We Are the Rebels (7 page)

Thomas, like so many others, felt royally ripped off.

LAW AND ORDER

Mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous
diseases and absent husbands. It sounds like the wild west, or at least Hollywood's
version of it. But there is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but
loyal satellite of the British Empire: it was firmly based on British institutions.

By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within 30 years,
it would become an international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike
Dodge City or Deadwood, one expected to be governed by the high standards of British
justice. As the Marco Polo Chronicle reassured its readers,
the Genuine Spirit of
British Generosity, Nobility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city.
They
would not need to fend for themselves: the mother country had their back.

But British respectability would certainly be tested. Camping life, like ship life,
created a community of intimate strangers. Tent living let in more than dust—it could
bring unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. As William Kelly said,
if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be
startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress.

Boundaries were uncertain, like the flicker of candlelight. One female sojourner
wrote that Australian conventions were
quite an elastic, compressible thing, and
give to the touch.
William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch
a fellow off-guard.
Ambition
, he observed, writing about the gold-rush population,
may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by
conventional barriers
. It was
a ‘downside up community'. And that made everyone anxious—particularly the authorities.

Well, perhaps not everyone.

George Francis Train's wife, Willie Davis Train, wrote to her father:
The extraordinary
change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year
,
can scarcely be
credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution
. For
Willie, the rush of change was like medicine, easing her grief at losing her only
child just weeks before leaving America.
As I advance in years and experience
, she
wrote to her brother on the same day,
I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution
that at times I marvel at my own thoughts
. An inner riot: a ‘wonderful revolution'
of spirit and circumstance.

But Willie was one of the lucky ones. The majority of newcomers, even other ladies
of breeding and education, encountered an avalanche of adversity. It could be a struggle
just to keep a toehold.

For every miner or merchant in the money, there was another down on his luck. And
that very often meant a starving wife and children or a shelved fiancée or fretful
mother at home, waiting for news of a distant son's good fortune.

Janet Kincaid was one of the wives left behind—in Glasgow, with six children and
a steady output of unanswered letters. By the time she at last got her husband's
latest address, she was heartily fed up.

You left to better your family, you don't need to write that any more, we have had
enough of that talk. You had better do something for
them
. You left the ship to better
your
self
and to get your
money
to your
self
. You never earned much for your family,
far less for your
Wife
, you sent five Pounds, two years and a half ago. You mention
in a letter to me that you made more money at the digging than ever you made at
home. You might have sent us the half of what you made. You are a hard hearted
Father
when you could sit down and eat up your
children's
meat your
self
. I was a poor unfortunate
Wretch
, little did I think when I was young what I had to come
through
with your
conduck
. We might have been the
happiest couple
in Greenock, you got a good
wife
and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante
do well at home is not to be trusted
Abroad
…poor Duncan [child number 5] does not
know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for
eating
… find a
proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your
deserted
Wife
Janet Kincaid.

British subjects had expectations of how they should be treated: with fairness and
dignity.

Similarly, it seems, some women believed in their own form of marital justice. Husbands
who breached such standards of civility could expect their comeuppance.

ALL THE SINGLE LADIES

Deserted wives might have had it tough, but single women could do remarkably well
for themselves in their new homeland. In fact, some fared better on arrival in Victoria
than their male counterparts.

Australia had always had a problem with gender imbalance—the legacy of starting out
as a penal colony—and the gold rush only made it worse. The British government was
eager to address the disproportion of the sexes by paying the travel expenses of
young unmarried women.

This ‘assisted passage' scheme was massively successful. In 1853, almost 10,000 single
women arrived in Victoria as government-sponsored immigrants.

Some female immigrants already had work lined up. When nineteen-year-old Irish girl
Eliza Darcy sailed to Victoria on the
City of Manchester
in July 1854, she went straight
into the service of Mr Jeffreys, on the Great Western Road, employed on a three-month
contract for £18 with rations. (Eliza travelled alone to Victoria, but also sailing
on the
City of Manchester
were members of the Howard family from Dublin. Devout Catholics,
the Howard and Darcy lines would later unite in the passion-fuelled summer of 1854.)

There was much to lure young women like Eliza. Victoria had a well-known ‘servant
problem'—as in, there weren't enough servants to go around—which meant firstly that
the pay was good, but also that the employee was calling the shots. The comic magazine
Punch printed cartoons that showed boisterous young women telling their masters where
to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has
not supplied
her with copies of Punch to read! In another, the young servant waits for her master
to chop the wood.

Mrs May Howell found her newly hired servant couldn't decide on a suitable starting
date.
It was what they call colonial bounce
, she said.
She means to come, but thinks
as this is a free country she must show herself independent.
William Westgarth observed
wryly that Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid
agreed to a temporary
trial of her new mistress
.

The marriage market, too, was wide open. One girl, employed as a servant, twittered
merrily to her sisters at home about her startling new prospects for matrimony:

I had an offer a few days after landing from a gold-digger, with £600–£700. Since
that I have had another from a bushman, with £900; he has gone to the diggings again,
to make plenty of money. That I have not decided on yet. I shall have a handsome
house and garden and all I wish…I have so many chances.

As well as a gold rush, Victoria was experiencing a ‘wife rush'.

Eligible women had an astonishing new power to pick and choose their mate (a fact
that caused a moral panic about the control of defiant wives). Other single girls
could get themselves an instant breadwinner. Eliza Lucus wrote home,
When immigrant
ships came in, the Diggers came down to meet them, to try and induce women to marry
them and go back to the diggings with them
.

The offer of marriage and a dray ride to the diggings was not every girl's idea of
a good time. But for many it was just another form of assisted passage. And single
women had an alarming degree of autonomy, able to choose between domestic service
and marriage.

Even more disconcerting for bystanders, these newly empowered young women were choosing
to go it alone and carve their own route to freedom and independence. Many found
themselves on the road to Ballarat.

THE ROAD

It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9
November 1853, he and his travelling companions dragged a bullock dray up long,
steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became hopelessly bogged on some
stretches of the road. On others, it was all they could do to keep the cart from
overturning in the potholes created by all the traffic. Thousands of fortune-seekers
were walking the same well-worn dirt track.

The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of
Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It's the same route that
you would take today. Now there is a tangle of arterial roads, truck depots and grey-faced
factories, but under all that it's the same flat, open terrain it was then.

William Westgarth described these plains as
an ocean of grass
. Charles Evans saw
the landscape the same way:
stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense
grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean.
It was fertile
ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that
had sustained the region's
Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.

Fifty kilometres from Melbourne, in the basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced
to navigate a deep jagged cut-out known as The Gap. This landmark provided a lucrative
winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king's ransom to haul out drays
piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched
parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out.
(Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western
Highway.)

A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding.
An average cart trip took three days in dry weather and cost £25—a princely sum.
But for anyone on foot, like Charles Evans, it was a week-long hike.

There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to the goldfields. Most of them
say that, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road was a
revelation.

Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was
immediately won over by
the beauty and healthiness of the country
.

Mary Bristow was rendered speechless.
I cannot describe the bush
, she wrote.
It means
such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of
human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks
.
She found the scenery
beautiful
and the black people
exquisitely made
. To her astonishment,
Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of
Eden
.

Mrs Mannington Caffyn was also rhapsodic but observed a downside.
Australian sunlight
,
she wrote,
is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant
and bumptious,
and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things
.

Ten-year-old Lucy Birchall, travelling with her parents and five siblings, did what
all young families do to pass the time on a long journey.
We were very merry, we
sang all the songs we could collect
, Lucy wrote. It took their minds off being
up
to our knees in mud, perishing with cold
and soaked by
nasty drizzling [rain] that
beat in our faces
. A pennyworth of peppermints helped.