Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (30 page)

With the collective of many mates on high, some would haul up buckets of dirt and rock as the others dig deeper, carting the tailings away by wheelbarrow – sometimes known as an ‘Irish baby buggy’ – or in sacks, to where the cradle is set up by the creek, just in case any gold has been missed. And here is the key. To prevent the walls of the shaft from caving in as you get below the water-table, it needs to be reinforced with split slabs of eucalyptus timber to hold back the mud – sometimes with sheets of bark laid perpendicularly against the slabs – as well as the gaps being packed with thick clay. Even then the water at the bottom of the shaft must be removed by pulling up endless buckets, though there is talk that some fellows on the Gravel Pits have started using a very noisy engine to pump it out.

When the diggers do get this deep, the danger is that water from an adjoining shaft will burst in so one precaution is that – together with the rope from the windlass on the surface used to haul up buckets of mud, clay, rock and
gold
– there is always another rope dangling ‘so that on any sudden emergency the man below may climb a distance up until there is time to lower the rope from the windlass’. Another problem at these depths is the foul and dangerous air, and a system of ventilation needs to be set up using calico sails on the surface to catch the wind and send it down below.

And, of course, the deeper the shafts go the bigger and tighter the population becomes – Ballarat will boast 19,000 residents by the end of the year – both in terms of physical proximity to each other and in the bonds of their mateship. And with the deep digging, since it can take as long as six months for diggers to work out if they have struck paydirt, the population also becomes more stable. By year’s end, Ballarat will boast 19,000 residents.

‘No diggings that I have seen,’ William Howitt would record, ‘and I have seen all of any importance – lie so compact as those of Ballarat.’

But as ever, the skill in deep digging lies in picking just which way those creek beds far below twist and turn as the diggers try to ‘follow the lead’, no matter how deep it goes.

And if it all gets too hard? Too bad. You must keep going. Once we get down deep, all of us diggers are depending on each other. If your shaft, just next to our shaft, fills with water, then ours risks doing so, too, through seepage or even wall collapse. We are all bound together. You may not be my mate on my particular shaft, but you are still my mate on these diggings. (And even the shopkeepers are mates, as many of them agree to provide the supplies we need to keep going for as long as six months, on the proviso they get a share of the proceeds. And, of course, to write down and administer such agreements come a slew of serious lawyers, not to mention medicos to tend to this increasingly sophisticated township.)

Soon enough, the more experienced of the diggers know roughly-as-gutsly what to expect as they get ever lower: After the relatively easy shovel digging through the rich, black surface soil, they come to the harder red clay about nine feet down, and this stratum can be up to 50 feet deep until they hit a flinty hard crust that is neither dirt nor rock, but so close to the latter you can barely tell the difference. This stratum is known to the diggers as ‘burnt stuff’, and is on the one hand hated because it quickly blunts the points of the pick that the blacksmith will soon charge another two shillings and sixpence to sharpen . . . but, on the other hand, looked forward to, because it means that easy digging is ahead. For after that comes a thin stratum, the yellow and blue clay of the men’s most vivid dreams.

It is here,
here
,
dear friends, once down to the level of the ancient creek bed, that our golden dreams are to be found, sometimes in small particles, sometimes in large nuggets and sometimes in smaller nuggets gathered together like bunches of grapes. If that is the case, what joy is ours! What riches are now in our possession!

And there is still more to come as, at this level, we expand our small shaft out into a large chamber – the size we have been allotted on the surface – which requires a great deal more slabs and technical ingenuity to hold back the mud. Then we can gather the gold, the gold, and still more gold.

And what was that line in the Reverend Dr John Dunmore Lang’s
Australian Emigrant’s Manual
,
again? Ah, yes, here it is: Are we not told in the word of God that
the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof? The silver and the gold
it contains are
His
,
for
He made it
,
that is the earth, and deposited these precious metals in it, as in a bank deposit, thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years ago that they be searched for and found, and drawn forth, and turned to account by intelligent, enterprising and energetic men.’

Well, we have now accessed God’s account, Heaven is ours, and what a life we can now lead! For the wise, it will be a wonderful life for many years to come. For the foolhardy, just a few weeks in Melbourne, but it is all equally exciting.

Failing to find gold, however, all the diggers can do is to keep digging until they hit solid rock, meaning they have ‘bottomed out’ and are without luck. Whichever way the ancient creek ran, it did not gurgle here. It is time to move on, to try to follow the lead of the creek elsewhere. If only that ancient brook had gone straighter it would have been easier to predict, but at least as it is, it means that even late arrivals have a chance of striking it lucky.

All up, deep-shaft mining is gut-wrenching, dangerous work, taking an average of six months to reach paydirt – if it is there at all – and fatalities from collapsing mines are as frequent as the rewards are stupendous.

But what is clear, as Carboni expresses it, is that Canadian Gully is ‘as rich in lumps as other goldfields are in dust. Diggers, whom the gold fever had rendered stark blind, so as to desert Ballarat for Mount Alexander and Bendigo, now returned as ravens to the old spot; and towards the end of February, ‘53, Canadian Gully was in its full glory’.

And of course –
of course
! –
where there are diggers there are troopers not far behind, always in pursuit.

As described by Carboni, ‘The troopers were despatched like bloodhounds, in all directions, to beat the bush; and the traps who had a more confined scent, creeped and crawled among the holes, and sneaked into the sly-grog tents round about, in search of the swarming unlicensed game. In a word, it was a regular hunt. Anyone who in Old England went fox-hunting, can understand pretty well, the detestable sport we had then on the goldfields of Victoria.’

And look here, there is no point in saying you have bought your license, but you just don’t have it on you.
It must be on you at all times
.

Of course this is a real problem if you have the paper license in your pants when you’re engaged in often muddy mining, at the bottom of wet shafts or knee deep in the creek, but that is not our problem. It is the
law
, so show us your license or face the consequences. Those consequences are severe and include first being chained to trees and logs like wild dogs before you’re marched off to the Camp lock-up – a very rough wooden cell somehow as capable of keeping the prisoners in as it is incapable of keeping the weather out – where the only way free is to pay the license fee, plus a fine.

What do you do, thus, when the cries of ‘Joe!’ go up, when you don’t have your license on you?

Run,
Ron! Like rabbits who have caught the scent of a fox in the wind, diggers disappear down their holes as if they are burrows, and then often head off into the labyrinthine tunnels that lie beneath. It is a brave trooper indeed who will venture down there, and for the most part diggers can safely remain underground until the ‘All clear!’ is sounded by their licensed mates above.

Even then, however, the troopers have their ruses to effectively smoke their prey out. On one occasion, they dress a couple of troopers as dirty diggers and then have them put on a blue in a dispute over a claim. Of course, the inevitable cry goes up, ‘A ring! A ring!’, bringing real diggers from far and wide, including up from their holes. Then, just as the two ‘diggers’ are shaping up to strike their first blows, suddenly the traps with fixed bayonets appear on all sides, backed by troopers on horseback.

‘Present your licenses!’

As if the traps had cast a fishing net where the shoal is at its thickest, on this occasion no fewer than 60 diggers without licenses are handcuffed to each other like common criminals and marched off to the lock-up, cursing all the while.

It is all so appallingly unfair. Nearly all new arrivals have a starting point of very little or no capital at all, having spent everything on the materials to do the digging, their passage to the goldfields and then food and housing when they are there. That means, after scraping together the money to pay the initial license, they are dependent thereafter on finding enough gold to afford the next month’s instalment. Those who can’t have no choice but to try to proceed without a license, with many ending up in a cell for their trouble – not for being criminal, but for being merely
unlucky
.
It is an infamy!

And where does the license money of those who do manage to pay go? Certainly not towards providing any government facilities, schools or hospitals on the goldfields, for of these there is nothing – with the exception of the large Government Camp that houses their oppressors. No, it goes back to Melbourne, most of it, and pays the wages of the administration that is running this whole iniquitous system. Now, in another place, at another time, perhaps the people could mount a political action to change that system, but here, now, the diggers do not have the vote, and, apart from John Pascoe Fawkner, there is no consistent voice raised on their behalf in the Legislative Council.

The Americans, of course, fought their War of Independence on precisely this issue – ‘no taxation without representation’ – and there are enough Americans on the goldfields conversant with the idea, not to mention British and Irish Chartists, that organised anger at this situation begins to bubble and spread.

In the meantime, however, the hunts go on, day after day, week after week, on and on and on.

On one occasion a digger by the name of Robert Serjeant returns with his mate to their hut to find the whole gully surrounded by troopers on a license-hunt. Serjeant and his mate are not worried for themselves as they both have their papers, but what about their other mate, the always unlicensed Joe – and for once, that is his real name – who they have left back at the hut?

Aghast, they look to their hut where they can see smoke curling from the chimney into the chilly air. The door – an old flour sack stretched across a frame of wattle saplings – is wide open, and two Joes are heading towards their Joe!

Hurrying forward to see if they can help, or talk the Joes out of it, they are just yards away from the entrance when the two troopers suddenly reel back from the open doorway.

To Serjeant’s stunned amazement, and the troopers’ great surprise, they have been confronted by a rather bulky but certainly smart-looking female, who asks them their business. Before they can even reply, however, she looks over their shoulders to see Serjeant and says, ‘Perhaps my brother can answer your enquiries, gentlemen!’

The Joes, however, have completely lost interest, beg the lady’s pardon and quickly head off. Clearly no lady such as this would ever be harbouring men without licenses.

It is only when the troopers are safely out of earshot that Serjeant’s newly found ‘sister’ allows herself to throw up her heels and cut ‘most unladylike capers round the dining table’, as Serjeant would later describe it.

What a lark! For the sister is, of course, Joe himself. Chortling all the while, he tells his mates he never has taken out a license, never will take out a license, and from this moment forth he is not to be addressed as Joe, but by his new name . . . Josephine!

8 February 1853, Sofala, the Turon, New South Wales, coming to the ‘pinch’ . . .

The diggers in New South Wales are not happy. By now most of them are concentrated around the Turon River, first prospected with minimal success by John Lister and James Tom two years earlier, and in certain places blessed with rich pickings.

On this fine, hot morning, though, no fewer than 1000 of the diggers head off on ‘shank’s nag’ – digger parlance for walking – to cover the five miles into the township of Sofala, where they intend to make their views known about the
Goldfields Management Act of 1853
,
which has been championed by the hero of the squatters, William Charles Wentworth. The central thrust of the Act is that henceforth the diggers’ license fee is not only doubled on aliens – defined as any non-British foreigners – to 60 shillings, but it would also apply to all people on the goldfields over the age of fourteen,
whether engaged in mining or not
– of course, ‘except in connection with pastoral or agricultural pursuits’, whose practicants get off scot-free.

The diggers know precisely what that is about. Wentworth, on behalf of the squatters, is trying to make things ever more difficult for those on the goldfields and force them back to work on the squatters’ properties. As a matter of fact, in the diggers’ view, this is what the whole license fee has been about from the beginning.

And the diggers on the Turon River have had a gutful of it. Pausing only, as recorded by
The Sydney Morning Herald
journalist on the spot, to ‘[break] the cradles of those who had taken out licenses and were working,’ they continue streaming towards the meeting place. Among them are some thinly scattered Aboriginal miners, who have a strong history of protesting against the license fee. A few months earlier, one miner had overheard an Aboriginal miner ‘chaffing a sergeant of the mounted police . . . asking him what business had he or any other white fellow to come and take
his
land, and rob him of
his
gold? What would [the sergeant] say, if a black fellow went to England and “turn ‘em Queen out”?’ This was very much in the vein of a group of Aboriginal diggers the year before who, when asked to show their licenses at Forrest Creek, replied to the mounted police that ‘the gold and land [are ours] by right so why should [we] pay money to the Queen?’