We Are the Rebels (13 page)

Thomas and Frances Pierson's reason for staying on the diggings was different. They
were determined
to make
something out of this country
as
we think it owes us something
.
The perception of failure, mixed with a sense of entitlement, was potentially explosive.

GETTING SPLICED, GETTING LICKED

Many female commentators noted that although diggers could be rough in their manners,
they would seldom 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 in general
not too thrilled with 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.

As long as that woman was not their wife or partner.

Another Ballarat resident noted that women on the goldfields didn't have much to
fear from strangers, then added ominously:
I have heard screaming and rows, but from
whom did it proceed? Invariably husband and wife.

When a woman
got spliced
, the colonial slang for either legal or de facto marriage,
she took her chances that her new other half would not beat, rape or otherwise abuse
her. Before the end of the 1850s, it was almost impossible to get a divorce in the
Australian colonies. But 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
. Williams' wife declared that her husband
was in the habit of beating
her, but had not done so much lately
.

Mary Ann Clay
had some words
with her husband Elijah, and subsequently charged him
with assault.
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.

The prevalence of domestic violence on the goldfields made a big impression on those
who witnessed it. Perhaps this was an effect of living in tents, where everything
can be heard and most things can be seen. Just as the cries of childbirth rang throughout
the neighbourhood, so did the thumps and screams of a thrashing.

Martha Clendinning witnessed the beating of a butcher's wife,
a horrid looking woman
rumoured to be an ex-convict, 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. 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.

Thomas Pierson put the violence down to the demon drink.
There are more taverns
,
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.
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
.

Mrs Massey also blamed the effects of alcohol,
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 just a recreation. Once under the
influence, the pent-up disenchantment of some diggers then detonated in violence
against their wives.

Modern commentators tend to disagree. Feminist lawyer Jocelynne Scutt, for example,
says that violence against women is not an outlet for frustration and despair (or
boredom), but a way to exercise authority over someone—particularly someone who
‘ought' to be subservient. This is most likely to occur when the man feels powerless
in some way, even when it is nature that's defeated him. Sociologists and social
workers report spikes in domestic violence following floods, hurricanes and other
natural disasters.

On the goldfields, it was the social order that was spiral-ling out of control. Did
women bear the brunt of men's need to assert their authority?

LAND LOCKED

Harry Hasting Pearce's grandmother lived on the Creswick Creek diggings, 20 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. But it wasn't just poor
men who felt thwarted in their ambitions.

The few diggers who made their fortunes often packed their bags and went home triumphant.
But many others who had made smaller finds had a more modest ambition: to start a
little farm somewhere on the millions of acres of Crown land that surrounded the
goldfields.

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 family time and time again became tiresome at best and humiliating
at worst.

Some saw it in terms of subsistence and independence. Set up on a farm, the missus
could grow a garden and feed the kids wholesome food, perhaps even send them to school.
Some of the more prosperous diggers, on the other hand, fancied themselves as landed
gentlemen and saw access to land as a way to ramp up their social status. Either
way, they were powerful motivations.

There was one big hitch. In 1851, when the Port Phillip District was granted political
separation and stopped being part of New South Wales, the new colony of Victoria
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 90 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.

The ‘land question' was both ‘bewilderingly complex', as historian Geoffrey Serle
has demonstrated, and crystal clear. Through a tangled legal web of rights and leases
a small number of squatters—many of them members of the Legislative Council—had
control of almost all the land. The lands, as they said, were effectively ‘locked'.

The ‘land question' was a major political battleground. Urban radicals, cautious
moderates, extremist aristocrats: everyone had a dog in the fight—and that was
before
the land-hungry gold-rush immigrants started clamouring for a share.

In late 1852, Governor La Trobe began making promises that town allotments and agricultural
plots near the diggings would be sold. A deputation representing more than 7000 people
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 25 shillings per acre. By
1853 the price had more than trebled, to £4. The immigrant married men and workers
who wanted to become small farmers had been dudded.

On the goldfields there was another source of friction.
Much of the land sold in
these areas was bought by employees of the government camps—the gold commissioners,
police inspectors and magistrates—using money borrowed from prosperous local publicans
and merchants. James Johnston, newly married to Maggie Brown Howden and earning a
salary of £400 a year, started buying up land almost as soon as the couple arrived
in Ballarat in the winter of 1854.

These deals were seen as ‘insider' trading—unfair and borderline corrupt. Worse still,
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 the little smallholding they dreamed of. 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—it was such an obvious remedy! It nagged at people, until three little
words became a powerful slogan that resonated across all social groups on the goldfields.

Unlock the lands!

BRITISH JUSTICE

British
and
justice
were the two words on everyone's lips in the whingey winter of
1854. The words generally had a question mark attached.

This? You call
this
British justice?

Henry Mundy shuddered every time he saw the soldiers pass by—
Lords' and dukes' sons,
friends of
[Governor]
La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace
on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country
. The indignity of educated
professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops sickened Mundy,
and he knew he wasn't alone.
Things will not remain long as they are
, he predicted.
The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed
to, British justice
.

English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by the
heavy-handed, arrogant treatment handed out by the police.
The arbitrary, Russian
sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities
, he called it. (Britain
was at war with Russia, in the Crimea, so it was a fairly weighty criticism.)

Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day. Prisoners could be left
manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full, or if the jailer didn't like them.
Honest men, too poor to pay their licence fee, were chained together with hardened
criminals. Women were locked up with men—nothing but a flimsy partition between
them. Other inmates were forced to act as servants, drawing water and chopping wood
for the soldiers up at the Government Camp.

Thomas and Frances Pierson went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning
and witnessed several
licence cases
. One man had borrowed another's licence. He was
jailed for two months in Geelong.
A still more heathenish part of
the matter
, Thomas
later reflected in his diary,
is that the man had a wife and six children in his
tent in Ballarat
, and the poor woman had only just given birth to the sixth.
The
English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation
, concluded Thomas.

Government oppression and negligence were getting serious—sometimes a matter of life
and death. The word tyranny rolled easily off tongues.

To add to the administrative problems, Ballarat was dealing with a new boss, the
incoming Resident Commissioner Robert Rede. Trying to make himself look good with
his own superiors, he used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order.
When a prisoner was rescued from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident
but assured HQ the incident
arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against
the authorities
.