We Are the Rebels (15 page)

When Sir Charles announced that he and his wife would leave the comfort of their
Toorak mansion to visit the goldfields, the news was taken as a sure sign that restitution
was imminent.
Ellen Young wrote another poem, the first of her offerings to be published
in the Ballarat Times, and included Lady Hotham in her salutation.

And let his fair, accomplish'd, gentle bride,

Her equal due—share in his fame, world-wide.

On 10 December 1853, aged 36 and fifteen years a widow, Jane married Sir Charles
Hotham, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria just four days earlier.
She knew what she was signing up for. Lady Hotham's new life would take her far away
from Somerset garden parties and court appearances routinely noted in The Times.
And by all accounts, she was more suited to the times and the task ahead than her
stiff-upper-lip new husband.

Of the two Hothams, it was Jane who proved more adaptable to the colonial circumstances.
Journalists noted that she was gracious, open, and perpetually cheerful. She appeared
to greet every new situation with wide-eyed enthusiasm. She threw dinner parties
every week, and invited
all the best people in the colony
, as William Kelly described
the squattocracy, but also those who, before striking gold,
never trod on a carpeted
floor.

Lady Hotham's
affability
was often contrasted to the
unbending
nature of her husband.

She also took to the streets. Before leaving for a tour of the diggings, Sir Charles
and Lady Hotham attended a tradesman's ball at the Criterion Hotel. There, noted
Kelly, they met an
assemblage of hard-brushed, shiny-haired operatives, publicans,
corporations and small shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, girthed in silk
or satin, and moist with mock eau-de-cologne
. It was a tough crowd: common, aspirational,
newly rich, starstruck.

Lady Hotham, with the
consummate tact of her sex
, merrily drank a low-rent brandy
cocktail at the urging of one of the guests. Her husband bristled at the vulgarity
of it all.

On the goldfields, Lady Hotham performed an equivalent act of slumming it. In Ballarat,
she went without Sir Charles to Black Hill to view the mining operations there, and
made a distinct impression.

It was indeed a grand and gratifying sight
, wrote the Diggers Advocate,
to see her
Ladyship shaking hands and exchanging civilities with the clay-besmeared but generous-hearted
diggers…scattering to the winds the almost blinding cloud of aristocratic prejudice
.

One miner was delighted to observe her ladyship
breaking and examining bits of clay
in her white, delicate little hand and talking and smiling to the people about her
all the while…her shoes and stockings all over mud, she doesn't care a straw—she
is joyous, and evidently happy.

But Lady Hotham was not merely content to get down and dirty for the fun of it. When
the people threw up a hearty three cheers for Hotham and his lady, she turned around
to face the crowd,
her eyes beaming with delight and face suffused with gladness.
She smiled, not with the cold dignity of a high born dame but with holiday glee.
She said plainly,
‘Well, I declare, these
diggers are, after all, fine hearty fellows;
I'll speak to Charles to be kind to the poor fellows, when we get back to town again'.
Lady Hotham's words and deeds seemed to warrant the conviction, held by Ellen Young,
that the Hothams would make the necessary changes to blow the faltering ship of
Victoria out of its doldrums.

Indeed, more people shared Ellen Young's confidence than George Francis Train's doubts.
Shopkeepers thought their trade would increase. Landowners thought the value of their
property would rise. Diggers thought their licence fees would be reduced and their
grievances sympathetically heard. So they thought.

PUT AWAY

In one of Hotham's
frank, liberal speeches
, he encouraged the people to contact him
directly should they wish to discuss a problem.
Whenever a suggestion can be made
or a hint given
, he said magnanimously,
let the author come to me, and he will always
find me ready to attend to his wants. At all events he will find in me a friend who
is willing to give a patient and attentive hearing.

Be careful what you wish for.

These days, we sign mass petitions on the Internet or at stalls outside shopping
centres with no real belief that we will have a demonstrable effect. It is a gesture,
a way of registering support for a cause, rather than a conscious act of
participatory
democracy. But in the nineteenth century petitions were a direct link between people
and their leaders; a ‘petitioner' was, in some real sense, the same as a ‘citizen'.
Petitioning was also a way of rallying support for local issues that gave people
a sense of belonging to a community.

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, women were big petitioners. They might act
as organisers for mass petitions in their neighbourhoods (although these petitions
were usually signed only by men). In the 1840s the London Times sneered at such women
as
petticoat politicians
. There are also several famous petitions signed by thousands
of women, campaigning against perceived social evils such as alcohol. Some historians
believe that women's petitioning efforts in Britain played an important part in Parliament's
decision to end slavery.

It should come as no surprise, then, to find women involved in petitioning activity
on the goldfields. Petitions about the licence fee in both Bendigo and Ballarat contain
at least a few women's names. In fact, with their husbands down a shaft, diggers'
wives probably did much of the footwork to collect the signatures.

But goldfields women found other ways of making their presence felt at the governor's
residence. Their individual petitions are peppered through the dusty piles of inward
correspondence to the Colonial Office, tied with ragged string, now kept at the
Public Record Office of Victoria. In these archives we find women who were otherwise
voiceless and undistinguished sending out distress signals that can still be heard
today.

Mary Sullivan of Bendigo was without her husband: he had been sentenced to five years'
hard labour for
stealing in a tent £5
. She begged for remittance of the sentence,
as she
and her eighteen-month-old child were
entirely without the means of living
in an honest manner
. In one of a series of petitions between May 1853 and January
1855, Mary hinted at what might become of her:
I am Young and in a Town abounding
in Vice, already I have been insulted
. She was finally turned down and advised to
try again in October 1855. She did not submit this final petition, which suggests
a poor outcome for her efforts to remain respectable.

Ann Middleton of Buninyong petitioned the Governor on behalf of her husband Charles,
a butcher, who had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to five years'
hard labour on the roads. Please, begged Ann,
restore him to his distressed and
unhappy wife and by doing so enable him to provide the necessities of his now distressed
family
. Some 40 signatures were attached to the petition.

Hotham scrawled his reply on the bottom corner of the petition.
Cannot interfere
with the course of the law
.

There are multiple petitions written by women—or, if a woman could not write, by
a literate friend—seeking to commute their husbands' jail sentences or have them
freed from lunatic asylums. Mrs Grant collected 117 signatures in her petition to
remit the jail sentence of her husband, James Grant, who was nicked for
shewing another
person's licence
. She was
in abject poverty and not able to procure the means of
livelihood
, she wrote.
Your Petitioner has also other children who are looking to
her for the means of subsistence and what will become of herself and them during
her husband's imprisonment Petitioner knoweth not.

These heartfelt pleas fell on deaf ears, terminating with Governor Hotham's standard
and abrupt response.

Cannot entertain. Not granted. Put away.

He tossed formal petitions bearing hundreds of signatures
in the same bin as the
many barely decipherable notes, which he marked
begging letters
, received from impoverished
widows or frantic wives seeking work for their unemployed husbands.

With their pleas to the Governor falling on deaf ears, people formed a new strategy.
Lady Hotham began receiving begging letters too. Mrs O'Neill, supporting herself
and her three children by
needle work and selling mostly everything I had
, requested
assistance in finding a position for her two boys.
Hoping your Ladyship will not
think me too impolite
, she wrote,
perhaps you would have the goodness to speak to
Sir Charles Hotham.

Twenty-three-year-old Esther McKenzie petitioned Lady Hotham the same week. Owing
to her husband being
indisposed
and her sixteen-month-old baby
dangerously ill by
Dentition
[teething]
and Colonial Fever and is not expected to live
, she was
very
distressed
and
without the necessities of life
. Esther was
fully convinced of your
Ladyship's kindness to the distressed
, and wrote that
she is filled with hopes…in
bestowing her a trifle to purchase some bread for her disabled family
.

Lady Hotham was not without pity. She instructed her clerk to acknowledge receipt
of Esther's petition, and ask her to
forward testimonials from respectable persons
who are acquainted with you
. But there is no further notation on the file. We can
assume it too was
put away
.

A SHAMEFUL SPECTACLE

And what did the men think of women's petitioning efforts? Did they put their wives
up to it, thinking that women's appeals would melt the icy hearts in the government?

It seems not. The women's letters were neither a ruse nor a joint strategy. They
were a source of shame for the men.

The Geelong Advertiser reported on the humiliation of imprisoned diggers, knowing
their wives were wheedling for their release. Being punished for your poverty with
a jail term for being unlicensed was one thing. But, the paper's editorial argued,
what was worse than the injustice was the indignity when
the spectacle is presented
to us of a wife taking round, for signature, a petition for the release of her husband
from jail, by reason of his poverty and ill health.

A spectacle. A debacle. A disgrace.

This wasn't mob violence. There were no barricades, no stone-throwing or burning
of effigies. But the message was the same. By constitutional means, these humble
petitioners contributed to the growing murmur of restlessness towards Hotham and
his refusal to listen to the people's grievances. Unlike his predecessor La Trobe,
he openly promised to give a
patient and attentive hearing
to the hungry, homeless
people. Instead, the men and women of Ballarat found their life-or-death pleas hastily
put away
.

Women's letters and petitions thus served two significant purposes: they highlighted
the powerlessness of their menfolk and underscored the heartless intransigence of
the new governor. And that put both of them under intense pressure.

A LICENCE TO SWILL

By that cold and cranky winter of 1854, it was clear that the licensing laws would
have to change. Police magistrates such as John D'Ewes were begging the government
to review its policies. Lawful access to liquor was a major source of grievance
for a very thirsty population with a strong independent streak.

The diggings were awash with sly grog, and the police were drunk on their power—either
to overlook infringements (for a price) or shut down an operation with brutal force.
Shanty keepers, often widows, who were too poor to pay bribes were still useful to
the police as scapegoats.
They paid the penalty of the pretended vigilance of the
police
, observed Henry Mundy. The sly-grog seller would be bailed up by a commissioner
and six troopers, who would proceed
to set fire to the frail tenement over the owner's
head and burn it to the ground and everything combustible in it
in a big show of
fake law enforcement.