The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (16 page)

The housing shortage underlay many of Melbourne's social woes. Real estate prices had dropped in Melbourne when the town was emptied following the first gold discoveries, but now the rush was on to accommodate the daily delivery of new souls. All manner of temporary structures were erected to serve as lodging houses; so much the better if you could get a liquor licence and call it a hotel. Not surprisingly, disease spread like wildfire through these unsanitary and overcrowded hostelries. In 1854, the Legislative Council took action and passed the
Act for the Well-Ordering of Common Lodging Houses
, which required landlords and their houses to be registered and inspected for cleanliness and ventilation. The latter was theoretically easy in a wide-open country. The former was virtually impossible in a city that would not get a sewerage system until the 1890s. Lodging houses were also supposed to keep the unmarried sexes segregated. Like the ships captains, on this score the city fathers were truly beating against the wind.

Frances and Thomas Pierson could find neither a lodging house nor a hotel room. After debarking from the
Ascutna
, they pitched a tent on the beach at Sandridge. Hundreds more were doing the same thing. The beach was reduced to a campsite hugging the shore. One day soon after the Piersons' arrival, a hideous summer gale
blew a hurricane
for fourteen hours without reprieve. The
sand flew in clouds thicker than I ever saw it snow
, wrote Thomas. The sand stuck to the perspiration that dripped from their exposed skin.
All our faces was so black
, Thomas spat,
you actually could not tell a black man from a white one
. It took the Piersons two months to locate their more permanent accommodation in Collingwood. Thomas's antipathy did not abate with a roof over his head. Frances was
too unwell
, suffering from the debilitating dysentery that racked new arrivals. After witnessing several neighbours die of colonial fever, he wrote in his diary,
This is a very unhealthy place—all a Lie that we were told in History or the papers
. Thomas Pierson was scared for his wife's declining health and felt mightily ripped off. He was not reserving judgment on Australia:
This is the most God forsaken accursed country I could conceive of
.

Even more desolate for some: those too poor or unlucky to find accommodation were left with one grim place of last resort. Canvas Town was a tent city, authorised by Governor La Trobe in 1852 as a salve for the housing crisis, located on the south side of the Yarra River at Emerald Hill (now the site of the Melbourne Arts Centre). Like the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed with tent dwellings were tent stores, bakers shops, butchers stalls, restaurants, sly grog shops and barbers shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.

It sounds like a fine solution, but the way of life for its eight thousand inhabitants was anything but idyllic. The
MARCO POLO CHRONICLE
had warned immigrants about Canvas Town,
the epitome of misery and costliness
. The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer. The only available water supply was the foetid Yarra River, downstream of the tanneries and soap factories of Collingwood and Richmond. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.

Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion'. The
begrimed and unrecognisable children
who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with firewood, rumbling between the tents with their
wretched occupants
, horrified Martha. Everyone and everything was covered in dust. Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack:
children squalling, women shrieking and men shouting, the noise was uproarious
.

There may have been mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, gaudy dresses, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous diseases and absent husbands, but we should not confuse this bedlam with Hollywood's version of the Wild West. There is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but loyal satellite of the British Empire, built by and upon British institutions. By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within thirty years, it would become an exemplary international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike Dodge City, one expected to be governed—and governed judiciously.

On the American frontier, Judge Lynch was the only paternal figure, and Darwinian logic—the survival of the physically and spiritually fittest—was remorseless. During the Californian gold rush, the ideology of order was based on the morality of the individual rather than the institutions established by the ruling elite: individual honour counted for more than an externally imposed social order. By contrast, British citizens expected to be governed by the organisations and ethos of British justice. As the
MARCO POLO CHRONICLE
reassured its readers,
the Genuine Spirit of British Generosity, Nobility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city.
They would not need to fend for themselves; the mother country had their back.

But prevailing British social mores would be tested. Tent living didn't only let the dust in. Like a sea voyage, mass camping brought unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. William Kelly described an
indelicate drawback
of tent living:
if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress, preparing for the stretcher.
There's a certain ribald piquancy to Kelly's sketch, but the fact is that camping life, like ship life, made for a community of intimate strangers.

Boundaries were as steadfast as the flicker of candlelight. In this, the material conditions of living reflected the metaphysical aspect of social change. One female sojourner wrote that Australian conventions were
quite an elastic, compressible thing, and give to the touch like anything.
William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch a fellow off guard; over-weening aspiration lurked in the shadows and threatened customary notions of decency.
Ambition
, he observed, writing about the gold rush population,
may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by conventional barriers
. It's no wonder that colonial anxiety did not turn on how to employ or house the restless throng daily washing up on the colony's shores, but rather on how to restrain this ‘downside up community'.
⁵

All a lie
, thundered Thomas Pierson. He was merely committing to his diary what many people discussed over tea and damper. The crashing discord between expectation and reality quickly became apparent to most immigrants. Just think of those three months or more at sea. It's a long time to defer gratification. To stare at the horizon with only the wide-open future ahead. All those promises of prosperity—milk and honey and manly self-regard—conjured up at will to crowd out the oceanic stench of vomit, piss, maggots and death. And then, finally, you're there. Thomas Pierson was not the only new arrival with a gnawing sense that he'd been hoodwinked. And Martha Clendinning was but one of many chroniclers who spoke of their intense anxiety.

Anxiety, as today's psychiatrists will tell you, can be a symptom of the dissonance between two fundamental states of being: a clash between inner conception and outer manifestation, or between the idealised and the actual. Could we diagnose a mass emotional decompensation among Victoria's immigrants? Commentators certainly evoked the language of disease to describe the social pathology created by the cascade of gold rushes. The
yellow fever
, it was called.
Melbourne is a dreadful place
, wrote Henry Mundy,
everybody seems to be going mad either with too much money or too little
. The entire colony was
infected
, according to John Capper:
the gold fever raged here more generally and more violently than in New South Wales.

George Evans analysed the root of the malady:
poor fellows who went up [to the diggings] with bright hopes and golden dreams are coming down with empty pockets and desponding hearts.
George Francis Train was apt to agree, despite the fact that he was well on his way to establishing one of Melbourne's most successful trading houses.
Lying reports. Yes—I repeat, lying reports
, Train wrote on 7 November 1853,
lying reports that went home from Melbourne and Sydney…reports made to catch the eye of every adventurer.
Train believed that the reports were planted by parties interested in land and sales commissions, then echoed by newspapers with an eye to their own profits. After six months in the colony, Train had decided that Victoria was not the Southern El Dorado, but the South Sea Bubble.
I know of no instance in commercial history
, he railed
, when so large a business has been transacted without any reliable information
.

Thomas Pierson also thought it was people
with interests
who trafficked in false hope; he fingered the shipowners—and merchants like G. F. Train.

Not everyone experienced their internal ructions as maddening. Willie Davis Train, a southern belle plucked from the plantation, might have been expecting to find life in the South Sea Bubble arduous. But after a year in Melbourne, she wrote in a long letter to her father, Colonel George Davis, a friend of Abraham Lincoln:
The extraordinary change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year can scarcely be credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution
. For Willie, the external pace of change had swept through her like a tonic, tempering her grief at losing her only child just weeks before sailing.
As I advance in years and experience
, she wrote to her brother on the same day,
I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution that at times I marvel at my own thoughts
.

An inner riot; a symbiotic uprising of spirit and circumstance. Willie's only misgiving was the amount of time George spent at work, absorbed in business, building a new stone warehouse or clinching another deal. He was also infamous for occupying a personal chair in gin-slinging at the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street, run by American proprietor Sam Moss.
I rarely see him
, she confided,
but must I suppose make no complaints
. Willie would have known she was one of the lucky ones. For the majority of newcomers, even other well-heeled ladies of fine breeding and education, it was a struggle just to keep a toehold in an avalanche of adversity.

For every miner or merchant in the money, there was another down on his luck. And that very often meant a starving wife and children or a shelved fiancée or a fretful mother at home, waiting for news of a distant son's good fortune. In the case of Janet Kincaid, her husband's ledger was definitely in deficit. He had been gone for over two years, following the rushes around Victoria, while Janet was left in Glasgow with six children and a slew of unanswered letters. By the time she at last procured her husband's latest address from his father, she was heartily fed up. A rare archival find, here is Janet in her full glory:

You left to better your family, you don't need to write that any more, we have had enough of that talk. You had better do something for
them
. You left the ship to better your
self
and to get your
money
to your
self
. You never earned much for your family, far less for your
Wife
, you sent five Pounds, two years and a half ago. You mention in a letter to me that you made more money at the digging than ever you made at home. You might have sent us the half of what you made. You are a hard hearted
Father
when you could sit down and eat up your
children's
meat your
self
. I was a poor unfortunate
Wretch
, little did I think when I was young what I had to come
through
with your
conduck
. We might have been the
happiest couple
in Greenock, you got a good
wife
and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante do well at home is not to be trusted
Abroad
…poor Duncan [child number five] does not know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for
eating
…find a proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your
deserted Wife
Janet Kincaid.
⁶