The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (7 page)

For Sarah Hanmer, the gold rush offered the chance to move back the hands of time. Born into a Protestant Scots–Irish farming family in County Down, Ireland, twenty-three-year-old Sarah Anne McCullough married Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer at St James, Clerkenwell in 1844. Henry Hanmer was a widowed surgeon; Sarah was a single mother. Four years earlier, her affair with a London accountant, Frederick Ford, had produced a child but no ring. It's unclear how her marriage to Henry concluded, but by 1850, Sarah was living in Albany, New York, and possibly working as an actress. She appears to have gone to America without her daughter Julia, who perhaps lived with Sarah's brother William McCullough. Sarah may also have worked for a time at the Adelphi Theatre in San Francisco, which was located near to Rowe's Circus. She later returned to London, booked a passage on the
Lady Flora
for herself, Julia and William, and sailed for Victoria, arriving in August 1853.

John James Bond, a fellow passenger on the
Lady Flora
, noted in his ship journal that the voyage had been
discomfort from beginning to end
. There was no fresh meat, the coffee was burnt, the sea biscuits musty and all passengers staggered out at Port Phillip
three parts starved. We have been taken in
, Bond lamented.

But thirty-two-year-old Sarah Hanmer had her own conjuring trick up her sleeve. As if by magic, she took six years off her age, reporting to the immigration agent that she was twenty-six. Julia was twelve. Nobody stopped to do the maths. Mrs Leicester Hanmer, acclaimed London actress, had arrived, and her adopted home of Ballarat would soon know all about it.

Clara Du Val was another woman who could make husbands and birthdays disappear. Irish-born Clara Lodge was a tearaway from an early age. Popular legend (a story that Clara herself might have propagated) has it that Clara's ambitious father held a ball in her honour when his daughter turned seventeen, at which Clara appeared in a belt studded with seventeen sovereigns to wear around her seventeen-inch waist. After the ball, the story goes, Clara was presented to Queen Victoria but instead of moving smoothly into a good marriage, she eloped with French artist Claude Du Val. Together the love-struck couple sailed in 1847 for Victoria where, Claude having died, the grieving widow du Val provided for herself as an actress. It was a tale that no doubt played well when Clara began treading the boards in Ballarat's theatres. Shipping records reveal, however, that Clara arrived in Victoria on the
Marco Polo
in May 1853. She gave her age as twenty; she was in fact thirty-four. There is no evidence of a Claude Du Val arriving or dying in Australia. In fact, Clara had eloped in 1830 with her dancing teacher, George William Du Val, the brother of renowned portrait painter Charles Allen Du Val. Clara and George ran into trouble with the law in the Isle of Man and later Liverpool, where George was arrested as part of a gang involved in a botched kidnap. Moreover, when Clara sailed to Victoria, she brought two of her three children with her: nine year-old Oliver and one-year-old Francis. Francis's twin sister, Clara, was left in Ireland. Whether Clara Du Val had ever met Queen Victoria or not, she had certainly seen the elephant.

Margaret Brown Howden was one of perhaps few real innocents going abroad. As she stood on the wharf at Birkenhead in May 1854, twenty-three-year-old Maggie was thinking of one thing only: her fiancé,
dear Jamie
. The farewell dinners in her native Scotland, the last calls, the settling of accounts, the shopping and packing and getting of gifts, being driven to the station by tearful relations—these things were all behind her now. Maggie was sad, but stoic:
we cannot know what changes may take place
, she wrote in her diary, [but]
never shall I forget my dear home.
Margaret was reared among the god-fearing gentility of the Scottish borders, the third daughter of Francis and Sophia Howden. There is a touch of exotica about her belied by her sheltered upbringing: Margaret's mother was born on the Prince of Wales Islands, later to become Penang, to a Chinese mother, Ennui, and a Scottish planter father, David Brown. But this was Maggie's first time at sea.
Oh dear!
she wrote when the sails had been hoisted, the vessel was rolling and there was no turning back.
I wish things would go on well to take me to my Jamie.

James Johnston, older brother of a dear friend, was waiting for Margaret Howden in Melbourne. James Johnston, Assistant Gold Commissioner at Ballarat: appointed in November 1853 with a salary of £400. James Johnston, nephew of George Johnston, famous in Australia for helping to arrest and depose Governor Bligh. Assistant Resident Commissioner James Johnston. Jamie.
My Jamie
.

By the time Charles Evans began his final descent into Ballarat on 16 November 1853, he had been in Victoria for just over a year. On his arrival at the ridge overlooking the diggings, after his week-long walk, he had but one shilling to his name. The great tent he and his brother George had purchased to start an auction house was safely loaded on the bullock dray, along with a few items to start knocking down. The night before, he and his companions had camped in a swamp, sharing a damper for their supper.
Everything was damp
, Charles wrote in his diary,
considerably damp—the ground, our beds, our bodies and our spirits
.

He and George had started many enterprises over the past twelve months: a confectioner's store, a coffee-roasting business, pie making, boarding house keeping, carting. All had failed to produce more than a hard day's work. He had been to the Ovens diggings and come back starving. He had seen men grow fat and others go mad. He should have known a thing or two about how this colony could turn pumpkins into carriages and just as readily change them back again. But still, when he at last walked onto the Ballarat digging, Charles was nothing short of flabbergasted.

We were astonished
, wrote Charles,
to see the immense number of stores—every fourth or fifth tent was either a store or a refreshment tent
. He couldn't fathom how they all made a living until
the riddle was in a great measure solved…nearly all sold grog
. This was only the first revelation.
Contrary to our expectations
, Charles lamented,
there were several auctioneers carrying on business
. How would they ever sell their wares, and thus get a meal that was more sufficient than damper and tea? The Evans brothers took a punt. Asking some miners
as to the probable course of the diggings for the ensuing summer
, they chose a locality with very few tents; a quiet spot near the bridge on Commissioner's Flat. If the underground rivers of gold flowed their way, Charles reasoned,
it will soon be the busiest quarter on the diggings
.

Eugene von Guérard's famous painting
Old Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853–54
hangs in pride of place at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Austrian-born von Guérard painted his masterpiece in 1884 or '85, some thirty years after the time he spent living on Golden Point in Ballarat. His memory was surely encrusted with a sugar coating of nostalgia or, along with his own yellowing notes and sketches, he had a copy of James Bonwick's
AUSTRALIAN GOLD DIGGER
'
S MONTHLY MAGAZINE AND COLONIAL FAMILY VISITOR
at hand. Von Guérard, with his scene of verdant hills and corpulent sheep, draws on the same ideological palette as Bonwick, who, in January 1853 penned a profile of a
typical diggings home in the Ballarat valley
.

Amongst the deep shade of the towering Eucalypts… [reside] the rosy cheeks of the little one, the contented smile of the matrons of the camp…the fret and fever of life have little place in the quietude and salubrity of this Diggings station…[there are] fuel and water for fetching, with no fear of a rent collector…privacy and security.

Bonwick could see nothing but
associations of the picturesque and beautiful.
Von Guérard's view of Golden Point depicts the same pastoral idyll: there are flocks of sheep being steered by a lone rustic, a scattering of whitewashed tents, a humble matron pegging out the wash, a solitary puff of smoke from a chimney. Green is the dominant tone; tranquillity is the message. The composition bears no resemblance to the many descriptions of Ballarat on the brink of that crucial moment between 1853 and 1854—when Charles Evans walked into Ballarat—or indeed to the many doleful sketches that von Guérard completed when he actually lived there. Von Guérard's painting is remarkable for its lyricism and elegance, but as history it's a sham.

Close up, newcomers who had heard Ballarat before they saw it were more shocked than awed. Diarists and letter-writers recorded their first impressions of the sheer ugliness of the diggings. To Mrs Elizabeth Massey, the goldfields had the appearance of
one vast cemetery with fresh made graves
.
²³
Uncovered mine shafts pock-marked the surface, with mounds of earth heaped beside. By the beginning of 1854, Golden Point was, in the words of William Westgarth,
an upturned, unsightly mass
. There was not a tree or blade of grass to be seen. John James Bond travelled to the diggings after disembarking from the three-parts-starved
Lady Flora
in August 1853.
[Ballarat] is an immense circular plain of mixed yellow and red earth
, he recorded,
every bit had been turned topsy-turvy
. Alexander Dick, a Glaswegian teetotaller, was most struck by the Flat, that expanse of Ballarat East and its hub, the Eureka Lead. The Flat was covered with tents and ‘flies' over mine shafts. Looked at from Golden Point or Black Hill
the Flat was a perfect sea of calico and canvas
.
²⁴
This description is more benign than most, but all emphasise the conquest of culture over nature, the bulldozer urgency of conquest.

The turnover from ancestral homeland to pastoral runs had happened quickly, but the transformation of Ballarat from sheep station to thriving frontier town struck like lightning. In October 1851, only a few months after the discovery of gold, one visitor described Ballarat as being like the
encampment of an army
. That is to say, it was
orderly
and
peaceable
, a neatly contained collection of simple tents with diggers methodically working the gully creeks.
²⁵
Before long, it was a riotous jumble of holes and mullock heaps.

One of the primary reasons for the sheer visual transformation of Ballarat by late 1853 was a shift in mining technology. In Ballarat, the shallow alluvial gold was quickly exhausted. But riches were still to be found below the deep basalt veins that followed ancient riverbeds under the surface. In fact, these deep lead deposits were larger and richer than ever found anywhere else in the world, but technological innovation was required to extract the exceptional nuggets. Deep sinking was the answer: a process by which ‘a forest was taken under ground', as Weston Bate evocatively puts it. The subterranean shafts needed to be shored up, which meant great investments of time and labour, particularly to cut the timber slabbing for shaft supports. But the rewards could be magnificent. At some leads, an average of £2000 per claim was achieved for a period of several weeks running in 1853, and this was enough to entice punters to stick with the gamble of hand-digging shafts up to 160 feet deep for at least a year to come. But the whole pastime was costly in every respect, not least to the physical environment.
²⁶

Only at night, under the cover of darkness and after the ceremonial gunshot, did the pulse of activity gradually subside. A
vast city hushed in the arms of night
, the poetically inclined bureaucrat William Westgarth wrote from his vantage point at Bath's Hotel on the township hill. Especially if it was a Sunday night, for on the Sabbath, a truce was called with the demonic striving.

Sunday in Ballarat was washing day.
Scores of men could be
seen in front of their tents with tin dish or bucket washing their weekly shirt and flannel
, recalled Henry Mundy. As a rule Sunday mornings were bathed in a reverential quiet, the time, noted James Bonwick,
consecrated to cookery
. A roast joint or plum pudding might be enjoyed, damper almost certainly baked.
It is here that the skill and economy of a woman are seen to advantage in a tent
, wrote Bonwick.

And by the summer of 1853, women were thick on the ground.
I did not fail to observe that the fair sex had ventured now on a large scale
, wrote Italian miner Raffaello Carboni on his second trip to Ballarat, at Easter 1854. On Sundays, some women put on their finest shawls to promenade around town or prepared picnics to enjoy in the bush. In the afternoon, stump preachers would be out, walloping bibles and singing hymns. The tents that accommodated the Catholic and Wesleyan congregations were full, the only Christian denominations to gain a toehold by 1854. Jews mustered a healthy quorum at the Clarendon Hotel for their Friday night Shabbat.