The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (26 page)

In the mid-nineteenth century, few women faced childbirth free of the well-founded fear of death. They weren't just aware the odds were against them; they could feel it in their waters. In fact, women referred to their entire pregnancy as a period of
sickness
. In popular euphemism, to labour was to
be ill
. The linguistic delicacy made sense. Up until the 1940s, maternal death ranked second only to tuberculosis as a killer of Australian women aged between fifteen and forty-nine.
¹⁷
There are no official maternal or infant mortality statistics available for the early period of Victoria's history. But based on records from Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital, historian Janet McCalman calculates that from 1856 to 1874, stillbirths fluctuated between four and eleven per cent, while maternal death rates could be as high as 4.5 per cent, or one in every 22.5 confinements.
¹⁸
As these numbers were achieved in a hospital, with midwives and obstetricians on hand, it is likely the maternal mortality rate on the goldfields was much higher. Dr Walter Richardson (father of the author Henry Handel Richardson), who practised in Ballarat in the mid-1850s, estimated that seven per cent of full-term births ended in a fatality.
¹⁹
He attributed this shameful record to the unsanitary squalor of Ballarat and the inadequate colonial laws that permitted unqualified charlatans and drunken illiterates to attend confinements on the goldfields, resulting in otherwise preventable deaths, stillbirths and deformities. International studies of maternal mortality in the nineteenth century support him: they show that the quality of obstetric care available to women was the definitive risk factor. Though malnutrition and other pre-existing health problems could contribute to childbirth complications, the single most important predictor of poor outcomes was access to an experienced accoucheur.

On the goldfields, as the diligent Dr Richardson attested, finding a good doctor was very chancy. Mothers, friends or neighbours were most likely to attend births on the diggings. Such women may or may not have had experience in delivering babies, particularly obstructed labours or high-risk deliveries such as twins or breech births. And prior to the development of antiseptic practices in 1870, post-partum infection was just as deadly following labour as maternal exhaustion and haemorrhage were during it. Henry Mundy noted that in Ballarat in 1854, a Mrs Charlton was
the most famous midwife round her quarter
. Mrs Charlton was a forty-five-year-old woman from Nottinghamshire who always had
a joke and a pleasant word for everyone
. But her patch may have been very small, limited to those in her immediate locality. It's also not clear whether she was a trained or lay midwife. There is no evidence that there were any trained midwives practising on the early goldfields.

In all probability, Mrs Charlton provided her services cheaply. The same cannot be said for the goldfields doctors, who were largely reviled as opportunist vultures, extorting profit from a vulnerable population. The standard call-out fee for a birth was a whopping £5, the same amount as the fine for failing to show a valid mining licence.
²⁰
Dr James Selby came to Victoria in 1852 to become a digger. It quickly became apparent to him that he would
make much more by my profession than gold seeking in the earth
. He soon found that he had as much work as he could handle and, as people continued to flood onto the fields,
the remuneration is increased tenfold. No man after practising here
, wrote Selby,
would be content to receive the London prices
. (And he only charged £1 for a birth.)
²¹
It didn't help the community standing of doctors that, until 1865, there was no system of registration for legally qualified medical practitioners. Medical historian Keith Bowden has claimed that the Ballarat goldfields were ‘awash with quacks and imposters'.

Henry Mundy paid for two doctors and a midwife to attend the birth of his wife Ann's first child. But not even this precaution could save the baby, who was
sacrificed
to salvage the mother—this generally meant cranial crushing to remove the baby from the mother's body. Seventeen-year-old Ann suffered a long labour. All the women who busied themselves around Ann
looked gloomy and distressed
. Henry stayed out of the tent.
For God's sake…save my poor little wife's life at all hazards
, beseeched Henry,
never mind the baby
. Ann barely cheated death. Later, Henry buried the baby in a rough box on the side of a range and fenced the grave with barked saplings where
no diggings were likely to occur
. Come Ann's second delivery a year later, she was
dreading I should be as I was the last time, but thank God it was nothing this time like that
. Baby George was born healthy and whole.
I'm so thankful it is all over
, said Ann, high on hormones, relief and the brandy she was given as the only form of pain relief.

When things went wrong in childbirth, the results could be ghoulishly catastrophic: cervical tears, prolapsed uteri, pelvic damage. British women were traditionally delivered lying on their left sides, which was thought to lessen the likelihood of perineal trauma. Women still tore, though, and the result would be a mangled anal sphincter and the lifelong opprobrium of faecal incontinence. Nineteenth-century midwifery practice included packing the vagina and perineal tears with rock salt. Women may also have had their knees tied together to facilitate healing.
²²
Yet recurrent infections at scar sites, exacerbated by repeated births—one child born every two years from age twenty to forty was the regular pattern—plagued women of all class, ethnic and religious origins. Childbirth was, perhaps, the only true social leveller.

Goldfields residents may have despised doctors for their extortionate fees, but doctors blamed midwives for the high rates of maternal and infant mortality. They were locked in a tussle for vocational supremacy that often went all the way to the courts. One such skirmish occurred when Mrs Katherine Hancock died eleven days after giving birth to her fourth child. Her birth attendant, Mrs Elizabeth Hazlehurst, was charged with manslaughter. Katherine was administered gin and sherry on the orders of the socially prominent Dr Wakefield. Mrs Hazlehurst testified that, in her opinion,
the baby was wrong for the world
and
she had to turn it
. (Katherine, before her death, reportedly remarked,
if that was turning a child, she would not like to go through it again
.) But the birth proceeded quickly and the baby was born
with a fine head of
hair, ready for the curling irons
. Mrs Hazlehurst left, and a neighbour, Louisa Vining, stayed through the night. At the trial Mrs Hazlehurst explained
she was employed as a midwife, not as a nurse tender
. Dr Wakefield visited Katherine five days after the birth. He found her low and weak, with her uterus completely inverted and
external to her person
. She died five days later of
mortification of the uterus
. A post-mortem concluded that Katherine's uterus was hanging from her vagina and some of her small intestines had also been pulled out of her body.

The court case turned on whether the use of stimulants had caused the inverted uterus. Dr Wakefield testified that labouring women were regularly given as much as a whole bottle of brandy, even by medical men. The real problem, he charged, was the ineptitude of Mrs Hazlehurst.
I have attended thousands of women, never with a midwife in attendance
, boasted Dr Wakefield. Other doctors agreed the only cause of uterus inversion could be
gross ignorance
and
the expulsive power used for the birth of a child
. The jury found Mrs Hazlehurst guilty, but made a recommendation to mercy. Their rider, it seems, was occasioned by the lengthy statement made by Mrs Hazlehurst in her own defence at the conclusion of the trial. This is how the
BALLARAT TIMES
reported her mercy plea:

She considered from her knowledge of medical terms, that she could have conducted her case better than [her defence lawyer] Mr Dunne; she attended the deceased purely from benevolence; she had been 16 year a midwife—never had a bad case, and was called, proverbially, ‘The Lucky Woman'. Dr Wakefield had a spite against her, and never had a previous opportunity of venting it. She had confined Mrs Vining herself, and with perfect success.

Mrs Hazlehurst then gave an extensive account of her midwifery experience and asked the judge to treat her leniently. Despite the fact that Mrs Hazlehurst had managed to impugn the reputation of both her lawyer and a high-flying doctor, the judge was persuaded by her testimony. The Lucky Woman was fined £20 and ordered to serve one hour in prison.
²³

It's tempting to think that because death was a frequent and indiscriminate visitor in the nineteenth century, those touched by it were less psychologically wounded than we might be today, when science has given us more ‘illusory control' than humanity has ever before enjoyed. Testimonies of goldfields mourners do not bear out this conceit. Deaths, particularly the deaths of children, were mourned with all the force of a lightning bolt to the heart. A child was considered born under a lucky star if she reached her first birthday on the goldfields.

The
MINER AND WEEKLY STAR
newspaper reported in January 1860 that of the sixty-one deaths in the Ballarat district in the previous two weeks, fifty-five were children, ninety per cent of whom were under eighteen months old. For the quarter ending in March 1861, in Ballarat alone there were sixty-seven deaths under six months, forty-nine under twelve months, twenty-six under two years and eleven under three years.

Dysentery was the great killer, closely shadowed by
maras-mus
(an archaic medical term for wasting caused by malnutrition, or what we would now call ‘failure to thrive') and common diarrhoea.
²⁴
George Francis Train described Victoria as a place where
children die like the spring flowers
.

Mary Ann Tyler, the auspicious diggeress, lost her first baby soon after her birth.
I cannot remember who was at the burial
, Mary Ann recalled later,
I was in such distress and kept fainting.
Scottish immigrant Jane McCracken attended the funeral of her four-year-old nephew who drowned in a creek.
It was a dreadful tryall for his Mother
, wrote Jane in a letter home to Auchencrosh,
as far as mind goes [she] has stood the bereavement much better than could be expected but she is very nervous and it has given her a great shock
. Apart from base grief, Jane also gave another explanation for the earth-shattering effect of losing a loved one in Victoria. The funeral represented
the laying of earth of the First of a Race in a New Country, the land of their adoption. An act of History in a Family, the consecrating of a sacred spot, that indissolvable [sic] link of connection to that soil
. Burying the dead in a virgin country meant the start of history and an end to forgetting. Jane herself was terrified that such a destiny might be hers.
There has been a good many died in their confinement or soon after it this season that I have heard of which made me more nervous,
she wrote to her mother soon after the birth of her second child in April 1853.
Death is making many changes among our acquaintances.

When Willie Davis Train became pregnant in May 1854, George Francis sent her back to America to have the baby. He wasn't prepared to take the risk that this new baby would go the way of their first (who had died in America just prior to the Trains' passage, so the decision wasn't entirely rational). Men grieved for their lost babies too. Charles Evans was a young bachelor but he was a keen observer of human tragedy. Evans watched a miner suffer over the death of an infant. He noted in his diary on 8 November 1853 that
the clinging insinuating love for a child is one of the greatest happinesses which the labouring man is blessed with and it is a hard trial for him to contemplate the sorrowful gap which the loss of one occasions
.