We Are the Rebels (10 page)

Women who wanted or needed to mine for gold certainly benefited from this freedom
from science and modernity. People worked their claims in small groups or families,
relying on manual labour for the seemingly endless jobs of picking, panning, puddling
and cradling. Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel
from a river's bed was rocked so that large rocks and nuggets were separated from
the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this
primitive and fatiguing implement
.
It didn't require great physical strength, though, or even wealth. Just patience,
perseverance and luck.

Bucketloads of luck. The daily rewards were tiny and took a long time to amount to
much unless you struck it very lucky. But for that very reason, the process exerted
a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a
hole like this:
not knowing what it would be like when we saw it,
but fully expecting
it every moment
. Like playing a poker machine today: every push of the button—every
thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new
destiny, right there and then.

Mary Ann Tyler, five years a
gold diggeress
, said:

You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work
for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so
enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should
one day discover more gold.

A TAX BY ANY OTHER NAME

No one, however, could have described the licensing regulations as enchanting.

This is how the system worked: while the gold was in the ground, the Crown (the British
government) owned it. For a licence fee of 30 shillings per month, you could stake
a claim to mine for gold and keep what you found. Each claim covered a patch of
ground 3.5 metres by 3.5 metres; the claim also gave you the right to take wood and
water from the land. Commissioners were appointed to collect the fee, and to check
licences.

From the very beginning the licence system was unpopular and unmanageable. The main
problem was that every person resident on the diggings (with only a few exceptions
such as ministers of religion and servants) was required to pay the fee whether or
not they found any gold. The licence fee worked like a poll tax, falling most heavily
on the people with the least ability to pay. To add insult to injury, the licence
was ruthlessly enforced, with gold commissioners ordering the mounted police to perform
snap licence checks, often at the point of a bayonet. Anyone caught not holding a
valid licence was fined £5, a huge sum. If you didn't—or couldn't—pay, you went to
jail.

There was an exemption:
All females not mining or trading and children under fourteen
years of age who shall only reside but not mine any Gold Field
. Women didn't need
to carry a licence, nor apply to the commissioners for the ‘exception ticket' that
priests and servants had to get. But this meant, by implication, that women who
did
mine or trade would need to take out their own licence in their own name.

No one knows exactly how many women were issued with mining licences, but there were
plenty of female storekeepers. And
all persons resident upon the goldfields in the
practice of a profession, trade or calling, of any permitted kind
were required to
pay up. Storekeepers were charged the hefty fee of £15 for a three-month licence
to run their business.

This charge was just as unpopular as the mining fee, partly because you got so little
for your money: simply the right to open for business. (Most stores in 1854 amounted
to little more than a family tent with two chambers: one was for sleeping in and
one was the shop.)

But the licensing system did lead to one novel situation: as licence-holders, women
acquired a legal identity separate from their husbands' that they hadn't enjoyed
previously. They were not just permitted but compelled to buy a licence.

Bringing miners, shopkeepers and other professionals under the same regulations framework
produced another interesting result. All goldfields inhabitants were effectively
defined as small-business people. It was a one-size-fits-all system of economic management.
This would contribute to the famous egalitarian spirit of the goldfields where, as
the balladeer Charles Thatcher sang to packed crowds in the theatres of Ballarat
and Bendigo,
we're all upon a level
.

And because women became central to the economy of the goldfields, they also became
closely involved with the culture of protest that grew in intensity like a summer
storm over the tumultuous months of 1854.

POP-UP SHOPPING

Gold digging wasn't the only way to strike it lucky. By March 1854 there were three
hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that women ran at least
two-thirds of these pop-up tent shops. Some of these shopkeepers had husbands who
mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—often the
sly-grog portion of the business. Although it was illegal to sell alcohol on any
of Victoria's goldfields, everyone knew that you could get a dram of whisky or gin
at practically any ‘coffee shop', ‘refreshment tent' or ‘general store'.

But Martha Clendinning and her sister Sarah had made a pact: even if other storekeepers
on the diggings winked at the authorities, they would never sell sly grog on their
premises. Though the laws to keep alcohol off the diggings had been
a complete failure
,
Martha reckoned that she must hold to her own standards. They would only sell the
best quality
tea, coffee and sugar, candles, tobacco (
the most important item
),
jams, bottled fruits, onions and apples and
some excellent small Cheshire cheeses
.

Martha, doctor's wife and daughter of a good family, did not want to be too snobbish,
however. She knew that she and Sarah needed to tone down their well-bred appearance
in the hope that
we should not be distinguished as ‘ladies'. We intended to pass
as merely respectable women of business; anything more than that would, we felt,
expose us to curiosity when we entered on our storekeeping life.

They didn't want to intimidate the diggers. They didn't want to lord it over the
diggers' wives. They wanted to
blend in
. But it was more than the desire to be inconspicuous:
We prided ourselves on being careless of appearances
. This was the diggers' way.
New chums passed themselves off as old hands by their down-to-earth clothing and
easygoing manners.

The Clendinnings chose a tent site at the centre of a treeless field on Commissioner's
Flat, and Martha volunteered to go to the Camp and purchase George Clendinning's
mining licence for him while he put the tent up. The other women residents, Martha
observed, were
of a very rough class
. The licence was delivered to her promptly.
Two diggers who had been waiting half the day for their licences were astonished.
‘Well Bill', said one, ‘the next time I want my licence, I'll send my missus for
it, instead of kicking my shins about here for hours'. ‘All right', Bill replied,
‘but you must get your missus first, my boy'.
Martha had a chuckle at her new-found
influence.

Once George Clendinning finally got the tent up, Martha paid for her own storekeeper's
licence. She didn't approve of the licensing system—Martha had to pay a standard
£40 a year
quite irrespective of its size and business capacity. My little one was
rated the same as the largest in the Main Road
—but she was thrilled to be open for
business.
I never forgot my first sale!
she wrote 50 years later: a box of matches
for sixpence.

While their husbands got on with the
hard and dirty work
of mining, Martha and Sarah
quickly established a loyal clientele for their humble wares. Martha bought a hen,
a rare commodity on the diggings, and sold her eggs to mothers of sick children.

Soon there was more demand, for more goods, than they could supply.
We were constantly
asked for clothing materials by the women
, but didn't have enough room to store large
bolts of cloth. Seeing the birthrate skyrocket around them, they decided to
venture
on a new branch of business
: baby clothes. Theirs was the first store on the diggings
to sell such
dainty little garments
and they quickly sold out.

But Martha Clendinning was not attuned only to profit. She was astute enough to realise
that the diggings offered her a new freedom, beyond her stifling old identity as
a gentlewoman. She took her lead from the
working class…to whom all species of employment
for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success
. Suddenly
it was merit, not birthright or breeding, that made all the difference.

Dr Clendinning was
most anxious
about the changes in his family circle. His plan
was to go on with gold digging until
the big find
, then retire with all
the decencies
of the home life of a gentleman
. But it was slow in coming to fruition.

This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her
excessive folly
, despite her
husband's concern that he
might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it
. While
she was making money and George wasn't, Martha would do as she pleased.

EVERYTHING THAT COULD BE WANTED

It is possible to live in most cities of the world and not have a clue how the other
half lives. Usually the poor don't live anywhere near the rich. But in the tent
city of Ballarat, an unlucky digger could see very clearly that his neighbour was
feasting on German sausages and Cheshire cheese while his own family ate damper
and maggoty mutton—yet again.

Advertisements for stores reveal the astounding range of goods available for sale:
red herrings, fresh salmon, Chilean flour, Havana and Manila cigars, fresh oysters
and lobster, preserved partridge, grouse, woodcock, lark, plover and hare.

Mrs Willey ran the Compton House store on Bakery Hill. She advertised parasols, china
crape and French cashmere shawls, Irish linen, widows' caps, ladies' and babies'
underclothing and French kid boots. Refreshment tents sold ginger beer and cordials
over the counter, and whisky and porter under it. You could get a dozen bottles of
French Champagne if you could afford it.
The stores were astonishingly well stocked
with everything that could be wanted
, wrote Mrs Massey, [with]
the most conspicuous
display of dresses, bonnets and quantities of china
. The wife of any digger who hadn't
struck it lucky knew exactly what she was missing out on.

Not that the storekeepers were happy either. Their taxes were going up. On 1 March
1854, there was a monster meeting of disgruntled storekeepers protesting against
a new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. In late February,
60 storekeepers had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was
extortion
, railed Thomas
Pierson, who by now had joined the throng in Ballarat and
ran a shop with his wife Frances.

The storekeepers resolved to stick together and refuse to pay the licence fee. By
the end of March they had all caved in.

But if the government officers up there in the Camp were on their toes, they'd have
realised that the short-lived protest was a sign of things to come.

MATES

Some historians think Australian mateship began on the Victorian goldfields. Russel
Ward, for example, talked about a ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist
morality' and thought it had something to do with teamwork—the fact that one miner
often acted as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine.
This group solidarity was reinforced when the authorities bullied and harassed miners
in the hated practice of ‘licence hunting'.

But Ward did not explore another unusual fact: this companionable environment included
women. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of
housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them.

And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women
stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour', in which
both the
pay and the status of the job go down), the goldfields women found themselves
highly prized.

I have become a sort of necessity
, remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to
the diggings with her brother and quickly became a helpmeet to his single buddies.
Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect
for her conversation and companionship too. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed
the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields:
I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end!