The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (8 page)

Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold fields
? asked Mrs Massey,
and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised places
. The Sabbath: a day of rest, a cessation of industry, a time to reflect on the spiritual and indulge the domestic. Maybe von Guérard had a Sunday in mind when he immortalised the calm and stillness of a Ballarat summer.

Von Guérard's painting is accurate in at least one respect. Rising out of the ground like a flare was a remarkable circular tent, unlike any other structure on the diggings. This was Jones' Circus.
²⁷
If weary travellers had left loved ones, crossed stormy seas and walked miles along a crooked road, surely here, finally, they would see the elephant. The Circus was both truth and metaphor. A fair dinkum illusion. For a shilling, you could be serenaded by a band of blackface minstrels, smudging their lily-white English skin with burnt cork. You could meet Signora Zephyrina, a Hobart girl, daughter of a housekeeper, who chose
the free and easy vagabonding life [of] bohemia
. (She borrowed her exotic name from a character out of a Madame de Staël novel.) You could see waxworks, wild beast shows, marionettes and dancing boys. You could watch a lion be tamed. You could ask Archie the Clown what it was like to be in Ballarat in the summer of 1853. He'd tell you it was a blast.

The tents, theatres, bowling alleys, dancing saloons and hotels, all filled with a noisy, rough, restless crowd, feverish with the excitement of the great battle with the earth for her treasures, and the feeling that something was going to happen. There was a general presentiment of impending danger. It was, to use a hackneyed simile, as if we were sleeping over a volcano that we knew must, sooner or later, burst forth.
²⁸

In Ballarat, it was all
spangles and sawdust
, old circus terms for good business and bad. On any given day, life could go either way.

TWO

DELIVERANCE

It had not been a good year for
the Nolan family of Monivea County, Galway. In 1846, the odds were stacked against carpenter Patrick Nolan and his wife, Margaret, a devout breeder of a dozen steel-eyed babes. First an old woman warned them the Nolan farm was built on a fairy path, then the cow died; by August, five-year-old James had suffered the same cruel fate. But still the pins kept falling. By 1849 eldest son Martin had taken the Queen's shilling and although the British army kept him in hot meals, he couldn't stomach his own rising gall. Martin soon deserted and fled back to the family farm, then gave himself up, fearing the repercussions if he were found. He was sent to India as penance.

These were the hungry years, the years of the Great Famine, and the Nolan family seemed as vulnerable to affliction as the mealy potatoes rotting in the ground. By 1851, nineteen-year-old Michael was on the run from the law for a different reason: he had refused to pay the family's English landlord his crushing rent on the farm. In a frank discussion, the landlord's agent had wound up with the prongs of Michael's pitchfork lodged in his backside. Aided and abetted by twenty-year-old sister Bridget, eldest of the remaining Nolan clan, Michael weighed up his chances with the courts and took to the road.

That's how, on 26 January 1852, Bridget and Michael Nolan found themselves standing on the docks at Birkenhead, about to board a ship bound for Geelong. On board the
Mangerton
, they met twenty-two-year-old Thomas Hynes, a farmer from County Clare, and thirty-year-old Patrick Gittins, a blacksmith and pike maker in his native Kilkenny. Less than two years later—on a honeycombed patch of dirt so remote it now seemed mythic—Bridget, Thomas and Patrick would forge a bond in blood.
¹

To comprehend what happened in Ballarat in the explosive year of 1854, we must first understand the tumult going on across the seas in the decade before that. It wasn't simply greed or poverty that pulled so many people away from the centres of their known universe—whether Pennsylvania or Paris, Limerick or London—and thrust them into uncharted waters. There were many reasons to join the exodus to the New El Dorado, as Victoria soon became known.

The 1840s had been a decade of extreme economic, political and social turmoil in Europe. In Ireland from 1845 to 1852 over a million people died in
an Gorta Mór
(the Great Hunger). At least another million refugees fled, sparking an unprecedented mass migration to the New World. The famine had wreaked most of its havoc on Ireland, but the potato blight that triggered the catastrophe also caused crop devastation throughout Europe. A subsistence crisis drove peasants and the urban working poor to join the rising tide of middle-class political reform across Britain and Europe.

Campaigns for a variety of political reform measures culminated in 1848, which has been called the Year of Revolution or the Springtime of the Peoples. Motivated by ‘a chronic state of dissatisfaction', as British historian Jonathan Sperber has termed it, popular mass uprisings swept through France, Germany, Britain and Russia, ousting monarchs and fracturing the customary accord between church and state. In Paris, the overthrow of Louis-Philippe ushered in the Second Republic. In Munich, revolutionary uprising culminated in the storming of the Zeughaus in March 1849, forcing the abdication of Ludwig I. Chartism, an English mass movement for social and political reform that demanded a widening of the franchise to include working people, saw thousands take to the streets. In July 1848, just five months after Louis-Philippe had been removed from the French throne, the British Government so feared a popular uprising from Chartist demonstrators—six million of whom had recently signed a petition—that Queen Victoria was evacuated to the Isle of Wight.

The extent of the crisis was summed up by an editorial in the London
TIMES
on 23 October 1851:
England is threatened by two revolutions, the one political, the other social. The socialist, the extreme radical, are your true political bloomers.
Just two months after gold was found beneath the pastoral runs of central Victoria, the British press was talking up the prospect of mass civic upheaval. But despite the widespread nature of radical discontent, the victories of 1848 were mostly short lived; the forces of conservatism successfully restored the political status quo.

Yet the
TIMES
editor was expressing another topical anxiety in his carefully chosen bloomer metaphor. 1848 was also the year that a group of middle-class women, headed by an indefatigable mother of six named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in Seneca Falls, New York to address the problem of women's social and political oppression. Together these ‘doctors' wives'—many of whom had cut their political teeth in the abolitionist movement, fighting to end slavery—penned the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, based on the American Declaration of Independence.

First and foremost, the document claimed the right of women to have a say in determining the laws that governed them. The women's suffrage movement was born. (Early Chartists in England also endorsed equal voting rights for men and women in their push for universal electoral representation. By the late 1840s, however, leaders had lowered the bar in favour of the more politically expedient goal of manhood suffrage.
²
)

At the same time, women's rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic began a campaign of dress reform, advocating that political freedom should be expressed by emancipation from the sartorial constraints of corsets and crinolines, fashion items that not only distorted women's bodies but also ruined their health. A Seneca Falls woman devised a new ‘rational dress' outfit, comprising a long tunic worn over billowing pants that were gathered at the ankle. The outfit became known as the Bloomer costume, after editor Amelia Bloomer, who publicised the costume in her magazine,
THE LILY
. Bloomers became an international smash, with women's rights advocates parading the costume in lecture tours across American and England. One such activist was English-born, French-educated, independently minded Caroline Dexter. Dexter became known as London's ‘apostle of Bloomerism' when she began lecturing to packed audiences in 1851.

Just at the moment the
TIMES
editor summed up the dual crisis facing England, news of the riches at Ballarat began to trickle into the press. In the eyes of many, Victoria would provide a place of social and political renewal where the stains of old-world enmity could be washed away. In 1852 Caroline Dexter's idealist husband, William, left for the goldfields and two years later, Caroline too migrated permanently to Victoria.

For reform activists like the Dexters, Victoria was a political tabula rasa on which they might inscribe fresh ideas for the future, free from institutional and ideological impediments to progress.
³
For renegades like Bridget and Michael Nolan, here now was the chance for a clean start, free from economic hardship and ethnic prejudice. By the time newspapers in London and New York began carrying daily reports of the material riches to be found in Victoria, a restless generation of young men and women was united by one great notion: liberty.

In London, the headquarters of radical activism was Clerkenwell. It was at St James Church in Clerkenwell, hotbed of Chartist unrest, that a Hampshire poet named Ellen Warboy chose to marry her beloved, Frederick Young, a chemist from Shoreditch, in 1837. In the same church, Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer in 1844, their marriage witnessed by Sarah's four-year-old daughter, Julia. These urban professionals and artists—with the exception of Henry, parted from the newly respectable Mrs Sarah Hanmer—would be in Ballarat by the beginning of 1854. A politically minded young Cornish man named Stephen Cuming and his wife, Jane, would join the caravan of progressive nonconformists. On 1 July 1848, the Cumings had christened their first daughter Martineau, after the liberal poet, writer and women's rights campaigner, Harriet Martineau. All of these women—Ellen Young, Sarah Hanmer and Jane Cuming—would play a vital role in the political future of their adopted homeland.

It was not only the English middle class who were dissatisfied with their lot. Anastasia Hayes (née Butler), who travelled to Victoria on the same ship as Charles Evans, was a devout Catholic from Kilkenny who, despite being educated and capable of holding her own against institutional oppression, was tired of treading water. At the age of thirty-four, she and her husband Timothy—a Wexford-born engineer and oil merchant who had been prominent in the Young Ireland movement—bundled up their five children and left for Victoria. The Irish dissidents had already fled their homeland as early as 1847; two of their children were baptised in Staffordshire, England. From her position of maternal and cultural authority within the Catholic community in Ballarat, Anastasia would become critical to the events at Ballarat.

Catherine Sherwin was another Irish lass on the move, but her momentum drew on a different sense of exclusion. Catherine was born in 1831 in County Sligo, Ireland. Sligo is famed for its mountainous Atlantic coastline, its favourite son W.B. Yeats and its massive rates of emigration; almost half of the County's population sailed from its renowned port between 1850 and the end of the nineteenth century. The Sherwin family was among the one per cent of Sligo's Protestant population. Literate and ambitious, Catherine would soon discover that, as the prosperous Mrs Catherine Bentley, it was not so easy to leave her deeply ingrained outlier status behind.

English teacher and historian James Bonwick, who arrived in Australia in 1841, recognised that the disaffected and dispossessed of Europe would not readily check their grievances at the door:

Amongst the immigrants who were day after day pouring in from every quarter, there was no doubt many a chartist, many a democrat, escaped from the thralldom of aristocratic England, many a refugee and exile from the continent of Europe, who came in search not only of gold but of a refuge from the soul-and-body-grinding despotism of Europe.

The revolutions ripping at the fabric of Europe were not seamlessly elided in Victoria; rather, the ideas, aspirations and language of the old world seeped into the porous new cultural and political landscape. Seen from this angle, the Victorian gold rush doesn't represent a new dawn in Australia's young history so much as the long dusk of Europe's age of revolutions. Travelling south, the gold rush immigrants were sailing neither into nor away from the sunset. It would be their fate to be forever caught between old world antagonisms and new world expectations.