The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (5 page)

Indeed, gold rush immigrants like Dr Gillespie, who had arrived on the
Marco Polo
in the summer of 1853, would have expected nothing less.
A revolution commenced in Australia which has affected the whole civilised world
, he wrote in his role as editor of the ship's in-house journal, the
MARCO POLO CHRONICLE
.
⁴
What awaited the newcomer was no less than
a new chapter in the world's history
.

Ages of tyrannous bungling and bad legislation had brought the continent of Europe to the verge of a terrific outburst. Every thinking mind looked anxiously onward to the next throb of outraged humanity. The unsolved problem of human happiness or misery found kindred echoes in the hearts of all men…The Australian goldfields have postponed the day of reckoning…

It is a virgin country.

In August 1851 a blacksmith named Thomas Hiscock made a discovery in the rural backblocks of colonial Victoria that would change the lives of hundreds of thousands of the world's citizens, not least the hinterland's traditional owners, the Wathaurung people. Alert to the gold deposits recently unearthed in New South Wales, Hiscock went looking for payable gold in the hills of Buninyong, some 110 kilometres northwest of the port of Melbourne. And Eureka! There it was.
⁵
The alluvial leads were deep and seemingly endless, following the trails of ancient underground river systems—mute, furtive, auspicious. Victoria, only recently separated from its parent colony New South Wales, was suddenly the only place to be. Within days, news of the strike in the central highlands had spread to Melbourne and Geelong; within weeks, eager prospectors were making their way overland from all corners of Australia, from the garrison towns of Sydney and Hobart to the modest goldfields of New South Wales to the pastoral outstations of South Australia. Nobody wanted to miss the windfall; for Victorians and their neighbouring colonists, 1852 was the year when there was ‘nothing but gold'.

Henry Mundy watched the sudden exodus to the new goldfields with a mixture of incredulity and excitement.
News of
gold at Ballarat
, he later wrote in his reminiscences,
set the Geelong people and those of the surrounding district crazy.
Overnight, the workers of Australia had gone AWOL: farms, building sites, ships, police barracks, government offices, shearing sheds—all were deserted. Schools closed and postal services were disrupted as the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff.
The reports in the papers drove everyone mad
, explained Henry Mundy.
Every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz.
Journalist John Capper, embedded with the diggers, concurred that
society had become to a certain degree unhinged…the ordinary course of business deranged
.
⁶
Henry Mundy's own parents walked off their dairy and hiked to the diggings. It seemed a simple equation.
Who'll buy cows in these topsy-turvy times?
wondered Henry. Beef and mutton sold for nothing; digging equipment and transport cost a fortune.

The first on the ground were those closest to home. The township of Geelong became virtually divested of men overnight. Women banded together to draw water, chop wood, mind children and safeguard each other from the perceived dangers of being ‘without natural protectors'. The famous ‘grass widows' of the gold rush were left in the forsaken towns like the soapy ring around a bathtub. Sarah Watchwarn was one of a band of Melbourne mothers who
gathered at night in a central home, a faithful Collie dog being the only guard against blacks and outlaws
. Sarah had arrived with her husband Robert in 1849 and settled in the outlying seaside suburb of St Kilda. Sarah later recollected that on the news of gold, St Kilda found itself
devoid of menfolk
.
⁷

But not all men wanted to leave their wives behind, and not all women would consent to be left. Anne Duke's parents, James and Bridget Gaynor, had emigrated from Ireland to Australia in 1842, when Anne was four years old. The Gaynors moved from Melbourne, where they had witnessed the laying of the St Patrick's Cathedral foundation stone, to the mineral springs outstation of Mt Franklin, where they worked for the Aborigines Protection Society. They were well placed to be one of the first families to arrive on the goldfields. Anne was just sixteen years old when she married George Duke; the newlyweds went straight to Ballarat. So too did Jane Curnow when her life derailed. Cornish-born Jane immigrated to Adelaide with her husband William and their five children in 1848. Months after the Curnows' arrival, William died of sunstroke. In 1851, on news of the gold finds, fifty-two-year-old Jane trekked overland from Adelaide to Ballarat, where her oldest sons soon began providing handsomely for their widowed mother.

But the path to salvation in this
virgin country
was not as straightforward as it appeared. For one thing, the road was clearly signposted with the evidence of prior occupation. Every
kur
(tree),
yalluch
(river)
banyall
(valley),
woorabee
(fish) and
murrulbuk
(eagle)—every rock, plant and creature—was part of an integrated spiritual, political and economic system for the Wathaurung people, who had made the fertile hunting grounds of the Ballarat basin their ancestral home for tens of thousands of years. For them, the gold rush of the 1850s represented a second wave of dispossession; the first was the surge of pastoral expansion—often violent—into Victoria from the 1830s.

It is estimated that prior to European contact there were up to 3240 members of the twenty-five Wathaurung language groups. By 1861, 255 Aboriginal individuals remained in the Ballarat region. Among these survivors were ‘Caroline', ‘Queen Rose' and ‘Old Lady'. What these three Indigenous women thought of the molten flow of white ghosts daily disgorging into their lands is not recorded. By the time Old Lady was buried according to customary rites in Ballarat in 1860, and Caroline and Rose died at Coranderrk Mission in the 1870s, the Aboriginal history of central Victoria was already considered a queer relic of an inevitably bygone era.
⁸

Newcomers to the goldfields from 1851 often commented on the presence of Aboriginal family groups, their dwellings and activities. When eight-year-old Scottish lad William McLeish arrived at Ballarat in 1854 he was delighted to come upon some Aboriginal women hunting possums.
One was up a tree; another catching them as they dropped. She said something I did not understand
, William later wrote in his memoirs,
but gave me a kindly look that reassured me there was no danger. On looking up I saw another woman engaged in chopping a possum out of a branch.
⁹
Many gold seekers were less sanguine about the Aboriginal presence than young William. Samuel Heape dismissed the Wathaurung as
poor helpless things
, while John James Bond was disgusted to hear
the howling of the lubras as their affectionate husbands drag them by their hair, dance on them or knock them on the head with their tomahawks
.
¹⁰
Few settlers and sojourners were prepared to concede, as C. Rudston Read did in his published account of his sojourn on the goldfields in 1853,
that white man has stepped in and taken possession of his land, nolens volens
. Early visitor W. B. Griffith recorded a glossary of Wathaurung language. He transcribed the most common nouns: words for sun, moon, water, fire, no, yes, old man, young girl. And he collected a handful of verbs: to walk, to run, to come, to go away, to rest, to know. And
pilmillally
. To steal.

Settlers might have been loath to acknowledge the Wathaurung as property owners, but many were aware of the extensive quarrying, and subsequent commercial transactions, being carried out by Victorian Aboriginal people prior to and after British colonisation. Gold was among the minerals extracted by Aboriginal people, as Captain Cadell, explorer of the Murray River, noted when in 1857 he registered a claim for the reward offered by the South Australian Government to discover a goldfield in that colony (in part to lure back its prodigal population). Cadell made his claim
conjointly with a black woman, or lubra, known as Betsy, who has resided at Cape Willoughby…for 30 years.

It appears that the latter recently informed the captain on being shown some nuggets from Ballarat, that she had seen plenty of ‘dat yellow fellow tone'; and that when her son was a ‘piccaninny' she, in company with another lubra, had beat out these stones, in her own words ‘made 'em long'.
¹¹

Aboriginal people's superior knowledge of gold deposits, like their prior ownership of the land, was no secret.

Wathaurung people were initially bemused that white people would go to such frenzied lengths to take so much of the
yellow fellow tone
or
medicine earth
from the ground. After all, you couldn't eat it, cut with it or use it to hunt. But they were also wise to the opportunities for their own commercial and social advantage presented by the European lust for gold. To the Indigenous locals, gold only became a ‘precious metal' when it was clear that the newcomers were so desperate to find it. Object exchange formed the basis of kinship relations, which were the backbone of Indigenous social, political and economic organisation. Wathaurung brought the white newcomers into their circle of influence, a fact demonstrated in the following exchange between two women whose paths had suddenly collided:

My mother and wife and small boy that come out from England with us was standing at the tent one day all alone, no other tents near when they saw a mob of native Blacks and Lubrias [lubras] and a mob of dogs with them come across the gully so my wife said to Mother what ever will we do now so Mother said we must stand our ground and face them for there is no get away So up they come yabbering good day Missie. You my countary [country] woman now…the Blacks said You gotum needle missie you gotum thread you Gotum tea you Gotum sugar you Gotum Bacca [tobacco]. So Mother had to say yes to get rid of them and had to give them all they asked for to get rid of them. That was what was called the Bunyong [Buninyong] tribe and when they left they gave their usual salute. Goodbye missie and thankfull enough they was to see them disappear off into the bush.
¹²

The white woman may have considered this would be the end of the affair, but to the Buninyong woman, initiating a new ‘country woman' joined their families in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual obligation.

During the period of pastoral expansion, many
ngurungaeta
(elders) formed kinship alliances with squatters in order to gain permanent access to their ancient ceremonial and hunting grounds. With the sudden surge in population into their territory, Wathaurung quickly translated the principal of bilateral transactions from complex socio-political associations to a more purely economic function. One way to do this was for local Indigenous guides to point diggers in the direction of a new ‘discovery' in exchange for money or goods.
¹³
Another was to supply the rapidly growing demand for
dallong
, heavy thick rugs or cloaks, made from
wollert
(possum),
goin
(kangaroo) or
tooan
(flying foxes).
Dallong
were prized by white fortune-seekers not only for warmth on frosty nights in a flimsy tent but also as a sartorial status symbol, due to the
majestic appearance
afforded to the wearer. A
dallong
could fetch as much as £5, and some indigenous makers sold enough to buy horses, as well as rice, sugar, bread, tobacco and alcohol. Other objects and consumables useful to the digging life, such as
biniae
(baskets) and
karrup
(spears) were also traded or sold. As historian Fred Cahir argues, Wathaurung were ‘not outside the landscape in the development of modern economic institutions'; rather they successfully adapted to and exploited the commercial opportunities presented by the open, unregulated market of the early gold rush.
¹⁴
Ballarat's early residents soon came to rely on Indigenous knowledge and craftsmanship.

By Christmas 1852, a year after Thomas Hiscock's ‘discovery', the luxuriant lands of the Wathaurung had been stripped of vegetation to become ravaged earth, honeycombed by holes and studded with calico tents. As Henry Mundy noted, the gullies were so crowded with people laying their small claims to river frontage that
there was not a shadow of a chance to edge in
.

But this was nothing compared to the avalanche of human endeavour that was about to descend.