The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (9 page)

It was impossible not to have great expectations. The pull towards Victoria was overwhelming, the allure fervently communicated by the first arrivals of late 1851 and early 1852. These men and women sent heartfelt letters home to family members, wrote correspondents' reports for newspapers and published literary accounts of their travels. The
WILTS AND GLOUCESTERSHIRE STANDARD
regularly published letters from successful emigrants. One ‘Elizabeth' had written to her mother:
I hope that all my brothers and sisters that are eligible for a free passage will apply immediately and be sure to apply as farm servants or dairymaids and they will be certain of a free passage to this our adopted country, the land of plenty.
⁴

The ‘land of plenty' allegory is a common theme in these early reports. Victoria was
the Promised Land
and Ballarat, a Christian emigration society confidently announced in its promotional literature,
is the Ararat on which the ark of Victoria rested, and saved the colony
. Seventeen-year-old Scotsman Alexander Dick sought
a new, free and better life
and
deliverance from what I regarded as servile bondage
. Fanny Davis, an assisted immigrant from England, thought that as her ship prepared to depart:
We must have looked very much like the Children of Israel going out of Egypt.
⁵

Indeed, Fanny's reference to Exodus 3:1—God's decree to Moses to lead his people away out of affliction into the land
flowing with milk and honey
—explains a great deal about the aspirations of those immigrants in flight. The impending journey to Victoria was not simply about the lust for gold. The gold seekers were not sinners, but innocents abroad. Dreamers. Visionaries. Refugees. Like Alexander Dick, they sought deliverance.

The story of Victoria's gold dovetailed perfectly with the global liberation narrative that expressed the spirit of the times. If repression was the lock, gold was the key.

The picture painted of Victoria worldwide was as a land paved with gold, a yellow brick road to unlimited opportunity. Newspapers around the globe printed endless statements of gold returns, enumerating the breathtaking value of the gold in private hands, Melbourne banks and diggers' pockets. On 8 April 1852, the London
TIMES
reported the
astonishing results
achieved over the past three months: £730,242 worth of gold
and where it is to end no human being can guess. The field is reported to be illimitable.
This correspondent pressed readers to hurry to the land where
boundless plenty smiles side by side with countless wealth.
Just three months later, the total value of gold thus far found in Victoria was £1,647,810.

The promise of instant wealth is perennially attractive—as the vice-like grip of poker machines and lotteries on the pockets of today's punters still demonstrates—but how much more compelling when there are eye-witnesses to the Midas miracle:

[Gold] lies on the surface and after a shower of rain, you may see it with the naked eye, and a child can put in a spade, and dig that with his little hands in one minute, which many of you in England wear out eyes and heart in getting.

That's how
MURRAY
'
S GUIDE TO THE GOLD DIGGINGS
, published in London in 1852, depicted the situation on the ground. Gold digging was simply child's play.

MURRAY
'
S GUIDE
drew on a series of anecdotes to present a
true account
for prospective diggers. Like other guidebooks that promoted the attractions of the goldfields—the healthy air, beautiful scenery and the
glow of animal enjoyment peculiar to bush life—
MURRAY
'
S
particularly encouraged
fathers of large families
to come, sowing the seed of aspiration in those husbands who, perhaps, had failed to bring home sufficient bacon in Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff. It was a well-publicised image: the victorious father arriving back in the mother country to a grateful wife and adoring children waiting patiently by the hearth.

According to John Capper, a man's children were, in England,
dead weights around his progress
, but a
true blessing
in Australia. Digger-turned-merchant Robert Caldwell agreed.
I enjoy the satisfaction of providing well for my family through my own exertions
, he wrote in his reminiscences,
a satisfaction I could never have felt in England
.

By late 1854, the time young William McLeish's family made the decision to try their luck in Victoria, British households were also suffering the material and psychological effects of the Crimean War.
Many of the working class found it a hard matter to obtain regular employment
, recalled William. Though the departing McLeish family was
surrounded by weeping friends who all believed they were bidding us a final good-bye, which indeed they were
, the promised restoration of masculine pride through honest toil beckoned like the Pied Piper.

Notions of ‘manliness' were linked to another important incentive to gold seeking: independence. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, manliness was a racialised concept imbued with assumptions about the civility of true British manhood, as against the brute stupidity or innate slovenliness of lesser beings.
⁶
For the labouring class, manliness was predicated on improving one's situation in life, and rested largely on the ability to become self-employed, and eventually self-made.

It is thus not surprising that the guarantee of autonomy resonates persistently in the letters of new immigrants to the family and neighbours they'd left behind. James Green conveyed this sentiment in a note to his sister, written on 24 July 1853, that answered her enquiry as to whether their brother George should also ‘come out'.
Come here by all means
, entreated James;
a few years here and he would be an independent man, he is very simple if he stops at home digging potatoes when he might come here and dig gold
.

Robert Caldwell similarly emphasised the
perfect freedom and thorough independence
of a gold digger's life, particularly for the
youth of energy, adventure and courage
. Samuel Mossman evoked the image of a poor labourer and his family huddled around the
embers of a miserable fire
, surviving a northern winter, unable to improve his living conditions. In Australia, by contrast, there was
no snow and fuel was cheap and abundant. It's the poor man's country
, Mossman declared
, what independence would surround them! In Australia want and penury is unknown, daylight and darkness, heat and cold, are more equally distributed throughout the seasons.
Mossman steered clear of biblical allusion but referenced other mythological tales. Many Britons came to Australia as sickly and downcast, he argued, but under the bright southern sun and wholesome air the weak man rallied. With
health and strength before him, like a young Hercules, he commences the world anew.

Images of heroic self-sufficiency reinforced the image of boundless personal space, both physical and psychic, to be found in Victoria.
I don't think I could breathe there now
, said one Englishman of his motherland,
it's always—you must do this, or you must not do that…it would fairly drive me mad.
⁷

The abolitionist movement had successfully campaigned to end slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Now a new generation was proclaiming that this was a time for white men to break free of their bonds, whether to exploitative employers, irksome family or a tyrannical state.
The land they are going to is neither formal nor exclusive
, wrote one booster,
working men need no introduction beyond industry and aptitude. Employers take no account of pedigree.

For a man beaten down by generations of class consciousness, this chance to stand tall and proud, regardless of the cut of his cloth, seemed nothing short of redemptive.
Australia may well be considered the Paradise of Working Men
, struggling fathers and superfluous sons were told.
The Sweat of the brow—the timeworn badge of labour—bears with it no stamp of servitude, and to the patient worker success is no problem. For all willing hands there is labour, and for all labour there is liberal reward.
⁸

Historian David Goodman, in his classic comparative study of gold digging in Victoria and California, has persuasively elucidated what he calls the ‘colonial narrative'—the story that contemporaries told about the effects of gold on society. One of the most significant elements of this story, Goodman argues, was ‘the depiction of the human relationship to the environment as one of struggle and conquest, a relationship which allowed scope for masculine heroism'. Goodman understands the colonial narrative as ‘a male story' because men's triumph over their circumstances—material and social—tapped into an atavistic desire for mastery.

But could this idea have appeal for women also? Did it have a
particular
appeal? This letter from Lucy Hart, written to her mother in England in May 1852, illustrates that autonomy was highly prized by women, too.

I would not come back to England again unless I had enough to keep me without work on no account. Neither would my husband. I am speaking now the very sentiments of our hearts, but people must be saving, industrious and persevering. We have deprived ourselves of many things we might have had, but what was it for? All to try to do something for ourselves so that my husband should not always work under a
Master
, and happy I am to inform you that we have gained that point, he is now his own master.

Lucy's letter, like most personal correspondence and ship journals, would have been read out aloud at gatherings and passed around among family members, friends and acquaintances.
⁹
It would have become precious cultural capital, impressing other women with its pungent whiff of satisfaction, almost defiance. Its message: wives in Victoria could enjoy the ancillary benefits of a proud, upright husband and mutual reward for family labours.

But it's also clear that women were promoting the advantages of autonomy for their own personal fulfilment. May Howell wrote ardently of life at the diggings:

I dare say it is an independent life, trusting to yourself, putting forth all your energy, no leaning on others, no one to control, or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law, and chalking out your path in life.

Forty-two-year-old Mary Spencer, sailing on the
Arabian
, felt no ambivalence or anxiety as she looked back over her shoulder at
the receding shore
of her homeland. As her ship diary reveals, she saw only the miraculous prospect of liberation from suffocating drawing rooms and the endless minutiae of genteel etiquette. Mary revelled in the starry nights on deck
with everyone happy, no jarring world of cares to disturb us
. Her only woe was that there was so little to write about:
happiness is quiet and uninteresting in its detail
. For both men and women, the heady assumption of self-governance would come to have major socio-political implications once they reached the diggings.

MURRAY
'
S GUIDE
held another prophetic image. This one relied on neither the promise of male breadwinning nor the intoxication of personal liberation. It involved the companionable mutuality of young husbands and wives making a new start together. This vision encouraged women to become the driving force behind emigration.
Wives should not allow their husbands to go without them if they have passage money for both
was the message, an inducement for women to assert command over proceedings. Other commentators exhorted women to come to the goldfields to
act as a stimulant to many fathers' yearning heart in this motley multitude
. Women, declared the
ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE
of September 1851, would give
a dash of humanity
to the
broad outline of savageism [sic]
that emerges when men congregate in sexual isolation.

The concept of women as civilising agents is endemic to transnational colonial history. According to this ideology, women are seen as agents of conservative restoration, bringing virtue to rough-and-ready frontier outposts. These angels of the imperial hearth would fulfil their ‘natural' role in sweeping aside the detritus of frontier living, taming men with wholesome marriages, bearing children to send to nascent schools, and holding together a moral universe in which charity and benevolence would smooth the jagged edges of corruption and greed.

Nonconformist teacher and historian James Bonwick was chief proselytiser of the ‘God's Police' archetype on the goldfields. It's a paradigm he laid out in his
AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER
'
S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR
, a magazine that ran from October 1852 to May 1853, sold in Melbourne and on the diggings, and sent back to be shared among family members and friends. To Bonwick, Victoria's golden gullies were
the gift of a God of gracious Providence
and he erected a special pedestal for women in his idealised rural scene. Bonwick wrote of the
sources of satisfaction
that awaited women who, with their husbands, set up happy, virtuous homes of honest toil. In the edition for February 1853, Bonwick described a pleasant weekend visit to Ballarat, where
no gold district has been so eminently rich as Eureka
.