We Are the Rebels (14 page)

Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the discontented rumblings
would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, Magistrate John D'Ewes wrote to the Colonial
Secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the
diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat. He mentioned in particular
the non-existence of
any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted
to Government servants
. The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported.
A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took donations for a new hospital. The
well known liberality of the diggers
when it came to these public ‘subscriptions'
meant that £270 was donated by 24 people that night. D'Ewes worried that there was
a toxic sense of ‘us and them' creeping in: he thought it would be a bad look if
the government was seen to be contributing in some way.

The police were uniformly despised. The Victorian Government paid peanuts and, of
course, it got monkeys. The police force was young, ill-trained, inexperienced and
frequently drunk. When the ‘traps' gave Frances Pierson ‘a call' in her store on
St Patrick's Day (a sure sign she was selling sly grog) her husband Thomas said,
a more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found
.
Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police to look the other way (and since Frances
Pierson didn't sustain a conviction, she probably did too). The system simply invited
corruption.

Punishments for sly grog were severe: a £50 fine or four months' jail for a first
offence; a second offence would get you six to twelve months with hard labour. These
were mandatory sentences and local magistrates had no power to soften them: only
the Governor could interfere. What's more, when a police officer recorded a conviction
he received a portion of the fine—a situation also set up to encourage fraud.

The cards were stacked in favour of the police. They either pursued known sly-groggers
relentlessly or extracted hush
money—and no doubt other ‘favours'. Samuel Huyghue,
a public servant living at the Government Camp, believed this system of rewards for
sly-grog arrests was to blame for the demoralisation of the police force.

Meanwhile, other aspects of law enforcement were a joke. A miner might disappear
down a shaft in the black of night never to be seen again, and the police would be
useless. Claim jumping was rife, but it was more often sorted out by fists and knives
than police intervention. Henry Mundy said that if a digger was killed in a mining
accident, assuming a policeman deigned to turn up at all, he would simply
say he's
dead right enough
, then slip a hand into the dead man's pocket to help himself to
any money or valuables.

If you wanted to safeguard yourself against crime, you kept a dog on a chain or a
pistol under your pillow. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria's finest.

LICENCE HUNTERS

But the biggest grievance—the focal point of daily complaints—was the way these
tyrannical vagabonds
went about checking licences.

Licences had to be renewed monthly, and
nothing
, wrote William Howitt,
could exceed
the avidity, the rigidity and arbitrary spirit with which the licence fees were enforced
on the diggings
. Cries of ‘Joe' could be heard around the diggings when a hunt was
on, alerting neighbours to the threat. (Joe was the universal slang for police. It
was not a nice word.)

Licence hunting by the police was heavy-handed and quite random: a form of victimisation
that particularly played on the shame of being unable to afford a licence.
Very few
like to have their poverty exposed
, assessed the Geelong Advertiser. But
that was
precisely what the practice of indiscriminate licence checking achieved:
the licence
law makes poverty a crime
. If you were caught you were imprisoned—which turned a
loyal subject into
a broken-spirited man
. Especially if he'd been arrested in front
of his wife and children and dragged away at the point of a bayonet.

To rub salt in the wounds, the police were
beardless boys
, as digger John Bastin
put it, who
would not leave the camp unless arrayed in uniform and gold lace
—whereas
(said Henry Mundy) the diggers were
as fine a class of men as anyone could wish to
see, many of them well educated, doctors, lawyers, merchants' sons.
He went on:
These
were men of pluck and spirit and intolerant of injustice, indignant at the impervious
and corrupt administration of the law
.

For American George Francis Train, however, it was political. He had no argument
with the licence fee itself. He thought it a perfectly reasonable trade for wood,
water, a gold escort and the privilege of driving a spade into the earth. What Train
despised was the Victorian Legislative Council, an institution he called a
burlesque
on free representation
. It was
absurd
that the miners had no vote, no voice in parliament.
Citizen George, who would later run for the US Presidency as an independent, could
patently see
there is a strong Australian feeling growing up
, rooted in the fundamental
democratic principle:
taxation without representation is tyranny
.

ENTER ELLEN YOUNG

From her tent on Golden Point, Ellen Young could see what was coming. At 44, she
was a community elder thanks to the unusual demographics of gold-rush Victoria. She
was also a woman of keen intellect who had been a prolific poet since the age of
thirteen. Today, you can find her lifelong collection of hand-written poetry bound
in a leather volume in the Ballarat Library. But it was on the first day of the miserable
winter of 1854 that Ellen decided it was time to go into print, publishing her first
truly political poem in the local newspaper, the Ballarat Times.

She had written the poem the previous week, during a flood. At the height of the
storm, Ellen later recalled, she rescued her mattress and then her
spleen evaporated
.
‘Ballarat' is a sixteen-verse commentary on the community's woeful living conditions
and depressed emotions. It begins ominously:

If you've not been to Ballarat

Then stay away from there;

I would not have my worst foe's cat

To have such sorry fare.

Ellen describes the poor state of the roads, the lack of fresh food, the famine prices,
the endless mud, the futility of complaining to the resident commissioners, the non-existent
gold and the burdensome memories of times and places past. She is trapped, they are
all trapped, caught between the distant rock of ‘home' and a hard place of ceaseless
toil.
The gold I promised still is hid; The past is all a sham
, wrote Ellen.

Ellen describes the conditions, but she also introduces a
new note into the public
discourse: indignation. A communal sense of grievance. A positioning of good men
against bad, heroes against villains.

The floods were out, the mail-man drunk,

What matter the delay?

That though the hearts of many sunk—

They're diggers!

Who are they?…

They're men—high tax'd, ill log'd, worse fed

Of strong and stalwart frame

Better was ne'er by hero led

Or earn'd a hero's name.

This was a position that would later be increasingly taken up by other organs of
public opinion. The Geelong Advertiser did not begin to echo Ellen's sentiments until
27 September, when it represented the diggers as
hard-working, taxed, unrepresented
members of the body politic
, hamstrung by
absurd, insulting regulations
. Ellen Young's
public intercession on behalf of the Ballarat community was a game-changer.

No one disputed her authority, or her right to become the mouthpiece for the people
of Ballarat. In fact she was actively encouraged by Henry Seekamp, the 25-year-old
editor of the new Ballarat Times (who was by now Clara Duval's de facto husband).
He published Ellen's increasingly political poems and strident letters to the editor
in the spring of 1854. And, unlike later Australian female writers who made their
opinions public, Ellen didn't even write anonymously. She flamboyantly ruffled her
feathers and signed herself
Ellen F. Young, the Ballarat Poetess
.

It's not that there wasn't a record of disaffection before Ellen Young arrived on
the scene. The short-lived Gold Digger's
Advocate was a newspaper with a broadly
democratic agenda. It argued strongly on behalf of the disenfranchised diggers on
all the diggings, predicting
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.

The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they now had a
free press and a bold, outspoken public advocate to call their own.

HERE COME THE HOTHAMS

When Sir Charles Hotham and Lady Jane Sarah Hotham arrived in Victoria on 21 June
1854, the people of Victoria had high hopes of their new governor. Ellen Young was
among them.
For much I hope a change is near / New brooms they say sweep clean
, she
wrote a few weeks before the regal couple docked.
We soon shall have Sir Hotham here
/ He'll make a change I ween.

Hotham's predecessor, Charles La Trobe, had been a shocker. Inexperienced as an administrator,
he was ill-equipped to oversee the massive population explosion that followed the
discovery of gold. As Victoria's first Lieutenant Governor, La Trobe had managed
a fledgling colony of 3000 people. On his watch, public debt had skyrocketed and
confidence in the government had plummeted.

But on Hotham's arrival there were flags strung up, brass bands playing and wild
cheers for the official welcome parade through the streets of Melbourne. Artillery
fire sounded from Flagstaff Hill, and Hotham made an impromptu speech to the rejoicing
crowd, promising to
do his duty as an honest, straightforward man should do
. Such
frank, liberal speeches
, Charles Evans noted, won Hotham the goodwill of the people.

The people of Melbourne are looking for the arrival of Sir Charles Hotham as religious
enthusiasts might look forward to the millennium
, the editor of the Geelong Advertiser
had written on 8 June. But George Francis Train, for one, was cautious.
I hope [Hotham]
is equal to the times in which he lives,
wrote Train on 23 July,
for if he is not,
depend upon it his official reign will be painfully brief, for our people have begun
to think
.

The Geelong Advertiser also recognised that Hotham had his work cut out. He had to
deal with
a whole army of lazy and
incompetent hangers-on, indolent, careless, incorrigible
;
men given jobs on the goldfields
simply because they could not be kept sober in
town
. There was also the small matter of how to fix the massively unbalanced budget
left by La Trobe's administration.