Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (31 page)

Another digger, James Bonwick, had met a party of natives at Bullock Creek, ‘well clothed, with a good supply of food, new cooking utensils and money in their pockets. One remarked with a becoming expression of dignity “me no poor blackfellow now, me plenty rich blackfellow”.’

Sadly, however, the rich blackfellows remain a rarity and, on this day, it is mostly fairly poor whitefellows on the march. Astute observers note that many of them have bulky, odd shapes showing up beneath their shirts at belt level – obviously guns – and their broad view is expressed in a large sign painted on canvas that adorns the podium in Sofala, where they now assemble:

AUSTRALIA EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN THIS DAY WILL DO HIS DUTY.’

And that duty is to fight, to protest, to make themselves heard! The best way to do that, in the view of the Chair of the meeting, a Mr Maxwell, is to not pay the license fee – a view that is all but unanimously acclaimed, with speaker after speaker lining up to agree.

At first the idea is for all the men to march on the Commissioner at his headquarters and
tell
him they will no longer pay their license fees, but when it is decided that this is too provocative, the meeting agrees to send just four men instead, as a delegation.

When those four men take their leave to do exactly that, crossing the Turon River to present themselves, the situation becomes rather odd. Once they advise the Commissioner and his police of their intent, they are treated with great courtesy.

‘Do you have licenses?’

‘No.’

‘Do you intend taking licenses?’

‘No, not while this law remains in force.’

‘Very well, we are sorry you have involved us in the disagreeable necessity of taking you, but other than to do our duty we have no alternative!’

And the four are indeed arrested.

Apprised of this news, the masses on the other side of the river react savagely.

‘To the rescue!’ comes the cry. Some diggers take out their pistols, while others wildly flourish clubs, and all set off to do exactly that when the local Wesleyan minister, the Very Reverend Mr Piddington, rushes to the platform and implores the mob to at least wait a while, stay their anger and see if there might be a peaceful solution.

Sure enough, a second delegation of miners is soon advised that the first delegation will be released upon paying a fine of £1 each, which they do. Further, the Commissioner politely informs them that there will be no more pursuits for license fees until further instructions are received from Sydney, and a universal bonhomie replaces the anger. ‘At parting they gave the Commissioners three cheers, and the latter acknowledged the salutes.’

As the satisfied diggers return to their huts and tents, a happy calm descends on the Turon River goldfields once more. Violent disaster has been averted by wise counsel, a decent Commissioner and goodwill on all sides.

The correspondent for the
Empire
is among those impressed, noting the great forbearance of the officials from making a difficult situation worse. ‘They have, I say, done their duty, and to their coolness, firmness and prudence, must be attributed the shedding of no blood, this day, upon the Turon.’

He is under no illusion, however, as to who is to blame for what could have been a catastrophic situation. For it is neither the diggers, nor the Commissioners and their men, ‘but evil be to them who have framed laws to bring friends into deadly collision’.

May 1853, Ballarat continues to grow

Ballarat is not only growing wider as ever more people flood in and dig deeper, but it is also growing up. By now the streets that the government surveyor, Mr Urquhart, had first drawn on a piece of paper only eighteen months earlier are actually taking shape. Though habitations of canvas still predominate, here and there they are giving way to stone and wood as more and more diggers – particularly those with a missus and kids – are choosing to live in solid constructions.

You can often tell where the Americans are living because they tend to build log cabins and display their curious flag of stars and stripes, while the English and most other Europeans favour habitations composed of bullock hides and sheep skins nailed to vertical slabs of wood for walls under tin roofs. As to the Irish . . . well, the only symmetry to their huts is that individually they tend to have no symmetry at all. As described by William Howitt, ‘They seem to be tossed up, rather than built.’

And, of course, now that the town is more established, some of the new constructions are businesses, like banks and stores.

In a community with as much sudden wealth as Ballarat, there prove to be many ways of making money that do not involve digging for gold. Selling supplies to the diggers, for example, can reap enormous profits for a canny operator. Many of the stores springing up in town are as extraordinary for the diversity of their contents as for their expense. Inside the doors are to be found everything from sugar-candy to potted anchovies; from East India pickles to Bass’s pale ale; from ankle jackboots to a pair of stays; from a baby’s cap to a cradle; and every apparatus for mining, from a pick to a needle . . . Here lies a pair of herrings dripping into a bag of sugar, or a box of raisins; there a gay-looking bundle of ribbons beneath two tumblers, and a half-finished bottle of ale. Cheese and butter, bread and yellow soap, pork and currants, saddles and frocks, wide-awakes and blue serge shirts, green veils and shovels, baby linen and tallow candles, are all heaped indiscriminately together.

One can pay for this with pounds, but the shopkeepers’ preference, of course, is for the currency of all of their dreams: gold. And yet in these exchanges, as the veteran diggers know, they must be more than careful. As elucidated by Ellen Clacy, who has spent many months on the goldfields by this time, there are many ruses. One is to weigh the gold in separate lots, on the reckoning that scales could not cope with the whole, and then, in the quick calculations adding it all up, make a mistake in the shopkeeper’s favour. Another method is to fix the scales themselves so they always weigh light, and still another is to have the gold dust weighed in a zinc pan with slightly raised sides. Clacy is one who notes that these pans are then ‘well rubbed over with grease; and under the plea of a careful examination, the purchaser shakes and rubs the dust, and a considerable quantity adheres to the sides. A commoner practice still is for examiners of gold-dust to cultivate long finger-nails, and, in drawing the fingers about it, gather some up.’

But perhaps the surest way of making money is to sell the thing that nearly all the diggers want: alcohol.

For at this very time, in this month of May, 1853, a further sign that Ballarat is no longer the remote outpost it once was is the first hotel going up, on Lydiard Street, courtesy of one of the first diggers to Golden Point, Thomas Bath, who has now decided to become a publican. Real walls of flat wooden planks! A real iron roof! A real bar! Its own
clock-tower
!

And they say that within a month it will actually be licensed, making it the only hotel between Buninyong and Lexton. As a legal drinking establishment, Bath’s Hotel will be something that Ballarat has not seen to this point – though there has never been any lack of sly grog tents – and there is a great deal of excitement as it takes form. Soon enough, the word will spread that there are more hotels coming, that former convict James Bentley, the big Vandemonian, is actually – if you can believe it – wanting to build his own hotel over on the Eureka.

The only people desperately
unhappy
about the advent of hotels are the sly-grog sellers, who have been making a fortune over the last couple of years, all but entirely untroubled by the Joes, many of whom are happy to take bribes to let those grog sellers ply their trade. (At £50 for a first offence of selling sly grog, it had been a wonderful windfall for the constables taking half the fine, though as the second offence brought six months hard labour and no fine, it had meant that the usual practice was for the constables just to take an ongoing £5 a pop to simply continue looking the other way week after week. Police Sergeant Major Robert Milne is particularly notorious for this and other corrupt practices, not to mention his high-handed haughtiness and lowdown ways.) While that grog is harmlessly enjoyed by many – if you’ve found a nugget on the day, it helps you to celebrate; if you’ve found nothing, it helps you to forget – there are others for whom it is more problematic . . .

For while there are those who are immeasurably enriched by the diggings, there are those destroyed on the diggings . . . and there are those hit by both fates. By this time William Craig is well established on the diggings, and things for him and his mates are going moderately well – apart from having been robbed the week before – without yet having struck the jeweller’s shop that would allow them all to retire. All they can do is keep going, and on this June day in 1853, 20 miles north-east of Ballarat, Craig is interested when three new arrivals announce themselves as deserting sailors from a ship at Port Phillip. Craig likes the cut of their jib and finds them friendly, well behaved and so hard-working that soon enough the creek they are digging becomes known as ‘Sailors Creek’ on the strength of it.

Before long they are on paying ground and earning well. The fellow that Craig notices most is one George Brentford, who had been an officer on the ship and carried himself as such. Though without arrogance, Brentford is clearly just a cut above – well spoken, of sunny disposition, quick to laugh and make friends with all around. All is going well and the three sailors are soon on their way to a small fortune when . . . one of the Bullarook sly grog carts arrives.

The sailors are doing so well by now that they buy a case of liquor with the wonderful label upon it, claiming it to be ‘Martell’s Pure Cognac’. Whether or not Mr Martell has had anything to do with its production is uncertain, but what is sure is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with cognac, for instead of a sparkling and transparent copper colour, this is a fiery red. And yet it is alcohol and Brentford helps himself to some more. And some more and some more . . . to the point that he can no longer speak, let alone stand. This is not an uncommon occurrence on the goldfields, as diggers who are doing well frequently go on benders. The difference on this occasion is that when Brentford wakes from his drunken slumber, his first desire is for still more drink. He soon insists on his fair share of the case, which by this time is calculated at three bottles, and he quickly starts imbibing. Gone now is his happy nature, replaced by a surly presence who is interested only in drinking more. And so he does.

The more his companions on the diggings try to sober him up over the next few days, the more he drinks. True, twice he tries himself to stay away from the grog, but just as soon returns to it – the more so when the grog cart returns. As later recounted by William Craig, ‘after consuming some half-dozen bottles of the liquor he appeared to have lost every human instinct beyond the knowledge that he had a mouth and a stomach.’

All his mates can do is leave him in the tent while they get on with working their claim, a little under half a mile away, and it is on emerging from this claim one morning that they look back to see smoke coming from where their tent is situated. They race back with other diggers to find that in his drunken insanity George Brentford has ignited the dry kangaroo grass that abounds in these parts and – all but nude – then walked through the flames! They can see him burning within the tent, smell his flesh, hear his screams, but they just cannot get to him until the flames have diminished. ‘What was only a week previously a perfect specimen of manhood,’ Craig would report, ‘had become a spectacle divested of human semblance.’ And that, dear friends, was the end of George Brentford.

Another case in point comes to Craig’s notice while he is visiting Bendigo.

Heading down the main thoroughfare one day, he looks up to see a wild-eyed man divested of most of his clothing and on a horse, galloping towards him at full pace. It is a miracle that he does not fall down one of the many holes that there abound, but somehow he manages and Craig thinks no more about it until that evening when, passing the same way, he sees the man’s dead body in the back of a cart with a crowd of miners all around.

Turns out that, not long after passing Craig, both the horse and the rider had a’tumbled, a’tumbled, a’tumbled down a very deep shaft and been killed on impact. So just what had possessed the rider to take such risks? A temporary bout of insanity it seems. And what has brought this on?

Therein lies the story. Just two days earlier – working as a ‘hatter’, which is to say on his own, the young Englishman who had arrived in the colonies a few months earlier had discovered a 27-pound nugget! Somehow, by hook or by crook, by heaving and straining, he had managed to get the nugget to the surface and, once gazing upon it, his mind had become unhinged. He talked to it, shouted at it, embraced it. He loved it to the point of such distraction that it soon became apparent to other kindly diggers that he and the nugget had to be taken in hand to the Government Camp, where they had ensured that both were safely looked after.

‘Reason,’ Craig recounted, ‘was to some extent restored when he realised that his treasure was in safe keeping; but later on he was induced to visit a sly-grog shanty, and was there plied with drink – burning, adulterated drink – and became the maniac I had seen in the morning.’

It is, of course, a very sad case, and while the goldfield authorities do the best they can to get to the bottom of what happened, so as to try to prevent it happening again, the truth is that there are far too many sly-grog sellers and diggers, and far too few officials on the ground to really have much effect on the welfare of those who fall by the wayside.

One official who manages to stand out at this time, however, for his generally efficient manner and proficiency is none other than the one-time ‘little doctor’ of the Bendigo diggings, Robert William Rede, who in October of ‘52 had thrown down his tools and taken up a roving commission on the staff of Mr. J. A. Panton, the Resident Commissioner on Bendigo, as Assistant-Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Gold District. The position sees Rede constantly shift camp according to the ebb and flow of the goldfields to the east and north of Bendigo.