Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (26 page)

And now here is Melbourne proper before them and . . .

And what is this? Of course, they should have known: before they can properly enter the town all must pay an entrance tax according to the amount of luggage they bear. (The economic times are apparently tough and, after being previously fleeced by both the boatmen and the watermen, the new arrivals now find themselves fleeced by the authorities as well!) For most of them this is a matter of eight to ten shillings.

As they head up Swanston Street, it is apparent the buildings are far more solid in nature than the wooden ones on the outskirts and are built of mostly brick, sometimes even sandstone. Most are small, though among them are dotted 14 much larger stone constructions, each of them churches.

While those churches are at least solace to those who have feared they have come to a city beyond the bounds of civilisation, the truth is that for most of the newcomers, had bad first impressions been a ticket home, there are few who would have made it to the downtown area.

Still, as to the city itself, it proves to be surprisingly well designed and is done in the manner of the Americans – laid out in a grid pattern, like a chessboard. Six main roads running north and south come straight up from the river, with four major arteries crossed by six streets running at right angles in turn, making 24 blocks. While this is quite unlike the layout of London, where streets have grown organically, one thing a little similar is the frequent ‘fog’ that comes from the whirligigs of dust that descend from the hinterland.

A typical first night for newcomers is extremely uncomfortable. Simply finding a bed in a town that does not have enough of them and can therefore charge exorbitant rates for those they do have is a challenge. Most people have to trek over the hill that lies just beyond the town where, as far as the eye can see, fields are covered in tiny little hovels thrown together with mostly scrap wood, ‘the upper portion being called Collingwood and the lower Richmond. These suburbs contain a population equal to that of Melbourne itself; and they have flung up from the vast influx of population, chiefly since the gold discovery.’

Another place, for the truly poor – situated in the rough plain on the south side of the Yarra – is called ‘Canvas Town’. And it is, as it sounds, a place where any family with any canvas may ‘install itself as it likes, either in the north or the south; providing, none the less, that it pays in advance a fee of five shillings a week levied by the very paternal government of the colony’.

Having secured lodging
somewhere
, the new arrival’s next challenge is to get to sleep in a place that does not rock the way their ship had rocked, where infernal dogs keep barking all night long and, for whatever frightening reason, there seems to be a discharge of pistols going off both near and far until dawn. (In England they at least have the decency to only begin their rare pistol duels at dawn.)

There are many ways to identify the new arrivals to Melbourne. The first and most obvious is that they look lost, but there are many clues beyond that.

Sometimes, if they were born and raised in the upper classes, they have unusually fine clothes that they have clearly bought in Europe only months before. Other times, there is a sheer Englishness about them, a certain superior and disdainful way they have of walking around – at least until they come to the realisation that no-one cares in these parts and they are only making themselves look ridiculous. But the surest way, the catch-all for all classes and nationalities, is the obvious open-mouthed wonder with which these fresh arrivals survey the scenes of the city.

For Melbourne at this time is like no other city on earth. A large part of it is the sheer
wild energy
– the exuberance, the recklessness and roughness – and the feeling that, here on the very edge of the known world, everything, but everything, is different to the way it is in other cities.

Look-ee there!

William Craig observes an open carriage roaring down the street, ‘drawn by a superb pair of horses, driven at breakneck pace through the main streets by a sailor dressed in an orthodox man-of-war suit, his hat and sleeves decorated with ribbons. A number of his mates, similarly attired, accompanied by coarse-looking specimens of feminine frailty – the latter attired in the most costly and garish hued clothing – occupied seats in the body of the vehicle. The gold ornaments on the women would have been sufficient to start a jeweller’s shop with.’

And here now is a man, obviously a goldminer who has struck it rich. Despite being very drunk he still has the wherewithal to be handing out glasses of champagne to whichever passers-by on the street might like to join him, drawing from a number of cases of champagne bottles that lie beside him.

‘Men appeared to vie with each other,’ Craig records, ‘as to who should get quit of their easily acquired wealth with the greatest celerity.’

This includes smoking £5 and £10 banknotes as tobacco paper and, for high hilarity, even eating sandwiches using money as the filler! One digger is seen to be rifling through a huge wad of notes, furiously pulling out and tearing up every dirty one he finds, swearing at the wretched gold brokers for ‘giving him dirty paper money for pure Alexander gold; he wouldn’t carry dirt in his pocket; not he; thank God! He’d plenty to tear up and spend too.’

The ‘law’, such as it is, does not work the way it does in places like London. For in the English capital the law is the law and everyone understands that the police are on the right side of it while the criminals are on the wrong side. Here, the matter is sometimes up for debate, and not for nothing would the Colonial Secretary, John Foster – a man of ever-severe expression, with nearly as much starch as his high collar – go on to describe the Victorian police in 1852 as ‘convicts, drunkards, open to bribery and wholly untrustworthy’.

That is certainly the experience of many of the new arrivals . . .

While walking up Elizabeth Street in the middle of the day, Ellen Clacy hears the roar of an approaching mob behind her and ducks into a spare patch of ground in front of St Francis Church so as to keep out of their way and let them pass. It turns out that a man had been arrested by two policemen for horse-stealing, and ‘a rare ruffianly set of both sexes were following the prisoner’, doing everything they could to free him, and the crowd is following close to see what happens. It is rare sport. And then it happens, right in front of her.

‘If but six of ye were of my mind,’ shouts one of the ruffians, ‘it’s this moment you’d release him.’

And this is even better sport! For all but instantaneously the crowd closes on the policemen and begins yelling at them, swearing viciously enough to peel paint and pushing them with terrible violence. As Ellen Clacy observed, ‘The owner of the stolen horse got up a counter demonstration, and every few yards, the procession was delayed by a trial of strength between the two parties. Ultimately the police conquered; but this is not always the case, and often lives are lost and limbs broken in the struggle, so weak is the force maintained by the colonial government for the preservation of order.’

In another, much later episode, when a robber is arrested and a constable takes him in hand, a mob bearing pistols, bludgeons and axe handles gathers to free him. At the end of the wild melee, after the prisoner is rescued, a dead man is left on the ground. What to do? The obvious – the body is carried into the nearest public house where an inquest is immediately held.

‘The deceased,’ Clacy recounts, ‘is recognized as a drunkard, the jury is assured that a post-mortem examination is quite unnecessary; and the man is buried, after a verdict is brought in of “Died by the visitation of God;” the said visitation of God having, in this instance, assumed the somewhat peculiar form of a fractured skull!’

It is only the newcomers, however, who stare in open-mouthed wonder at such antics – everyone else has seen it all before. Besides which, the old hands are simply too busy either spending the fruits of their labours on the goldfields to worry about it, or they are preparing to get to the fields themselves with all possible haste.

Most other cities in the world are populated by predominantly people of just the one race . . .

Not Melbourne. Here, if you spit over your shoulder you’re just as likely to hit a haughty Englishman in the eye as an escaped American slave; a Chinaman with a pigtail as an Aborigine with a lone blanket protecting what is left of his modesty; a beady-eyed Vandemonian pickpocket as an obviously successful digger dressed in his regulation blue serge shirt and newly purchased ‘wide-awake hat’, the green veil still hanging from its lid to protect him from the flies.

Strangely, there are far more women than men. They range from the obviously well-born English ladies dressed in the latest fashions to low-brow, up-skirt harlots; from old ladies with bonnets and parasols protecting their skin from the harsh Australian sun to young Aboriginal women who appear to have fallen on hard times. Far and away the most common, however, and this is where the great numbers come from – despite men in the colonies outnumbering women four to one overall – are the so-called ‘grass widows’. These are the myriad middle-aged married women who have been left behind to run the house and raise the children while their men have simply upped sticks and left for the goldfields. If their husbands do find gold, the women may be well-turned out and carrying large bundles of shopping on one of the only three streets that are paved – Bourke, Collins and Elizabeth streets. If not, they are more likely to have a hard-pinched, poverty-stricken look about them and are more frequently seen on the muddy streets, holding out nothing but the hope that their husbands will soon make a breakthrough. But life is far tougher for them now than just a year ago, before gold was discovered. Then you could buy a four-pound loaf of bread for five pence – now it costs a shilling and sixpence. And they say that on the Ballarat goldfields it now costs four shillings.

Here in Melbourne, meat is twice as expensive and bacon four times as dear. Rents have gone up at least 50 per cent, if not more. Everything has soared in price by simple dint of the fact that with all the newcomers there is much more demand and, with all the men gone to the goldfields, far fewer to provide goods and services.

As to those newcomers, they are not only bemused by the strange ways the colonials born and bred in this country speak – for reasons best known to themselves they have trodden upon and squashed every syllable in their armoury – but also by their curious colonial ways. For again, look here now! Here is a colonial couple heading down Great Bourke Street. The ‘Australian’ man has a letter in his hand to put in the mailbox but, as there is a lot of mud between him and the box, without a word he hands the letter to his wife and nods casually towards the box. That good woman understands and leaves the shelter of their common umbrella to pick her way through the mud and post the letter before returning, wet through, all without a
word
of complaint.

‘Colonial politeness,’ the staggered English arrivals call it.

And over there is a very common-looking digger, asking the driver of a cab what the fare would be to have his services for a whole day.

‘Perhaps more than you’d like,’ says the driver, eyeing the digger’s poor dress and obvious poverty.

‘What is it?’ asks the digger.

‘Seven pounds for the day.’

‘There is ten,’ says the digger, peeling off just one note from the whole roll he has in his pocket. ‘You can light your pipe with the difference.’

They are a weird mob, and the English writer William Howitt, a Quaker, aptly describes Victoria at this time as being in the grip of a ‘hairystocracy’, filled as it is with huge, hairy men with untamed whiskers and wild hair, galloping through the streets and brawling their way through the bars and brothels with equal abandon, unceasing in their endeavours to drink the town dry. And the shopkeepers, of course, love them for their exuberantly free-spending ways, even outright advertising for their customers by referring to them as, well, as this:

TO THE NEW ARISTOCRACY.

If you want the best article of any description to be had in the city, you can be supplied by De Carle and Co., Gold Diggers’ General Provision Stores, Little Bourke Street.

Such appeals to their vanity
work
,
and to many a genuine aristocrat visiting these shores it seems that the diggers have no sense of their . . .
place
in the world. These hairy brutes simply don’t care that an English gentlemen is due deference from the lower orders as a matter of basic principle. In this place, everything is turvy-topsy, front-to-back and the polloi hoi really do have the attitude that Jack is as good as his master, and in many cases better . . .

Signs of the city’s obsession with gold are everywhere, including in every shopfront window, up to and including baby linen warehouses and milliners. Often on a white placard there is a drawing of a pile of gold on one side, while on the other is a pile of sovereigns or a wad of banknotes. This indicates that the shopkeeper is happy to pay cash for whatever gold you have, and all of them will have carefully calibrated scales for the purpose. The most striking advertisement of all is in the window of a shop in Collins Street because – far from being a drawing – it is a real human skull, perforated by a bullet. That bullet lies a foot or so away to the left, ‘as if coolly examining or speculating on the mischief it had done’, while on one side is a revolver and on the other a seeming pile of nuggets. Above all is a large sign blaring the words: ‘Beware in time.’

For, you see, clearly this skull was once upon the shoulders of a digger who did not have the brains to sell his nuggets to this shopkeeper, preferring to keep his gold in his pockets and so make himself a target of violent robbers!

What do the conservative denizens of Victoria think of this turn of events? Very, very little . . .