Very early in the gold rush, radical opinion in the city and on the fields concentrated on the land issue—that the land was locked up by the squatters who sat in numbers on the Legislative Councils of both New South Wales and Victoria and who paid nominal rent, and denied any future prospect of land ownership to the miners who paid immensely per square metre for their minute claims. RL Milne, a conservative pamphleteer from Melbourne, witnessed a meeting on the issue in 1852. ‘To my astonishment, [there] was a republican flag, the stars and stripes of North America, waving in prognosticating triumph, right over the British ensign, in full view of the city of Melbourne.’
He reported further that one of the speakers was in the habit of taking off his hat to salute the multitude of miners and workers at public meetings, stating that in doing so he paid them a compliment he did not pay to any queen—‘thereby intimating the right of sovereignty in them, and not the Crown of England’.
The Melbourne Age set the tone for the new men—the city progressives and radicals, and those on the goldfields. It would say in 1857, ‘The laissez-faire system will not answer in this country.’ That is, there would need to be government intervention to ensure equity in land, employment and rights. These concepts caused undeniable grief to conservatives such as William a’Beckett, the first Chief Justice of Victoria, who was throughout the 1850s the champion of order, which to him meant not merely law and order but the accustomed order of classes without which, he believed, civilisation must end. Gold was dangerous because it had the power to turn class relations upside-down. He would write a pamphlet, Does the Discovery of Gold in Victoria, viewed in relation to its Moral and Social Effects, as Hitherto Developed, Deserve to be Considered a National Blessing or a National Curse?
It had certainly introduced into society a general contempt for polite dress and personal appearance, and an acceptance of squalid crowding-in. And of course smoking and drinking and swearing. Chief Justice a’Beckett saw this thrusting towards equality as ‘the dream of a madman or the passion of a fiend’. It would be possible to call him a prig and a hypocrite, given that he married while in Melbourne his deceased wife’s younger sister, a marriage which had been forbidden under British statute not yet enacted in Australia. But he would have argued, ‘My act did not bring the very pillars of society down.’
For gold hunting, said William’s brother, Thomas a’Beckett, also a lawyer, was ‘not, per se, a desirable occupation. Its success is not dependent upon moral work, and it has a tendency to destroy rather than promote the observance of those rules of conduct which, while they contribute to wealth and welfare, elevate the individual who practises them and promote social happiness.’
It was believed that the goldfields could be unhinging too—that they increased the numbers of the insane. Gold, alcohol and harsh conditions were considered to bring on madness. Everyone dreamed of nuggets. James Thomas Harcourt, who ran for some years a private lunatic asylum in Victoria, stated in the course of a trial in the Victorian Supreme Court in 1852 that it was a ‘common feature’ with Victorian lunatics to place their excrement in their pockets and say it was gold.
A talented lawyer, the Irishman Redmond Barry, also chimed in on the side of the establishment. He had been spirited enough on his journey to Australia to have an affair with a married woman passenger and to be considered such a dasher as to be confined to his cabin by the captain. Now, in Melbourne, a man at the height of his talents, he was almost hyperactively beneficent in his civic activities and heavily involved in the founding of those bulwarks against barbarism, the University of Melbourne and the Victorian Institute. ‘All this points to prove,’ said Barry at the opening of the university in 1854, ‘that the barren acquisition of money does not satisfy the cravings of the people who possess comprehension.’
Churchmen looked upon the gold craze as an enemy of piety. Anglican Bishop Perry declared gold could act ‘to the increased prosperity of this colony, and for the happiness of its people; or for the destruction of social order, and the introduction of an age of barbarism amongst us’. Like the a’Beckett brothers, the bishop thought it a problem that gold threatened to make the poor rich, as the poor knew ‘no other enjoyment than the gratification of their appetites’.
By contrast with some colonial gentlemen, Lord Robert Cecil, a promising 21-year-old Englishman and future prime minister of Britain, was cheered by the signs of good order in the great pitted and denuded landscapes of Ballarat and Bendigo. He was recovering from a nervous collapse in 1852 when he visited the goldfields. An Oxford and Eton man, he wore a jumper, since he had been warned that the diggers hooted ‘gents’, and he aspired to be called ‘mate’ according to the general tenor of the gold localities. Everyone was ‘mate’ except the Chinese diggers, and sometimes, in cases of personal relationships, even them. At the goldfields, found Cecil, ‘there was less crime than in a large English town and more order and civility than I have myself witnessed in my native village of Hatfield’. That pillar of society Redmond Barry would come to agree with him and would give praise to the unwritten British Constitution and its moderating influence in saving Victoria from the worst excesses of Californian Yankeedom.
GOLDFIELD ARRIVALS
It is a truism that diggers emigrating to the Australian colonies in hope of a golden bonanza brought with them new attitudes, their backgrounds making them intolerant of police officiousness and sceptical of oligarchies.
Peter and Richard Lalor, for example, who arrived in Australia in 1853, might be taken as typical of the educated Irish. They had left a nation gutted by Famine and cowed by political repression, and they brought with them a family tradition of both civil resistance and physical force. Their father, a middling farmer, had been a supporter of Daniel O’Connell, and had been elected to the Westminster parliament as a member of the Irish Party in the House of Commons. Their brother, James Fintan, ideological force of the Young Ireland Movement and of the Irish uprising of 1848, was a friend to the famed Irish political prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land—William Smith O’Brien, John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher. He wrote that only those who worked the land should own it, a doctrine which anticipated Marx and Engels. In the midst of the Famine he urged farmers to go on a nationwide rent strike, and was arrested and then released from prison as his health declined. He agreed to take part in an uprising in the summer of 1849 to protest against the sending of the harvest out of starving Ireland, but nothing came of it and two days after its proposed date he died in Dublin. Peter and Richard Lalor therefore came from no vague tradition of nay-saying. Their father, Patrick, would state in the year of his sons’ emigration to Australia, ‘I have been struggling for upwards of forty years, struggling without ceasing in the cause of the people.’
Arrived in Melbourne, Richard and Peter entered a business partnership as spirit and provision merchants, which gave Peter finance sufficient to go to the Ovens goldfield late in 1853. In 1854 he moved to Ballarat where he tried several spots, finally sinking a shaft on Red Hill and living in a small hut made of logs on the Eureka goldfield.
John Basson Humffray arrived in Ballarat the same year Peter Lalor went to the Ovens. He had been born in north Wales in 1824, the son of a master weaver who made sure he was well educated. His home county, Montgomeryshire, and his hometown, Newtown, were centres of the Chartist movement, in which the young Humffray involved himself. In Ballarat, another young man of ideas, the Italian Raffaello Carboni, described Humffray as ‘perplexed at the prosperity of the vicious and the disappointment of the virtuous in this mysterious world of ours’. He was, like Lalor’s father, a believer in moral force and, despite the increasingly severe provocations offered by the Victorian police to the miners, rejected the concept of armed retaliation and resistance. Grubbing in the clay did not consistently attract him as a fit vocation for a man, so he opened a bookstore in Ballarat, but he was always a solid supporter of the diggers. He was appalled by the establishment and the attitudes emanating from ‘the
Camp’, the cantonment occupied at the north end of Ballarat by the police and military. The British army, engaged so heavily in the war against Russia in the Crimea, did not have many troops to spare for the colony of Victoria, but the longer the miners’ grievances went unaddressed, the more troops of the 12th and 40th Regiments marched up from Melbourne through the Eureka diggings and over Bakery Hill to take residence in the Camp.
Raffaello Carboni, an Italian nationalist in his early thirties, had been briefly imprisoned for his politics while a seminarian in Rome. Having left the Church to work in a bank, he became a member of the Young Italy movement which sought to unify Italy by driving the Austrians out of the north, taking the Papal States from the Pope (who, said the rebels, should be content to be a spiritual prince), and the south from the heinously corrupt Bourbons who ruled the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. When Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Young Italy general in exile, returned to Italy from Peru in 1848, he took Milan from the Austrians and marched on Rome. The Pope fled, and his restoration became an objective both of the French and the Austrians. Carboni was an officer in a Garibaldian battalion led by his friend Colonel Cattabeni, and was wounded three times in the leg during Garibaldi’s defence of Rome. When the French assault finally drove out the Italian nationalists, Garibaldi went again into Peruvian exile, but Carboni settled in Cornhill in London, taught languages and read graphic accounts of the Australian goldfields in the London Illustrated News. He was in Melbourne by mid 1852 and was soon at Ballarat. ‘I had joined a party; fixed our tent on the Canadian Flat; went up to the Camp to get our gold licence.’ Then he walked to Golden Point and jumped into an abandoned hole. ‘In less than five minutes I pounced on a little pouch [a seam]—the yellow boy [gold] was all there—my eyes were sparkling—I felt a sensation identical to a first declaration of love in bygone times—“Great Works!” at last was my bursting exclamation.’ This was his favourite epithet, and the exuberant young man, one of whose wounds sometimes still reopened, was known and liked as Great Works Carboni.
In January 1853, Carboni saw a party working a claim at Canadian Gully in Ballarat find a golden rock weighing 93 pounds (42 kilos), and then shortly after another weighing 84 pounds (38 kilos). A few days later, at a depth of 15 metres, another monster weighing 136 pounds (62 kilos) was discovered, and named ‘The Canadian’. Raffaello Carboni, with a claim on a hill above, declared ‘Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other goldfields are in dirt.’
LETTERED MINERS
Not all diggers were as well educated or politically sophisticated as Peter Lalor, John Humffray and Raffaello Carboni, but many of them were. By the time of Carboni’s arrival, there was a lending library established at Golden Point and it was passionately patronised by diggers. It proved that by 1854, the literacy rates in goldfield males were much higher than those prevailing in the British population. Eighty per cent of the goldfields Irish, for example, were literate.
This reality altered and even elevated the goldfields, though they did not look like salubrious locations. The Sabbath was well observed. Methodists were established by the end of 1853 with a resident preacher, and Father Matthew Downey, a Kerry man educated at Naples, was the first Catholic priest to take up residence on the Ballarat fields. His bishop described his habitation as ‘the most miserable apology for a dwelling I have ever seen. A few wine casks serve as chairs . . .’ Theatres were opened on the Gravel Pits field in late 1853 and on Eureka in 1854, while the Adelphi Theatre in Ballarat itself quickly followed. A racing club was formed and cricket was played in the summer.
The diggers seemed to be imposing their own version of order. Yet a new Victorian governor, Charles Hotham, wrongly believed he was dealing with anarchic and unlettered scum. Westminster, too, was thinking of putting an export duty on gold as well as the licence fee. The diggers pointed out that such a step would be ‘class legislation, inasmuch as there is no export duty on wool or tallow’. They were not fools, but they felt they were counted as such. And they were the inheritors of the tradition of the year of revolutions, 1848, when that famous bloodless French coup had delivered a poet-president, Lamartine, when even the starving Irish rebelled abortively, when the Italians had risen against the French and the Austrians.
Indeed, as the Irish made their way to the ports to take ship to California or Australia, they were still likely to encounter cadavers, black with typhus, hollowed by hunger, in ditches. Homeless widows and children screamed their plaints of misery at them on their way. And they trod on, taking ship to a saner world. But in Victoria they found all they hated: the landlord, the bailiff, the equivalent of the tithe-gouger—anointed by authority—in their path. The old tyranny was encapsulated in the uniform of the Victorian police. And La Trobe, and Hotham after him, had not released even enough ground to allow the miners a vegetable garden.
Charles Hotham was a hardnosed naval captain of some diplomatic experience, but no appeaser. Victoria was for him a second choice—he had wanted a Crimean War command. New provisions for constitutional reform for Victoria and New South Wales were under consideration in Whitehall, as a result of pressure from colonists. In the meantime Victoria was to be wrung into shape like a warship might be. The policy, and Hotham’s mindset, would be catastrophic. Feeling the gritty winds blowing off the goldfields in 1854, Hotham did not need a prefabricated hut—he lived in reasonable resplendence in a residence in Toorak, and received dispatch riders from the goldfields.
He was alarmed that the Americans on the goldfields had formed the Order of the Lone Star with the intention to extend to the citizens of Australia the benefits of liberty and republicanism. His predecessor La Trobe had written to London earlier to say that though ‘some danger might be apprehended’ from the Americans, he did not think republicanism was apparent on the goldfields. Indeed, La Trobe and Hotham, had the latter possessed the gift to see these things, would have noticed how regularly the diggers looked upon their situation as a violation of traditional British rights, not necessarily of republican ones. It was even so with Carboni.
In November 1853, he had gone to a meeting on Bakery Hill, just above Eureka, where four hundred diggers expressed sympathy with the plight of the police-plagued Bendigo diggers and a petition was raised for a reduction of fees. There was a ‘great waste of yabber yabber’, said Carboni, about the lack of digger representation in the Legislative Council, and much complaint about monopoly of the land. Before leaving the meeting, Carboni held a brief conversation with a medical man, Dr Carr, whom he would later meet under a more pernicious star. Carr complimented Carboni on his English, and then told him (as relayed in Carboni’s shaky French) ‘Nous allons bientot au revoir la Republique Australienne! (We’ll soon see an Australian republic).’ Carboni, who believed in an independent but not necessarily republican Italy, remarked, ‘Quel farce! (What a joke!)’
‘I understood very little of these matters at the time,’ Carboni later admitted. ‘The shoe had not pinched my toe yet.’ But there was talk of a diggers’ congress, and the storekeepers of Ballarat added to the diggers’ petition their own protest declaring that the licence fee was ‘unjust in principle, partial in collection’.
Soon afterwards, a new field was found on the Buckland River near Beechworth, towards the New South Wales border in the north-east, and five thousand men rushed there, forgetting their politics. On top of that nearly a thousand diggers, mainly Americans, sailed away to try the goldfields discovered at the headwaters of the Amazon, though they were replaced by 1500 supposedly apolitical Chinese.
Governor Hotham knew he must now visit turbulent Ballarat. Driving up the dusty main road from Melbourne with his wife, the grand-niece of the illustrious Lord Nelson, he arrived in the town on a Saturday evening and was pleased to find ‘an orderly and well conducted people, particular in their observance of Sunday’. A digger carried his wife through the mud and a nugget of 75 pounds (34 kilos) was found and named in Lady Hotham’s honour. The governor was pleased to note that shafts had to go
deep to find gold, since that meant a digger had to stay fixed in one locality for the better part of six months before he bottomed out, either on a vein of gold or nothing. At nearby Bendigo Hotham was presented with a petition to do away with the licence fee, and met the diggers and spoke equably with them. Even so, his military eye had noticed that a soldier invading the surface of the goldfields would be poorly placed to deal with a digger firing upon him from within a shaft.
Hotham’s brief, like that of any governor, was to cut debt. Revenue from the goldfields had declined in the last months of 1854. Hotham’s advice, however, was that only half of the diggers paid their licence fee. He instructed his Gold Commissioners and the acting Commissioner of Police that an effective search be made on all the fields at least twice a week to raise revenue.
As far as the diggers were concerned, they would now be hounded even more by the corrupt police and officious soldiers of the Camp. A digger had described the Camp as ‘a kind of legal store where justice was bought and sold, bribery being the governing element of success, and perjury the base instrument of baser minds to victimise honest and honourable men, thus defeating the ends of justice’. Yet His Excellency foolishly put his fondest hopes in it.
The soldiers and police lived well in the Camp, and the police were involved in the sly grog business not only as paid-off protectors but also as partners. Some had a business arrangement with James Bentley, a former Vandemonian convict, Melbourne confectioner and gold-buyer, who had built the first-class Eureka Hotel that could accommodate eighty people. Bentley’s premises were always protected by the police. But Sergeant Major Milne, a notorious policeman, descended upon Frank Carey, an alleged American sly-grogger who would not pay him bribe money, and closed him down.