The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (15 page)

a most curious and picturesque exhibition of the people of all nations…the swart Briton walks shoulder to shoulder with the flat-faced Chinaman, the tall and stately Armenian, the lithe New Zealander or South Sea Islander, the merry African from the United States, the grave Spaniard, the yellow-haired German, the tall, sharp visaged Yankee, and the lively Frenchman. Every state in the world has its representatives

Among the religious denominations represented in Victoria, the 1854 census recorded three thousand
Mahometans and Pagans
. By the end of the year that figure had risen to ten thousand, about half of whom were Chinese.
²
On the other hand, noted Caldwell with little sense of alarm,
the wild animals and native inhabitants seem to have almost melted away.

Commentators often noted the degree of dissimilarity, if not overt hostility, between the diverse ethnic groups, particularly the English and the Americans. Robert Caldwell believed the most
troublesome
part of the population came from America while the most
depraved
hailed from Britain via the Californian goldfields, where they had picked up the worst of American vices. The Americans' political creed, said Caldwell, was to
condemn everything British and with ignorant effrontery on British soil, to uphold as
perfect everything American
. American Silas Andrews noted that the populace was a
mixture of all nations
, mostly English of the
lowest class, possessing none of that activity and capability of turning their hands to anything, which the ‘Yankees' possess
. At the boarding house where Thomas and Frances Pierson, from the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, eventually found a place to stay, there were three tables set up in the dining room: one was the
Britishers table
, another the
Yankey table
, and a third the
Experienced Colonials table
. We are accustomed to understanding anglophone ethnic tensions in Australia as an immemorial turf war between the English and Irish, but there was more than a hint of the Boston Tea Party about the parlours of 1850s Melbourne.

Where did Sarah Hanmer seat herself? Born into the McCullough clan in Scotland, Sarah was Anglo-Celtic. But like another actress of her generation, Lola Montez, Sarah had travelled to America during the Californian gold rush. In 1850, she was living in Albany, New York, raising enough capital to put herself in pole position when the magnetic pull of gold exerted its southward traction. Later, in Ballarat, Sarah would show that her allegiances were surprisingly
Yankey
.

Gold rush Melbourne—gateway to the diggings—was a city reeling. In the year following the first gold discoveries it became a virtual ghost town.
The reports in the papers drove every one mad
, wrote Henry Mundy, who had emigrated to Australia as a boy in 1844,
every shepherd, hutkeeper, stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for and examining quartz.
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, primed with potential but no labour to see it through. Postal services were disrupted. The police force was gutted. Roads could not be built for the lack of navvies. Schools closed and the public service staggered along on a skeleton staff. And husbands notoriously deserted their wives, creating the legendary grass widows of the gold rush, the discarded victims of male caprice. Some women expected their husbands to reappear with a pocketful of gold; others knew they were gone for good.

A year later, many of the original fugitives had returned, having either made their pile or realised there was now a more reliable and less backbreaking fortune to be made servicing the boatloads of immigrants being daily disgorged onto Melbourne's shores. Carpenters, stonemasons and other artisans found their skills were suddenly at a premium. Dubious lawyers and uncertified doctors, who had come to Australia to dig for wealth, discovered that their professional practices were lucrative regardless of talent or qualification. A publican's licence was a sure route to prosperity.

The social condition of the colony, and especially the city of Melbourne
, wrote John Capper in his popular guidebook of 1854,
becomes every day more complicated and unmanageable
. Regulation of rents, prices, wages, sanitation and labour practices was a dream of the late nineteenth century's progressive thinkers. In the early 1850s, the guiding principle was adaptation, not control. By November 1853, on the eve of their departure for Ballarat and over a year since Charles and George Evans had stepped off the boat, George amused himself with the array of ventures he and his equally educated brother had embarked upon:

Verily we have now got all the irons, poker, tongs and all: let me see, what are we? Confectioners, cooks, booksellers, dealers in cordials, fruiterers, lodging housekeepers, hay horners, storekeepers, carters, dealers in timber, et et et et

No one knew the value of adaptability better than women. What was needed in Victoria, far more than fine garments, letters of introduction and sterling protocols, wrote Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye in her advice manual for prospective female immigrants,
is 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
. There was no doubt that Melbourne was a pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off sort of a place.

It was also, thanks to the combination of dislocation and new money, a place of intoxicating experimentation. Commentators had endless fun describing the peculiarities of local dress. Diggers, draymen and labourers, reported Robert Caldwell, had adopted the ‘uniform' of blue flannel shirt, brass-buckled belt, straw hat, knee-high boots and colourful
neckchief
. Large gold rings and flowing beards were also popular. It was a
worker's costume
, but adopted by all walks of life as a symbol of colonial authenticity. William Kelly, who had been in California before arriving in Australia in 1853, observed that in Melbourne it was de rigueur to dispense with coats, gloves and bell-toppers, and that the scorecard on neckties vs. bare necks was fifty-fifty. Kelly also enjoyed describing the attire of Melbourne's women who, he said, were
addicted to flowers and corn-stalks
worn in their bonnets. They also exhibited a
passion for parasols
(quite sensible, one would think, in the Australian sunshine). Warming to his topic, Kelly described how the
gentler portion of the [female] community
stayed indoors while the women who walked out in public were the
strong-minded class…

striking but unattractive women [who] jostled you on the flagways, elbowed you in the shops, and rattled through the streets in carriages hired at a guinea an hour, arrayed in flaunting dresses of the most florid colours, composed of silks, sarcenets and brocaded satins.

For Kelly, the most amusing detail of all was what these promenading women wore on their feet. Dressed to kill, they
buried their tiny feet and tapering ankles in lumbering Wellingtons
.

The journalist Charles Lyall had another expression for the peculiarities of women's dress in Victoria.
The prevailing costume of the Ladies
, he wrote,
is the chacun a son gout style
. The French phrase translates as ‘each to his own', expressing individuality of taste or choice. John Capper put the
strange antics
of Melbourne's women down to the fact that many of the young wives had
never seen money before
, hence the fashion for white satin, ostrich feathers and pearls, which they exhibited proudly while
refreshing themselves with a pot of half-and-half
. The women of Melbourne might have been lampooned for their gaucheries, but they relished the opportunity to experiment with unorthodox appearances. For those women who were proceeding to the diggings, such aesthetic adventures were good preparation for the journey ahead.

The explosion in Melbourne's growth had far-reaching effects, and many immigrants, particularly those with families, were disheartened by what they saw when they left the relative security of their ship. The search for decent lodgings was the first challenge. Single young men like the Calwells could bed down in any nook or cranny, but fathers struggled to find accommodation for their dependants. Solomon Belinfante, a Jamaican-born London Jew of Portuguese Sephardic ancestry, arrived on the luxurious
Queen of the South
in June 1854, the same journey that brought Governor La Trobe's replacement, Sir Charles Hotham, to his new home. Solomon had been assured a room in Melbourne by one of his brethren. He went ashore with his pregnant, twenty-one-year-old, Jamaican-born wife Ada, their infant daughter Rebecca and her nursemaid, after a comfortable seventy-eight days at sea under steam power.
We had lunch in a miserable place called Sandridge
, wrote Belinfante, aged forty, 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
. 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.
³

Genteel Martha Clendinning had a similarly tough time of finding lodgings. Thirty-two-year-old Martha was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, raised in Kings County. As a daughter of the Protestant Ascendancy class, it was fitting that she married a doctor sixteen years her senior. By the time Martha and her husband, George, arrived in Melbourne, they had already endured a long and monotonous voyage from England that ended in a calamitous shipwreck in Port Phillip Bay, just off Queenscliff. All the steerage passengers lost their entire belongings in the hold and lower deck, but the Clendinnings, in a first-class berth, got off lightly. They did lose their digging tools and almost lost their tent, which later became their Ballarat home for two years. But in Melbourne, Martha, her seven-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her sister, Sarah Lloyd, eventually found a room to rent—also in Collingwood—in the house of the
well known vocalist
, Mrs Tester. George Clendinning and Sarah's husband stayed at a pub, sleeping atop a billiard table.

At this stage, the suburb of Collingwood had no roads and the stumps of newly felled gum trees poked out of the ground. A four-foot-high gum stub protruded right at the entrance to the doctor's wife's new abode. Martha marvelled at the happy-go-lucky spirit of her young daughter
who remained free from all the anxieties and fears for the future that pressed on her parents
. The girl was
perfectly happy
, wrote Martha in her memoirs,
and enjoyed all the changes and chances we had passed through
. She probably slept well at night, too, unlike Martha, who found sleep
impossible
. It wasn't just apprehension that kept her awake; her restlessness was also
owing to the crowds of mosquitoes that attacked us
. Everyone complained about the mosquitos. Some newcomers reacted so badly to the insects' stings that they had to be hospitalised. And when they were not being monstered by mosquitos, neophyte Victorians were driven mad by flies.
⁴

But if insects were irritating, there was a more menacing scourge. Colonial fever was a quaint name for a hideous disease: typhus, spread by head lice, and characterised by headaches, chills and the foul smell of rotting bodily fluids. It was sometimes known as
putrid fever
. Colonial fever was exacerbated by overcrowding and poor hygiene. It took out young and old, hearty and sickly alike, and it frightened even the Pollyannas among the immigrants. Women were known to shave their pubic hair to diminish the chances of lice infestation. To add to the lethal mix, influenza, scarlet fever, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough all became endemic in Victoria in the 1850s, associated with high immigration, high birth rate and congested living conditions.