Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (19 page)

Against such outrages the diggers have appealed to the people. Will the people answer them? That question remains to be answered, but having the press behind them would be a good start.

September 1851, Mt Alexander region, 50 miles north of Ballarat

As rich as the pickings at Ballarat prove to be, however, the foraging instinct of the diggers is, as ever, not just to dig
down
to the riches, but also like ripples on a pond, to spread
out
to see if there might be even better – or at least less crowded – pickings elsewhere. And it is at this time that the word spreads: some shepherd named Worley has discovered a piece of golden quartz four miles north of Castlemaine in Barkers Creek, lying at the southernmost ridges of Mount Alexander. Within days the first group of restless diggers from Ballarat swoops into the area, and within weeks they move along into the nearby, fabulously auriferous gully of Forrest Creek, which runs east towards Chewton and will give its name to the lucrative Forrest Creek diggings. Always, the search is for the easy alluvial gold, which doesn’t require a great deal of digging.

Within weeks men are winning up to half a pound of gold per day and by November, ‘two, three, and four pounds per day [is] common amongst the
luckies
’
of Forrest Creek. Another valuable goldfield has been discovered – one of many soon to be uncovered – that is so strong and so rich, in the early days particularly, that much of the flow of new chums from Melbourne to Ballarat is diverted instead to these Forrest Creek diggings. Just 6000 men had been a part of the first rush on Ballarat, but more than twice as many now race to Mount Alexander’s quartz-covered ranges and what will become 15 square miles of adjoining goldfields centred on Chewton – a number that soon swells to 30,000. Within three months, the Ballarat fields are briefly left all but deserted. These are heady times, and with the growing realisation that it is frequently the first to arrive who get the easiest pickings, there is a constant frenzy to move from one set of goldfields to the next. Only on Sunday does the frantic labour stop, with the Commissioner strictly forbidding any work on the Sabbath.

The stories – and they are true – soon spread not only to the other diggings, but also, of course, to Melbourne, which is once more agog. One man managed to find 80 pounds of gold in a single hour! Another, using no more than his penknife, if you can believe it, filled a quart pot with nuggets in just one day’s digging!

Prospectors quickly come to realise that this entire Mt Alexander Range is ‘a prolongation of that of which Buninyong forms a part,’ and every nook and cranny of this fresh country, every ridge and gully, every hopeful outcrop of rock – all of it up for grabs! – is now being scoured by hopefuls.

The net result is that only a few weeks after Forrest Creek has been discovered, the blessed wives of two workers on the Mt Alexander North pastoral property, Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Farrell, find gold while camping next to Bendigo Creek, 24 miles north of Castlemaine. In short order, those diggings are soon opened up. Bendigo Creek proves particularly rich, and in the coming months no fewer than 40,000 diggers will be feverishly working both sides of its banks.

3-4 October 1851, the Ballarat goldfields receive two visitors . . .

Where once was a bubbling creek with no more than an occasional passing shepherd for company, all is changed. Now, a solid mass of men are as busy as ants, trekking back and forth up and down the recently denuded slopes, carrying buckets of dirt, rocking the cradle, ladling water from the creeks to wash it through and spasmodically emitting cries of joy as they gather the gold.

On this Tuesday, however, the diggers receive a visitor who is not there to join the diggings so much as to have some understanding of them, to inform his future decisions. William Westgarth is a senior member of the colony’s first parliament, which is just about to sit, and the first president of Melbourne’s Chamber of Commerce. He is impressed from the first.

Conducted to the right spot at Golden Point, he is given a spade and is met with success in an instant: ‘Out of one pound weight of matrix which I removed on the corner of the spade, I picked out 7s 6d worth of gold.’

It is a great deal of food for thought. On Westgarth’s way back to Melbourne, he would recount, ‘I mused over all I had seen, and long ere reaching home had concluded that £10,000 a day was being taken out of Ballarat.’ It is a staggering amount of wealth coming from a spot that previously produced next to nothing, and clearly the government is quite right to garner its fair share.

The next day, an even more important visitor arrives, with a name more than merely familiar to the diggers. Though in this rustic scene the signs of faraway Melbourne are few, for weeks now government notices warning of penalties for such offences as not having a fully paid license on you at all times have been pinned up and pasted all over the goldfield, always released by authority of ‘His Excellency’ Charles Joseph La Trobe.

And now, here is the man himself. Here is Lieutenant-Governor Charles Walter
Joseph
La Trobe, come on his first visit to the diggings and dressed in a frockcoat and tall hat for the occasion.

‘Joe!’ cries out a digger upon first sighting him, to the general merriment of all – with the exception of the Lieutenant-Governor, who stiffens at this presumption. But it is too late.

Joe! Joe!
Joe
!
JOE! Somehow this nickname seems so perfect for Charles Walter Joseph La Trobe that it sticks, and soon it will become not only the sobriquet for La Trobe but indeed all those who represent his authority, from the Gold Districts Commissioners to their retinue of Assistant-Commissioners and clerks and assistants; from the captains who represent the armed might of the British Empire in these parts to their subalterns, sergeants and soldiers; from the police inspectors to their constables and native police who are charged with keeping Her Majesty’s peace on the goldfields. The Joes are the officials, the authorities, the stuffed shirts, those who, without ever lifting a pick in anger or picking up a shovel, presume to rule over the diggers. By defining them, the diggers are also helping to define themselves, the valiant souls who have come here from all over the world to try their luck. The diggers come from all walks of life, from all classes and levels of education and from many countries. And they’re all equal here – no-one is better than anyone else, so don’t try it on, because no-one cares.

On this day, though, the joe in question – the original – goes for a walk around the diggings accompanied by some native police and their white commander, Captain Henry Dana, and is largely ignored by the diggers.

Still, it is instructional for him. The level of enthusiasm that the diggers have for their task is quickly apparent, and he can see why. He roughly counts 500 cradles being worked by about five times as many men, with another 500 or so men arriving every day – and just about all of them are making huge amounts of money! When he comes to the first shaft, that of William Brownhill, and observes the way he digs for the gold, La Trobe says to the miner pleasantly, ‘Your mother did not think when you came to Australia that you were going to dig gold out of the ground in that manner.’

What worries His Excellency, though, is where this labour is coming from, and who is doing the work they have left behind? He even raises with the diggers themselves the possibility of revoking their licenses for as long as two months, until such times as the harvest can be taken in, at which point they would be able to resume. But not to worry, La Trobe assures them, ‘During that time, each man’s allotted space would be carefully guarded, and returned to you.’

Very kind of you, Joe. But do you not understand? We are neither convicts nor slaves, but free men. It may well suit
you
to have us return to the farms to bring in the harvest. But it does not suit
us
.

Like Westgarth, La Trobe is quick to notice how well the diggers are doing and at one point witnesses just two tin dishes of dirt producing a staggering eight pounds of gold, while he also hears of a party of diggers who find 16 pounds of gold in the morning and another 15 pounds in the afternoon!

La Trobe leaves the diggings with much to consider and, upon his return to Melbourne to find it even more abandoned, a growing sense of desperation. On 10 October he writes to the Secretary of State in London, Earl Grey, to update him on the situation:

‘It is quite impossible for me to describe to your lordship the effect which these discoveries have had upon the whole community . . . Within the last three weeks the towns of Melbourne and Geelong and their large suburbs have been in appearance almost emptied of many classes of their male inhabitants . . . Not only have the idlers to be found in every community, and day labourers in town and the adjacent country, shopmen, artisans, and mechanics of every description thrown up their employments and in most cases leaving their employers and their wives and families to take care of themselves, run off to the workings, but responsible tradesmen, farmers, clerks of every grade, and not a few of the superior classes have followed; some, unable to withstand the mania and force of the stream, but others because they were, as employers of labour, left in the lurch, and had no other alternative. Cottages are deserted, houses to let, business is at a standstill, and even schools are closed. In some of the suburbs not a man is left, and the women are known, for self-protection, to group together to keep house. The ships in the harbour are in a great measure deserted . . . Even masters of vessels, like farmers, have made up parties with their men to go shares at the diggings . . . Both here and at Geelong all buildings and contract works, public and private, are at a stand-still.’

For his part, Earl Grey – though perhaps drinking some calming tea with his famous father’s name to it – is nothing if not alarmed to read the missive. Apart from everything else, the wool provided by the colonies is the staple that the British textile industry depends upon. Without it, that industry would struggle.

The solution for Charles Joseph La Trobe right now? Well, if it is not to revoke the licenses – both his experience on the goldfields and subsequent advice received concur that the resistance to such a move would be overwhelming – then perhaps at least they should be more expensive? Perhaps even doubled in fee? That would simultaneously limit the number of would-be goldminers deserting to the fields and ensure that those who are mining generate more revenue for the government’s coffers, which are becoming ever more depleted by the steadily increasing expenditure necessary to administer the goldfields and the steeply rising wages that must be paid to those civil servants decent enough to remain in their workplaces and keep Victoria functioning. Compounding La Trobe’s financial problems is the insistence by the Legislative Council that none of the colony’s general revenue be spent on ‘any services for anything which in its opinion is consequent on the discovery and search for gold’. The heavy cost of administering and policing the goldfields, thus, can only come from the license fees themselves.

24 October 1851
The Melbourne Morning Herald
reports . . .

A HOAX

Yesterday Mr George Say amused himself in cooking up a cock and bull story about gold being found in the gutter at the corner of Lonsdale and Swanston streets, and very near his late public house, the ‘St George and Dragon’. He had the impudence to bring a specimen of it (as he called it) to our office, and told all manner of lies to induce us to perpetrate the hoax on the public. It appears that he procured a piece of quartz from some place or another, and over this lie had sprinkled some gold-beaten leaf, and had rubbed some of the leaf into the crevices of the ‘sample’ to form the delusion. If Mr Say gets his window smashed in some fine night for carrying on such vagaries, we will not pity him one bit.

James Daley, the long-dead convict who had first faked the discovery of gold for his own ends to try to fool Governor Phillip would have been proud – and unsurprised that the ruse did not work.

1 November 1851, Melbourne, La Trobe worries

It is not quite that Victoria has fulfilled Governor Gipps’s warning of 12 years before – that if gold fever takes hold then ‘we will all have our throats cut’ – but things are still worrying Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe. For the general madness that has taken hold of Victoria is now
so
strong that, on this day, Charles La Trobe writes to Governor-General FitzRoy to request an increase to his small military force in Victoria. He later informs Earl Grey in the London Colonial Office of his hope that this action proves sufficient, ‘happen what may’, to safeguard the gaols, banks and public buildings.

For its part,
The Melbourne Morning Herald
is quick to express the common mood among those of the better classes. ‘It is sad,’ it opines wearily, ‘that the gentleman should change places with the lucky blackguard.’

Early November 1851, the Ballarat goldfields widen, deepen . . . and rise

Meanwhile, the stream of people heading to the diggings continues to swell, to the point that it becomes first a river of humanity heading to specific spots and then nothing less than a flood as those people spread across the land, frantically fossicking for the treasures they know abound there, if only they can be the first to find them. On those goldfields, where there had been complete wilderness only months before, there are now entire tent
cities
,
with some solid structures even sprouting among them.

Look there, now, at what used to be Yuille’s Run. From the hilltops looking down into the valley at night, the hundreds and hundreds of fires make the new arrivals look like an occupying army, and in many ways that is exactly what they are. The diggers sit around these fires, warming themselves and smoking their pipes, even as they cook their meals of damper and mutton chops . . . and damper . . . with perhaps a little more damper after that, and boil their billies of tea.