We Are the Rebels (9 page)
Authors: Clare Wright
Most of the timber was used for tent poles and mineshaft supports, but in late 1853
Ballarat was also ferociously
burning timber for heat, light and fuel.
The blue smoke
of ten thousand campfires curled slowly upward
, observed John Deegan,
and blended
with the haze of the summer evening
.
DEEP LEAD MINING
An upturned, unsightly massâ¦every bit had been turned topsy-turvy.
This is how newcomers
described the Ballarat diggings in 1854.
In the early days of the gold rush, mining was done with picks and pans at the edge
of flowing riverbeds. But in Ballarat, this shallow âalluvial' gold was quickly exhausted.
By late 1853 there was a shift in mining technology. Riches were now to be found
far below the surface, beneath deep basalt veins that followed the ancient riverbeds.
In fact, these deep lead deposits were larger and richer than any found anywhere
else in the world, but new methods were needed to extract the gold.
Deep sinking was the answer: but it was a long and gruelling process. Deep shafts
had to be laboriously dug, then shored up with timber, which had to be cut by hand.
The rewards could be magnificent, or non-existent. It could take up to a year to
âbottom out' on a hole. The whole undertaking was costly in every wayânot least to
the physical environment, which was left scarred and stripped of vegetation.
Though magical, it wasn't a pretty sight. Numerous diarists and letter-writers remarked
on the sheer ugliness of the diggings. To Mrs Elizabeth Massey, the goldfields had
the appearance of
one vast cemetery with fresh made graves
. Uncovered
mine shafts pock-marked
the surface, with mounds of earth heaped beside. It was, said William Westgarth,
an upturned, unsightly mass
with not a tree or blade of grass to be seen.
And the place was packed. There were so many people going about their business, remarked
Mundy, it was like a
lively busy hive
. Thomas McCombie said
the ground actually appeared
as if in motion
. He stood for a moment on the hill above town and watched the frenzied
bustle. Listened to the din of thousands of cradles rocking gold out of the clay
on either side of a creek. Startled as diggers popped in and out of holes like frantic
moles. The view was so extraordinary that McCombie could only anticipate
a new order
of things
.
Only at night, under the cover of darkness and after the ceremonial gunshots, did
the pulse of activity gradually subside. A
vast city hushed in the arms of night
,
the bureaucrat William Westgarth wrote poetically.
Rising above the vast ocean of canvas that was the diggings, stood the Government
Camp, built on the high ground to the west of the Yarrowee River. High and, in theory,
mighty.
On the Victorian goldfields, the Resident Commissioner was the man in charge. Robert
Rede, who had abandoned a medical degree to try his luck at gold digging, took up
this position of ultimate authority in May 1854. Beneath him were
the assistant commissioners,
magistrates and other senior civil servants. The police were the grunts: poorly paid
henchmen who did the hard slog.
A submission to a commission of enquiry into the Victorian police force, held in
late 1854, described the boys in blue like this:
The service generally is so unpopular, that, with few exceptions, only those who
are either too idle to do any thing else, or who having failed in all their other
attempts to gain a livelihood as a last resource enlist into the Police.
There was also a military presence on the goldfieldsâsoldiers of the 12th and 40th
Regiments of the British army. This force was separate from the police, with its
own leadership and structure. A small number of soldiers were allowed to bring their
wives and children with them. Wives were expected to wash, clean and cook, not only
for their husbands but also for the unmarried or unaccompanied officers.
In Ballarat, this whole motley crew was housed at the Government Camp: a parcel of
land bounded by a high picket fence and identified by the huge Union Jack flying
from a central flagstaff. As in the rest of the town, there were only a few (very
expensive) new wooden buildings. Most of the living quarters and offices were under
canvas.
This ramshackle arrangement of lodgings accommodated the administrative workers stationed
at Ballarat, their families and servants (tent keepers, drivers, packhorse keepers)
as well as the police force and the military. In total, over one hundred people
were crammed into the government ghetto.
The architects of the camp may have a method
in their madness
, wrote the Geelong Advertiser in February 1854,
but it is not easily
seen.
The summer of 1853â4 was uncomfortable and trying for a community of campers living
out in the elements. A
tremendous blow of hot wind blew down to pieces a great many
tents
, wrote Thomas Pierson on 5 January. Living in those flailing tents were 6650
women, 2150 children and 10,700 menâalmost 20,000 inhabitants, of whom 45% were women
and children. It's a far cry from what William Withers called the
womanless crowds
of the first year of the gold rush.
Newcomers to the diggings knew to expect that women and children would be there in
numbers. You only had to open your eyes.
I did not fail to observe that the fair
sex had ventured now on a large scale
, wrote Italian miner Raffaello Carboni on his
second trip to Ballarat at Easter 1854. The Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong
Advertiser reminisced in July 1854 about the old days when the
adventurous ladies
who had come to see the diggings
were welcomed with three cheers. Now, he sighed,
the coach
brings up its hundreds of the fair sex, and not a solitary cheer greets
its arrival
.
RAFFAELLO CARBONI
THE BIOGRAPHER OF THE REBELLION
DIDN'T FIRE A GUN BUT HE WAS IN IT UP TO HIS ARMPITS
BORN
Urbino, Italy, 1817
DIED
Rome, 1875
ARRIVED
1852
AGE AT EUREKA
37
CHILDREN
Never married. No children
FAQ
Italian revolutionary and freedom fighter. Writer and master of many languages.
Used as a translator on the goldfields. Was not in the Stockade, but he wrote a full-length
book published on the first anniversary.
ARCHIVE
The Eureka Stockade
, 1855.
When William Howitt arrived at the goldfields in 1852, the fair sex seemed to be
doing all right.
There
are some hugely fat women on the diggings
, he wrote,
the life
seems to suit them
. They appeared to enjoy the outdoor existence, adapting to its
conditions and dressing in practical clothes fit for hard work.
A wide awake hat,
neat fitting jacket, handsome dress
, observed Howitt:
a costume quite made for the
diggings
.
It needed to be. In the mornings, Howitt saw women and girls hanging out the wash,
cooking over campfires and
chopping wood with great axes which swung them
. They
kept chickens and goats. These
diggeresses
, he concluded, provided
a certain stationary
substratum beneath the fluctuating surface
.
In other words, women had quietly become the bedrock of the Victorian mining communities.
Englishman William Kelly, who had written books about the Californian goldfields,
said the Ballarat diggings were remarkable for
the large proportion of women
. Only
3% to 10% of the Californian âforty-niners' were female, clearly a much smaller proportion
than in Victoria. So whereas
the Californian digger had to roast, grind and boil
his own coffee
, said Kelly,
the Victorian, who is surrounded with women, would be
saved all that bother.
Kelly neglected to inform his readers that most women charged
for their highly prized services.
On the downside:
the most callous specimens of the female creation I ever encountered
were mere green pulp in comparison with some of the granite-grained viragoes
of the
goldfields. Kelly obviously preferred the dewy maidens of the old country to the
sun-baked matrons who tried their luck under the Southern Cross.
Other observers also noted that the average diggeress did not much resemble an English
rose.
Lovely, blooming maidens
, as Howitt put it, soon withered in the harsh Australian
climate. As their worlds opened up, women's skin wrinkled, and pale,
soft complexions
became weathered. Shelter and security were exchanged for opportunity. It was a trade-off
that many were only too happy to make.
In these early years of the gold rush, mining required little capital outlay. Small
claims could be pursued by individual miners. Technical know-how and even physical
strength were not absolutely necessary.
William Kelly was one of the first commentators to note the everyday sight of women
engaged in hands-on mining. Out walking around the Eureka lead one morning in early
1854, Kelly spied
fossickers of the female sex at work, and these, too, of the diminutive
degree both as to age and size
. You can sense that Kelly longed to mock these mining
maids, as was his inclination, but he stopped himself.
And here I must do the women the justice of remarking that their industry was accompanied
with a decency of garb and demeanour which elicited respect and went to prove that
becoming employment engenders respectability of feeling and healthy appetites.
Working-class women, of course, had always worked. What Kelly found remarkable was
the presence of âdecent' women performing acts of industry.
It was just another sign of the adaptability that women
needed to be successful in
this world turned upside down.
WOMEN'S LEGAL STATUS
In English common law, a husband and wife were one person. A married woman was a
feme covert
, a woman âcovered'âor hiddenâby her husband in law. She could not incur
debts, nor could she sue or be sued in court. She couldn't enter into a contract.
That meant banks would not lend money to women, and therefore it was almost impossible
for most women, with no access to credit or capital, to go into business.
Before the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts in the 1870s, a married woman
couldn't own property in her own name. A single woman, a
feme sole
, had the same
legal and property rights as a manâup until the time of her marriage. Then her money,
goods, income and lands became the property of her husband.
Underpinning all this was the assumption that a married woman didn't need any independent
financial or legal status because, being âas one' with her husband, her safe passage
through life was assured. The system failed to take into account wife desertion,
marital cruelty or domestic violenceânot to mention a woman's desire for autonomy
over her own affairs.
Oh, and it was almost impossible to get a divorce. Where her legal status was concerned,
a nineteenth-century woman was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself. William Westgarth,
writing in 1857, remarked on the strangely old-fashioned state of mining technology
in the wake of the industrial revolution.
There are few vocations
, he noted,
that
can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society's
progress
. He meant that the work didn't owe a lot to science or technology.
Ballarat, he said, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as
a great mercantile
exchange
. It was about partnering, share-holding and other interpersonal relationships.
It wasn't really about machinery, which women had mostly not been taught about, or
high finance, which involved bank loans and credit facilities that women could not
legally get. Gold mining was more like the family-based âcottage industry' style
of work that was the norm before the industrial revolution.