tent on Golden Point, Ellen Young could see what was coming. At 44, she was a community elder thanks to the unusual demographics of gold-rush Victoria. She was also a woman of keen intellect who had been a prolific poet since the age of thirteen. Today, you can find her lifelong collection of hand-written poetry bound in a leather volume in the Ballarat Library. But it was on the first day of the miserable winter of 1854 that Ellen decided it was time to go into print, publishing her first truly political poem in the local newspaper, the Ballarat Times.
She had written the poem the previous week, during a flood. At the height of the storm, Ellen later recalled, she rescued her mattress and then her spleen evaporated. ‘Ballarat’ is a sixteen-verse commentary on the community’s woeful living conditions and depressed emotions. It begins ominously:
If you’ve not been to Ballarat
Then stay away from there;
I would not have my worst foe’s cat
To have such sorry fare.
Ellen describes the poor state of the roads, the lack of fresh food, the famine prices, the endless mud, the futility of complaining to the resident commissioners, the non-existent gold and the burdensome memories of times and places past. She is trapped, they are all trapped, caught between the distant rock of ‘home’ and a hard place of ceaseless toil. The gold I promised still is hid; The past is all a sham, wrote Ellen.
Ellen describes the conditions, but she also introduces a new note into the public discourse: indignation. A communal sense of grievance. A positioning of good men against bad, heroes against villains.
The floods were out, the mail-man drunk,
What matter the delay?
That though the hearts of many sunk—
They’re diggers!
Who are they?…
They’re men—high tax’d, ill log’d, worse fed
Of strong and stalwart frame
Better was ne’er by hero led
Or earn’d a hero’s name.
This was a position that would later be increasingly taken up by other organs of public opinion. The Geelong Advertiser did not begin to echo Ellen’s sentiments until 27 September, when it represented the diggers as hard-working, taxed, unrepresented members of the body politic, hamstrung by absurd, insulting regulations. Ellen Young’s public intercession on behalf of the Ballarat community was a game-changer.
No one disputed her authority, or her right to become the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat. In fact she was actively encouraged by Henry Seekamp, the 25-year-old editor of the new Ballarat Times (who was by now Clara Duval’s de facto husband). He published Ellen’s increasingly political poems and strident letters to the editor in the spring of 1854. And, unlike later Australian female writers who made their opinions public, Ellen didn’t even write anonymously. She flamboyantly ruffled her feathers and signed herself Ellen F. Young, the Ballarat Poetess.
It’s not that there wasn’t a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on the scene. The short-lived Gold Digger’s Advocate was a newspaper with a broadly democratic agenda. It argued strongly on behalf of the disenfranchised diggers on all the diggings, predicting dire consequences if the diggers were forced to submit to political slavery.
What Ellen Young did was different. Ellen spoke for the people, as one of the people, about what it was like to be among the people. Her husband was a digger. She was a digger’s wife who had decided to toil with a pen instead of a pick.
The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they now had a free press and a bold, outspoken public advocate to call their own.
HERE COME THE HOTHAMS
When Sir Charles Hotham and Lady Jane Sarah Hotham arrived in Victoria on 21 June 1854, the people of Victoria had high hopes of their new governor. Ellen Young was among them. For much I hope a change is near / New brooms they say sweep clean, she
wrote a few weeks before the regal couple docked. We soon shall have Sir Hotham here / He’ll make a change I ween.
Hotham’s predecessor, Charles La Trobe, had been a shocker. Inexperienced as an administrator, he was ill-equipped to oversee the massive population explosion that followed the discovery of gold. As Victoria’s first Lieutenant Governor, La Trobe had managed a fledgling colony of 3000 people. On his watch, public debt had skyrocketed and confidence in the government had plummeted.
But on Hotham’s arrival there were flags strung up, brass bands playing and wild cheers for the official welcome parade through the streets of Melbourne. Artillery fire sounded from Flagstaff Hill, and Hotham made an impromptu speech to the rejoicing crowd, promising to do his duty as an honest, straightforward man should do. Such frank, liberal speeches, Charles Evans noted, won Hotham the goodwill of the people.
The people of Melbourne are looking for the arrival of Sir Charles Hotham as religious enthusiasts might look forward to the millennium, the editor of the Geelong Advertiser had written on 8 June. But George Francis Train, for one, was cautious. I hope [Hotham] is equal to the times in which he lives, wrote Train on 23 July, for if he is not, depend upon it his official reign will be painfully brief, for our people have begun to think.
The Geelong Advertiser also recognised that Hotham had his work cut out. He had to deal with a whole army of lazy and incompetent hangers-on, indolent, careless, incorrigible; men given jobs on the goldfields simply because they could not be kept sober in town. There was also the small matter of how to fix the massively unbalanced budget left by La Trobe’s administration.
CHARLES HOTHAM
CAPTAIN OF A SINKING SHIP
* * *
WRONG MAN IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME
BORN Suffolk, 1806
DIED Melbourne, 31 December 1855
ARRIVED June 1854
AGE AT EUREKA 48
CHILDREN None
FAQ Distinguished naval career. Sailed the world. Disappointed to be made Governor of Victoria in 1853—he wanted a posting in India.
When Sir Charles announced that he and his wife would leave the comfort of their Toorak mansion to visit the goldfields, the news was taken as a sure sign that restitution was imminent. Ellen Young wrote another poem, the first of her offerings to be published in the Ballarat Times, and included Lady Hotham in her salutation.
And let his fair, accomplish’d, gentle bride,
Her equal due—share in his fame, world-wide.
On 10 December 1853, aged 36 and fifteen years a widow, Jane married Sir Charles Hotham, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria just four days earlier. She knew what she was signing up for. Lady Hotham’s new life would take her far away from Somerset garden parties and court appearances routinely noted in The Times. And by all accounts, she was more suited to the times and the task ahead than her stiff-upper-lip new husband.
LADY JANE SARAH HOTHAM (NEE HOOD)
THE MERRY WIDOW
* * *
QUEEN BEE WHO DIDN’T MIND GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY WITH THE DIGGERS
BORN St Marylebone, England, 1817
DIED London, 1907
ARRIVED June 1854, on the Queen of the South
AGE AT EUREKA 37
CHILDREN None
FAQ English gentry, related to Lord Nelson. Widow. Married Sir Charles Hotham, newly appointed Governor of Victoria, in December 1853. Toured goldfields. Received letters and petitions from aggrieved diggers and wives.
ARCHIVE Hotham Papers, Hull University Archives, DDHO/10/42
Of the two Hothams, it was Jane who proved more adaptable to the colonial circumstances. Journalists noted that she was gracious, open, and perpetually cheerful. She appeared to greet every new situation with wide-eyed enthusiasm. She threw dinner parties every week, and invited all the best people in the colony, as William Kelly described the squattocracy, but also those who, before striking gold, never trod on a carpeted floor.
Lady Hotham’s affability was often contrasted to the unbending nature of her husband.
She also took to the streets. Before leaving for a tour of the diggings, Sir Charles and Lady Hotham attended a tradesman’s ball at the Criterion Hotel. There, noted Kelly, they met an assemblage of hard-brushed, shiny-haired operatives, publicans, corporations and small shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, girthed in silk or satin, and moist with mock eau-de-cologne. It was a tough crowd: common, aspirational, newly rich, starstruck.
Lady Hotham, with the consummate tact of her sex, merrily drank a low-rent brandy cocktail at the urging of one of the guests. Her husband bristled at the vulgarity of it all.
On the goldfields, Lady Hotham performed an equivalent act of slumming it. In Ballarat, she went without Sir Charles to Black Hill to view the mining operations there, and made a distinct impression.
It was indeed a grand and gratifying sight, wrote the Diggers Advocate, to see her Ladyship shaking hands and exchanging civilities with the clay-besmeared but generous-hearted diggers…scattering to the winds the almost blinding cloud of aristocratic prejudice.
One miner was delighted to observe her ladyship breaking and examining bits of clay in her white, delicate little hand and talking and smiling to the people about her all the while…her shoes and stockings all over mud, she doesn’t care a straw—she is joyous, and evidently happy.
But Lady Hotham was not merely content to get down and dirty for the fun of it. When the people threw up a hearty three cheers for Hotham and his lady, she turned around to face the crowd, her eyes beaming with delight and face suffused with gladness. She smiled, not with the cold dignity of a high born dame but with holiday glee. She said plainly, ‘Well, I declare, these diggers are, after all, fine hearty fellows; I’ll speak to Charles to be kind to the poor fellows, when we get back to town again’. Lady Hotham’s words and deeds seemed to warrant the conviction, held by Ellen Young, that the Hothams would make the necessary changes to blow the faltering ship of Victoria out of its doldrums.
Indeed, more people shared Ellen Young’s confidence than George Francis Train’s doubts. Shopkeepers thought their trade would increase. Landowners thought the value of their property would rise. Diggers thought their licence fees would be reduced and their grievances sympathetically heard. So they thought.
PUT AWAY
In one of Hotham’s frank, liberal speeches, he encouraged the people to contact him directly should they wish to discuss a problem. Whenever a suggestion can be made or a hint given, he said magnanimously, let the author come to me, and he will always find me ready to attend to his wants. At all events he will find in me a friend who is willing to give a patient and attentive hearing.
Be careful what you wish for.
These days, we sign mass petitions on the Internet or at stalls outside shopping centres with no real belief that we will have a demonstrable effect. It is a gesture, a way of registering support for a cause, rather than a conscious act of participatory democracy. But in the nineteenth century petitions were a direct link between people and their leaders; a ‘
petitioner’ was, in some real sense, the same as a ‘citizen’. Petitioning was also a way of rallying support for local issues that gave people a sense of belonging to a community.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, women were big petitioners. They might act as organisers for mass petitions in their neighbourhoods (although these petitions were usually signed only by men). In the 1840s the London Times sneered at such women as petticoat politicians. There are also several famous petitions signed by thousands of women, campaigning against perceived social evils such as alcohol. Some historians believe that women’s petitioning efforts in Britain played an important part in Parliament’s decision to end slavery.
It should come as no surprise, then, to find women involved in petitioning activity on the goldfields. Petitions about the licence fee in both Bendigo and Ballarat contain at least a few women’s names. In fact, with their husbands down a shaft, diggers’ wives probably did much of the footwork to collect the signatures.
But goldfields women found other ways of making their presence felt at the governor’s residence. Their individual petitions are peppered through the dusty piles of inward correspondence to the Colonial Office, tied with ragged string, now kept at the Public Record Office of Victoria. In these archives we find women who were otherwise voiceless and undistinguished sending out distress signals that can still be heard today.
Mary Sullivan of Bendigo was without her husband: he had been sentenced to five years’ hard labour for stealing in a tent £5. She begged for remittance of the sentence, as she and her eighteen-month-old child were entirely without the means of living in an honest manner. In one of a series of petitions between May 1853 and January 1855, Mary hinted at what might become of her: I am Young and in a Town abounding in Vice, already I have been insulted. She was finally turned down and advised to try again in October 1855. She did not submit this final petition, which suggests a poor outcome for her efforts to remain respectable.
