We Are the Rebels (11 page)

THE SERVANT PROBLEM

For working-class women on the goldfields, being paid for domestic work without having
to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a revelation. It was
like going freelance. Many women found regular employment as tent keepers for single
men; some older women, often widows, set themselves up in business as boarding-house
keepers or licensed victuallers (running legitimate pubs).

As a result, women in droves left their positions as servants in towns and on stations
and headed to the diggings. (Eliza Darcy was one such woman. She ditched her job
with Mr Jeffreys and walked to Ballarat.) They may have wound up doing the same work—cooking,
childminding, wet-nursing—but they did it on their own terms, informally aligned
to a
team rather than bonded to a single master or mistress. The pay was good, too,
because demand for domestic services was so high.

It was all part of the servant problem—which was part of the startling new social
order in this startling new world.

THE MARRIAGE GAME

There was something similar going on in the marital stakes, where women also felt
a power that they had never experienced before.

Ellen Clacy arrived in Victoria with her brother in the winter of 1852 and departed
in April 1853 on the arm of a new husband. On her return to England, she wrote an
advice manual for women desiring to emigrate.
Do so by all means
, she counselled,
the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with
twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England.
The reason for
this unusual situation? According to Ellen, the imbalance of the sexes meant
we may
be pretty sure of having our own way.

Englishman Henry Catchpole, who arrived in Melbourne in February 1854, wrote home
to encourage his sisters to emigrate and get
a Golden Husband
.
Tell them that it
is a first rate opportunity for them
, wrote Henry. After six months in the colony,
he was still on message.
There are many young chaps looking out in Melbourne when
the ship comes in
, wrote Henry.

And a cartoon from London Punch called ‘Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off
to the Diggings', shows women thumbing their noses at offers from decent, upstanding
gentlemen and heading to the goldfields on their own.
A cottage! Fiddle de dee Sir!
exclaims one pretty lass.
Bother yer Hundred Pounds and House in the Public line
,
says an imperious woman with head held high. The women help each other to disembark
from the ship, to the consternation of the men who thought they could prance in as
shining knights and wander home with a full-time cook free of charge.

Catherine Chisholm, a 33-year-old single woman from rural Scotland, was constantly
chided by her family for not sending more news of her comings and goings in Victoria.
That included her marriage in 1857, four years after her arrival.
We are greatly
astonished at you for not mentioning anything concerning your husband,
scolded Catherine's
brother Colin.
Even what is his name, is he a native of the colony, or is he a native
of Britain and what is he at for his daily bread
.

For some gold-rush women, immigration was clearly a matter of what goes on camp,
stays on camp.

GIRLS ON THE GROG

Thousands of people from every corner of the globe, all living in tents, working
hard and playing hard, young and free. Early on, the government took one look at
the situation on the
goldfields and realised the only way to prevent complete carnage
was to regulate the sale of alcohol. Publicans' licences would be granted in the
townships surrounding the goldfields, close to the government camps, but no alcohol
was to be sold on the diggings.

So how did that work out?

Every storekeeper sold sly-grog
, Police Magistrate John D'Ewes wrote later. There
were also what Henry Mundy called
regular grog shanties
. These places had a large
square shutter hung on hinges at the top of one gable of the tent, facing the road.
Inside, a rough counter with big kegs of booze was retailed out at sixpence a mug.
Jugs could be filled up and taken home, to be shared among friends and family.

Mrs Massey called sly grog
this most hateful traffic
, but since she knew the sale
of alcohol was the most lucrative activity on the goldfields, she took its presence
for granted like everybody else. In fact, every traveller to or resident on the
diggings remarked on the presence of sly-grog sellers. Ellen Clacy had a theory:
that
the privacy and risk
created
an excitement which the diggers enjoy as much as
the spirit itself
.

There were an estimated 700 sly-grog outlets in Ballarat: approximately one venue
for every 30 adult residents. Contemporary illustrations and accounts show that most
of the ‘refreshment tents' on the diggings were run by women.

Not only were women selling the grog, they were drinking it too. Some women delighted
in having a whisky or a shandy gaff—pale ale mixed with ginger beer—telling
racy
jokes, which were none of the choicest as far as language was concerned
. This is
Henry Mundy's assessment of a Mrs Charlton, who saw no reason
to be squeamish. She
could see no harm in her talk nor cared if others did.

Charles Evans also noted that women tended to feel liberated from more polite behaviour
on the goldfields where drinking was concerned.
It is painful to contemplate the
horrible havoc which drunkenness makes on the diggings
, he wrote in his diary,
even
women feeling themselves relieved from the salutary checks which society in civilised
life lays on them fall into a view bad enough in men, but disgusting and repulsive
beyond expression in women.

Some women were dead-set alcoholics, of course—either before they arrived at the
diggings or in response to its harsh realities. But others were merely joining in
the carnival. Some may even have felt a drink at the end of the day was a just reward
for their hard work.

Certainly, women expected to be included in the humming social life of Ballarat.
Mrs Massey attended a ball on the diggings and described the scene in detail. The
venue was a large tent with smaller refreshment tents and ladies dressing-room tents
scattered around it. Gentlemen diggers and their wives, along with Camp officials
and their wives, attended the evening. The ‘ball-room' walls were covered with pink
and white calico, the pillars supporting the roof were adorned with garlands of
pink and white flowers. There were glowing Chinese lamps, carpets, divans and sofas.
The band was excellent and there was dancing until sunrise. The whole thing, thought
Mrs Massey, was
charming
.

She also commented on the childcare arrangements. Women were hired to care for the
babies, aged from newborn babies to toddlers. As Mrs Massey explained, the mothers
were
not able to leave them at home, and wishing to join in the evening's amusement
,
brought them along and put them to sleep on beds and sofas, popping in to visit between
dances.
During
the evening,
she said,
I saw several ladies walking about, in full
ball dress of course, nursing and hushing their dearly beloved infants
. Here was
another goldfields innovation: paid childcare at social functions, so the hard-working,
bread-winning mothers of Ballarat weren't left holding the baby.

THE CHINESE PUZZLE

Not all diggers were invited into the tent of goldfields sociability. The Wathaurung
were on the fringes but tolerated. The Chinese, on the other hand, were strategically
marginalised.

The fraught relationship between Europeans and Chinese on the goldfields is a well-worked
claim in Australian history.

Students 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 spilled
over into a brutal massacre. Thousands of miners actively rallied against the Chinese
diggers to drive them off the field, and the police were called in to put down the
riot.

In traditional accounts of the gold rush, the chief complaints made against the
Chinese were that they muddied the waterholes through their tendency to work over
the discarded tailings of European diggers; that they worked on Sundays, when all
the good Christians knocked off to go to church, that they were thieves and gamblers,
and that they accepted low wages and would therefore drive everybody else's wages
down too. But in 1854, the chief grievance against the Chinese was this: they didn't
bring their women with them. As one Royal Commission reported in April 1855,
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.

People didn't like the fact that 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 then setting up separate
camps. There were estimated to be 3000 Chinese in Ballarat alone by early 1855, among
a total of 5000 on the goldfields.

They ate their own strange food and dressed in their own strange costumes: high conical
hats instead of the usual digger's cabbage hat; loose gowns that looked like women's
attire and long pigtails—the kind of get-up thought to be 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 gave it a go. They opened their own restaurants.
They preferred opium to alcohol. And they diligently sent their earnings 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 actually
be hurt by
John Chinaman
? Why, 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
. Although Mrs Howell's friend admitted
he had never heard of it happening at any diggings, you had to wonder what might
a man be capable of, when he had none of his own kind of woman about?

Early in 1855, a scandal erupted in Melbourne that brought to a head all the suspicion
of the Chinese diggers and their womanless ways. 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 journalist 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.

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,
he wrote,
and we have not
the moral courage to say so
.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.

It was May 1854, and Ballarat was a raft of tents in a sea of cold mud. The summer
of 1853–4 had been dry, the wet season had arrived early and now the rain had come.
Mining had practically ceased. John Manning, the master at St Alipius Catholic School
on the Eureka lead (where Anastasia Hayes was now working as a teacher while Timothy
mined), complained that few of the 74 children on his roll were in attendance
owing
to the severity of the weather
. Abandoned mine shafts which the diggers had used
as latrines became putrid cesspools.

Sarah Skinner lay in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain howl as
she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. For Sarah, everything burned.
Near the end of labour, her brow ran with sweat and her tender, swollen skin stretched
like taut canvas around the baby's head. A final push and a tearing of flesh: she
screamed; the baby wailed. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as Sarah
gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy.