The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (31 page)

In the winter of 1854, a profound movement of communal disaffection mushroomed in the damp, putrid fields of Ballarat. Under Ellen Young's matriarchal tutelage, distrust of authority and collective grievance started to generate broader political debate about the big-ticket items of poverty, land reform, health and economic management—not to mention the whole damned notion of British justice.

Chief among the complaints of the goldfields polity was poverty: crushing, irrefutable, seemingly irredeemable poverty. Thomas Pierson wrote that in Ballarat he had seen examples of
great wealth but few other places could produce the same amount of destitution poverty and want
. Thomas Mundy, who carted illegal alcohol to the diggings rather than dig himself, saw it every day. People arrived at the goldfields with a few shillings or no money at all. They pitched their eight foot by six calico tent
thinking to pick up gold as soon as they land
. The result for forty-nine out of fifty of them?
What privations the most of them had to go through
, Mundy wrote,
hard living, hard lodging, bad drinking water [which] often brings on Colonial fever or dysentery
. Average weekly earnings on the Ballarat goldfield in 1854 were £1-13-9 (not quite thirty-four shillings). When a bag of flour cost £14, a loaf of bread 4 shillings, rice 1s per pound, sugar 9s, butter 4s, and brandy or gin 8s per pint—not to mention the monthly licence fee of 30s—there was clearly no fat (or fibre) in a family's weekly rations.
⁸

Jane McCracken wrote home to her mother that for every family that did well in the colony, two or three did not.
I have felt more truly sorry for people here than ever I did at home
, confessed Jane. Poverty has always been a women's issue. In the French uprising of 1871, wrote historian Edith Thomas,
les petroleuses
, the incendiary women, literally torched Paris in rage and despair at their devastating penury and the exorbitant price of bread.

Jane McCracken's personal sympathy highlights another problem: the lack of help for those in need.
No one seems to care for the poor immigrant, good or bad, body or soul
, echoed Crown Land Commissioner C. Rudston Read. The goldfields were still a frontier: no hospitals, no benevolent institutions funded by the state or friendly societies. Everything was still too new and raw and mobile and undone for that. There was not even an almshouse. Martha Clendinning would help establish the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867, but in 1854, welfare was a matter of individual goodwill extended by kin if you had any, friends if you had made some or shipmates if you could track them down.

In this unfinished part of the world
, wrote twenty-two-year-old Noah Dalway in a letter home to his mother in Ireland,
it is now that I feel the loss of you all and of a home where, had I been what was required of a son, I might now be happy in that home without any care anxiety or laborious work, all of which are now my only companions.
⁹
Wasn't the El Dorado of the South meant to put an end to care, anxiety and unrewarding toil?
This Australia, dear mother, is most falsely represented
, Noah declared in 1854, after months on the goldfields.
So many thousands, what are they doing, barely making a living
. According to Noah, only men of capital who could start their own line of business had any guarantee of raising themselves out of destitution.
I often grieve
, he said,
to think that I have not as much as a £5 note to call my own and to send you some
.

Harry Hastings Pearce's grandmother lived on the Creswick Creek diggings, twenty miles from Ballarat, in the 1850s. Later she would tell her family that the number one cause of all the trouble in the summer of '54 was poverty. William Howitt reckoned that the diggers were primarily aggrieved by false accounts of the richness of the diggings and the ease of procuring gold, followed closely by the exorbitant price of food. But the arbitrary nature of gold mining, and Ballarat's particular palaeo-geology, meant that not everyone was starving. A quick glance at the advertisements in the
BALLARAT TIMES
would still show that while some families couldn't afford bread, others were dining on potted pheasant and imported jellies. If my neighbour could eat like a king, why not I?

Those who made their fortunes often packed their bags and went home triumphant. But for the majority who had failed, there was not even enough loose change for a coach ride to Geelong, let alone a passage to Britain. To many, there seemed an obvious solution. If gold digging was so futile, why not farm the millions of acres of Crown land that surrounded the goldfields? Till the virgin soil. On the land, people imagined, there could be an end to the restless pursuit of fortune and an acceptance of a modest livelihood of rural toil. It's where many immigrants had started their journeys, after all.

The idea was especially attractive to family men, who longed for a home base where they could leave their wives and children while they continued to follow the rushes, chasing new leads to golden success. Gypsy life was initially fun and adventurous, but uprooting a large family time and time again became tiresome and humiliating. Set up on a farm, the missus could grow a garden and feed the kids wholesome food; perhaps even send them to school. It was not just the starving diggers who envisaged this redemptive possibility. Prosperous diggers who felt an affinity with the Australian landscape and social outlook (not to mention the speculative potential of all that fertile pasture) also fancied themselves as landed gentlemen. For this emergent middle class, access to land was not about subsistence but accelerating social status. Here was the yeoman ideal of independence and mastery combined with the launching pad to upward mobility of a land boom.

There was one big hitch. 1n 1851, when the Port Phillip District was granted political separation from New South Wales, the new colony was divided into about one thousand unfenced and unsurveyed sheep runs. The squatters who controlled these runs produced the wool that accounted for more than ninety per cent of Victoria's exports. Only some 400,000 acres had been sold—in the towns of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland and in the ‘settled' areas near them, tiny agricultural outposts such as Bacchus Marsh and Kilmore.
¹⁰
The ‘land question' was both ‘bewilderingly complex', as Geoffrey Serle has ably demonstrated, and crystal clear. Through a tangled legal web of long leases and pre-emptive buying rights to the squatters—many of whom sat in the Legislative Council—the lands were effectively ‘locked'. The land question was an A-grade political battleground, contested by urban radicals, cautious moderates and extremist aristocrats alike. And this was
before
the land-hungry gold rush immigrants began clamouring for a piece of the pie.

In late 1852, Governor La Trobe began making promises that town allotments and agricultural plots near the diggings would be sold. A deputation representing the wishes of over seven thousand people, recruited in part by James Bonwick, had convinced him that the
bulk of the working population and most of the married men wish to become landholders
. La Trobe made good his pledge, and for eighteen months from early 1853 more than half a million acres were sold. But there was another snag: as squatters and wealthy speculators outbid each other to gobble up the new allotments, the price of land skyrocketed. In 1850 the average price of rural land was 25s per acre. By 1853 the price had more than trebled, to £4. The immigrant married men and workers who thought to exchange shovel for scythe had been dudded. It didn't help matters that much of the land sold around the goldfields was bought by employees of the government camps—the gold commissioners, police inspectors and magistrates—with money borrowed from prosperous local publicans and merchants. James Johnston, Margaret's Jamie, on a salary of £400 a year, started buying up land almost as soon as the two of them arrived in Ballarat in the winter of 1854.

The capitalist land-grabbers did nothing to improve the lands, let alone cultivate them, so there was still no agricultural produce flowing to the goldfields, and diggers were no closer to their pastoral idylls. Food prices remained high, especially in winter when the roads became impassable. Unskilled workers could find no alternative employment at a time when public expenditure on roads, docks or other infrastructure was negligible. Thus most miners, concluded Harry Hastings Pearce via his grandmother's tales,
were condemned to the hopeless search for gold
.

Land reform. The concept became a pernicious irritant precisely because it was also a palpable remedy. Three little words formed a potent mantra. Unlock the lands. Unlock the lands! UNLOCK THE LANDS. Public debate was on the side of the diggers, and even conservative merchants like Robert Caldwell, who was still touting the myth that there was no such thing as poverty in Australia, advocated land reform as an antidote to intemperance.
Cannot the government come into competition with the publican, and, instead of presenting the means of a debauch, put before the eyes of the returned digger a sweet little corner of fifty acres
, he wrote.
How many a wife longs for this bait to be hung out!

Certain diggers agreed. Locked lands meant spare money was spent in pubs rather than on homesteads. American Seth Rudolphus Clark thought it was
sheer bad management on the part of the government…to encourage low dissipation and drunkenness
when family farms might be built, and fruit and vegetables grown. Creating a means for miners to buy small plots of agricultural land
had long been the subject of anxious attention
, as one goldfields official put it, but the issue increased in urgency as the proportion of women and children on the diggings increased.
¹¹
This fundamental shift from pure industry to entrenched domesticity had reached its undeniable zenith by the winter of 1854.

It's not that there wasn't a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on the scene. In February 1854 two English Chartists, George Black and H. R. Nicholls, began publishing the
GOLD DIGGER
'
S ADVOCATE
from their HQ in Melbourne. The
ADVOCATE
drew on arguments and emotions that had been in circulation at least since the Bendigo anti-licence protests of mid-1853. Its self-proclaimed charter was to please
all true lovers of liberty of conscience and freedom of action
. (At one shilling and sixpence it was more expensive, as well as more political, than Bonwick's journal and lasted about as long; the
ADVOCATE
folded in September 1854.) Like Chartist newspapers in England, the
ADVOCATE
advanced a number of causes with a broadly democratic agenda. It argued for an amendment to Victoria's Constitution to extend electoral representation to (male) diggers, and railed against the petty tyranny of the goldfields officials over the disenfranchised diggers. The
ADVOCATE
commented at an urban remove for all diggers on all diggings. It predicted
dire consequences
if the diggers were forced to submit to political slavery.

What Ellen Young did was different. Ellen spoke for the people, as one of the people, about what it was like to be among the people. Her husband was a digger. She was a digger's wife who had decided to toil with a pen instead of a pick. But this was no drawing room dirge: there was no drawing room, just a leaky tent. Ellen, you could say, was an early fan of the notion that the personal is political; that personal grievance can and should amount to political utterance.

Given her association with Clerkenwell and the sophisticated references to democratic traditions in her poetry and letters, she may well have been an activist in Chartist struggles in England, the popular democratic movement that drew in many radicalised women, particularly in the early 1840s. Certainly, Ellen's poetry bears all the hallmarks of classic Chartist melodrama: a redemptive narrative based around a golden age of autonomy, present misery and oppression, an enemy outsider, liberation by heroic Chartist manhood, and a radiant future based on citizenship, chivalry and domestic harmony.
¹²
Ellen may even have come to Victoria with hopes of fulfilling the early Chartist promise of political equality for men and women, a platform that by the 1850s had been pragmatically dumped in favour of manhood suffrage, perceived as a more achievable goal.

Ellen would have found like minds in some of the other women steeped in Chartist heritage who also found their way to Ballarat. Twenty-nine-year-old Cornish-born Jane Cuming (née Sweet) arrived in Victoria in 1852 with her husband Stephen and their first two children. The Cumings were deeply influenced by Chartist and liberal philosophy. Their daughter Martineau, born in the revolutionary year of 1848, was named after the English feminist writer, political economist and abolitionist Harriet Martineau. Jane Fryer was another active Chartist who went to Ballarat with her husband in 1854. At twenty-two years old, Jane was buzzing with the reformist zeal of the young. She was one of the first to marry in a British registry office, eschewing a church wedding in favour of what she saw as the more equitable vows of a civil ceremony. Jane went on to become a prominent socialist, co-founding the Australian Secular Society and working tirelessly for the Eight Hour Movement, the women's suffrage movement and anti-conscription and peace campaigns.