Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (29 page)

Firstly, and most importantly, as you already know, we miners are known as ‘diggers’, but rather than a merely descriptive term of what we do, it is an honourable sobriquet for what and who we are. To be a ‘digger’ is to be an independent man capable of having come here from great distances. If you’re a digger, thus, you are in all likelihood a good bloke, unless of course you are a ‘Vandemonian’, likely an ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land who is going to try to ‘jump’ our claim, that is, steal all or part of it from us. We don’t like Vandemonians in these parts. If the difference in weight between them and violent drunks was in gold and you sold it . . . you couldn’t buy a cup of tea.

True, it is not only Vandemonians who try the jumping, and there is a lesser sin of ‘shepherding’ – squatting on a claim for someone else without genuinely trying to work on it. For once a patch is not worked on, it is presumed to be abandoned and reverts to the Crown, meaning it is available for another group to work on. The inevitable result of shepherding are vicious disputes as to whether the ground is being properly worked on or is, in fact, available to be claimed by others.

In that case, we might strip to the waist and have a ‘donnybrook’ – a fight – at which point the cry will go up on the goldfields, ‘A ring! A ring!’, as the other diggers form a circle around us while we hurl haymakers. But even then, once it is all settled, we’re just as likely when the sun goes down to have a ‘nobbler’, local parlance for a drink of spirits – you with a black eye and me with a swollen lip – and forget all about it. (Say, care for a nobbler of ‘blow my skull off’ from the sly grog seller? A mixture of ‘cocculus indicus, spirits of wine, Turkey opium, cayenne pepper and rum, diluted with five times the quantity of water’, it sells for 2 shillings and sixpence a glass. A couple of those and you’ll forget the black eye, I promise!)

Whatever happens, though, make sure you don’t get in the ring with one of the ‘New Zealand Aborigines’. Huge Maori men with olive skin, they are heavily covered with tattoos, even over their faces, and most of them would sooner a fight than a feed. And when they do fight, they’re not too keen on any of these London Prize Ring Rules either, none of this stuff about just using your fists – they come at you with everything they can get their hands on, including picks and shovels. They’re fair-minded and don’t try to steal others’ claims, but God help you if you try to steal theirs.

One who certainly agrees with this estimation is William Craig, who has also now arrived on the diggings. His later recorded views of the New Zealand Aborigines would be clear, for they have, he says, no ‘conception of the legal aspect of the question; possession with them was nine points of the law; so when the rowdy
pakehas
attempted to peg them off, they resorted to hostilities, and their savage instincts being roused by the sight of blood, they chased the “pugs” off the field with what offensive weapons could be laid hold of. The general impression at that time was that all Maoris were cannibals . . . However that may be, the New Zealanders were allowed undisputed possession of the ground.’

But then back to the digging. Always back to the digging. As we do so, our chief hope is to find that we are ‘on the lead’ – that is, that we ‘bottom out’ right on the remains of the ancient creek bed, the ‘gutter’, where large nuggets of alluvial gold are to be found in such abundance we call it a ‘jeweller’s shop’. If we’re ‘off the lead’, though, there’ll probably be just about nothing there and our hole will be called a ‘shicer’, from the vulgar German word
Scheisse
,
which is the same as our vulgar word sh- well, never mind. There are ladies present.

Each time we hear the cry of ‘RUSH HO!’ our ears prick up, for that is the call that a new lot of jeweller’s shops has been found in a particular area and plenty of us diggers abandon the claims we’re on and rush to the new one. Yes, a lot of luck is involved, and there will be many who miss out, but against that there is many a digger who, as Ellen Clacy would note, says he would ‘rather spend his last farthing digging fifty holes, even if he found nothing in them, than “tamely” earn an ounce a day by washing the surface soil; on the same principle, I suppose, that a gambler would throw up a small but certain income to be earned by his own industry, for the uncertain profits of the cue or dice.’

But remember: whatever happens, we all stick together.

Your ‘mates’ – those who are working your claim with you – are probably good blokes too, as are my mates, and as a matter of fact there are so many mates in these parts that we may as well all be mates together and even address each other as ‘mate’.

We know how to work, alright, even while recognising it is hard and brutal, and frequently attended by disappointment, disaster and deepening debt.

But, you know what? There is also a rough kind of prestige and a great sense of community in being a ‘digger’, a sense of belonging to an earthy fraternity that is the talk of all the colonies. Let others work for wages in the cities or on the farms, keeping regular hours, endlessly doffing their cap to their bosses, but that life is not for us. Here on the goldfields, a digger is his own boss and answers to no-one other than his ‘mates’ – the men he is specifically digging with – just as they are answerable to him.

And because there are so many like us, living just like this, there is an immediate affinity between us all from the start. As one, we have left our other places of work, even our other countries, to get here and live this life, and we understand each other. Back in the city they divide themselves up into ‘Emancipists’, ‘Natives’ and ‘Emigrants’, but not here. Here we are all just ‘diggers’; we are all ‘mates’. Strike it rich or not, we understand each other and broadly like each other. A lot.

One thing that unites us is that we have common enemies: the ‘Toorac spiders’, the government officials who no doubt spend all day engaged in ‘yabber yabber’, useless talk, and wouldn’t know a real day’s work if it bit them on the bum.

Raffaello Carboni’s own education in these troublesome matters takes a large leap forward on a particular morning in late January, when he is hard at work on his claim and suddenly hears some movement in the nearby bush, followed shortly thereafter by wild barking from his dog, Bonaparte. A few seconds later, a shadow falls upon him, much as a shadow falls on his soul once he sees who it is.

It is a ‘trap’, a big brute of a man in his blue uniform, with the hardened face of a ruffian, all of six foot and armed with a rifle at the end of which a bayonet is clearly capable of making any cruel point that it so desires.

‘What’s up?’ asks the Italian.

‘Your license, mate,’ replies the trap in a manner that brooks no argument. There is an arrogance about him, an insolence, a manner of demand that is so overbearing that, even though the Italian does in fact have the required license and is able to retrieve it and show it to the trap’s rough satisfaction, he is not able to do another lick of work. For he is deeply troubled.

Has he really journeyed 16,000 miles to the other side of the world to get away from the iniquitous ‘law of the sword’ only to find it here, too?

Will he really have to suffer the ongoing indignity of bowing and scraping to men such as this? For the truth of it is, it is not just this man, but practically every man in authority on the goldfields that troubles him.

This country really is, it is clear now, a penal settlement populated by a huge proportion of criminals where the ruling triumvirate – at least here on the goldfields – consists of ‘inveterate murderers, audacious burglars and bloodthirsty bushrangers’. Far from finding Nirvana, as he had hoped, Carboni is in this bullock drivers’ land at the mercy of uniformed thugs with guns.

Late January 1853, fare thee well, from the shores of Victoria

The forlorn figure standing high in the lighthouse at Shortlands Bluff, Queenscliff, just inside Port Phillip Bay, straining his eyes for more than an hour as he stares after a disappearing ship, is most particular. For it is, in fact, none other than His Excellency Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe, and the ship he is staring at is bearing his wife and three young children back to Europe.

A devoted husband and father, he has been on ship with them for all of the previous week, ensuring that they are comfortable and settled in, and then accompanied them all the way to the heads as they started off, before he had had to say an all-too-hurried goodbye before jumping into a government vessel that has accompanied the ship for the purpose.

That vessel has dropped him on the shore so he can better watch their ship gradually recede, grieving at his separation from his family and particularly his still ailing wife, even as he prays to ‘our merciful Father, with full confidence that He will be with them, & watch over them by day & night; & in His own good time bring them to their desired Haven’.

Finally satisfied that they are on their way, and that he can no longer see a speck of them on the far horizon, he re-embarks and heads back to Melbourne to what he describes in a letter to his daughter Agnes that night as, ‘Poor deserted Jolimont! And all there so reminds me at each step of Mamma & the children – that I could almost begin to avoid the sight of it. However I have so much to do, & such weighty duties on my hands, that I have no time to sit & mope & grieve’.

31 January 1853, Ballarat diggings, a breakthrough at Canadian Gully

What will the diggings bring this day? No-one ever knows. All they can do is keep going the best they can and hope that down there in the hole Lady Luck will guide their picks as they work away in the near stygian darkness. On this particular late afternoon, four Englishmen – cousins Daniel and Jack Evans, John Lees and William Green – are working away on a difficult hole they’ve established at Canadian Gully, East Ballarat. Only 20 feet down they met the water table, but, nonetheless, sensing that Lady Luck might come with them if they go deeper, they procured timber to case the shaft, put clay and bark in the cracks, bucketed out the water and kept going. On this day, they are at 66 feet when they hit bedrock, and so start a horizontal shaft of some 30 inches high for 36 inches wide. The Evans boys go on rotation digging, while the other two cart away the dirt. When Daniel finds some handsome nuggets, he is thrilled and climbs to the surface to boast to the others.

‘This is the way to get gold,’ he tells Jack. ‘You don’t know how to get it.’

We’ll see about that. At 5 pm Jack climbs back down to take his turn. Only a short time later, those up above hear a strange commotion. Cave-in?
Catastrophe
?

No, wait. Laughing. Jack is laughing! And calling out his cousin’s name, ‘Daniel! Daniel! Daniel!’

Daniel looks down to see his cousin looking up at him, but Jack can hardly speak.

‘What is it, Jack?’ Daniel repeats.

‘I’ve found it!’ says Jack. ‘And it’s a big’un.’

‘Softly, for God’s sake, keep quiet,’ Daniel hisses back, terrified that if other miners hear, there will be a stampede to their hole.

‘How big is it?’

‘Three or four hundred weight,’ Jack replies before laughing again, a gurgling eruption of joy he simply cannot control.

And this time it is Daniel who can barely speak, and nor can his two companions. And yet, Jack is not far off!

It is only with extraordinary effort that the four of them are able to haul the nugget to the surface. The Frenchman, Antoine Fauchery, is there and records that the man who has found the nugget, which looks like a leg of mutton, is ‘speaking very softly, like a man who had just committed a crime’.

Putting the nugget in a bag, they sling it between a pole and then, with great difficulty manage to get it back to their tent while they decide what to do. Eventually, they get a policeman to come to escort themselves and the nugget back to the government station, where it is weighed.

It comes in at a mighty 134 pounds 8 ounces, meaning the ‘Canadian Nugget’, as it will become known, is worth –
dot three, carry one, subtract two
– nearly £9000. And that’s these Victoria diggings for you. In California they measure their gold by ounces – here, we do it by the
pound
.
No Americans have even heard of such a nugget ever being discovered in their own country.

Immediately taking the goldfield Commissioner’s advice, the four lucky souls head off to Melbourne and, together with their sizeable booty, set sail for ye merry old England, very rich men indeed.

Behind them, they leave the goldfields transformed – their find has changed the whole way of thinking. In May of the previous year, it had been first discovered that gold could be found by digging shafts rather than mere surface holes, but now it is obvious that the treasures to be found deeper and deeper still are extraordinary.

To this point, it had been felt that the hard, rocky crust struck generally 50 feet down was the true bottom, beyond which there was no point in trying to go further. The sailors, however, have chanced on the truth: that is a false bottom. The true jeweller’s shop is just as likely to lie beneath. The aim is to try to get to the ancient creek bed that lies far below, and these men have helped to show their compatriots the way.

On the instant, there is as great a rush to start once more in previously abandoned diggings as there is for those who have drifted away from Ballarat to get back there immediately. It becomes a gold rush within the gold rush, with the returnees joining those who are now rushing to the gold city to beat them all for the first time – many of them to sink shafts as deep as 150 feet.

But how to get down that deep, and overcome the fact that you are nearly always digging well below the water-table and have to frequently dig through entirely unstable mud?

The first thing is to work with a lot of mates. Instead of working solo or with one or two others on a round hole dug in an eight by eight foot square, when working in a co-operative of up to 12 men, that shaft could expand to 24 by 24 feet. And no more circles . . . We’re talking square shafts, usually just big enough to get a man with a leather or wooden bucket down comfortably.