The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (27 page)

People with strong religious convictions found a common way to bear up under their suffering.
I suppose that I must now submit to that humble position in which it has pleased Providence to place me
, wrote one woman when grappling with her fate. Divine Providence: the protective care of God. A belief in the higher wisdom and logic of Nature—the idea that there is a sovereignty or superintending power that is beyond our human control—was long the chief opium of the grieving masses. A merciful God would take away, but he could also give.
There is an overruling Providence
, wrote Jane McCracken,
who orders all things wisely and well if we would only trust in him. God alone can give us either prosperity or adversity as he sees good for us.
The flip side of the tragic was the miraculous.

But Jane was prescient in realising the dreadful temptation that stalked even the most devout believer in times of adversity. She warned,
our carnal hearts is [sic] prone to discontent when worldly things seem to go against us.

A cartoon engraved by Samuel Calvert for
MELBOURNE PUNCH
in 1856 shows a digger sitting bolt upright in bed, rudely woken by the rain streaming through his patently un-waterproof tent. A dog cowers under the man's stretcher. A tent-mate sits huddled under a blanket, face obscured. The title of the cartoon is ‘Domestic Bliss in Victoria'. But judging by contemporary accounts of tent living on the goldfields, a little precipitation was the least of your worries. A more chilling prospect was the alarming prevalence of domestic violence in Victoria.

Many female commentators noted that diggers could be rough in their manners, but seldom would they harm a woman. Martha Clendinning recalled that she was never disturbed in her tent at night while her husband was away. One male digger, who was far from enamoured of life on the goldfields, wrote in a letter to a friend,
There is one thing, however—bad as the diggers are…I must do them the justice to admit that they prove themselves at least men where a woman is the case.
²⁵
Charles Rudston Read similarly noted that he never heard of any outrage or incivility towards a woman on the goldfields inflicted by a stranger. Yet, he added in ominous parentheses,
(I have heard screaming and rows, but from whom did it proceed? Invariably husband and wife)
.

When a woman
got spliced
, the colonial idiom for either legal or de facto marriage, she took her chances that her new other half would not beat, rape or otherwise abuse her. Popular belief in the apocryphal ‘rule of thumb'—the maximum thickness of an item that could legally be used to beat a wife for the purposes of ‘correction'—was common but assault of a spouse was never in fact legally sanctioned. Rather, in the nineteenth century, wife beating was a widespread social custom, referred to by the French as
the English disease
.

The problem was that a woman had little practical recourse if she or her children were battered. The control a head of the household could exert over members of his family was paramount in western jurisprudence. A wife was construed as having the legal status of a chattel: an item of property, no better than a slave. Until the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts in the 1870s, upon marriage a woman lost all rights to ownership of property, and even the custody of her children. Before the end of the 1850s, there was no means of divorce in the Australian colonies. It was not until 1878 that Britain passed laws to allow a woman to obtain a legal separation from a husband on the grounds of cruelty. But well into the twentieth century, as legal historian Jocelynne Scutt has written in her landmark investigation into domestic violence in Australia, ‘the courts continued to enshrine the position of head of family as one to be occupied by a dominant male person, with wife and children submissive adjuncts to his authority'.
²⁶

It is impossible to know whether women tended to suffer more at the hands of men they met and married in Victoria, or partners whom they had accompanied across the seas. What is clear, however, is the profound impression that domestic violence had on those who witnessed it on the goldfields. Perhaps this was an effect of the intimacy of living in a tent city, where everything and everyone was experienced up close. Just as you could see through canvas backlit by a candle, so too the sounds of internal struggle could not be muffled. Just as the cries of labour and birth could be heard throughout the immediate vicinity, so too the thumps and screams of a thrashing. The inescapability of family violence on the goldfields startled the largely middle-class chroniclers who had not previously lived in such close proximity to members of the ‘lower orders'. It is a thoroughly discredited myth that the upper echelons of society are immune from spousal abuse; still, on the goldfields a black eye received in a domestic assault was colloquially known as a
Hobart Town coat of arms
, a reference to the convict stain of Vandemonians.
²⁷

Martha Clendinning witnessed the beating of a butcher's wife,
a horrid looking woman
. The woman, it was rumoured, was an old lag, transported for killing her baby.
I saw the butcher fling her out of the tent and kick her savagely till the blood streamed from her face
, wrote Martha, without evident emotion. Mrs Massey was horrified by what she saw of domestic bliss on the goldfields.
Alas! Poor human nature
, she wrote,
most of the wives in the camp exhibit on their faces the brutal marks of their husbands fists.
Sociologists and social workers report the spikes in domestic violence in the aftermath of floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. On the goldfields women bore the brunt of men's need to assert irrefutable physical authority at a time when all else was spiralling out of control. As the balance of gendered power shifted in women's favour, bigger, more hardened fists could be trusted to beat them back down.

Was domestic violence a crude levelling mechanism, then, or a form of blood sport for the angry and aggrieved?

Thomas Pierson attributed the Victorian phenomenon of public pugilism to rampant intemperance.
There are more taverns in Melbourne, according to the population
, he wrote,
than in any other place I ever saw and yet they are all full from the time they open until they close. It is very common here to see women fighting each other, men licking [beating up] women and women men.
A few doors up from Frances and Thomas, a whole household were drunk and fighting one night. The next day they appeared one by one
with black eyes and scratched faces
. Charles Evans also witnessed the spectacle of a drunken woman staggering along a road on the Ballarat diggings. Her husband tried to drag her home by her wrist.
She resisted
, wrote Charles,
and an interesting struggle took place much to the entertainment of a group of diggers.
Henry Mundy recalled a
wag
playing a trick on this mate by
beating an erring wife
, thumping a bag of flour
and a man's voice yelling out ‘you call yourself a wife'…then an imitation of a woman's voice. ‘You wretch you wretch you brute do you call yerself a man'. Thump went the blows again thick and heavy ‘oh oh' in a wailing woman's voice.
The sham Punch and Judy show went on like this until a crowd rushed to the spot
to save the woman from further ill treatment, only to be laughed at
. Bare-knuckle boxing. Cock-fighting. Wife-beating. Anything for a dust-up and a wager.

Mrs Massey found the overt violence between men and women more confronting than humorous. She also came up with a plausible explanation for its origin. She too blamed the effects of drink,
to which [the diggers] are tempted by disappointment to resort, in order to drown care
. According to Mrs Massey's theory, drink was a way to alleviate despair rather than frivolously pass the time. Once under the influence, the pent-up disenchantment of some diggers then detonated in a savage show of strength against their wives. This was often credited as being part and parcel of the ‘animal instinct' of the lower orders. (James Bonwick advised frustrated diggers to shoulder their burdens by reading.
Battle manfully for mental food
, he counselled.
When the intellect is starved, the moral power is weakened
—thus leading good men, let alone inferior ones, into temptation.)

Jocelynne Scutt claims, however, that violence against women is not used as an outlet or circuit-breaker for frustration and despair (or boredom), but as a way to establish authority over someone who is perceived as a legitimate subject of male domination and control. This is most likely to occur when the man feels powerless: socially, culturally or economically undermined, his prerogative to govern threatened.

Whether by law or circumstance, women generally felt compelled to stand by their beastly man. Yet perpetrators of domestic violence could be forced into a form of public reckoning. Ballarat court records from 1854 and 1855 are full of cases of women hauling their husbands before the magistrates on charges of assault, using abusive language and threatening their life. In some instances, it appears the woman had tried to leave her husband. Elizabeth Johnson charged Thomas Johnson with
threatening to have her back to live with him or he would take her life
. The case was referred to the police for further investigation. John Williams was charged with beating his wife. He testified that he had not kicked her as she alleged;
he had only given her one blow because she would not stay at home
. He promised the judge
he would not strike her any more but he hoped she would stay at home
. The prosecutrix declared that her husband
was in the habit of beating her, but had not done so much lately
. Williams was bound to keep the peace for three months, with two sureties of £10.
²⁸
Many such cases ended by being settled out of court, or by both parties failing to appear. Women may have used the justice system as a way of leveraging power they could not otherwise muster. In doing so, they took a calculated risk that the act of public disclosure would not further inflame a husband whose self-esteem was already at rock bottom.

Court cases give us rare access to the voices of women who did not have the leisure or literacy to write diaries—a sneak peak behind closed calico. Mary Ann Clay, for example, charged George Copely with violently assaulting her. Mary Ann said on oath:

I am the wife of Elijah Clay of Ballarat. My husband had a few words with me on Thursday the 5th [of January 1854]. [Copely] began to interfere. He has one tent and we have another. I told him to mind his own business and affairs. He then called me most awful names unfit to mention. I went to sleep and he woke me by the names he was calling me. I went to his tent and asked what he meant by it and what he should interfere for in my husband's business and mine. He jumped out of his bed and kicked me violently in the head and various parts of my body and ill-treated me and struck my child. The kicks and blows cut my head. I had told him that he had no business to interfere between me and my husband… The assault took place in the defendant's tent. I used no bad language nor gave him any provocation. I swear positively that I was not drunk that day.

Copely pleaded not guilty. Police Magistrate John D'Ewes disagreed, and fined him £5 or one month's prison.

Mary Ann had justice on her mind. At the same court session, she charged her husband Elijah with assault.

On Thursday night the 5th I went to a store on these diggings to pay for a dress I had bought. When I returned my husband said did you pay that pound I said yes. We had supper and afterwards we had some words. I wanted to reason with my husband but he would not hear. He beat me most dreadfully about my head and face. It was then he gave me the blow on the jaw. I forgave him for that blow.

Like Copely, Elijah Clay pleaded not guilty. But this time Mary Ann withdrew her complaint, and Elijah was ordered to find sureties of £40 to keep the peace for six months.