Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (14 page)

The People’s Advocate, 23 July 1851

Early June, 1851, Melbourne stirs

Devastating!

For those in the town of Melbourne and its regional surrounds, the news of the finds of gold in the north, up Bathurst way, is producing terrifying results. For though the new colony itself has been prospering, with over six million sheep now fattening and breeding on more than 1000 stations, animal raising is a labour-intensive exercise, and much of that labour is not long in downing tools, upping sticks and heading north to try their luck. So, too, in the principal towns of Melbourne and Geelong – the latter the heart of the rich farming land – as within days everyone from ex-convicts, policemen and judges to labourers, shepherds, carpenters, common merchants and men of the civil service have all thrown it in and are streaming to the goldfields near Bathurst. The consequence is that ships must go unloaded, furnaces unstoked, foundries and factories unmanned, and flocks unattended, while the few remaining authorities must find replacements for the departed police and judges wherever they can. So desperate is the situation that they even going so far as to employ the hated Vandemonians from across Bass Strait – always the lowest class of men, far more used to being
hit
with a truncheon than
wielding
one on the side of justice.

Most appalled with the turn of events is the squattocracy, the wealthy squatters who have already made a fortune by paying a pittance to collective thousands of men to run vast flocks of sheep upon the rolling grass flatlands. Many of their workers have simply gone in the night. Elsewhere, it is reported that farmers who had just sown their crops for the next season’s harvest have also walked off their land and headed to the goldfields.
Something
must be done to prevent all the able-bodied men from going.

Early June 1851, Ophir under siege

A bare fortnight after the first mass of diggers arrive on site at Ophir, what was once a wonderfully secluded wooded gully, with a bubbling creek and ample birdlife, is being transformed by every new arrival. The undergrowth is trampled to make space for tents. Trees have been cut down both for firewood and to ensure that when their root-systems are exposed by the holes being dug all around they won’t fall upon the miners.

One journalist reaches for his quill and describes it thus: ‘The point was occupied by about fifteen parties cutting straight into the hill, and as we looked down upon their busy movements, digging, carrying earth, and working the cradles at the edge of the water, with the noise of the pick, the sound of voices, and the washing of the shingle in the iron boxes of the cradle, I could scarcely believe that barely two weeks ago, this was a quiet secluded gully in a far out cattle run.’

It is far from secluded now. They are now part of a noisy swarm, not only loving finding the gold, but loving the prospecting life as well. As observed by one digger, James Bonwick, ‘The wild, free and independent life appears the great charm. They have no masters. They go where they please and work when they will.’

1 pm, Monday, 9 June 1851, passions rise in the Hall of the Mechanics’ Institution, Collins Street

And
still
they stream in! It is one of the largest daytime gatherings yet seen in Melbourne. At five minutes past the hour the hall is already more than half full, and it continues to fill so rapidly that it soon goes from ‘standing room only’ to people who are listening outside continually shouting ‘Speak up!’ so that they, too, may follow proceedings. For the issue at hand is important: what can be done to prevent the colony from continually bleeding vast numbers of its workers to the New South Wales goldfields?

Upon the motion being put by one of the first settlers of the colony after Batman, the distinguished politician John Pascoe Fawkner, that the Mayor of Melbourne chair the meeting – and that motion being passed – that gentleman takes over.

William Nicholson begins by noting that the purpose of the gathering is to raise a significant amount of money, ‘which can be offered as a reward to any person or persons who shall within a given time make known the locality of a gold mine, [in this region] capable of being worked to advantage’.

Nearly all at the meeting are in furious agreement that the move is necessary, as many of the colony’s finest step up to the podium to not only pledge their own money but to exhort others to do the same.

Councillor McCombie is blunt in stating outright that, ‘If something is not done to prevent the present universal movement for the goldfield, property will suffer and be reduced in value, buildings will be stopped, and the city be almost denuded of its population.’ For his part, Councillor Hodgson maintains, ‘If we act properly, the discovery of gold in these parts will turn out to be one of great advantage to this colony, as it is no doubt one of the wise dispensations of Providence for bringing population to this country. We have seen that when there was famine in Great Britain numbers had departed from that country for Canada and America; but when gold was found in California, the tide of emigration went there. I think that gold being found in this colony is another means used by Providence to send population here.’

Others take a less benign view of Providence, warning starkly that if they do ‘not now make an effort and do something, our working men will all rush to Sydney’.

Despite the general alarm, the gathering is not without some levity, with Councillor McCombie drawing great laughter when, after others suggest that a reward should also be offered for the finding of other valuable minerals, he sagely notes, ‘No shrine, Pagan or Mahommedan, has drawn as many pilgrims as that of gold’. He goes on: ‘Should we succeed in finding gold, we will make this colony great, fully one hundred years before she could otherwise arrive at greatness.’

Hear,
hear.
Hear,
HEAR!

But wait, what’s this? For among all the learned, distinguished and well-groomed gentlemen suddenly stands a poorly dressed fellow with the huge, rough hands that mark him as one who must bear a pick, shovel or some other rough tool for a living. Unbidden, he now steps to the podium and notes – in what is as pure a form of Chartism as you’ll find after a six-day march in any direction – that, ‘though a working man from Yorkshire, I have as good a right to speak as anybody else’.

No, he doesn’t! Stop him, someone, please!

No
,
let the man speak!

As reported in that rising force among Melbourne newspapers,
The Argus
,
this fellow’s insistence on speaking occasions ‘great confusion and cries of order’.

Order!
Order
!

Unbowed, however, the working man goes on: ‘Why have you not taken steps before now to find these mines and minerals . . . ? I am perfectly prepared to worship gold too, but I personally am not carried away by the gold mania. I have occupied the same situation for three years, indeed ever since I have come to this colony, and I most earnestly impress upon my fellow workers that they should not leave their work and run away after gold-finding. But I do not believe that this meeting is really called for the advantage of the working classes. If those who had called it had wished to serve the working classes, they would have done something during the last three years, to remedy the dirty lanes and alleys, and the stagnant pools of Melbourne, for I can tell you that health is always gold to the working man. I see many of the [town council] coming forward now, but why had they not come forward to remedy these evils?’

A stir of protest rolls through the meeting, eventually quelled by more cries of ‘Order!
Order
!’

‘I protest against the whole of the proceedings,’ he finishes his address. ‘This meeting is more to enrich the rich, and oppress the poor man.’

Noteth
The Argus
: (‘
Hisses and applause
!’)

And so it goes. At least by the time the meeting breaks up at four o’clock in the afternoon its principal aim has been realised. Two days later, the bottom right-hand corner of
The Argus
bears an announcement that is soon the talk of Melbourne:

TWO HUNDRED GUINEAS REWARD

THE Committee appointed by the General Meeting held in Melbourne on the 9th instant, are now prepared to offer a Reward of
TWO HUNDRED GUINEAS
To any person or persons who shall discover to them a GOLD MINE, Or
DEPOSIT
within 200 miles of Melbourne, capable of being; worked to advantage; this amount to be independent of any reward the Government may be disposed to grant.

WILLIAM NICHOLSON, Mayor, Chairman.

29 June 1851, at Clunes, 90 miles north-west of Melbourne, a pick picks right

Though born in Ireland, in many ways James Esmond is a man just like Edward Hargraves. He, too, had been on the California goldfields, leaving Australia in June 1849, and has gained some experience as a gold prospector, even if he did arrive a little too late to really prosper. By then, all the best claims had been taken. And the 29-year-old is equally intrigued by the possibility that gold might be found in Australia, based on the remarkable similarities between the sort of country he is familiar with in Victoria – the Pyrenees Ranges – and the goldfields of California.

The odd thing is that, two years earlier, a shepherd by the name of Chapman, who had been working on a station in the central Pyrenees, had caused a small rush when he claimed to have found 38 ounces of gold. The disbelieving Esmond, however, had not joined in, going to California instead. But now he has returned, convinced that greater treasures might lie in these here Pyrenean hills.

Back in the Burnbank area, Esmond meets by chance the respected German physician turned geologist Dr George Herman Bruhn, who tells him of a promising quartz-bearing reef on Donald Cameron’s property ten miles south-west at Clunes. Now, just as he had seen done in California, Esmond begins a systematic search for gold in this very place.

On this day, Esmond finds himself on the northern side of the hill opposite Cameron’s property, at the eastern base of the Pyrenees, with his pick raised above his head, ready to strike a blow at a likely looking bit of quartz. What has propelled him to this place in time is much the same as what had first propelled him to leave Ireland a little over a decade earlier to work on sheep stations and then drive the weekly mail coach between Buninyong and the Horsham region, before propelling him all the way to California . . . and back. In part it is a restless nature, in part a sense of adventure and, perhaps mostly, it is a belief that there is a better life for him somewhere just up ahead, if he can only find it . . .

With the smooth, downward arc of the pick, wielded by a man who has done this many times before, the tip of the tool splinters the rock face – and what is the first thing he sees?

Splinters of quartz . . .

But wait. For there is something else, gleaming back at him in the sunshine, a wink from Mammon himself.
Gold
!

More excited than he has ever been in his life, Esmond continues fossicking, gathering samples. In no more than an hour he has enough gold to prove that his is a payable find.

A week later, on 5 July 1851, after at last tracking down his missing horse, Esmond takes his small sample of gold into the offices of the
Geelong Advertiser
,
where, with a mind to claiming the substantial reward that has been offered for finding gold, he meets journalist Alfred Clarke and shows him the samples. The gold, as Clarke would recall, shows ‘distinctly to the naked eye, embedded in the quartz, in small particles, varying from dust size to the size of a small pin’s head’.

Stunned, Clarke asks the obvious: where did you find it?

Up among the mountains, Esmond replies vaguely, with a nod of his head towards the distant Pyrenees, but will not be drawn further.

With Clarke in tow, however, he does allow for his gold to be
confirmed
as such by the equally stunned local jeweller and watchmaker, William Patterson.

And then, while Clarke prepares to write his truly ground-breaking story, Esmond heads off to Melbourne to buy the material he needs to build a cradle just like he used in California.

Late June 1851, up Mudgee way in New South Wales, a blackfella breaks through

Local lore has it that there are good blackfellas, bad blackfellas and tragic blackfellas. A good blackfella understands that no matter how they might feel about it, they have lost their land and their way of life, and adapts accordingly to fit in with the white man’s way – even working for the white man to make his dispossession easier.

A bad blackfella doesn’t accept the loss at all and continues to fight against it, up to and including committing terrible violence on law-abiding white people.

And a tragic blackfella is caught between the two: destroyed by a combination of the loss of his land and indulgence in the worst of the white man’s vices, like alcohol.

Jemmy Irving is a good blackfella. Raised and educated in the old mission school at Wellington, he had been working for many years as a stockman for the well-known squatter Dr William John Kerr from Wallowa, and had been treated well. The mostly merry Dr Kerr first came to Australia from Ireland as the doctor on a convict ship, and was a man of noted humanity and kindness. After starting a medical practice at Bathurst, he moved on to sheep farming on a run situated on the highlands between Macquarie River and Meroo Creek. The run was situated on very fertile land right by the Meroo Creek, about 53 miles from Bathurst and 18 miles from Mudgee, and he and his family prospered. Still, as the only medico within a hundred horizons, he has always been available to give free medical assistance to whomever needed him, including his workers, and his lovely wife frequently acts as his voluntary nurse.