Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (25 page)

What is going on?

And then the Cap’n realises: his weapons have been got at. That morning, the Second Officer poured water down the barrels of his guns and removed the percussion caps from the firing mechanism, rendering them useless. Apoplectic with rage, the Captain bursts forth with fearful combinations of every swear word he has ever heard on the seven seas in a manner both shocking and new to the passengers. His last two loyal crew members listen, perhaps impressed at the range and depth of the Captain’s vulgar vocabulary, but certainly not unduly frightened by it. For in this country they are as good a man as him, and perhaps even better! Suddenly, however, like a volcano that is finally spent, the Captain runs out of swear words, and with that most of his anger seems to be exhausted, too. He can even see the funny side of it, a glimmer of humour returning to his eyes.

One of the departing crew calls out, ‘Look here, old man, if you were like us chaps, working for 40 shillings a month, would you go back in that old hooker, and gold lying about in every direction, waiting to be picked up? We’ll see yourself on the diggings a week after the ship arrives.’

On this point the captain is noncommittal, but at least he does not bother arguing the point. Instead, with a deep sigh of resignation, he lights a cigar and returns to his cabin.

Down in the quarter boat the crew opens a case of brandy, toasts ‘health and happiness’ to all those left aboard, and then the Second Officer asks in jocular fashion that when the Captain surfaces once more, could they remind the worthy gentlemen to debit him for the value of both the boat of yesterday and today, along with this case of spirits?

‘Then,’ as William Craig will recount, ‘with three hearty cheers they took to their oars, and went up the bay, all joining in a song that had become familiar to us when pumping during the voyage:

Oh, fare you well, my own Mary Ann,

Fare you well for awhile . . .’

A small parenthesis here: there is of course ample precedent for such scarpering seamen to do well for themselves on the goldfields. In Sydney, a celebrated story circulated that when one of the desperate captains had searched through the bars and brothels for either his men or anyone who he could employ to get his vessel back to England, a simple sailor had pulled out an enormous wad of notes and ‘offered to buy the ship and the captain’. Close parenthesis.

———

For those aboard
Scindian
,
the biggest problem for now is that with nigh on a couple of dozen sailors scarpered, there remains only the skipper, the Chief Officer, one sailor and the cook to do the work of 25 men, all while a dead calm keeps the ship stuck exactly where they are. This requires many of the passengers to fulfil the duties of the recently departed, meaning that the wind that blows up the following morning is more than ever welcome, as they are moving once more in the direction of Williamstown, and many a passenger who has ‘learnt the ropes’ on the way over hauls on the lines.

Scindian
anchors off Williamstown and some of the ship’s passengers are shuttled to shore. Now shakily disembarking at what passes for a pier – rocking enough to make a sea-dog feel at home and ‘an inlander sea-sick’ – the weary voyagers are confronted by ‘a leviathan eatinghouse’, superscribed with the notification ‘Dinners always ready from morning till night’ and the postscript ‘Hot soups always on hand’ – a place more interesting to those freshly arrived, who have been without fresh meat for so long. And next to it again, a blacksmith operating out of a tent, the chief wonder of which is that it has not burnt down long before as an unending stream of sparks flies upwards from the smithy’s forge to the canvas roof.

Their task is neither an easy nor cheap one, organising travel from Williamstown into the heart of Melbourne. Getting freight from London to Port Phillip Bay – a distance of almost 13,000 miles – comes at a cost of £3 (60 shillings) per ton. And yet to get themselves and their luggage onto one of the small, dilapidated boats that passengers are able to take to ferry their possessions the eight miles to Cole’s Wharf costs five shillings.

Little by little, this bustling city that was no more than virgin bush less than two decades earlier heaves into view.

If this El Dorado be, then a strange looking one it is. For while, yes, the spires and the many chimneys with the lazy curls of smoke in the distance really, clearly, are those of an established town of bricks and mortar, just as the many wooden cottages bespeak a civilised if not wealthy people, what can one make of the hundreds of acres of canvas that mark the approaches to this town? As with an army besieging a city – and that is what they are, an army of immigrants – on every landed horizon surrounding Melbourne there are tents set up.

But it is just the beginning for those like Ellen Clacy, an Englishwoman who has come to Australia with her brother and some friends to try to make their fortune.

For as they at last set foot on dry land at Sandridge Wharf, in Hobson’s Bay, staggering slightly in the classic manner of people with ‘sea legs’, who for many months have been used to standing on heaving decks, these new arrivals are confronted by a group of ‘watermen’ and find ‘the whole cost of transferring your effects overland to your lodgings in the town is actually more than bringing them the previous 13,000 miles, including the cost of conveying them from your house to the London Docks’. They have little choice but to agree, and the surly watermen – mostly absconded sailors who have decided that certain daylight robbery of this kind will be more lucrative than chancing their arms on the dark diggings anyway – sulkily load their belongings onto one of their hideous carts, even as they look longingly towards Liardet’s public house, just over the road from where their targets have landed, a place they are clearly desperate to return to.

With the cart loaded high with carpetbags, baskets, parcels, portmanteaux, sea-chests and the like, the only place left to sit for the dozen or so passengers on the side are the narrow planks of the cart for this purpose. With a curse from the waterman and a touch of his whip, his weary nags whinny plaintively and the cart starts off with an exhausted lurch. In short order the new arrivals pass a massive open-air market, where many of the vendors are people just like them – except six months on. That is, they are immigrants who have tried their luck on the diggings, found nothing and now must sell everything they have, for whatever they can get, in the hope they can raise enough money to get back to the civilisation of their homelands. Others are clearly more recent arrivals – they’re not nearly so battered or weathered – who are about to head to the diggings and realise that much of what they have brought from their homelands is superfluous to their needs and they’d be much better to have money instead . . .

And speaking of Jack being as good as his master, it also appears that many of the structures the new chums can see beside these small businesses are houses that Jack built. For the most part they are rickety, lopsided affairs that have clearly been put together with whatever materials have come to hand – and the result is that the houses rather resemble their sullen owners, who are lounging out on their verandahs, watching the newcomers balefully as the carts trundle by loaded with their luggage.

The various paths from the wharves to Melbourne Town that the Lalors, the Craigs and the Clacys are following are, of course, already very well travelled. Many of those who take them – past, present and in the coming days, weeks and months – though unknown to them at the time, are of significance.

A Frenchman, Antoine Fauchery, who, coming from Gravesend, has arrived in Victoria aboard
Emily
just a week before those on
Scindian
, has come
pour suivre la fortune
,
to try his luck on the goldfields. From Toronto, Canada, aboard
Magnolia
,
comes Charles Ross, in the company of his great friend and old school chum Thomas Budden, while from ever-green County Kilkenny in Ireland arrives Timothy Hayes and his wife, the beautiful and heavily pregnant Anastasia – she with such fiery red hair that it very nearly matches her temper when things displease her – together with their first five children. Having survived both the potato famine and their involvement with the uprising of the Young Ireland movement, the Hayes, like pretty much everyone else in Melbourne, have decided to come to Australia to make a new start.

For his part, Raffaello Carboni, the similarly red-headed revolutionary from the Young Italy movement, who had been wounded three times while fighting for Garibaldi to throw the Austrians out of Italy, is similarly motivated.

Eager to discover new worlds, and having read about the goldfields with growing excitement, Carboni has journeyed all the way to Australia in the hope of starting a new, rich life, free from the oppression he has known. In his pocket, as one raised on the Catholic duty to always have alms for the poor, he has a few copper coins, ready to hand to whichever beggars he might see. So far, there have been none!

All he can see, instead, are either manifestations of great wealth or, more pertinently, another whole strand of people who are after his coins and more for an entirely different reason. They are, as he will later describe them, ‘a shoal of land-sharks, who swarmed at that time the Yarra Yarra wharfs’. They take £5 from him, merely for landing his luggage!

19 October 1852,
Vulcan
arrives, bearing the 40th Regiment

A lot less welcome than
Scindian
,
and even
Araminta
,
is the state-of-the-art iron steamship
Vulcan
,
which on this day passes through the heads of Port Phillip Bay bearing 800 Redcoats of the 40th (2nd Somersetshire) Foot Regiment. Yes, they are a relatively famous military unit, known as ‘The Excellers’ – with a proud history going all the way back to 1717, and a renown renewed in the previous decade through their fearful work with the bayonet in the battle of Maharajapore in the Gwalior Campaign in Madhya Pradesh, India – but in many ways that is the whole point of the colony’s revulsion. For what is a crack military unit doing in this peaceful part of the world in the first place?

It is, not untypically,
The Argus
that is most forward in expressing its disgust: ‘The soldiers are come at last. The
Vulcan
steamer anchored yesterday in Hobson’s Bay, freighted with a cargo of two kindred evils – two malignant diseases which have perhaps about equally desolated the world – the red-jacket and the small-pox.

‘True to their nature, while shut out from inflicting their woes upon mankind, they have waged war upon each other, and for the present, we are to be precluded from the satisfaction of actual contact with either of them . . .

‘The red coat has ever been the foe of all true liberty. In precise proportion as it has in any country advanced, has constitutional freedom stood still or gone back.’

But here they are, and here they will stay for some time. On board, two particular officers gaze to the shore – just as soldiers have done since time immemorial when first sighting a new land where they are to serve – wondering what it holds for them.

Yes, yes, of course these newly arrived Englishmen have been quick to hear the stories of others deserting their posts as soon they get close enough to the goldfields to do so, but neither are they remotely the type to do so. Both Captain John Wellesley Thomas and Lieutenant Joseph Henry Wise are career British Army men – men of honour, men of duty, men who know to pass the port to the left and love nothing better than raising a glass, gentlemen, to Her Majesty . . . the Queen!

The Queen . . . The Queen . . . The Queen . . .

Ah, but their part in our story is truly yet to come.

October-November 1852, on the track winding back to Melbourne

While the soldiers and officers from
Vulcan
must stay in wretched and frustrating quarantine for the next fortnight, other recent arrivals are initially free to traipse where they will. And so it is that after landing, all of the many new arrivals set off on the well-worn and meandering path around the contours of the bay for the next eight miles, the shores of which are strewn at the high-water mark with ‘a debris of drift spars, broken oars, ship-blocks, dead-eyes, used-up passengers’ beds and pillows, dilapidated hencoops, empty brandy cases, broken bottles, and kegs with a ballast of salt water.’

It is not something to gladden the newcomer’s heart.

‘“And is this the beautiful scenery of Australia?” was my first melancholy reflection,’ Ellen Clacy will record of her impressions. ‘Mud and swamp – swamp and mud – relieved here and there by some few trees which looked as starved and miserable as ourselves. The cattle we passed appeared in a wretched condition, and the human beings on the road seemed all to belong to one family, so truly Vandemonian was the cast of their countenances. On we went towards Melbourne.’

As the newcomers cross the Yarra on an admittedly new-looking bridge, the dismal sight comes of many wooden huts on its banks, said to be boiling-down works – to boil down the fat from sheep and cattle to make tallow for candles and soap – and the stench emanating from them would seem to bear that out. Beside the huts are huge, white pyramids of bones, extending up to 40 feet high. Behind those stinking huts are slightly undulating slopes on which, Antoine Fauchery records, ‘grows grass that is neither green nor yellow, and on which here and there a few thin oxen are grazing. Plains, and then more plains stretching out
ad infinitum
,
like the boredom that comes over you at the sight of them.’