We Are the Rebels (6 page)

SOUTHERN STARS

During their first miserable, stomach-churning weeks at sea when everything solid
melted into air, people still had the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which
everyone did, before electricity and TV) kept passengers in touch with a familiar
reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations that
you knew, and could use to
chart a known route towards an unknown destiny.
Those
stars seemed a last link uniting us
, wrote Mrs Charles Meredith.

Then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even
that certainty was stripped away.
I do not know one thing that I
felt
so much
, lamented
Mrs Meredith,
as the loss of the North Star
.

At the equator, you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set—the entire celestial
sphere. Another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched
further south towards Australia, passengers had no choice but to fix their mental
compass on the Crux Australis: the Southern Cross.

Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the
equator on 15 July 1853:
Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different
to an English sky.

The Southern Cross said to these voyagers that everything had changed. It told of
a new political identity, freed from old allegiances. But it was a symbol of belonging
too. The Southern Cross offered new immigrants the embrace of a new community. It
represented something shared. Something that became recognisable, habitual, as the
voyage continued. Something you could rely on when everything else was slipping
away.

And before long that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance
for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.

THE DEEP

After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into
the South Atlantic, following the winds and current, heading towards the Cape of
Good Hope and the Roaring Forties.

The dancing and music-making on deck came to an abrupt halt as ships entered the
arctic trade winds of the Southern Ocean. Heavy seas and strong winds buffeted the
ship. Passengers were forced to find their sea legs all over again. On a day that
was blowing
a perfect hurricane
, Fanny Davis stayed below but one of her cabin-mates
fell over trying to get on deck and knocked several teeth in.

Later a woman delivered her baby in the middle of a fearsome storm only a week out
from Port Phillip. It was
a night of terrors
, with waves flooding the berths and
snow blanketing the deck. The baby died as soon as it was born; the mother followed
not long after.

Another traveller, Mrs Graham, witnessed the sea burials of a baby and toddler from
the one family, dead within two days of each other and wrote:
the body fell with
a splash and all was over but the cries of the Parents who felt deeply the loss of
the child.

On Sarah Raws' ship,
a lady died this morning in our cabin, leaving
ten grieving
children. She had become
very intimate
with Sarah's mother and father, and Sarah
attended the funeral.
They sewed her up in canvas, and it was an effecting
[sic]
sight to see the bereaved family
. The woman's son offered the very large sum of £200
to the captain to bring the body to land, but the
law prohibited this and so she
was
consigned to the deep
. They had only three days left to sail.

Passengers kept a watch out for land, but it was often the scents of Australia that
first alerted immigrants that their journey was almost complete.
An aromatic odour,
as of spicy flowers
greeted journalist William Howitt as he coasted through Bass
Strait.
A beautiful awakening at 4 o'clock
, wrote Maggie Brown Howden on 29 July
1854.
Saw from my porthole Cape Otway lighthouse, a most cheering sight, and at 6
o'clock saw land of the country we had so longed for weeks to behold. At last that
comfort was granted us.

But the ordeal was not over yet. Ships still had to navigate the Heads of Port Phillip
Bay to reach the port of Melbourne. Captains who didn't know the local tidal and
weather conditions could stumble at the final hurdle. At least 50 ships have been
wrecked on the Rip.

Genteel Englishwoman Martha Clendinning, travelling with her doctor husband and
young daughter, had a calamitous ending to her voyage, when the
St George
foundered
on rocks just off Queen-scliff. The Clendinnings, in their first-class berth, got
off lightly, losing only their brand new digging tools. But all the lower-class
passengers in steerage lost their entire belongings. These poor buggers limped ashore
with nothing.

It was grief and fear, not elation, that accompanied many passengers as they docked
at their new lives.

(NOT SO MARVELLOUS) MELBOURNE

Gold-rush Melbourne—gateway to the diggings—was a city reeling. In 1852, the year
following the first gold discoveries, the city was like a ghost town.

Crews (and even captains) abandoned their ships in the harbour, leaving nothing more
than a
forest of masts
, as Alexander Dick described the port of Melbourne. Construction
sites were frozen in time: buildings had been started but there were no workers to
finish them.

The police force was gutted, schools closed, the public service staggered along on
a skeleton staff. And husbands (notoriously) deserted their wives. Some women expected
their men to reappear with a pocketful of gold; others knew they were gone for good.

A year later, however, many of the original fugitives had returned. Some had made
their pile; some had realised they could make a fortune a lot more easily selling
goods and services to gold diggers than digging for gold themselves.

Carpenters, stonemasons and other artisans found their skills were suddenly in demand.
Shady lawyers and dubious doctors, who had come to Australia to dig for wealth, discovered
that their professions paid better—regardless of whether
they really were qualified.
A publican's licence was a sure route to prosperity—liquid gold. You just had to
be adaptable.

And no one knew the value of adaptability better than women. As Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye
wrote in her advice manual for prospective female immigrants, what was needed in
Victoria, far more than fine garments, letters of introduction and impeccable manners,
was
a smiling face, and a firm determination never to look on the shady side of
the picture but to make the very best of every cross, accident or discomfort
. Melbourne
was a can-do sort of a place—and it was growing at a ferocious rate.

Victoria and the goldfields

SETTLING FOR COLLINGWOOD

The explosion in Melbourne's growth had far-reaching effects. Many immigrants, particularly
those with families, were disheartened by what they saw when they left the cosy
little floating world of their ship. The search for decent lodgings was the first
challenge. Single young men could bed down in any nook or cranny, but fathers struggled
to find accommodation for their dependants.

Solomon Belinfante, a Jamaican-born London Jew, had been assured of a room in Melbourne
by one of his brethren. He went ashore with his pregnant 21-year-old wife Ada, their
infant daughter Rebecca and her nursemaid, after a comfortable 78 days at sea under
steam power.

We had lunch in a miserable place called Sandridge
, wrote Belinfante (aged 40) in
his diary,
then walked to the omnibus ankle deep in mud…heartily sick of the Cohen
promises to engage lodgings…heartily disgusted with the place
. But Ada and Solomon
soon settled in Collingwood, where he became a commercial broker and she got on with
the business of having eleven more children.

At this stage the suburb of Collingwood had no roads and the stumps of newly felled
gum trees poked out of the ground. A metre-high gum stub protruded right at the entrance
to Martha Clendinning's new abode. Martha and her daughter were lucky to find a room
to rent in the house of the
well known vocalist
, Mrs Tester. Martha's husband Dr
George Clendinning stayed at a pub, sleeping on a billiard table.

The housing shortage underlay many of Melbourne's
social woes. All manner of temporary
structures were erected to serve as lodging houses. And, not surprisingly, disease
spread like wildfire through these unsanitary and overcrowded hostelries.

Colonial fever was a quaint name for a hideous ailment: typhus. It was spread by
head lice and characterised by headaches, chills and the foul smell of rotting bodily
fluids. It was exacerbated by overcrowding and poor hygiene. It took out young and
old alike, and it frightened everybody. Women were known to shave their pubic hair
so they wouldn't get lice.

Influenza, scarlet fever, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough all became endemic
in Victoria in the 1850s. All associated with high immigration, high birthrate and
congested living conditions.

CANVAS TOWN

Those too poor or too unlucky to find proper accommodation were left with one grim
place of last resort. Canvas Town was a tent city located on the south side of the
Yarra River at Emerald Hill. It's now the site of the Victorian Arts Centre. Like
the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed
with tent dwellings there were tent stores, bakers' shops, butchers' stalls, restaurants,
sly-grog shops and barbers' shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.

It sounds like a fine solution, but the eight thousand inhabitants led a squalid
existence. The Marco Polo Chronicle called Canvas Town
the epitome of misery and
costliness
. The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer.
The only water supply was the fetid Yarra River, into which the tanneries and soap
factories of Collingwood and Richmond upstream had already emptied their disgusting
waste. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.

Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by
what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion'. The
begrimed and unrecognisable
children
who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with
firewood, rumbling between the tents with their
wretched occupants
, horrified Martha.
Everyone and everything was covered in dust.

Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack:
children squalling, women shrieking and men
shouting, the noise was uproarious
. The colonial urban jungle of Canvas Town looked,
sounded and smelled like somewhere you'd want to escape from, not sail halfway around
the world to find.

Unable to get any accommodation at all, Thomas and Frances Pierson pitched a tent
at South Melbourne beach where
sand flew in clouds thicker than I ever saw it snow
.
All a Lie that we were told in History or the papers
, he fumes in his diary.
This
is the most God forsaken accursed country I could conceive of.