We Are the Rebels (4 page)

That's from Murray's Guide to the Gold Diggings, the Lonely Planet of the day, published
in London in 1852: gold digging was simply child's play.

Murray's Guide particularly encouraged
fathers of large families
to come, sowing
the seed of aspiration in those men who might have failed to bring home quite enough
bacon in Manchester, Edinburgh or
Cardiff. Samuel Mossman used the image of a poor
British labourer huddled with his family around the
embers of a miserable fire
,
surviving a northern winter, unable to improve his living conditions. Whereas in
Australia, said Mossman, there was
no snow and fuel was cheap and abundant. It's
the poor man's country
…
want and penury is unknown, daylight and darkness, heat and
cold, are more equally distributed throughout the seasons.

All you needed was a readiness to work:
For all willing hands there is labour, and
for all labour there is liberal reward.
And the bright southern sun, Mossman promised,
would make a weak man strong:
like a young Hercules.

Becoming a young Hercules might not have appealed so strongly to most women, but
for them there were other opportunities for transformation. In an era before passports
and credit cards—before ID checks of any kind, really—the gold rush offered the chance
to move back the hands of time. Single mother Clara Duval arrived in Victoria on
the
Marco Polo
in May 1853 with two children. She gave her age as 20. Clara was,
in fact, 34.

THE LONG GOODBYE

Standing on the docks at Liverpool in May 1854, 21-year-old Maggie Brown Howden was
thinking of one thing only: her fiancé,
dear Jamie
. James Johnston, Ballarat's assistant
commissioner. Her farewells from her native Scotland were
behind her. The last calls,
the settling of accounts, the shopping and packing and being driven to the station
by tearful relations. Maggie was sad, but stoic:
we cannot know what changes may
take place
, she wrote in her diary, [but]
never shall I forget my dear home.

Despite the fact that hundreds of ships were setting sail for Victoria, departures
for the three-month ship journey were cause for intense emotion and grand ceremony.
The decision to emigrate to the other side of the world was never taken lightly,
for it was often the last time that loved ones would ever see each other.

The departing McLeish family was
surrounded by weeping friends who all believed they
were bidding us a final good-bye, which indeed they were
. Anxious relatives would
hear no news of their kin for at least six months; that is how long a return letter
would take to arrive.

Thomas and Frances Pierson left Staten Island, New York,
to shouts of hurahs, cheers,
waveing handkerchiefs, hats tc tc fireing of pistols and farewell music
. Frances
took her photographic equipment aboard; Thomas took his characteristic bad mood.
There had been little else but news of Australia in the American papers for months,
and Frances and Thomas were lucky to get a berth.
Nearly every nation of the world
is represented on our ship
, wrote Thomas.

Merchant Robert Caldwell described the cosmopolitan flood of immigrants onto Victoria's
shores:

The swart Briton walks shoulder to shoulder with the flat-faced Chinaman, the tall
and stately Armenian, the lithe New Zealander or South Sea Islander, the merry African
from the United States, the grave Spaniard, the yellow-haired German, the tall, sharp
visaged Yankee, and the lively Frenchman. Every state in the world has its representatives…

The passengers came in every hue and occupied every station in life. From the poor
farm girl, her passage paid by the government, to large families with money and discontented spirits. As their ships finally pulled away from sobbing relatives and fading band
music, they set their sights on one thing:
a far off land of Promise, where they
may find wealth, social distinction and domestic happiness.

Well, that was the plan anyway.

THE WILD WORLD OF WATER

These days it's hard to believe that a journey could completely transform you. Today
we can cross the globe so fast we might never even speak to the strangers in the
seats around us. Unless disaster strikes, the voyage itself leaves us unchanged.

But by the time the gold-rush immigrants reached Ballarat, they'd already endured
a colossal, epic journey. And it was an experience many of them found life-altering.
A new era
, as one shipboard journal proclaimed grandly.
Men, women and children who
had hitherto hugged the land now committed their destinies to the wild world of water.

But first they had to get over their seasickness—which was, like war and childbirth,
a truly democratising experience. Few first-timers escaped it, and even old hands
felt the effects as the land disappeared astern and the body lost its bearings. With
nothing fixed to focus on, the balance between eye and ear was disturbed. The ship
would pitch and rock and yaw, and even when that ceased there was still a constant
nauseating motion in the head.

It helped to keep busy and concentrate on mechanical tasks, as Louisa Timewell discovered.
Although the ship swayed like a hammock in the breeze, she and the other women still
needed to go about their daily business. They held their babies on one hip while
washing out clothes, trying to keep the basin steady.
It's very laughable to see
them pitching about so
, wrote Louisa
.
Fortunately for her, babies are strict taskmasters.
I got on deck all day with the children
, Louisa wrote,
and the time passed off very
pleasantly
.

Céleste de Chabrillan was the wife of the new French Consul to Melbourne. She described
a less pleasant scene on the
Croesus
as it headed for the open sea in 1854.

It jolted and tossed about on the waves so much that passengers and objects all
came tumbling down on top of each other…The famous line ‘
hare you sichowek
' (are
you seasick?) went from one passenger to the next, some escaping to their cabins,
others leaning over the side. The only reply one hears is moaning, groaning and retching.

Céleste herself felt the initial effects of this
horrible sickness
, but she refused
to yield to its power:
I am fighting against it.
She stayed on deck—alone—while her
husband Lionel remained in their cabin for three days with his head between two pillows.
I was distressed to see him suffer so
, she lamented. But the headstrong Céleste,
a former dancer and courtesan, declined to stay by his side in their dark, cramped
cabin:
I prefer to face the enemy and I go back up on deck
.

Brave-faced Fanny Davis was mortified to find that defiance alone was not enough.
It was a great mistake me being ill
, she wrote,
as I did not mean to be
. It offended
her dignity that crewmen needed to come down with mops and buckets to clean out her
cabin.

Agnes Paterson was, by her own admission,
reduced to a most
pitiful condition
and
Charlotte Spence
was a pitiable mess
, refusing all nourishment for days. On the
Lady Flora
, the ship carrying the actor Sarah Hanmer and her daughter Julia to their
new home, the doctor prescribed wine and porter for the invalids. Another passenger,
John James Bond, thought that might explain why
some of the ladies are again disposed
to faint
.