The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (35 page)

After the goldfields tour, the Hothams returned to Toorak, where Lady Hotham tended her unchaperoned garden and sold off all the gaudy, glittering ottomans and easy chairs that came with the house, while Sir Charles got on with the business of firing public servants and answering his mail.

In one of the
frank, liberal speeches
Hotham delivered on arrival, he encouraged the people to contact him directly should they wish to discuss a problem.
Whenever a suggestion can be made or a hint given
, he said magnanimously,
let the author come to me, and he will always find me ready to attend to his wants. At all events he will find in me a friend who is willing to give a patient and attentive hearing.
²⁸

Be careful what you wish for. Raising and signing petitions had long been a way for individuals and groups to register protest and call attention to their causes. These days, we sign mass petitions on the internet or at stalls outside shopping centres with no real belief that we will have an effect. It is a gesture, a way of registering support for a cause, rather than a conscious act of participatory democracy. But in the nineteenth century petitions were a direct link between people and their leaders; the word ‘petitioner' was, in some real sense, a synonym for ‘citizen'. Petitioning also performed an adhesive function, rallying support for local issues that gave people a sense of belonging to a moral, political or geographic community. (Internet petitions do have the effect of rallying what Benedict Anderson famously called ‘imagined communities'.)

In the early to mid-nineteenth-century, it was not uncommon for women to act as organisers for mass petitions in their towns, villages or neighbourhoods, although these petitions were customarily signed by men only. The British Anti-Corn Law League made masterful use of middle-class women to mobilise public opinion in its 1840s campaigns against government economic policy.
The TIMES
sneered at such women as
the petticoat politicians of Manchester
.
²⁹
Individual women also produced their own petitions supporting the rights of their husbands, dependents, local freedom fighters, victims of persecution or others for whom they pleaded for amnesty or mercy.

There are also several celebrated petitions, signed by thousands of women, to represent the interests of women as a group against a perceived social evil. Examples include the
Women's Petition Against Coffee Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying Enfeebling Liquor
(1674)
³⁰
and the Women's Petition to the National Assembly, presented in Versailles in 1789 by the women of France, demanding an
equality of rights for all individuals
, including
the sweetest and most interesting half among
you
. Some historians claim that women's petitioning efforts in Britain contributed substantively to parliament's decision to end slavery.

It should come as no surprise, then, to find women involved in the petitioning activity that was one of the dominant forms for non-representative democracy on the early goldfields. Five thousand diggers, including two hardy women, Florence Foley and Sarah Williamson, signed the Bendigo Goldfields Petition, presented to Governor La Trobe in August 1853 in protest over the licence fee. At least one of the major petitions written by Ballarat miners pertaining to the licence fee or judicial proceedings in the final months of 1854 contains women's names. With their husbands down a shaft, diggers' wives probably did much of the footwork to collect signatures.

But goldfields women found other ways of making their presence felt at Toorak. Many eagerly accepted Hotham's kind offer to be a friend when in need. Their individual petitions are peppered through the dusty piles of inward correspondence to the Colonial Office, tied with ragged string, secure in the vaults of the Public Record Office of Victoria.

The brittle blue pages make compulsive reading. In them we find women who were otherwise voiceless and undistinguished sending out distress signals that can still be heard today. Mary Sullivan of Bendigo began her campaign for compassion in May 1853, and was still fighting it with serial petitions up to January 1855. Mary's husband had been sentenced to five years hard labour for
stealing in a tent £5
. She begged for remittance of the sentence, as she and her eighteen-month-old child were
entirely without the means of living in an honest manner
. In one of her petitions, Mary explained that her husband
was only a few weeks in bad Company
and promised to
use all of my influence to lead him to
the path of honesty
. She hinted at her fate should her husband not be restored to her:
I am Young and in a Town abounding in Vice, already I have been insulted
. Mary was finally told that not enough of her husband's sentence had been served; she should try again in October 1855.
³¹
That Mary did not furnish this final petition suggests a poor outcome for her efforts to remain respectable.

Ann Middleton of Buninyong petitioned the governor on behalf of her husband, Charles, a butcher by trade, who had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to five years hard labour on the roads. Ann pleaded for the welfare of her five children, aged between eight years and two weeks. She maintained that this was a first offence, and in any case Charles was not guilty; his partner claimed to have purchased the sheep and her husband paid half the purchase price. Please, begged Ann,
restore him to his distressed and unhappy wife and by doing so enable him to provide the necessities of his now distressed family
. Some forty signatures were attached to the petition, plus testimonials from former employees. Hotham scrawled his reply on the bottom corner of the petition.
Cannot interfere with the course of the law
. The law, as administered by the local judiciary, was so clearly regarded as an ass that such dismissive responses could only have fuelled the tension that was mounting in the second half of 1854.
³²

There are multiple petitions written by women—or, if a woman could only sign with her mark, by a literate friend—seeking to commute their husbands' gaol sentences or have them freed from lunatic asylums. Some petitions are written in French and Italian. Mrs Grant collected 117 signatures in her petition to remit the gaol sentence of her husband, James Grant, who was nicked for
shewing another person's licence
. Mrs Grant's appeal was poignant.

Your Petitioner is at the present time in abject poverty and not able to procure the means of livelihood having just been confined, she wrote. Your Petitioner has also other children who are looking to her for the means of subsistence and what will become of herself and them during her husband's imprisonment Petitioner knoweth not.

These heartfelt pleas fell on deaf ears, terminating with Governor Hotham's standard and abrupt response:
Cannot entertain. Not granted. Put away.
To Mrs Grant's appeal, the governor appended an extra chastisement:
Never interfere with sentences. Culprit knew the law and risked being found out
.
³³

Hotham tossed formal petitions bearing hundreds of signatures in the same bin as the many barely decipherable notes, which he marked
begging letters
, received from impoverished widows in search of pecuniary aid or frantic wives seeking work for their unemployed husbands. These women's letters, along with their formal petitions, are immensely significant. Historian R. D. Walshe has claimed that the Eureka clash was inevitable due to Hotham's ‘absolute intransigence' in his mission to revamp the colony's economy no matter the consequences.

Hotham's resulting policy—of small government, smaller heart—was put under intense pressure by the constant barrage of earnest missives from desperate and deserving women. Some women even travelled down from the goldfields to seek a personal audience with the governor. Honoria Anna Bayley came from Ballarat to request employment for her husband.
I trust that as one of her Majesty's subjects you will not consider my request an intrusion
, she wrote to Hotham.
³⁴
Others cast aside the usual petitioners' attitude of fawning humility and came out all guns blazing. Eliza Dixon wrote to Hotham on behalf of her husband, who was awaiting his death sentence in jail.
Should the sentence be carried into effect
, she pleaded,
you will leave a Wife and Mother of 4 children utterly destitute neither of them being able to support themselves one being at the breast and the rest all under 5 years of age
. Eliza attributed personal responsibility to Hotham for this potential outcome, and she was remarkably forthright in her solution:
Your Excellency's mercy is a great attribute. Extend it to a poor unfortunate man who now cannot help himself and the Great Judge (should you ever require it) will do the same by you.
³⁵
Eliza's letter was put away with all the others, and we can only guess what she thought when Hotham met his maker just over a year later.

Suspicious of what their governor's friendship meant, people formed a new strategy. Lady Hotham began receiving her own cache of begging letters. Mrs O'Neill, supporting herself and her three children by
needle work and selling mostly everything I had
, requested assistance in finding a position for her two boys.
Hoping your Ladyship will not think me too impolite
, she wrote,
perhaps you would have the goodness to speak to Sir Charles Hotham.
³⁶
Twenty-three-year-old Esther McKenzie petitioned Lady Hotham the same week. Owing to her husband being
indisposed
and her sixteen-month-old baby
dangerously ill by Dentition and Colonial Fever and is not expected to live
, she was
very distressed
and
without the necessities of life
. Money for rent, medicine, medical attendance and even
the very sixpence with which I post this petition was borrowed
. Lady Hotham had developed a reputation for benevolence; her largesse seemed to exist in inverse proportion to her husband's. Esther was
fully convinced of your Ladyship's kindness to the distressed
, and wrote that
she is filled with hopes…in bestowing her a trifle to purchase some bread for her disabled family
. Lady Hotham was not without pity. She instructed her clerk to acknowledge receipt of Esther's petition, and ask her to
forward
testimonials from respectable persons who are acquainted with you
. There is no further notation on the file. We can assume it too was
put away
. By coincidence, Lady Hotham did send £5 to another Mrs O'Neil in October 1854, after receiving her plea for assistance. Gold Commissioner Wright had appended a note to Mrs O'Neil's letter explaining that her husband was a lieutenant in the 4th Regiment before he became ill and died. Mrs O'Neil argued that her husband's military service entitled her to a grant of land in the colony, but £5 was all she got.
³⁷

What did men think of women's petitioning efforts? Did they put their wives up to it, thinking that women's appeals would fire a more penetrating arrow into the steely breast of the administration?

It seems not. The women's letters were neither a ruse nor a joint strategy. The
GEELONG ADVERTISER
reported on the exacerbated humiliation of imprisoned diggers, knowing their wives were peddling for their release. When one man was inhumanely punished for his poverty with a gaol term for being unlicensed, the paper editorialised that what was worse than the injustice was the indignity.

These men in gold and silver lace, armed from head to heel, have taken the aged and sick from their tents. The spectacle is presented to us of a wife taking round, for signature, a petition for the release of her husband from gaol, by reason of his poverty and ill health.
³⁸

A spectacle. A debacle. A disgrace.