The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (29 page)

Within a few months of the Gold Fields Commission report, a law was passed charging the Chinese £10 per head to land in Victoria. They came in greater numbers than ever before, disembarking at Robe in South Australia and walking 400 kilometres overland to the diggings. The racialised poll tax was a gamble that never produced dividends for the Victorian Government. It was classic loss chasing; they should have learned by then.

Only one other minority group received as much private and public commentary as Aborigines and the Chinese. Jews. Remember the Californian digger who jibed that you knew the good old days had ended once the women and Jews arrived? In Victoria, the wisecrack never quite held up. Jewish miners were among the first on the fields, and their presence in Ballarat is indivisible from the establishment and progress of the Lucky City.

In 1851, there were 364 Jews in Victoria, two-thirds the number there were in New South Wales. The Victorian Census recorded 2903 Jews in 1861: 1857 males and 1046 females. Overall, the Jewish population of Australia trebled in the decade between 1851 and 1861, allowing Jewish congregations to become self-sufficient for the first time. While the Victorian Jewish community increased almost tenfold over this period, the New South Wales community did not quite double. By 1861, the Jewish population of Australia constituted 0.48 per cent of the total, a proportion that has not changed significantly since that time.
³¹
Such was the impact of gold.

The Ballarat Hebrew Congregation was established in the dining room of the Clarendon Hotel in Lydiard Street South, just a stone's throw from the Government Camp, on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) 11 October 1853.
³²
Henry Harris, who may have been a Cornish Jew, ran the Clarendon Hotel. Harris was also the first president of the Congregation.
³³
One of the founding members was Charles Dyte, a thirty-two-year-old Londoner five feet tall, with mercantile training. He arrived in Ballarat in August 1853 and wasted no time in setting up a prominent auction house.

Many gold rush Jews came from Britain and bore anglicised names such as Harris, Franks, Marks, Isaacs, Simons, Josephs, Davis and Moss. There was also a fair share of the more distinguishable Levys, Cohens and Lazaruses. Others came from the wider Jewish Diaspora, particularly Germany and parts of Eastern Europe. Annie Silberberg was born in Poland in 1836 and educated in Paris. She arrived in Victoria in August 1853 with her parents Golda and Jacques, and siblings Esther, Eva, Meyer and Isaac. Annie married Lewis Hollander at Melbourne's Stephen Street synagogue in 1860, moved to Ballarat and bore sixteen children.

Rebecca Abrahams married Polish-born Alfred Isaacs in London in August 1853 and set out for Victoria soon after, arriving in 1854 on the
Queen of the East
. Her first son, Isaac, became Governor-General of Australia in 1934, after serving as a member of Australia's first federal parliament, attorney general and Chief Justice of the High Court. Isaac Isaacs described his mother as
an extraordinarily gifted woman with a phenomenal faculty of absorbing and retaining knowledge
who personally supervised the education of each of her four living children. From 1859, the Isaacs family lived in the gold towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth.
³⁴

Though some Jews did actively mine for gold, they more commonly entered into business on the goldfields, rapidly assuming leading positions as auctioneers, storekeepers, hawkers, jewellers, tobacconists and publicans. (Alfred Isaacs was a tailor.) This follows the pattern of Jewish integration into other western communities; the Jews of Cornwall, for example, occupied the trades of silversmith, watchmaker, pawnbroker, merchant, pedlar, auctioneer and brokers, with women working as milliners, dressmakers and shopkeepers.
³⁵
The Jews of Victoria chased a new opportunity for enterprise and endeavour, but they did not break the pattern of previous migrations.

Unlike the Chinese, Ballarat's Jews were quickly accepted as part of the vibrant, edgy, entrepreneurial flavour of the day. Being there at the genesis of a new local community, Jews were able to play leading roles in the establishment of institutions and civic ideas, rather than accommodating themselves to the scraps they were thrown by a chary host. London Jews, by contrast, had historically become pedlars and secondhand dealers because of a city ordinance prohibiting Jews entering the retail trades. Depending on the locality, similar restriction applied to the finance sector and the professions. In continental Europe the ghetto system established such occupational boundaries geographically. But in Australia, there was no such formal impediment to freedom of movement or trade.

Still, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the partisan prism of individual minds. Mrs Massey, in surveying the many nations assembled in Victoria, singled
out a dark, Jewish-looking man
for special comment. His black eyes, wrote Mrs Massey, showed
more than shrewdness; it amounted to unpleasant cunning
. She made no such remarks about the Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Indians, Maoris and African-Americans whom she also encountered on Melbourne's streets. Henry Mundy performed a stylised rendition of a visit to
a jew's shop
in Collins Street:
you vant a pair trousers…I sell sheep, very sheep, yo get nodding so sheep in anoder shop
. Oddly,
MELBOURNE PUNCH
, which began publication in late 1855, ran a regular column called ‘Shylock', which purported to expose Jewish converts to Christianity. It may have been a victory to convert the heathen Chinese, but successful evangelism in the Jewish community purportedly exposed the scheming duplicity of its members.

In October 1856, following the depiction of a German Jew as
naturally criminal
in Ballarat's
MINER AND WEEKLY STAR
newspaper, Charles Dyte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that
Jews as Cosmopolitans [have] ever been esteemed as being most loyal, orderly and quiet
. It is significant that Dyte felt enough confidence in his own social status to stand up and defend his people publicly. He had good reason to be assertive. Though he was less than five feet tall,
Ikey Dyte
was a big man on campus. He would go on to become the chairman of the Ballarat Mining Exchange, the chairman of the first borough council of East Ballarat and a Member of the Legislative Assembly from 1864 to 1871. Dyte would later be hailed for
play[ing] his part manfully in the famous affair at Eureka.
³⁶

If the Chinese were tarnished for deliberately leaving their women behind as permanent grass widows, the Jews faced a different problem. An article appearing in the
LONDON JEWISH CHRONICLE
in August 1852 summed up the challenge:

The recent discoveries of gold have tempted many young men to leave the land of their birth and depart in pursuit of fortune. Among their ranks the young Hebrew has gone also to seek an independence by frugal habits, industrious pursuits, and the sweat of his brow…the steady-going English Jew will not expect to build up a fortune with such rapidity… yet, by reason of the fast increasing population of the gold colonies, he will see the acquisition of gain must of necessity become a work of time. Such being the true state of the case, the young Jewish emigrant will find that after he has become settled…the social and domestic feeling, inherited from his ancestors, will make him find that he requires affection; that he wants a home; that he craves a gentle partner, who by her assiduous love and sweetness may lighten his labour.
³⁷

So, the Jewish immigrant supposedly played his game according to reason, not chance. But he was, nonetheless, a man of emotion. His independence was not predicated on fleeing the cloying constraints of domesticity. Rather, he coveted a home of
love and sweetness
as just reward for industry. But where would he find such a homemaker, when there were so few Jewish girls in Australia? The
CHRONICLE
had a solution. It called for English rabbis to preach female emigration from the pulpit,
unless in the interim a Mrs Chisholm rises up out of Israel
. This was the only thing that would
save many a young man from marrying a Christian
. The rallying cry was heard, apparently, and by August 1853 none other than the real Caroline Chisholm came to the rescue. With the Jewish Ladies Benevolent Society of London, she corralled a contingent of twenty ready and willing single Jewish women. The precious cargo sailed on the newly built
Caroline Chisholm
, along with other Jewish families immigrating to Australia. The spectre of intermarriage was averted—for a time at least. Two generations on, few of the grandchildren of the gold rush Jews still identified themselves as Jewish.
³⁸

Robert Caldwell predicted that Victoria would provide the peaceful gathering place for all nations. But plenty of others mapped a social geography of division and distinction. Jews and other minority religious groups were not eligible for public aid to establish denominational schools. In 1854, there was a growing movement for a change to the relevant act of parliament, but William Westgarth favoured abolishing aid altogether and returning to pure user-pays. This, he argued, would be the only truly non-discriminatory practice, if Victoria were to live up to its reputation of
political and social inclusiveness
. Colonial liberality was a tetchy beast; it relied on visionary leaders to give constitutional rights their cultural claws.
To dream of excluding a Jew from the colonial parliament would be as foreign to the law as to the public sentiment
, wrote Westgarth in 1858, the same year that the Melbourne Club moved out of John Pascoe Fawkner's pub and into its purpose-built citadel in Collins Street. Jews were customarily barred from the elite gentlemen's club, and women were officially disqualified.

William Westgarth noted that there was
a sprinkling of all the nations of the earth
on the Ballarat goldfields—he estimated that ten per cent of the population was
foreign
—but each tended to stick to its own turf. In particular, he pointed out a locality thirty metres distant from any other tents that was inhabited by several hundred Frenchmen. Raffaello Carboni, an Italian, noted that the English, Germans and Scots diggers of Ballarat worked generally on the Gravel Pits, while the Irish
had their stronghold on the Eureka
. The Americans, he tells us in typically idiosyncratic fashion,
fraternised with all the wide-awake, ubi caro, ibi vultures
. The Latin translates roughly as ‘where there is flesh, there are vultures'.

This aphorism neatly sums up the suspicion and wariness with which many British immigrants viewed the large contingent of Americans on the goldfields. Thomas Pierson, the Philadelphia freemason, noted
a general prejudice
against Americans, which he put down to envy of their
superiority in all things
. Westgarth, on the other hand, noted the American belief in
self-adjustment
rather than government regulation; their trust in human nature over vested authority. People accustomed to self-government, these commentators worried, were bound to clash with people accustomed to the rule of law.
We have no sympathy with mob law in the Queen's dominions
, said Henry Mundy ruefully. The mob was such an unruly, unpredictable ogre precisely because it was constituted by such a diverse range of human beings, all with their own codes, superstitions, values, resentments, methods of wish-fulfilment and personal histories of loss, shame and frustration.

A conciliation of such diverse pretensions and interests
, realised the Swiss miner Charles Eberle,
will not be achieved without conflict
.

SEVEN

THE WINTER OF THEIR DISCONTENT

It was to be a winter of untold discontent.

By June, plummeting temperatures amplified the cruelty of the past weeks' driving rain. With the benefit of modern meteorology, we now know that the mercury dips lower 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 southwesterly draught of cold discomfort blowing 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.

Jones' Circus might have been emblematic of gold rush illusions, but its tent was exceptional for its size and solidity. It was like a citadel compared with the simple pitched-roof tents of most miners and shopkeepers and their families. 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 Mason. She had transported feather beds, bedsteads and a mountain of covers to the diggings. The Piersons had been warned that you could use 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 tap a vein that winter went straight to the waiting Wathaurung and bought a possum skin cloak.