The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (14 page)

After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into the South Atlantic, following the natural circulation of 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. To avoid getting out of bed, Fanny and her friends huddled together under mantles and coverlets,
telling fortunes in teacups to pass the time
.

It was the little ones who suffered the worst in this final leg of the voyage. One boy on James Menzies' ship had a shocking fit. The doctor worked quickly to extract five worms from the lad's gut, each measuring eight inches long. On Fanny Davis's ship, one pregnant woman had lain in the hospital since departure. She 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.
¹⁴
Four children died on John Spence's ship. The babies, he wrote pragmatically,
were nursed on the spoon, always more easily injured than those who nurse on the breast
.

Sarah Raws witnessed another morbid scene.
A lady died this morning in our cabin.
Her death came as a
great shock
; she had only been confined to bed for one day. The woman left ten grieving children. She was
much respected in our cabin
and had become
very intimate
with Sarah's mother and father. The woman's husband was a Baptist deacon, already settled in Australia. 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 £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.

It was grief and fear, not elation, that accompanied many passengers as they sailed into their dizzying futures.

When Louisa Timewell's ship docked at Sandridge wharf (now Port Melbourne), she was dumbstruck by the jetsam of prosperity.
Passing down the Yarra Yarra
, she wrote,
we saw thousands of bullocks' and sheep's heads lying at the edge of the river a little way from the slaughtering house, rotting in a heap. I thought how many poor families would be glad of them in England
. What an extraordinary land that would discard good meat as so much waste. As the anchor dropped from Sarah Raws' ship, shouts of joy rang out.
It appeared like coming out of Sodom into Paradise
, she remarked. Fanny Davis swore that her ship had experienced the worst passage in years:
We are all totally worn out in mind and body and want of sleep
. On the morning of the
Ascutna
's arrival in Port Phillip, Mrs Dunn gave birth to a son in the stateroom adjoining Frances and Thomas Pierson. The ship's unassuming captain, George Pepper, named the boy George Pepper Ascutna Dunn.

The hours leading up to Margaret Howden's reunion with her
dear Jamie
prickled with tension. At just eighty-two days, the
Hurricane
's voyage had been lightning fast, spared serious illness and blessed with agreeable company and generous conditions. But for Margaret the day of reckoning—the much-anticipated meeting that had kept her spirits buoyant all these weeks—was about to be realised. Was dear Jamie craving his young Maggie as much as she ached for him?

July 29 Saturday
A beautiful awakening at 4 o'clock. 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. My feelings were more than can be described. To think that my own beloved Jamie was residing in that land. I saw the sun rise for the first time on my new place of abode. Oh! I sincerely trust that the hour, God willing, is not far distant when I shall meet my Jamie again, in perfect health, and all I could desire.

It had been, after all, more than six months since the last communication with James. Anything could have happened since then. He might have been struck down by that fearful colonial fever. He might have left his government post. He might, God forbid, have found a currency lass to love. Margaret, for all she knew, could be alighting in a land where she knew no one but her shipmates—and they, surely, would scatter on the winds of their new destinies.

July 31 Monday
A memorable day
. All the forenoon, walked on deck with Mr Robertson feeling very unsettled at the prospect of a termination to our voyage…Came down, then I put the cabin in order in fond expectations. We anchored at 5 o'clock. Oh! How thankful I feel. Several Scots came, but alas! my own Jamie was not among the number.

Margaret ran from one porthole to another trying to get a glimpse of her fiancé, but it was no use. He was simply not at the docks. So she returned to her neat berth and the routines of ship life: tea, walking, prayers, staring at the horizon.

August 1 Tuesday
A most anxious day as I was looking out for my
beloved
but alas! did not come.

By Wednesday, Margaret was compelled to leave the
Hurricane
. She packed up her
own dear cabin
, said farewell to new friends, and stepped onto the wharf at Sandridge. Margaret bravely walked to the Bedford Hotel.
Once again on dry land.

August 3 Thursday

Oh! I long for my Jamie.

August 4 Friday

Thought of my Jamie first thing. In very low spirits. Another day passed.

Then, miraculously, mysteriously, Margaret's diary is missing the pages for August 5 to August 10. So we know nothing of how, where or when the day of reunion with James Johnston happened—but happen it did. Margaret and James were married on Wednesday 9 August 1854 at St Peter's Anglican Church, Eastern Hill. They were about to endure the honeymoon from hell.

The
Lady Flora
, carrying Sarah Hanmer and her daughter, Julia, cruised through Port Phillip Heads on 13 August 1853.
We have
been taken in
, complained Hanmer's shipmate J. J. Bond.
Nothing but discomfort from beginning to end
. The captain spent most of his time drinking below. The first mate was
mad with ill temper
. The steward and attendants were
insolent fellows who laughed at our misery
. The passengers were
three parts starved
. The salt beef was inedible, the sea biscuits musty, the coffee burnt.
Dirt, confusion and noise have prevailed in place of order and regularity
, Bond lamented.

How much more acutely must William Timewell have felt this sense of injustice, of being royally duped? His wife Louisa would contract colonial fever only months after their arrival, leaving William with a clutch of motherless children and a sourdough leaven in need of constant feeding.

For Sarah Hanmer, about to shed six of her thirty-two years when the immigration agent at Port Phillip asked for her age, the performance of grievance was poised to find a new and very public stage.

FOUR

THE ROAD

When the
Lady Flora
sailed into
harbour in the spring of 1853, it was less than three short years since the Port Phillip District had been separated from its parent colony of New South Wales. Victoria officially became an autonomous colony on 1 July 1851, a month before gold changed its fortunes forever. Charles La Trobe was Victoria's first lieutenant governor, overseeing a town of fledgling institutions, a hinterland squired by a self-selected landed gentry (the ‘squattocracy') and a measly 23,143 inhabitants.

Compared to sin-city Sydney, which had more than double the population, Melbourne before the gold rush was a country cousin. The inter-colonial influx following the discovery of gold, with a tsunami of immigrants hot on its heels, started an overnight boom in Melbourne. The mantle of inferiority was quickly thrown off, and Melbourne revelled in a carnival-like upheaval. According to John D'Ewes, a civil servant whose name would be forged in the fires of Eureka,
the streets wore a very holiday appearance.
¹

By the census of April 1854, the city of Melbourne and its neighbouring seaport towns (Sandridge, Williamstown) recorded a population of some 65,000 males and 45,000 females. That represents a near five-fold increase in a mere three years. Just imagine if Melbourne's present-day population of 3.8 million quintupled to almost twenty million in less time than it takes to build, say, an Olympic stadium. Add to this phenomenal explosion the 52,000 males and 14,000 females packed onto the goldfields, which did not even exist when the census was taken in 1851, and the 49,000 males and 30,000 females in inland towns and districts including Geelong: this was a colony heaving under the weight of its own success. By August 1854, there were over 115,000 men, women and children on the goldfields alone. The official figures did not include the ‘dying race' of Aborigines (estimated to be around 2500, a fraction of the 25,000 likely to have occupied the Port Phillip district prior to European occupation) or the Chinese, neither of whom were considered worth counting.

Like other cities that grow by magic
, wrote American gold seeker Dan Calwell to his sisters at home in Ohio,
most of the buildings are temporary and they are already giving place to more capacious and costly ones.
Dan and his brother Davis had spent almost five months sailing from New York, arriving in the spring of 1853.
The quietness of ship life
, wrote Dan,
was superseded by the noise and confusion of a second Babel.
Melbourne reeked of wide-open possibilities, and the Calwell boys, only twenty and twenty-one years old, couldn't wait to cross the line that separated the mundane from the electrifying.

Nothing stayed still for long: taking a census at the feverish height of a gold rush was like trying to herd cats. The only piece of empirical data that refused to budge was the disproportion of the sexes: 193 males to every hundred females—a fact, said the statisticians, that
can scarcely fail to attract the attention of the legislature
. There was one demographic detail that was universally acknowledged. The proportion of people in the
prime of life
, aged between twenty and forty, was substantially higher than in Great Britain or in any other colony. Victoria's population was overwhelmingly young, male and mobile.

It was also surprisingly cosmopolitan, with all the associations of excitement and glamour, the sinuous interplay between cultures this sexy word conjures. Here is British merchant Robert Caldwell's pen picture of the populace of Melbourne: