The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (18 page)

By 1 September 1853, news of fresh gold strikes at Ballarat—110 feet deep, tens of thousand of pounds worth of gold per hole—came whistling down the wire. These spectacular finds were dubbed the ‘Jewellers' Shops', so seemingly effortless was it to reach into the earth and pull out a fortune. The ensuing rush saw thousands of people suddenly throw in their jobs and head straight to Ballarat in the spring of 1853. Sparkling new evidence of Ballarat's untapped potential prompted a resurgence in intra-colonial travel to the diggings, as people ventured from South Australia and Tasmania to try their hand. George and Charles Evans left Melbourne on 11 November 1853, with John Basson Humffray in their travelling party. After an unsuccessful stint at mining on the Ovens goldfields, Charles Evans had decided that auctioneering, not digging, would be the key to future prosperity. J. B. Humffray was making his first trip to the goldfields—with no inkling, surely, that exactly a year from that date he would be at the forefront of a campaign for justice that would make the Bendigo Red Ribbon movement look like a fancy-dress party.

As for the Piersons, they too decided to go into commerce rather than industry. They planned to open a store at Ballarat, unperturbed by Thomas's recent failure at Bendigo. Frances carefully packed her camera and photographic apparatus. A daguerreotypist from Liverpool whom she had met in Melbourne assured her that her equipment was of impressive quality. And there would surely be a host of lucky diggers eager to commemorate their pristine nuggets.
Frances has some idea of her and the [Liverpudlian] Gent commencing the business
, Thomas wrote, with a hint of condescension, in his diary as they prepared to depart. What would the Worshipful Master back home at the Philadelphia Olive Lodge have thought of the idea? But Victoria was not Pennsylvania and Frances knew it.

The Piersons arrived in Ballarat on 6 December 1853. They were greeted by twenty thousand other hopeful supplicants at the altar of rampant ambition.

The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It's the same route that you would take today, without the tangle of ring roads, truck depots and tilt-slab factories. The modern-day industrial heartland takes advantage of the same topography that departing diggers appreciated: flat, open terrain, a carpet of basalt rolled out by ancient lava flows from the South Australian border to Port Phillip Bay. William Westgarth described these plains as
an ocean of grass
. Charles Evans saw it the same way:
stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean.
It was fertile ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that had sustained the region's Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.

The seventy-mile road to Ballarat—a well-worn track, really—marked the ragged course for a chaotic rush of fortune-seekers. Carts, drays, coaches and thousands of pairs of galloping hooves and plodding feet carried people and goods to the magnetic epicentre of Victoria's goldfields.
The fact is
, wrote one man in a letter home to Scotland in February 1852,
everybody, old and young, rich and poor, learned and illiterate are off to the diggings
. James Bonwick noted that the allure was physically impossible to ignore.
The Gold Fields have a most bewitching influence
, he wrote after his own visit to Ballarat in 1852,
the very name begets a spasmodic affection of the limbs, which want to be off
.
¹⁶
The road to Ballarat was akin to William Blake's ‘crooked road of prophecy', a road washed smooth by the salvation that lay at the end.
¹⁷

Thirty miles from Melbourne, in the low, fertile basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced to navigate a deep cut-out known as The Gap. This jagged landmark provided a lucrative winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king's ransom to haul out drays piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out. (Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western Highway.) Back on flat land, the road snaked through a thick stringybark forest to Ballan and from there followed a gentle incline towards the only sizable peak on the landscape, Mt Buninyong, rising to the left. Once reaching that acme of achievement, you were almost there. A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding. An average cart trip took three days (and cost £25 in dry weather—a princely sum). On foot, it was a week-long hike.

There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to Ballarat. In most of them, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road is a revelation. Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was immediately won over by
the beauty and healthiness of the country
. Mary Bristow was rendered speechless.
I cannot describe the bush
, she wrote.
It means such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks
. She found the scenery
beautiful
and the blacks
exquisitely made
. To her astonishment, Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of
Eden
. Mrs Mannington Caffyn, in her contribution to the compendium
COO-EE: TALES OF AUSTRALIAN LIFE BY AUSTRALIAN LADIES
, was also rhapsodic but observed a sting in the tail of Paradise.
Australian sunlight
, she wrote,
is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant and bumptious, and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things
. Many women who travelled the roads in summer reported sitting out the midday sun under a stand of trees, taking their lead from the old hands, not to mention the cows and sheep.
¹⁸

As early as March 1853, contemporary observers like James Bonwick were already commenting on the incontrovertible fact of the women: the diggings were attracting them like ants to honey. Bonwick wrote in his
AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER
'
S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
that in just two days he counted
one hundred and twenty ladies, going up either with or to their lords of the pick and cradle
. Bonwick called it a phenomenon, this
feminine Exodus from our townships
. He also noted that
some husbands have taken uncommon care to prepare for the coming of their better halves
by forsaking their tents for log cabins with stone chimneys, floor coverings and even an iron bedstead.
¹⁹

Some diggers were not so much tearaways as nest-featherers. Their wives accompanied them to keep families intact that would otherwise have fractured, but also in a genuine spirit of exploration. When James Watson determined to go to Ballarat, his wife Margaret, who had already survived several trials with James and their children,
decided that this was one more adventure for her
.
²⁰
Emily Skinner knew that her husband William
would not go if I objected very much, etc. but
, she reasoned,
what a much better chance we should have of getting on [together].
After thinking and talking it over a little, the couple determined that William would precede Emily, make enough money to build a comfortable tent home, then send for Emily to join him. This plan was realised surprisingly quickly.

There were hundreds of single women, too, on the road to Ballarat, some joining (or searching for) absent husbands or connecting with kin or kith from their old lives, others forging their own distinct paths in the world. Eliza Darcy, who left the employ of Mr Jeffries in October 1854, was one of them. Having seen out her pre-arranged contract, Eliza headed to Ballarat, where numerous members of her extended family had gathered. Anthony and Honora Darcy and their five children, probably Eliza's cousins, had recently arrived on the
Parsee
. Also sailing on the
Parsee
were six Dunne children, aged seventeen to twenty-three, and their mother Mary, Eliza's aunt. Other Dunnes had travelled on the
City of Manchester
with Eliza, as had several members of the Howard family. By the explosive spring of 1854, all these Darcys, Howards and Dunnes would be in Ballarat. By August 1855, Eliza would be married to Patrick Howard, a close friend of an Irish engineer named Peter Lalor who was engaged to her cousin, Geelong school teacher Alicia Dunne.

Bridget Nolan was also on the road to Ballarat. Life at the Mt Wallace station had been exciting for the Nolan siblings, with a visit from bushrangers and an old black woman coming to stay, but after eighteen months the call of the diggings could no longer be dismissed. Possibly Bridget had got word that her shipmate Patrick Hynes was in Ballarat and a reunion beckoned. Now that they had shoes, Bridget and her brother Michael walked the ten kilometres from Mt Wallace to Ballarat. She and Patrick Hynes would be married in the spring of 1854.

There is no account of how Clara Du Val or Sarah Hanmer, both single mothers of young children, made their way to Ballarat. Unlike Eliza Darcy, neither of the actresses appeared to have a network of family and friends to support them. But there were many women making the journey on their own. Emily Skinner met
two stout young women
on her journey to the Ovens.
They told me that they had many offers of a place [in Melbourne], as it was hard to get servants
, wrote Emily in her diary,
but the girls were determined to go to the diggings, where high wages and easy times awaited them
. Such was the unruly confidence of the times.

Forty-two-year-old spinster Mary Bristow was keen to go to the diggings
as a kind of bivouac
, and found three young women to accompany her. The party set off on foot almost immediately. The first night the women slept in a covered dray, but it rained in torrents.
I don't think I closed my eyes
, wrote Mary. In the morning, the women walked to a nearby brook
and completed our toilets
. Mary was relieved to note that
there is always due observance of respect
from the men in their travelling company. The first day, they walked fourteen miles, the next twenty-four miles. The women wore veils and large bonnets against the summer sun. They never ventured out in the middle of the day; it was
too dangerous to expose [ourselves] to the sun's burning rays.
But if the sun was hazardous, Mary found that the people of the road were not.
All strangers or travellers receive a welcome in this hospitable land
, she recorded: ladies could walk or ride long distances unattended and have nothing to fear.
I have never been so happy or free from care
, she wrote, calling to mind a line of Ralph Waldo Emerson's about ‘the independence of solitude'. It was on a Victorian bush track that Mary Bristow discovered the sweetness of her own company and freedom from the crowded concerns of others. How curious that Emerson, the American champion of individualism, provided the guiding light for a woman forging a path to the Victorian gold diggings, the fabled home of radical collectivism.

Mrs Elizabeth Massey also found a change in herself on the road to Ballarat. She was not so much pulled by the allure of gold as pushed by the weight of duty. Back in England Mrs Massey had been married only a few weeks when her new husband
unexpectedly called on
her to accompany him to Australia.
Disgust
, she wrote in her memoir eight years later,
indeed is not a word strong enough to express my feelings at the moment, particularly as
I had to wear a calm face and not distress my loving friends by any ebullition of feeling
. Mrs Massey considered her journey banishment in place of a honeymoon. On arrival in Victoria, the Masseys went straight to the diggings to avoid the
filth, flies and expense
of Melbourne. It was on the road that Mrs Massey's expulsion began to take on a more optimistic quality. On the road, she found that people were more
warm-hearted and hospitable
than at home in England, more
compassionate and forgiving
. Her theory?
They themselves [have] passed through the fiery ordeal of expatriation and suspense.
A haphazard community of wanderers, a band of gypsies, no longer contained by a ship's hold or a social milieu of formality and diffidence.

Indeed, sudden outbursts of feeling, the likes of which Mrs Massey could not afford to affect at home, seemed the very order of the day in impulsive Victoria. Bonwick described this fashion for spontaneity in the February 1853 edition of his
GOLD DIGGER
'
S MONTHLY MAGAZINE
, a widely distributed publication that Mrs Massey may have consulted.

Our gold fields, as a grand focus of moral magnetism, have drawn together a heterogenous multitude of all classes, climes and character. The ardent and impetuous form the vast majority…strong appeals are made to the sordid and animal passions of humanity.