We Are the Rebels (12 page)

Two weeks later, an inquest was held into Sarah's death. Midwife Jane Julian testified.
She
was not a regular midwife, she said, but had attended a few females in their
confinement
. She'd done her best. On the day after the birth Sarah was well, sitting
up, nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane,
the new mother was
seized with cold shivering
. The doctor, William Wills (father
of the famous explorer who died in the desert with Burke), attributed Sarah's fever
to her milk coming in.

Over the next week Sarah became sicker. Now Dr Wills diagnosed
puerperal peritonitis
,
a terrible killer of nineteenth-century women. He ordered the standard treatment:
turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the
bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two
hours.

Sarah's baby fell ill too, and died by the end of his first week without ever being
named. Dr Wills gave
weakness
as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile
to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like; she had already put two
other babies in the ground.

A distressed William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered
the baby's death to have been
caused by the mother's milk
. Dr Stewart observed Sarah's
deteriorating condition and, though he continued her enemas and blistering, claimed
it was beyond human skill to save her life
.

Almost two weeks after the birth—two days after his son's funeral—William Skinner
held his wife's limp, clammy hand for the last time.

At Sarah's inquest on 25 May, the Coroner pronounced that the woman had died from
natural causes
. A jury of William's peers added a rider to the verdict:
We consider
that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man
her days might have been prolonged
.

The widowed William Skinner was, in a strange way, one of the lucky ones. Although
his wife's body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had
finished with her, he had at least managed to
get
a doctor. He could console himself,
perhaps, that he had not failed her completely…

Another miner, Patrick Carey, was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son
died from the fever that had
racked him for days. The Coroner asked Patrick why he
hadn't sent for medical assistance. His reply:
Because we had not a blessed sixpence
in the tent
.

RAW COLD AND UNFATHOMABLE MUD

It was to be a winter of untold discontent. By June, plummeting temperatures amplified
the cruelty of weeks of driving rain. With the benefit of modern meteorology, we
now know that it gets colder in Ballarat than just about anywhere else in Victoria
outside the Alpine regions. It is only 115 kilometres from metropolitan Melbourne,
only 435 metres above sea level, yet it has a mean (very mean) winter maximum temperature
of 10.7 degrees Celsius. And then there's the cunning wind chill factor: a biting
southwesterly that blows down off the escarpment.

No one was immune from the surly blast. Those perched up in the Camp and those nestled
down on the Flat all shivered in their tents, imagining what family and friends
at home were doing in the northern summer sunshine.

Many diggers slept on the bare ground, noted Thomas McCombie, with a canvas fly for
protection from the rain and wind. According to McCombie, a great number of single
men lived under the eucalypt branches they made into
miams or wigwams
. Frances Pierson,
on the other hand, had made a cosy tent home for herself, Thomas and their son Mason.
She
had transported feather beds, bedsteads and a mountain of covers to the diggings.
The Piersons had been warned that you needed as many blankets in Ballarat on a spring
or autumn night as you would in a frozen American winter. Thomas was thankful for
the advice, and felt nothing but sympathy for the
99 out of 100 people who had but
two blankets to sleep on under and over
. Those who were lucky enough to find a little
gold that winter went straight to the waiting Wathaurung and bought a possum-skin
cloak.

Charles Evans, never one to whinge, was compelled to note the frigid conditions.
He woke each morning
half perished with cold
and was amazed to find ice crusting
the drinking water in his buckets. Thomas Pierson, who seemed never to stop whingeing,
recorded in his diary that 25 June 1854 was the grimmest day since he and Frances
had arrived eighteen months ago.
A strong, damp wind and cold as could be without
freezing
, wrote Thomas.

He had just cause for his crabbiness.
Incessant rains
, Police Magistrate John D'Ewes
later recalled.
A raw cold atmosphere and unfathomable mud
. The fair-weather campers
left.

But 44-year-old Englishwoman Ellen Young was in it for the long haul. She'd first
pitched her tent on Golden Point in the spring of 1852. Now, burrowed in for another
cold season, she burned as much wood as she and her husband Frederick could cut and
carry back from Black Hill.

Woodcutting was an entitlement of Frederick's mining licence. This, thought Ellen,
was an enlightened idea. It was just a shame the monthly renewal fee was so high,
and the penalty for non-compliance so harsh. Ellen could see the frightened, dejected
look in the eyes of the men who had to choose between paying 30 shillings for a valid
licence
(and lawful timber collection) and buying a loaf for their hungry children.

This winter the whole town
seemed out of joint
, as one journalist put it. Even Mother
Nature appeared to have turned the tables. The rainy season was supposed to be the
harvest of dig
gers
, providing plenty of the water you needed for puddling and washing
gold.

But by 1854 that wasn't the way most miners were working. It was all deep lead sinking
now, great long shafts yawning into the ground. And the water was a terrible menace.
A shaft could fill with water faster than you could say Joe, loosening the timber
supports that held back the great weight of earth, engorging the hole, ruining months
of backbreaking labour.

Or worse, drowning the poor wretch whose turn it was to bucket. If eight men were
in the digging party and each of those men had three children, that was two dozen
children who would go hungry. Hence the endless bucketing, day and night, night and
day, to keep the shafts clear.

Water was supposed to be the solution, not the problem.
The water, after all
, wrote
Bonwick,
is the true philosopher's stone; for by its touch the gold is brought to
view.
But Ellen Young was a
perceptive woman, as well as an educated one, and she
knew if there was a magical substance that could turn base survival into blissful
perfection, it was not water or gold. It was bread.

POVERTY POINT

In the winter of 1854, a profound dissatisfaction mushroomed in the damp, putrid
fields of Ballarat. The main complaints of the goldfields community was poverty:
crushing, irrefutable, seemingly unending 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
. Henry
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 little calico tent
thinking to pick up gold as soon as they land
.

The result, for 49 out of 50 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
34 shillings). That was enough to buy eight loaves of bread—and nothing else at all.
Factor in the monthly licence fee of 30 shillings and there was clearly no fat (or
fibre) in a family's weekly rations.

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. Rampant poverty raised 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. Martha Clendinning would help establish the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867,
but in 1854, welfare was a matter of individual goodwill extended by family 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 22-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.

Wasn't the Promised Land under the Southern Cross 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
.