Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (13 page)

And whatever else, the last part is most certainly true: the colony’s collective mind is indeed affected with such ‘astonishment and wonder’ that ‘sober reason and common sense’ are soon in singularly short supply. A collective madness appears to take hold, so much so that on this very day people from all walks of life are seen to leave their lives in the city, buy picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and every digging implement they can get their hands on, and head up Parramatta Road towards the Blue Mountains and beyond. Before the week is out, that first small thud from the
Herald
dropping on front verandahs across Sydney causes a growing thunder as whole human waves hit the diggings. First in their dozens, then in their hundreds, they come!

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, from the lowest of the low, right up to an aide of Governor FitzRoy himself – they answer the siren’s call.

For, as they say in California, there really is
gold
in them thar hills! Each fresh discovery, each nugget, each story that circulates of someone who left their work on a Monday as a poor man only to be a rich man ‘fore seven days have passed causes the excitement to grow.

The Sydney Morning Herald
captures the mood on 20 May 1851: ‘A complete mental madness appears to have seized every member of the community, and as a natural consequence there has been a universal rush to the diggings. Any attempt to describe the numberless scenes – grave, gay, and ludicrous – which have arisen out of this state of things, would require the graphic power of Dickens.’

Only ten days after the announcement, no fewer than a
thousand
men are at Ophir.

When, just four months earlier, Hargraves had ventured up this very track he had looked like a lone man on a horse. In fact, as it now transpires, he had been something of a cross between a trailblazer and the vanguard for an entire gold-digging army.

What can the authorities do? The answer is very, very little, no matter how hard they try. Although Colonial Secretary Thomson replies to his Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Green, that he must take his Inspector of Police with some men to halt the diggings, it is the same as before – while Commissioner Green and the police do indeed hand out notices to desist, the diggers barely look up. The authorities will have to come up with a different system. One with teeth. What is certain is that, unable to stop the masses from digging, they’re going to have to find a way to make them pay for the privilege.

The Sydney Morning Herald
is also far from happy with the course of events, strongly editorialising: ‘The mania for emigrating to the gold-fields of California, which at one time threatened to decimate our population and which naturally filled sober-minded colonists with an anxiety bordering on alarm, has often occupied our most serious alarm, but that mania, compared with the one which we are now menaced with by the discovery of gold within our own borders was as nothing . . .

‘Should our gold prove to be abundant in quantity, rich in quality and easy of access, let the inhabitants of New South Wales and neighbouring colonies stand prepared for calamities more terrible than earthquakes and pestilence.’

———

The government geologist, Samuel Stutchbury, writes from the diggings at Summer Hill Creek to the Colonial Secretary. Mr Stutchbury begs to inform him that ‘gold has been obtained in considerable quantity’ and that ‘the number of people at work and about the diggings (that is, occupying about one mile of the creek), cannot be less than 400, and of all classes’. The gold, he says, is not merely in the creek, but also on the ground all around it.

He also adds as a word of warning, ‘I fear, unless something is done very quickly, that much confusion will arise in consequence of people setting up claims.’

‘Excuse this being written in pencil,’ he concludes, ‘as there is no ink yet in this city of Ophir.’

21 May 1851, the New South Wales Governor issues a proclamation

It is the equivalent of trying to stem a flood by planting a single stop sign in front of the rushing waters. For on this day a ‘PROCLAMATION’ appears in
The NSW Government Gazette
,
to be picked up by other papers in the coming days, asserting that, as Australia is a British colony, all of its land is
Crown
land, meaning all gold found upon it belongs to Her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria . . . and all those who want to dig for it will have to pay Her Majesty’s Government 30 shillings a month,
in
advance
,
to work a claim of eight feet by eight feet, totalling 64 square feet.

And as the proclamation makes clear, the consequences of failure to pay that fee are serious: ‘Therefore, I, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, the Governor, aforesaid, on behalf of Her Majesty, do hereby publicly notify and declare, that all persons who shall take from any Lands within the said Territory, any Gold Metal, or Ore containing gold . . . without having been duly authorised in that behalf, by her Majesty’s Colonial Government, will be prosecuted, both Criminally and Civilly, as the law allows.’

Most importantly – for this is the major measure to try to ensure social stability, the measure insisted upon by the squattocracy – the license can only be granted to men who ‘had been properly discharged from employment or were not otherwise improperly absent from hired service’. And it has to be carried on that person at all times.

And yet . . . no-one cares.

They don’t even care – can you
believe
it? – that Governor FitzRoy has the right to do this, as established by the sixteenth-century lawsuit
R. v. Earl of Northumberland
(‘Case of Mines’), which was decided in 1568. They all keep digging regardless. And from Sydney, others keep heading out to join them.

Reports from letters to the editor of
The Sydney Morning Herald
over the next few days gives the flavour:

About 30 seamen as well as the mechanics and labourers at the new buildings in George Street left this morning for the diggings.

Sydney is going stark, staring mad. Gold, gold, gold is the one and only topic, from the merchant down to the chimney sweep. Little else is thought of or talked about. Labourers and tradesmen are striking for wages and leaving in all directions. Sailors are deserting their ships, and young men in good situations giving notice or throwing up employment at once.

The population of Sydney is in a fearful state of commotion from the prevalence of the gold mania. Numbers come round the coach office, eager to catch the news on the arrival of the mail. The probable number who left Sydney for the diggings on Monday last was 1000, and in less than a week it is expected ten times the number will start for Bathurst.

This proves a prescient prediction, for within days the roads leading out of Sydney are packed with an unending cavalcade of drays and carts, each more heavily laden than the last with ‘tents, rockers, flour, tea, sugar, mining tools, etc. – each accompanied by from four to eight men, half of whom bore firearms’. The less wealthy are seen to be pushing mere wheelbarrows with their supplies and implements, while one extraordinary conveyance is seen to be pulled along by four bulldogs!

Already the number of people on the streets of downtown Sydney is noticeably thinner, while Parramatta – that much closer to the diggings and therefore all the more tempting for its population – looks so deserted it may as well have dingos running down its main street.

Everywhere, the shops have adapted to the gold rush by putting in their front windows and on their principal display shelves everything that might attract the attention of a man heading off for the goldfields from the standing start of no provisions: shovels, picks, axes, saws, pots, pans, dungarees, heavy shirts and heavier boots, and most particularly . . . cradles.

‘The gold washing machine, or Virginian “cradle”,’ runs one contemporary account, ‘hitherto a stranger to our eyes, became in two days a familiar household utensil, for scores of them were paraded for purchase.’

And, yes, the hands that rock those cradles are frantically grasping, reaching for ever more supplies, but it is not hard to see why it is so and why the rush is filled with people from all walks of life. The price of gold at this time is around £3 an ounce, while the average labourer is earning little more than £20 and certainly no more than £30 for an entire
year
’
s
work. With just one nugget, one lucky find, you could earn many times more than your annual wage.

The Maitland Mercury
sagely notes: ‘Many persons are now going to dig for gold who are wholly unfit for such work; men who would hesitate to walk the length of George Street in a shower of rain are going, at the beginning of winter, to a district where the climate is almost English, and where they will not be able to get shelter in even the humblest hut.’

Not for nothing does the alarmed Governor write to the Colonial Secretary in London, informing him that the rush is already ‘unhinging the minds of all classes of society’.

Will unhinged minds agree to pay the license fees? This is far from sure, and it is the Government Surveyor, Samuel Stutchbury, still on site at the diggings, who is the first to pinpoint the problem, in a letter to his masters in Sydney on 25 May: ‘Up to this time the miners are quiet and peaceable, but almost to a man armed. With such numbers as will without doubt in a very short period be brought together, good order will very much depend upon the government adopting wise measures for collecting dues, which should be made as easy as possible in the mode of payment; as I fear that no police power could enforce the collection of dues against the feelings of the majority.’

And there will be many more diggers coming, so extraordinarily munificent are these goldfields proving to be. He estimates there to be currently 1000 people there, ‘and with few exceptions they appear to be doing well, many of them getting large quantities of gold. Lumps have been obtained varying in weight from 1 oz to 4 lbs, the latter being the heaviest I have heard of’.

Upon reading such reports, the authorities are not long in concluding that the rush will soon get a whole lot
more
intense. Clearly something must be done to maintain order, as well as putting in a structure to collect the license fees, and on 23 May the government announces the appointment of its first Commissioner over the Gold Region, with the former Police Magistrate of Parramatta, Mr John Richard Hardy, being appointed to the post. It will be for him to oversee Her Majesty’s peace and ensure that the law and regulations are being obeyed. As ‘the Crown writ small’, he will have the responsibility of issuing the licenses and, most importantly, collecting the fees.

The appointment of such a figure is an obvious course, but
The Sydney Morning Herald
thinks the authorities have picked the wrong man: ‘We feel particularly curious to know upon what grounds Mr. Hargraves is overlooked [as Gold Commissioner], or if not overlooked, why his claims are the last to be considered [when] to Mr. Hargraves, and Mr. Hargraves principally, does the merit of the discovery belong . . .

‘Already, a general feeling of indignation has been expressed, and more particularly at the diggings, at the apparent slight with which Mr. Hargraves has been treated in this matter.’

Within a little over a week, the government caves in and agrees to appoint Edward Hargraves. Again, the
Herald
is honoured to report it, in an edition that also carries an apology for the fact that many recent editions have been delivered late, because ‘our runners being found wanting, have rushed for the Diggings without leave or license, at least without ours’.

The good news is that the
Herald
pronounces itself ‘satisfied, as will be the Colony and the parent country, extreme gratification in learning that the local government, as a preliminary bonus to Mr. Hargraves, have presented that gentleman with the sum of £500, and the appointment of Commissioner of Crown Lands, for the purpose of exploring such districts as he may judge desirable of investigation for further discoveries of gold’.

Hargraves himself is of course extremely gratified, not just with the remuneration and the position as Commissioner, with its handsome salary of £250 per annum, but with something else that rivals it for pleasure. The position also comes with a uniform, boasting a great deal of gold lace and a peaked cap, and on those goldfields he is always to be accompanied by two mounted policemen.
Heaven
!

Yes, there is an ongoing outcry from the squatters at the government’s seeming accommodation of the mass of labourers who continue to leave their jobs to go to the diggings, but when their man on site, Samuel Stutchbury, reports that ‘there is no doubt that auriferous deposits exist throughout a very great extent of country, and that very shortly the export of gold from this will rival that of San Francisco’, it is obvious that there is not a lot they can do.

‘It would be madness,’ Colonial Secretary Deas Thomson gravely tells pastoralist James Macarthur, ‘to attempt to stop that which we have not physical force to put down’.

CHAPTER TWO

VICTORIA

Population and wealth will flow in upon us in copious, rapid and continuous streams . . . A high and noble destiny awaits the long despised Australia, and she must now be treated by her haughty mistress, not as a child, but as an equal. In every point a great change must be, or Australia will know how to vindicate her rights.