The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (28 page)

Because of the unprecedented economic opportunities available to women in the early gold rush, some found they could successfully leave abusive or otherwise damaging relationships. Eliza Perrin sailed to Victoria from Derbyshire in June 1853 with her daughter Fanny. Her husband John was already in the colony. The reunited family went to Ballarat. Before long, Eliza realised John was no more inclined towards gallant husbandhood than he had been in England. Her letters home are not explicit about the shame of domestic violence, but she alludes to it.
Alas the one I was tied to was far from being what he ought to have been
, she wrote to her cousin in 1859.

I will not say much in writing but as regards behaviour from him I have had about the worst. We might have been well to do if he had been like myself persevering but he carried on as he did at home with his drink and jealousy until at last I brought him before his betters and he was bound over to keep the peace for six months.
²⁹

After Eliza's day in court, John left to live with his brothers. Eliza had been keeping a
Refreshment House
, but John
drank and destroyed all that I had before he went away.
John paid no maintenance for their three children and Eliza heard he was
passing as a single young man
. In the meantime, Eliza rebuilt her business, saving money and eventually building a public house for £70 on the main Melbourne to Ballarat road. Through her good relationship with Ballarat's merchants, she was able to
buy any amount of goods…all in my own name. It was only with my own endeavours that I had kept the 3 children and myself
, wrote Eliza to her cousin.

He does not know that the house belongs to me or anything in it. The Divorce Act is not passed here yet or I would be rid of him altogether. I am determined he shall not live with me anymore. I only wish I had left him sooner and you had been out here. We should have had money in our pockets. I think of buying 2 or 3 acres of ground at the back [of the public house]…I am rearing poultry and fencing in a garden. I can hire a man for 15 shillings per week and find him meat that will pay me better than a miserable husband.

Eliza encouraged her cousin, who had a fatherless child, to come to Victoria.
But never let it be known but what your husband is dead
, Eliza advised. The women and their children could enjoy both the fruits of Eliza's hard-won independence and the frontier trend for identity fraud.

The early gold rush period represents a unique state of social fluidity, as hundreds of thousands of people effectively became hunter-gatherers, classic nomads following one rush after another. Whole communities could disappear literally overnight, on the back of a rumour that a glittering new lead had been unearthed in a distant gully. Like solipsistic gypsies, gold seekers carried their homes on their backs and told their own fortunes.

But in a place where housing was temporary, clothing was rudimentary and work was almost exclusively manual, what was to distinguish the civilised folk from the so-called savages? To confuse matters further, the Wathaurung were not merely spectators of the curious ways of these feverish strangers; they were speculators in their own right, accepting the risk of remaining on their traditional lands, not just in fulfilment of spiritual obligations, but in the hope of economic reward too. If you looked closely, you could see white men acting like wild beasts while black men lived on the profits of their labours.

Some observers noted the success of Indigenous people in selling cloaks and rugs, yet, almost without exception, commentators chose to focus on the gender relations they observed among Aboriginal tribes. Robert Caldwell is typical.
The natives
, he wrote in 1854,
are the most miserable beings…As among other savages, the women do all the work, while the men lie idle in the sun
. He called up every racially charged cliché in the book: uncivilised, naked, heathen. To Caldwell, talk of Aboriginal land rights, which he had evidently heard, was nothing more than
mawkish philosophy
. He believed
it was no more of an injustice to deprive the black man
of his land than that of a kangaroo or cockatoo
. The Aborigine did not possess it, because he did not cultivate it. And why did the Aboriginal man squander the opportunity to work the land? Because he was content to leave
the poor squaws labouring under heavy loads, while the men burden themselves with little or nothing
. Such an appalling lack of manliness was what set the Aborigines apart from the white diggers whose steadfast labour underpinned their virtue.

What was more, the blacks beat their women! J. J. Bond observed that when Aboriginal men were drunk at night, you could hear their
loud yabbering
and
the howling of the lubras
as their menfolk beat them. Thomas McCombie extended description to judgment.
The domestic relations of the aborigines are only suitable to a race at the very bottom of the scale of refinement
, he wrote. Evidence for the prosecution? They don't marry, their women are given away against their will by male relatives, who are
mean spirited enough to desire the wages of such prostitution,
then are beaten if they won't go quietly, even speared on the spot if
very obstinate
. The Aboriginal women, conceded McCombie, are
naturally well-behaved, but are treated with cruel neglect
, regarded by their menfolk as
mere domestic slaves to obtain provisions or to drudge for them.

The fact that so many white men on the goldfields were dependent on their wives or other women for financial support was a contradiction that, unsurprisingly, went unremarked.

If Aborigines were condemned for the shabby treatment of their women, the Chinese diggers were reviled for an even greater sin: they did not bring their women with them at all. The fraught relationship between Europeans and Chinese on the goldfields is a well-worked claim in Australian history. School children are typically taught about the Lambing Flat riots on the Burrangong goldfields in New South Wales in 1861. In this incident, long-held anti-Chinese animosity spilt over into a brutal massacre, with thousands of miners actively rallying against the Chinese diggers to drive them off the field and the police called in to quell the riot.

But the forces of the state were hardly impartial adjudicators. The state-sanctioned discrimination of taxing Chinese immigrants to disembark in Victoria (which began in 1855) gave the lie to the idea of a utopian brotherhood of man under the Southern Cross. Classically, the complaints made against the Chinese were that they muddied the water holes through their tendency to work over the tailings of European diggers, that they worked on the Sabbath, that they were thieves and gamblers, and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive down the value of labour. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was their dubious, and possibly devious, homogeneity.

This was the problem: the Chinese kept to themselves. Though they seemed harmless, they came to Victoria in great numbers—
thousands at a time
, wrote one commentator—and stuck together, walking in long files to the goldfields and then setting up separate camps. Here, they ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical hats instead of the ubiquitous cabbage hat, loose gowns that looked like women's attire and long pigtails that were similarly more suited to a schoolgirl than a working man. They practised their own medicine—acupuncture was readily available at the Chinese camps, and some Europeans availed themselves of its benefits—and they opened their own restaurants. They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their winnings home to family members in China, where their wives were looking after the old and the young in the community in line with Confucian tradition, rather than blowing it on a spree. All this marked the Chinese out as different and peculiar.

But who might be hurt by
John Chinaman
? European women. This is what Mrs W. May Howell was warned when she went to the diggings.
Oh the diggers would not annoy you
, she was told by a friend.
It's those brutes of Chinamen; but they'd better not begin to insult white women, or they'll find it rather dangerous
. Though Mrs Howell's friend admitted he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder at what a man wouldn't be capable of when he had none of his own kind of woman about. And what better way to assert one's own manliness than to threaten vengeance on any cur who dared touch his womenfolk?

Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the disparate suspicion of the Chinese diggers' masculine exclusivity. Police discovered a set of
foul and wicked prints
. The pictures, which were evidently of naked ladies (whether Chinese or European is not clear) and were said to bring
the blush of shame and indignation into the cheek
of respectable men, were being sold on the sly to Europeans. One writer, suspicious of Melburnians' tendency to lurch
from panic to panic
, wrote an article on ‘The Chinese Puzzle' in the
MELBOURNE MONTHLY MAGAZINE
. He was a lone voice in publicly defending the Chinese, pointing out their industry and energy, their impeccable credentials as citizens, their intelligence and cleanliness.
But ask a Britoner on the street what objection they have to the Celestials
, he wrote,
and they will answer: Morals, sir, morals. Pagans, you know Pagans. No Mrs Chisholm at the Chinese Ports…no wives for the Pagans, sir, Prints, sir, improper Prints.

Without women to keep them on the straight and narrow, no wonder they wanted to look at dirty pictures. Or so the scaremongering tactics went. The panic reached fever pitch in 1856 when a prosperous high-class English-born prostitute called Sophia Lewis was found murdered in her bed, her neck slashed from ear to ear. Sophia was known to entertain rich Chinese merchants in her Little Bourke Street brothel; she spoke Cantonese and decorated her parlour with oriental ornaments. Two Chinese men were tracked to the Bendigo diggings and eventually tried and hanged for her murder—although there were many who doubted the competence of the police investigation.
³⁰

As the writer of ‘The Chinese Puzzle' duly noted, the only argument against an otherwise
intelligent, educated and industrious people
was the absence of their wives. The rest was
blind prejudice
.
We are afraid of the Chinese, and we have not the moral courage to say so
, he wrote.
Meanwhile, Mrs Chisholm is requested to smuggle us a few China women, and, by all means, to let those she brings be young
. Failing that improbable event, the writer suggested another course of action. Miscegenation. Encouraging some of the pagans to
unite themselves to more durable British spinsters and attaching themselves to the soil of Victoria
was the crucial piece of the racial puzzle. The conundrum of division and prejudice would only be solved once the Chinese inter-married to
found a new family upon the face of the earth
.

The fate of the Chinese was sealed when the Gold Fields Commission, empowered to investigate the turbulence on the diggings in late 1854, handed down its final report in April 1855. It estimated that there were up to 3000 Chinese in Ballarat, 2000 in Bendigo, 1000 in Forest Creek and, most disturbingly, 1400 landed in Melbourne in the month of February 1855.
The question of the influx of such large numbers of a pagan and inferior race is
a very serious one
, judged the commission.
Even if the Chinese were considered desirable colonists, they are unaccompanied by their wives and families, under which circumstances no immigration can prove of real advantage to any society.
According to the commission's report, the Chinese immigrants'
low scale of domestic comfort
,
incurable habit of gaming and absurd superstition
were
vicious tendencies
that were
degrading
to the morale of a civilised white society. Victoria needed rational men, graced by a woman's touch, to restore its presently deranged society to an even keel.