The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (38 page)

Others were traumatised out of their corsetry. Eliza Lucus's teenage sister, Fanny, died
through the cursed crinolines
. It was a horrific accident. Fanny was dishing up dinner when her voluminous dress caught alight from the open fireplace. She lived for five hours in excruciating pain.
It was nearly the death of poor mother,
recalled Eliza,
her grief was great.
Eliza's mother never wore crinolines again. For goldfields women, corsets and crinolines made even less sense in the stifling heat or noxious mud, especially if there was manual work to be done. For gentlewomen, ‘dressing down' also made a potent statement of solidarity with the democratic ethos of goldfields life.

But as Lucy Chesser documents, and contrary to John Capper's reassurances, many cross-dressing colonial women did not reconstitute themselves as outwardly female, instead choosing to live out their days as ‘men', some with wives. Others had a bet each way. As late as 1879, you could still find women working alongside male miners during the week, dressed as men, then stepping out in satin and lace to a Saturday night dance on the arm of their husband.
¹⁶

If some women were dressing down, there was also an upswing in conspicuous consumption by successful digging families. Genteel Mrs Massey lampooned the material girls of the goldfields: newly married, newly rich, spending up on luxury items such as parasols and lace, with which they had no previous acquaintance. She dismissed them as
the most absurd caricature of a digger's wife
: gaudy, ostentatious, laughable. Numerous commentators remarked with snobbish surprise on the superior quality and taste of Victoria's fashions. William Westgarth is typical.
The ladies are attired with an elegance and costliness that would scarcely be looked for in the miscellaneous gathering of so young a society
, he wrote. Robert Caldwell missed the elegance:
every extravagance and peculiarity of costume
, he marvelled,
is indulged in at pleasure.

Men, too, trialled new looks and fashion statements. By day, you couldn't distinguish a gentleman from an ex-convict because of the unofficial diggings uniform of blue flannel shirt, gray neckerchief, straw hat, knee-high boots and beard and moustache, which was worn by miners, labourers and draymen alike. But at night, some men cast off their utilitarian duds and slipped into evening clothes: black pants, white shirt, a red sash, patent leather boots and black plush hat. John Deegan describes such men as
swells
or
mashers
, and says they took their sartorial cues from the Californians in their midst. The outmoded term
masher
is a real gem. It derives from the Romani gypsy word
masha
, meaning to entice, allure, delude or fascinate, and was originally used in the theatre, although it is unclear who these diggers were setting out to delude.

Men were caught cross-dressing too, but as an entirely different form of escape. Fugitives fleeing from the hands of justice regularly disguised themselves as women. Charles Evans was returning to Ballarat from a trip to Melbourne when he
met a man in woman's clothes, handcuffed and guarded by an armed
policeman.
Evans later learned that the man had shot dead another man a short distance up the road.

So while some women and men dressed down, either for political or practical purposes, others played dress-ups, experimenting with new-found wealth or social flexibility. Just as a girl in her mother's wardrobe will try on new identities—imagining herself as twice the woman she knows herself to be—so the early gold rush generation experimented with wearing the breeches of alluring power and prosperity, whether they permanently achieved it or not. Could anybody blame them for playing the game?

Thousands of men from every corner of the globe, all living in tents,
en plein air
, manually labouring, in holiday mode, young and free. The La Trobe government took one look at the social landscape of the goldfields and came to the speedy realisation that the only way to prevent complete carnage was to regulate the sale of alcohol. Publicans licences would only be granted in the surrounding townships. No alcohol was to be sold on the diggings. It was a cunning plan bound to fail.

Every storekeeper sold sly-grog
, Police Magistrate John D'Ewes wrote in his 1857 memoir of Ballarat in 1854. A first offence for unlicensed selling elicited a £50 fine or four months in prison for non-payment. Police officers received a portion of the fine if they recorded a conviction. A second offence received six to twelve months gaol, with hard labour. The local magistrates had no power to commute; only the governor could interfere with statutory sentences. The cards were stacked in favour of the police, and they either pursued known sly groggers relentlessly or extracted sufficient hush money—and no doubt other ‘favours'—to stay on the right side of the cut. Samuel Huyghue, from his view inside the Camp, believed the system of rewards for sly-grog seizures was to blame for the demoralisation of the police force.

Every traveller to or resident on the diggings remarked on the presence of sly-grog sellers. There were an estimated seven hundred sly-grog outlets in Ballarat.
¹⁷
That means approximately one venue for every thirty adult residents. Ellen Clacy theorised that
the privacy and risk gives the obtaining it an excitement which the diggers enjoy as much as the spirit itself
. It helped that women ran most of the ‘refreshment tents' on the diggings. Mrs Massey called sly grog
this most hateful traffic
. But since she knew the sale of alcohol was the most lucrative activity on the goldfields, she took its presence for granted, along with everybody else.

Apart from the grog that was sold from the stores, there were what Henry Mundy called
regular grog shanties
. These were conspicuous by having a large square shutter hung on hinges at the top of one gable of the tent, facing the road. Inside, a rough counter with five- to ten-gallon kegs of hops beer, ginger beer, lemonade and cider was retailed out at sixpence a pannikin. Jugs could be filled up and taken home, to be shared among friends and family. Such shanties were similarly the domain of women, and have been immortalised in S. T. Gill's famous watercolours. Charles Thatcher also made a legend of Big Poll the Grog Seller, who epitomised youthful colonial pluck and bounce, dodging and weaving authorities while
turning in plenty of tin people say/ for she knows what she's about
.
¹⁸
Even artful young women were making an ass of the law.

Not only were women selling the grog, but they were consuming it too. Some women delighted in having a nobbler 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 noted a similar tendency for women to feel liberated from more polite behaviour on the goldfields where drinking was concerned.
It is painful to contemplate,
he wrote in his diary,

the horrible havoc which drunkenness makes on the diggings, 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, either before they arrived at the diggings or due to its harsh realities, but others were merely joining in the carnival. Some, buoyed by the mood of entitlement, may even have felt a drink at the end of the day was their own just reward for ceaseless toil.

Certainly, women expected to be included in the effervescent social life of Ballarat. Mrs Massey attended a ball on the diggings and described the scene in detail. The event occurred in a large tent, with smaller refreshment tents and ladies dressing-room tents scattered about like satellites. Gentlemen diggers and their wives, and 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 intermixed of pink and white. There were lighted Chinese lamps, carpets, divans and sofas. The band was excellent and there was dancing until sun-up. The effect, thought Mrs Massey, was
charming
.

The sober Englishwoman also noted a feature of the event that young artist S. T. Gill failed to capture in his well-known sketch,
Subscription Ball, Ballarat 1854
. Women were hired to care for the babies, aged from newborns to toddlers. Mrs Massey explained that 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
. So 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.

By the winter of 1854, it was clear that the licensing laws would have to change. Police magistrates such as John D'Ewes were begging the government to review its policies. The diggings were awash with sly grog, and the police were drunk on their power to either overlook infringements (for a price) or shut down an operation with brutal force.
Rum, gin, brandy, beer and stout have been known to run down Camp Hill from Lydiard Street in streams
, attested Henry Mundy. He was speaking literally: the police poured away rivers of contraband alcohol, draining it into the dirt.

The waste of so valued a commodity was seen as flagrant baiting of the impoverished community by a bloody-minded police force. Poor shanty keepers, often widows, were used as scapegoats of caution;
they paid the penalty of the pretended vigilance of the police
, observed Henry Mundy. Too poor to pay bribes, the sly-grog seller would be bailed up by a commissioner and six troopers who would proceed
to set fire to the frail tenement over the owner's head and burn it to the ground and everything combustible in it
. It was a show trial. The members of the open-air court would stand by helplessly as judge and jury dispensed their justice, and the now homeless woman in the dock wept piteously.

Legitimate access to liquor was a major source of grievance for a population that had both the original hard-earned thirst and a libertarian taste for self-rule. Meanwhile, legitimate publicans in the township rued the competition of the sly groggers. The authorities deemed that the new breed of publicans, only a piece of paper away from their illicit origins, could be used to help dob in sly-grog sellers. It was considered truly bad form to lag on a sly-grog seller if you couldn't pay the bill, but desperate diggers were known to do it. Spies were
the blackest of Satan's crew
, according to Henry Mundy: if found out, an informer's life was in danger. Publicans and sly groggers—former comrades in crime—were now to be set against each other in a risky strategy of divide and conquer.

The new law was proclaimed on 1 June, in the administrative black hole between La Trobe's departure and Hotham's arrival. Publicans licences would now be granted on the goldfields, but exclusively to
owners of substantial houses only on sold lands or within half a mile of such
. It was a licence not just to sell booze but to print money, and the government knew it. The annual fee to sell spirits was set at £100, with an extra £50 to occupy Crown Lands for the purpose.

The good news for the government was that opening the floodgates to legal liquor sales would generate much-needed revenue. But the legislators had sowed the seeds of the policy's own demise.
In other localities good tents may be licensed at the discretion of the Bench of Magistrates
, read one clause of the new legislation. So discretionary power was back in the hands of local warlords. And what on earth did
good tents
mean? Good structure? Good conduct? Good connections? The scene was set for a tragic turf war between the owners of licensed public houses (which, by law, had to provide accommodation and meals), licensed tents (which merely had to be
good
), the residual sly groggers (selling out of their coffee houses, refreshment tents and stores), and the already abhorred local authorities who were entrusted to act as umpire.

But there was a startling twist. In July, a further qualification was introduced. Applicants for a publicans licence had to show their marriage certificates. No single men would be eligible for a licence. One Melbourne journalist drew a long bow between this novel constraint on men's commercial freedom and the palpable zeitgeist of autonomy (and votes) for women.
Good news for the ladies
, he wrote,
this will, most probably, cause an increase in the marriage returns.
The mocking continued.