THE REFRIGERATION WARS
It was ever the concern of Australian colonies to shrink time and space. Refrigerated ships were like the telegraph. In an iced hold time and distance were nullified since all spoilage was halted. To ship frozen Australian meat and keep it frozen all the way to Britain presented the consummate challenge for a Lancashire-born hyper-businessman named Thomas Mort. Mort had emigrated to Australia to escape the Dickensian drudgery of life as a clerk in Manchester. He had made his fortune as an auctioneer and a wool buyer, and, most notably, he created the first market in Sydney where wool could be sold and bought in an orderly manner. This replaced the old haphazard system by which wool buyers rode out beyond the limits of, say, Liverpool in New South Wales to intercept the owners of the wagons of wool coming down along the roads from the bush, then haggled with them over a glass of spirits at such public houses as the Woolsack.
Mort acquired pastoral properties, a tin smelter and mines, and built at Balmain, with the help of Captain Thomas Rowntree, a ship-graving dock so large that it could take the steamers which first arrived in Australia in 1853, and the ships of the Royal Mail. What a gift for innovation would have been smothered had he remained a Manchester clerk. He knew that Great Britain offered substantial business to any exporters of meat who could get the produce to them, the Britons being Europe’s only incessant beef eaters. In the decade 1851–1860 the average production of meat in Britain was 910 000 tons, or 72 pounds (33 kilograms) per head of population, which was not sufficient for the British appetite, which was closer to 110 pounds (50 kilograms) per person.
Many had been trying to solve the refrigeration challenge. As early as 1846 the husky, Canadian-raised Sizar Elliott made his first attempt to ship Australian meat by canning it in Sydney. Israel Joseph then opened a factory, and so did the Dangar brothers, New England pastoralists, in Newcastle. Their motivation was the doubling of Australian sheep numbers in the eight years from 1860 to 1868, which was too many for the local market and live export. The boiling down of both sheep and cattle in large stinking vats in the bush resumed on a large scale, animal tallow selling for more than meat.
The results of early refrigeration experiments were small-scale. Sizar Elliott went broke. In the early 1870s small quantities of hard frozen beef reached Britain from the USA, the meat being frozen by a mixture of natural ice, cut from rivers and lakes in the north-eastern USA, and salt. But this method worked only because of the shorter distance the American meat had to travel, and in any case the climatic conditions of Australia did not favour natural ice.
In 1855 James Harrison, Scots printer and publisher of the Geelong Advertiser, self-educated at such institutions as the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute, created an ice-making machine in Geelong. It was said to be able to manufacture 3 tons of ice per day. He experimented with ether to produce a practical refrigerating machine in which the ether vapour was condensed to a liquid again and recycled. Harrison applied for British patents in March 1856. While Harrison was distracted by refrigeration and ice-making, his newspaper was losing money, and he was declared insolvent in 1861 and the assets of the publishing company sold. In 1866 he was employed by David Syme, proprietor of the Melbourne Age, and was left with little time to devote to refrigeration schemes.
In 1865 a refrigeration-minded pastoralist named Augustus Morris, who had been mocked by his peers for trying to raise money to back Harrison, met up with a fellow enthusiast, Eugène Nicolle, in Sydney. Nicolle was a Frenchman, a graduate of the University of Rouen employed on engineering projects in England and then in Australia, and the holder of a patent for his own refrigerating machine developed in 1861. Nicolle’s Darlinghurst plant was opened in 1863. His machine depended on the cooling effect which arose from ammonia being absorbed in water. In 1866, with the backing of Augustus Morris, he called a public meeting to raise money for an experiment which would demonstrate the feasibility of exporting frozen meat. The meeting was held in the rooms of the merchant Thomas Mort, who was not in Sydney at the time and had up till now shown little interest in Nicolle. But when Mort returned and met Nicolle and Morris, he offered to finance further experiments in refrigeration.
The experimental machinery was built at the Sydney Ice Company’s works in Paddington and was demonstrated to an invited audience in September 1867. Samples of frozen meat from Nicolle’s new refrigeration machine had already been served at Government House and elsewhere and been approved of and, above all, afflicted no one with food poisoning. Mort bought the rights to the new machine and was granted a patent in November 1867. He called a meeting on 2 February 1868 to raise funds of £10 000–15 000 for a trial shipment of around 200 tons of frozen meat to Britain. A large committee was gathered and included pastoralists and merchants. But even so, the subscriptions came to only £2500. Nicolle, after attempting to work on refrigeration based on air, returned to improving his ammonia heat-absorption machine. The progress was so slow that Mort apologised to his subscribers in 1869. Meanwhile, Mort was becoming interested in the refrigerating machines built in Britain by Rees Reece which, like Nicolle’s, were based on ammonia absorption. Mort wrote to his brother William asking him to obtain a model of Reece’s machine.
Mort’s sense of urgency was due to the fact that sheep numbers had continued to increase so significantly and at the same time wool prices were still falling disastrously. Mort was auctioning off many pastoral properties and at the same time waiting for the right equipment to save the bush by refrigerating meat. By 1872 he had become disillusioned with the international possibilities, but decided to use Nicolle’s refrigeration system on land. He would build an abattoir at Bowenfels, 150 kilometres from Sydney, where he could buy stock cheaply, chill the meat there and transport it by railway wagons, refrigerated with a mixture of ice and calcium chloride, to a cold store in Darling Harbour. By the time it was all working properly and profitably, he was approached again on the question of whether he would make a trial shipment of meat to Britain. He said he could not finance it alone; but if £20 000 was subscribed, he could ship between 300 and 500 tons of meat overseas.
Mort trialled Nicolle’s shipboard ammonia refrigeration in 1875, but before it left Sydney Harbour, the ship’s vibrations strained the pipes and the fluid flooded the meat. By March 1876, most of the money had been subscribed or promised and the project went ahead. The problem was that though the ammonia plant worked well on land, ships’ masters and insurers were unwilling to accept the hazards of having ammonia on board their ships. Nicolle adjusted his scheme to use the cooling effect produced when salts such as ammonium chloride were dissolved in water. The salt solution could then be boiled on board the ship to recover the salt crystals that would then be recycled into the refrigerator. The engineering workers at Mort’s dock had a lot of difficulty making the equipment, since they had to use exotic metals to resist corrosion. But by 1877 it was working well.
Then, in 1878, Mort, full of schemes at sixty-two years of age, fell sick while at his property at Bodalla in southern New South Wales and died of pleuro-pneumonia. Nicolle retired with the great endeavour unfinished. Harrison, having been sent broke by his refrigeration schemes nearly a quarter of a century before, continued with his work in Melbourne and had overcome the scepticism of his friend the Reverend Doctor John Ignatius Bleasdale, a remarkable Catholic priest with a passion for chemistry who was Harrison’s confidant. Harrison conducted experiments and, until his health failed, Bleasdale reported on them. Harrison exhibited his products at the Melbourne exhibition of 1872–73, showing fresh meat frozen and packed ‘as if for a voyage, so that the refrigerating process may be continued for any required period’. A group of pastoralists had subscribed £2500 to enable Harrison to prepare and take to Britain a parcel of 25–50 tons as a demonstration. Thus the Norfolk sailed from Melbourne on 22 July 1893 with Harrison and two tanks of frozen meat on board. Before departure, David Syme, Harrison’s editor at the Age, a gaunt, reserved man but
one who had backed with the power of his paper all colonial innovation, provided a champagne lunch for Harrison.
The experiment proved to be a fiasco, the tanks leaking shortly after leaving Melbourne. The rotting meat had to be thrown overboard off Cape Horn. Meanwhile, new refrigeration schemes were used to cross the Atlantic and led to the successful delivery of meat from New York, but again they did not have to deal with the challenges the longer haul from the Antipodes involved. In 1877 the first successful shipment of frozen meat from the southern hemisphere took place when a ship from Montevideo, the Paraguay, took mutton to France. The Grand Hotel in Paris served the meat for a whole week.
Thomas McIlwraith, a Scot, ultimately to become a controversial premier of Queensland, hearing of the Paraguay, asked his brother Andrew and Andrew’s English partner Malcolm McEacharn to inspect the Paraguay at its mooring in France and report on whether the refrigeration system would work in shipping meat from Australia. McIlwraith and McEacharn then chartered the ship Strathleven and set up a refrigeration plant like the Paraguay’s inside the hold. None of the ill omens and misfortunes which had plagued the other apostles of refrigeration intervened now. The ship left Melbourne on 6 December 1879, and arrived in London on 2 February 1880 with its meat still frozen. The refrigeration machinery was absolutely adequate to the task and indeed so effective it could be shut down for part of the day even in the tropics. Neither Andrew McIlwraith nor Malcolm McEacharn followed up the success of the voyage by engaging in the meat trade. But by 1882 eight ships had been fitted with refrigerating machinery for the Australian and New Zealand meat trade.
A huge offload of protein to the northern hemisphere began.
MINERAL DREAMS
By the 1860s the gold rush was turning into a mineral industry. The joint stock company was replacing the individual red-shirted miner. Naturally the sentimental alcoholic Henry Lawson remembered from his childhood the days that mattered to him, the early golden years that were somehow less mercenary than the later ones.
The night too quickly passes
And we are growing old,
So let us fill our glasses
And toast the Days of Gold.
When finds of wondrous treasure
Set all the South ablaze
And you and I were faithful mates
All through the roaring days.
But the Roaring Days, if they had ever been so fraternal, were no longer like that. The prospector had become an employed miner, and the world of the miner was an early catalyst of industrial action. A young Orkney Islander named William Guthrie Spence, who had arrived in Melbourne with his parents in the Roaring Days, specifically 1852, had created a Miners’ Union which he united with the Amalgamated Miners’ Association in 1878 in the first coup of a career devoted to industrial action. A vigorous Presbyterian and temperance man, he was characteristic of those practical Scots who believed that the deity helped those who took action rather than passively awaited His will.
Throughout the 1860s he might be found addressing miners across Victoria, in Clunes and Ballarat and Castlemaine, and with equal eloquence preaching to Presbyterians, Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians on Sundays. The gold-mining business was a matter of industrial equity for him, not of memories of old mateships.
In the early 1860s, 40 000 miners left eastern Australia for the Otago gold rush in New Zealand’s South Island, but to compensate that loss, an increasing number of women and families came to join husbands and fathers in Australian gold-mining areas. The women humanised the gold towns, introducing sheets to go with the blankets, serving meals on china and putting muslin curtains in the windows. Even so, Anthony Trollope found the store tents and shops in the valley at Bendigo, which ran for seven miles, ‘dirty, uncouth, barren, and disorderly’. He declared the hospitals excellent, however, and charitable welfare, in his conservative view, so good as to almost encourage poverty.
Well-ordered cottages, broad streets and stone churches were by now the mark of Ballarat. Later goldfields, such as Lambing Flat in New South Wales, still possessed the old rawness, the hotels and boarding houses being large tents, and at the dances miners in muddy clothes and heavy boots ‘solemnly danc[ed] the Mazurka’ with each other. The pubs, when they were built—477 public houses and hotels in Ballarat alone—were numerous and sometimes remarkably elegant compared to the shebeens and grog tents of the first days. The gold buyers often built their fortunes here, buying cheaply on the fields, sending the portion they bought off to Melbourne by gold escort.
Not all the goldfields had achieved sophistication. Young diarist G.O. Preshaw joined the Bank of New South Wales and was sent to the remote goldfield of Kiandra, a later field than Ballarat, Bendigo or Ophir. The bank was still located in a calico tent with a stream of melted snow running in a channel down the centre of the mud floor. Preshaw had to carry all the gold deposits of the day nearly a mile to the small military and police camp where they were stored under the commandant’s bed. He and his fellow clerks tried to supplement their wages by sinking a shaft inside the bank, but it yielded them little.
Indeed, to get enough gold on some of the goldfields now, diggers had to buy and install quartz-crushing equipment, great machines called ‘batteries’. Several such machines had been in operation at Bendigo as early as 1855, but their use accelerated from the 1860s onwards. By 1864 the number of small miners in Bendigo had dropped to 83 000, of whom a third were Chinese, and average earnings were about £70 a year. Machine drills now came into use and took the mining underground, and the typical lung diseases of miners began to be seen, including ‘black spit’. Individual prospectors might still be found in places like Ararat, Stawell and Rutherglen, but when they eventually went they often left a mining ghost town in their wake.
In a Queensland depression in 1867 James Nash found gold at a place named Gympie, north of Brisbane. Gympie’s white reefs of gold helped create the standard mining town with wooden fronts and canvas posteriors. Charters Towers’ gold was discovered by men who were too late to Gympie to cash in on its wealth. Gold was located behind Cooktown on the Palmer River and at Hodgkinson in the hinterland behind Cairns; James Venture Mulligan was said to have had a hand in both. It happened thus: Mulligan was an Irishman who on arrival in Melbourne in 1860 had tried to join the Burke and Wills expedition, and had been lucky enough not to be accepted. He subsequently settled in Armidale in New South Wales, where he opened a butcher shop and prospected on the Peel River. He followed the gold to Gympie in 1867, Gilberton in 1871 and the Etheridge, or Charters Towers, in 1873. That year Mulligan led a party of six from Georgetown to investigate a gold discovery by William Hann in the Cape York Peninsula near the Daintree and Palmer rivers. He had unspecified problems with Aborigines but came out to Cooktown with 102 ounces of gold. After the proclamation of the Palmer goldfield by the governor, Mulligan’s party received a £1000 reward. He discovered gold at Hodgkinson near Cairns, but since Hodgkinson was mainly a reef requiring crushing and there was little alluvial gold to be found, many miners were furious at him for attracting them there. He had lived by the gold frenzy and now died of it. A drunken prospector who was assaulting a woman by the Hodgkinson River was interrupted by Mulligan. The drunkard beat him and Mulligan died the next day in the rough hospital at Mount Molloy.
The biggest company involved in the Northern Territory in the early 1870s was the Northern Territory Gold Prospecting Association. In their prospectus they declared that the Northern Territory was an extension of the rich goldfields of Queensland, which was not the truth. The company’s party had arrived in Palmerston (later Darwin) in February 1872 and went south with equipment and horses and men, following the trail of empty meat tins and medicine bottles along the telegraph line. One of the principals of the company was John Chambers, an Englishman long settled in South Australia who with his friend William Finke (whose name John McDouall Stuart would attach to
the river of that name in Central Australia) had in 1857 found copper and had formed the Great Northern Mining Company. The mine had been found to be grossly overvalued, but Finke had survived the scandal.
The Overland Telegraph had created relay stations at a site named the Shackle and at Pine Creek, 121 and 150 miles (200 kilometres and 240 kilometres) from Palmerston respectively, and as John Chambers and others surveyed the geology of the Pine Creek area, excited telegraphs were sent down the line to Adelaide offering mine sites for sale or investment. Agents in Adelaide would buy the so-called mines without having even seen them. Sixty companies having been floated by May 1874, Northern Territory gold shares were bought up in the Brisbane stock exchange. The stock exchange was busy until after dark, and the cafe nearby was full of men smoking cigars and bubbling with speculative fervour about some Northern Territory rock outcrop.
Men with less capital actually marched to the far-off fields equipped with a broad hat, Holloway’s Ointment (a universal cure for cuts, bruises and ‘inveterate ulcers’), quinine, tent, hammock, mosquito net, revolver and breech-loading gun. At Pine Creek, coloured flags marked the borders of mining claims where men were digging or plugging dynamite into holes in reefs to blow up the quartz. Pine Creek was a rough settlement, devoid of women. Relatively nearby Yam Creek was famous for being ‘the place where resides an actual, real, live young lady’.
But there were great problems impeding the mining process itself, either by individual prospectors or by companies. There were no nearby vegetable gardens or stations to supply the fields with fresh food. Perhaps the desperate isolation of the field is best encapsulated in a recipe for liquor drunk there consisting of gin, kerosene, sugar, Worcestershire sauce and ginger. More refined goods could come in only by long-distance carriage or by ship to Palmerston. The long journey to the Northern Territory inflated the price of everything and in the rainy season the mines could not be reached anyhow because of the morasses which lay between them and the port to the north. Hence, in November 1873, D’Arcy Uhr’s journey with cattle 600 miles from Normanton in Queensland to sell the meat on the hoof on the goldfields! Others who tried the same journey came to disaster—William Nation lost his cattle and nearly starved to death after getting lost along the track from North Queensland by way of the Gulf of Carpenteria. He had £29 in his pocket and no food to spend it on. ‘Farewell, dear friends, all,’ he wrote at one stage.