The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (24 page)

On Saturday 13 May 1854, Sarah Skinner gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy. The baby's lusty cries were music to the ears of midwife Jane Julian, Sarah and William's neighbour. Two weeks later, Jane testified at the inquest into Sarah's death
²
that she
was not a regular midwife but [had] attended a few females in their confinement
. She'd done her best. On the day after the birth, Sarah was well, sitting up nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane, the new mother was
seized with cold shivering
. William Skinner, twenty-seven, son of a Devon miner, sent for Dr William Wills (father of the doomed explorer). Dr Wills attributed Sarah's fever to her milk coming in.

Over the next week, Sarah continued to ail. Dr Wills now diagnosed
puerperal peritonitis
—the grimmest reaper of nineteenth-century childbirth—and ordered the standard treatment for postpartum infection: turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two hours.

A medical text from 1785 gives us an indication of how Sarah was faring as Wills attended her.

Child-bed fever…begins, like most other fevers, with a cold or shivering fit, which is succeeded by restlessness, pain of the head, great sickness at stomach, and bilious vomiting…A great pain is usually felt in the back, hips, and region of the womb;…and the patient is frequently troubled with a tenesmus, or constant inclination to go to stool. The urine, which is very high-colored, is discharged in small quantity, and generally with pain. The belly sometimes swells to a considerable bulk…a bilious or putrid looseness, of an obstinate and dangerous nature, comes on, and accompanies the disease through all its future progress.
³

Sarah's baby also began suffering bowel complaints and bloody stools. He died by the end of his first week, without a name, and was laid to rest five days later. Dr Wills gave
weakness
as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile herself to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like, having already put two other babies in the ground.

A distraught William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered the baby's demise to have been
caused by the mother's milk
. Dr Stewart observed Sarah's deteriorating condition and, though he continued the enemas and blistering, claimed
it was beyond human skill to save her life
. He denied her the last-ditch treatment of leeching the abdomen, though leeches were abundantly available from the many pharmacists retailing on the Ballarat goldfields. Almost two weeks after the birth, and two days after his son's funeral, William Skinner held his wife's limp, clammy hand for the last time.

At Sarah's inquest on 25 May, the coroner pronounced that the woman had died from
natural causes
. A jury of William's peers added a rider to the verdict:
We consider that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man her days might have been prolonged
. The now-widowed William Skinner was, in a perverse way, one of the lucky ones. Although his wife's body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had finished ‘attending' her, he had managed to secure professional services. In that, at least, he had succeeded.

Fellow miner Patrick Carey was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son succumbed to the fever that had racked him for days. The coroner asked Patrick why he hadn't sent for medical assistance. His reply:
Because we had not a blessed sixpence in the tent
.
⁴

The idea that the Australian gold rush produced a classless society, founded on the sort of egalitarianism that only a resources boom can buy, is one of the enduring myths of the Eureka legend. From the beginning, Ballarat was a competitive environment. How could it be otherwise, when its
raison d'être
was the lucky strike? And in competitive environments, there are bound to be winners and losers. In their classic text
The Psychology of Gambling
, Jon Halliday and Peter Fuller define gambling as ‘a redistribution of wealth on the basis of chance and risk, an event that always involves loss to one party and gain to another'. The psychological and sociological bedrock of the gold rush ethos was, in fact, the antithesis of egalitarianism.

Here lies the paradox of diggings society: a world turned upside down, but not levelled. Who wanted to be a millionaire? Everyone. How many succeeded? Few. What was the difference? Chance.

For most punters on the early Victorian goldfields, successful mining required three things: diligence, stamina and a godsend.
It is said by some
, wrote Henry Mundy,
there is no such thing as luck, that every man is the architect of his own fortune. Such people had never been gold digging.
Swiss miner Charles Eberle agreed.
It is a lottery
, he concluded after a long tour of duty in Ballarat.
⁵
Ellen Clacy called the diggings
the lottery fields
. In this game of chance, Mother Nature was the house.

In Ballarat, it was geology that safeguarded her stash. The lines of gold deposits were
capricious and uncertain
, as one miner put it, following the subterranean maze of buried rivers. On the surface, the creeks and gullies revealed nothing of what lay beneath. Deep lead mining was like recreational fishing, casting a line into a dark pool in the pure hope of a bite. But deep lead mining was also dangerous, costly and time-consuming work, requiring fortitude but little manual skill or technical knowledge.

You could sink a shaft not ten feet from your neighbour's claim. You could both dig; both line your shaft with split timbers to hold the loose ground, and bucket out the constant cascade of seeping water. You could both wallow in the cold and dark and wet (or, in summer, hot and foetid) earth for five, six, nine months. And he might hit the gold-infused riverbed while your hole dropped over a bend in the gutter, missing the mark. He wins. You lose. Rock bottom. Duffered out. A shicer. But still you have to pay your licence fee, month in, month out, gold or no gold.

The deep lead mining of Ballarat, wrote Geoffrey Blainey in
The Rush That Never Ended
, ‘was therefore more of a gamble than any other branch of gold mining'. Like childbirth, deep lead mining was exhilarating, wildly profitable, completely ruinous, risky business.

Eberle's conclusion that mining was a lottery was tinged with disgust, not devil-may-care jouissance. He reckoned he'd been sold a pup.
The gilded imagination of European publicists has, with few exceptions
, Eberle considered,
influenced the general attitude.
Expectations of easy pickings were still high, even in late 1854 when Eberle left Lausanne. But it did not take long
for the scales to fall from our eyes
. For Eberle and so many others, it was
a
bitter deception
. Still, as the experts will tell you, ‘loss chasing' is an important component in the psychology of gambling, inducing players to persevere longer and raise the stakes higher in an attempt to recoup misdirected finances, time and pride.

Thomas McCombie was quick to point out that the independent diggers of the early 1850s were not the professional miners of the 1860s. The former were only in the game, he believed,
for short-term gain or failure
. Mining was not
a regular calling
, as it would become for the salaried men of the syndicalised mining companies that had already begun taking over operations by late 1854. The amateur gold diggers knew little of science, engineering, metallurgy, chemistry or geology—all subjects that would be taught at the Ballarat School of Mines from 1870. No, the early diggers, said McCombie, were purely individual speculators,
anxious about their families
, eager to make a killing and go home. That they could not earn enough to buy an egg, let alone a passage, was the hard-luck story told around countless campfires. Young Martin Mossman poured out his tale of woe in a letter to his Aunt Hetty. He went to the diggings three times, but had no success. He was poorer than when he started.
I have no good fortune
, he wrote,
I am not a lucky digger
. Martin's Uncle Charles, on the other hand, went into
a speculation
and is
now worth £40,000.
Uncle Charles was coming home, but
I am just worth what I carry on my back
, wrote Martin.
⁶

What's more, 1854 represented a significant turning point in the attitude of many immigrants to rolling the dice. Antoine Fauchery, a French digger and photographer who lived at Ballarat from 1852 to 1854, reflected on the mounting disillusionment with short-term gold mining:

In 1853 if you took ten emigrants, nine of them would have worked resolutely on the diggings, while the tenth would, with great regret, have gone in for business. Towards the middle of 1855, the proportions were completely reversed. Out of ten emigrants nine were speculating in something or other—tool handles or lemonade at a penny a glass, and the tenth, stripped of all resources, kept to his pick, but with what ill grace.
⁷

The assumption of easy pickings had put the wind in the sails of over a quarter of a million immigrants between 1852 and 1854. By mid-1854, things were changing. And the longer people—especially family men—spent embedded in unsuccessful speculations, the deeper the hole they seemed to have dug for themselves.

The conditions of life on the goldfields were to a certain extent ‘democratising': everyone was in the same leaky boat, regardless of rank, breeding, qualification, nationality or religion. There was only one place you could have a baby and that was in a tent. The rough, raw newness of it all made for a sort of temporal and material parity. But this pioneer equivalence was in itself such a wild anomaly that most everyone felt the need to comment on it.
MURRAY
'
S GUIDE
described gold digging as
a pursuit open to all who are strong enough…members of the learned profession side by side with the refuse of the earth.
Thomas McCombie commented that
the many persons of birth and education [were] rather difficult to recognize in their blue serge shirts and cord small clothes
. It's fair to say there was an obsessive focus on the ease with which clothes could disguise caste, a simple sleight of hand overturning centuries of vigilant class-consciousness.

Why did Sarah Skinner's placental site turn septic, while the other women attended by Jane Julian survived? Nothing was dependable; everything was a matter of happenstance. The straitjacket of the Old World had not been undone, simply re-laced. It felt like a bitter deception indeed. Who could be made to blame?

Martha Clendinning didn't need a demographer to crunch the numbers and suggest a marketing plan for her shop. She could see with her own eyes that Ballarat was experiencing a baby boom. With no hospital or midwifery services, Ballarat's tent city rang with the cries of birthing. At least one pharmacist advertised breast pumps to relieve the agony of hyper-lactating new mothers. (
Milk fever
, which we now call mastitis, was a painful and, before antibiotics, a potentially fatal infection. Dr Stewart was not unreasonable in suspecting Sarah Skinner's bursting breasts as the cause of her delirium.) It also did not take George Clendinning long to realise that he could lay his hands on more reliable sources of profit than his barren mine shaft. By 1856, Dr Clendinning had hung out his shingle as a
Coroner, Surgeon and Accoucheur
at Bakery Hill.

In 1850, one birth was registered in Ballarat. In 1851, there were five. That figured doubled to ten in 1852 and leapt to twenty-eight in 1853. Then, in 1854, 404 babies squalled their way into life. Those women not having babies were busy making them. In 1855, there were 756 registered births and in 1856 that figure almost doubled to 1242. You might expect the rate of increase to have remained constant as Ballarat grew into a fully-fledged town with schools and other institutions of progress. But that's not what happened. In 1860, there were 1652 births and by 1880, 1216. For the rest of the nineteenth century, there was never as much per capita procreation going on as there was in 1854 and 1855.
⁸
In mid-1850s Ballarat, there was not only a resources boom, but also a baby boom.