Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (32 page)

Late May 1853, the Ovens goldfields, 230 miles north-east of Ballarat, the word spreads

Roll up! Roll up! For Row’s Circus is in town. Of the many circuses that circulate around the towns and goldfields, allowing the diggers and sometimes their families respite from the endless tedium of their tough lives, this particular circus has a great attraction. Yes, it has a horse trained to lie on its back and ‘flourish his heels in the air’. What is more, though his shoes are of gilded iron, to the audience it looks like they are forged of gold, and the word soon spreads uphill, down dale and even further along the diggings. Have you heard? A horse with shoes of gold! At a local election, the owner of the circus rents out the horse so that it can lead the procession that takes the candidate to the polls, and as thousands pour into the streets to see those marvellous shoes glinting in the sunlight, the word spreads still further! A gold-shod horse! ‘Shoes of gold at the Ovens!’ run the headlines. There is something so pleasing about the yarn that it travels on to Melbourne, Sydney, London and beyond! It is nonsense, of course, but it is too good a tale not to repeat, and in short order crowds of diggers head to the Ovens. Just as people in far off countries eschew their visions of finding a land of milk and honey – no, they want to go to a place where the horses are shod with gold!

1 June 1853, at ‘The Chalet’, it’s about the Americans . . .

It has been a very grim, very lonely few months for Charles La Trobe since his family left. In their absence, his time has been spent doing two principal things: waiting for news that his resignation has not only been accepted but that a suitable replacement has been found; and engaging in the endless business of running the colony. On this evening he addresses himself to writing to the Duke of Newcastle – the new Secretary of State – to keep his superior up to date. Though there have been no more recent large-scale protest meetings, which is a relief, there is no doubt that the problems with the licensing system, the question of its adequate policing and general unrest have not disappeared.

One issue that he is particularly concerned about is the Americans and the danger they might present, as republicans, to the security of the colony remaining a part of Her Majesty’s domain.

For this fear is not just in Victoria itself. In Washington, before long, the British Ambassador to the US would be frank in an official report to his masters at the Colonial Office: ‘There can be no doubt that a revolution in Australia by which its connections with Great Britain should be severed would be an event highly acceptable to the great mass of the American people.’

La Trobe does not see it quite like that.

While acknowledging that ‘some danger might be apprehended’ from the Americans, his strong view is that they are not the primary danger.

No, the real problem in these parts is the newspapers, most particularly
The Argus
,
which is committed to promoting ‘the idea of a substitution of republican institutions for the present monarchical form of Government’.

What makes this doubly dangerous is that
The Argus
is so cheap to purchase, at just threepence, that it means even a ‘day labourer’ can buy a copy. Worse still, as it is ‘diligently and widely distributed through agencies established at the several goldfields’, those ideas are in danger of spreading. And it really is a danger that must be watched very carefully indeed. ‘I would neither deceive myself or others,’ La Trobe writes, ‘as to the power which republican and democratic tendencies . . . possess when fairly roused and found to be supported by the masses within, and by sympathy if not by actual aid from without’.

Yes, it is not the Americans that worry him, but those people who most support
The Argus
,
the ‘chartists, socialists, and others . . . who have recently come amongst us, [all of them influenced by] the growing sense of importance and independence arising from unexampled prosperity, emancipation from old ties and obligations, and powers of self-support, and self-government, which should not influence the multitude’.

All up, heading into this southern winter, La Trobe feels a growing foreboding, and he is more glad than ever that he has tendered his resignation and should be heading home before another year has passed. The only thing he is looking forward to now, more than news that his family has arrived safely in Europe, is news that his replacement, whoever he is, has been selected and is on his way . . .

CHAPTER SIX

TROUBLE BREWS

Hardly a man is to be found contented to remain where he
is . .
. You hear endless stories of ladies who have been used to large establishments and giving parties, now obliged to give up all thoughts of appearance, and open the doors even themselves . . . No servants are to be had, and many of the best and pleasant families [are] literally driven out of the country by it . . . Almost all the best families there . . . are going home to England, and taking this opportunity of getting out of the country; most of them hoping to return when things have returned into something like better order.

Charlotte Godley, wife of John Robert Godley, the founder of Christchurch,
New Zealand, was most unimpressed when she arrived in Sydney in 1853 to discover the only available domestic servant was the ‘unsuccessful digger, whose health has suffered, or who has no luck at all’.

It was a digger’s life. Hard work by day, blazing fire in the evening, and sound sleep by night at the music of drunken quarrels all around, far and near.

Raffaello Carboni

Although our property has nearly doubled in value since the discovery of gold, I would myself rather have back the olden times when labour was plentiful and everything went on regularly and steady. We were then at least tranquil and easy in our minds, whereas we are now nearly worried to death with cares for the present and anxiety for the future.

Alfred Joyce, a squatter who had a run west of Castlemaine, writing in 1853

Winter 1853, into the swing on the Victorian gold diggings

Across all the diggings of Victoria, the sun rises, the sun falls, the gold comes up from the ground and is soon on its way to Melbourne under escort, followed closely by the diggers who found it. They cannot wait to spend the proceeds – usually like mad things – and return a few weeks or months later with the glazed look in their eyes of men who have lived and loved hard and fast, and want to do some more of it, if only they can strike another vein.

Ballarat itself is continuing to grow to the point that the Government Camp now moves from a bushy outpost to a mound situated on a small rise about a mile to the west of Ballarat Flat, on the edge of the township – exactly where Government Surveyor Urquhart designated its proper position. It is bound by Camp, Sturt and Field streets, with the large gully that contains Yarrowee Creek providing the other boundary. Yes, this Camp will remain rustic in the extreme, based as it is around rough wooden barracks for the soldiers and police, some storerooms, doctor’s quarters, the officers’ mess house, the Camp hospital, the Commissioner’s residence, together with a few administrative buildings. The whole thing is enclosed by a high picket fence, with the Police Magistrates’ Court just outside. But it is at least a vast improvement on the previous tent outpost, and it also has an extremely primitive wooden cell for a lockup, which is certainly better than chaining offenders to a log, like a dog. From the point of view of those down in the gully on the wet diggings, the Camp is always up on high, removed and infuriatingly aloof.

Meanwhile, things have also consolidated to the point that by now some 15 of the 40 original land lots marked out by the surveyor and his men have been sold, mostly to businesses and shop owners. True, there remains some agitation from diggers who want to buy property outside the township, perhaps for farming and homestead purposes, but the administration of Charles La Trobe has for the most part resisted to this point. The government’s hope, however, that such agitation on this and other issues – like the license fees – will remain within manageable bounds proves misplaced.

The ongoing slew of new gold discoveries in the first half of the year in Ballarat and elsewhere caused such a daily rush of frantic diggers to newly popular hills and gullies that there was little time for organised protest – and they were all flush with cash anyway – but now the situation changes.

The autumn had been particularly dry and many of the small creeks had ceased to run, meaning that ‘in every quarter of the goldfields thousands of cartloads of the auriferous soil are seen heaped up at the edges of the workings awaiting the change of the season and the ready means of washing the ore’. With the coming of the wintry rains and the sudden availability of water, the population swells again with the creeks as thousands of men return from the cities to work the waiting heaps of soil. And yet, as most of them arrive with entirely unrealistic expectations of what they might earn, so does agitation increase for the total abolition of the gold license fee, which many of them now struggle to pay. And if the New South Wales Legislative Council is considering it, why not Victoria?

It is worth reflecting upon.

La Trobe himself describes the unifying effect of resistance to the license across the Victorian goldfields in a despatch to the Secretary of State, the grand old Duke of Newcastle: ‘It was one [subject] which touched every man’s private interest and feelings, through his pocket; it at once furnished a main thread with which all other minor subjects of discontent or agitation, or grievance, real or supposed, could be linked; and engaged the co-operation to a greater or lesser extent, of a large mass of the population of all classes, otherwise little disposed to complain and hitherto unaffected by the ordinary subjects of agitation. As usual in such cases, it brought into immediate notoriety, and to the aid of the agents, fresh force in the persons of certain individuals hitherto unheard of; but, however worthless, evidently adepts in the science of popular agitation. Public meetings were held in all quarters.’

But is any one of these ‘certain individuals’ made of the right stuff to lead the diggers in a sustained struggle for justice?

Since the monster meeting by the Old Shepherd’s Hut seven months earlier, Captain Harrison has been in Melbourne, acting as the gold diggers’ delegate and making regular appeals through the pages of
The Argus
for the diggers to contribute their promised one shilling per man, per month, so that he may continue his agitation with the authorities on their behalf – not that it is obvious exactly what he does or what progress he is making.

For, really, as one contemporary writer notes in the pages of
The Sydney Morning Herald
,
Captain Harrison was ‘forgotten the moment he left the stage’. The correspondent goes on: ‘It is surprising that, with such a cause as the gold digger boasts with his means – with the large bodies of men of one calling unanimous on many points as to their grievances – that not one man has turned up having the least pretension to the talent of a leader.’

Despite the absence of that one truly charismatic leader to galvanise the diggers, at least the agitation persists, and on this occasion it takes an oddly lyrical turn . . .

The net result of, to use La Trobe’s term, ‘co-operation’ on the diggings in Victoria is the formation of an ‘Anti-Gold License Association’, and in early June it is decided that all the diggers should sign a petition to be presented to His Excellency. But this, my friends, is not just any petition.
This
,
the Bendigo Petition, is bound with green silk, runs to over 30 feet long and bears, it is claimed, 23,000 signatures gathered from the diggers all over Bendigo, Castlemaine, Ballarat, Stawell and Forrest Creek.

Would that all of man’s angst could always turn into such a thing of physical and moral beauty as this. For the diggers not only affirm their view that ‘in the present impoverished condition of the Goldfields, the impost of Thirty Shillings a Month is more than Your Petitioners can pay’, but it also records their grievances on more temporal matters, specifically decrying ‘the Squatter Land Monopoly,’ and that ‘armed men (many of whom are of notorious bad character)’ are sent to collect the diggers’ license fees.

The diggers maintain to His Excellency that the way they are treated for non-payment – being chained to trees and logs – is ‘contrary to the spirit of the British law which does not recognise the principle of the subject being a criminal because he is indebted to the state’.

Because the current across-the-board 30 shilling license fee makes no distinction between the successful and unsuccessful digger, and, regardless, the average digger is currently only making £3 15 shillings per month, the petitioners earnestly request His Excellency to reduce it to ten shillings per month and allow 15 fee-free days to registered newcomers, as well as ceasing to send armed men to collect the fee.

In conclusion, the document reads: ‘Your petitioners would remind Your Excellency that a Petition is the only mode by which they can submit their wants to your Excellency’s consideration, as although they contribute more to the Exchequer than half the Revenue of the Colony they are the largest class of Her Majesty’s Subjects in the Colony unrepresented.’

It is with high hopes that the petition is carefully secured and sent off to the Lieutenant-Governor in Melbourne, escorted by a delegation of three diggers from Bendigo, who personally hand it to His Excellency on 1 August.

13-27 August 1853, Bendigo and surrounds