The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (23 page)

You can almost see the vindictive, self-righteous spittle fly from the aggrieved lips of Thomas Pierson as he ups the ante on his family's future:
we determined sticking to it a while yet to make something out of this country if we can as we think it owes us
something
. A dangerous position: to hold a grudge, to feel a sense of entitlement.

On 1 March 1854, the Piersons attended a monster meeting of similarly disgruntled storekeepers, a show of strength against the new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. There were by now three hundred stores at Ballarat. One Ballarat resident estimated that at least two-thirds of the stores on the diggings were run by the wives while their husbands mined during the day and perhaps conducted the business in the evening—generally the sly-grog portion of the business.
¹⁶
In late February, sixty storekeepers, including the Piersons, had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was
extortion
, fumed Thomas. The fine was particularly unreasonable when residents were being asked to subscribe private funds to build a hospital. The problem, according to Thomas, was this:
the English nobility send out their Bastard children to make unprincipled and contradictory laws
. But what was to be done? At the meeting, the storekeepers resolved to refuse en masse to pay the licence fee. By the end of March they had all caved in.
Mark the independence of Englishmen
, wrote Pierson in his diary entry of 25 March,
then compare them with Americans
who would never
quietly submit
to illegal taxes and the unjust imposition of fines.

That night a huge thunderstorm burst over Ballarat and it rained and hailed for a week solid, turning the parched ground of summer into rivers of mud. Frances Pierson packed up her store and moved it to higher ground.

In his 1958 classic
The Australian Legend
, Russel Ward commented on the ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist morality' that existed on the Victorian goldfields. Ward traced the origins of this ethos to the teamwork required for deep lead mining (a line of analysis that also runs strongly through the work of Bate and Blainey) and the common arrangement of one miner acting as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine. This group solidarity, Ward argued, was reinforced by the uniformly despised practice of licence-hunting. Ward pointed out that Victorian diggers called their co-workers ‘mates', in contrast to the Californian term ‘partner', signifying a comradely rather than commercial relationship. The close affiliation of the Australian labour movement with the history of mining disputes tends to support Ward's case.

But Ward did not explore another unusual aspect of this Australian egalitarian affinity: the inclusion of women in its companionable embrace. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them. And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour', with concomitant loss of pay and status), the goldfields women found themselves highly prized.
I have become a sort of necessity
, remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to the diggings with her brother and quickly became a pseudo-wife to his single buddies. Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect for her conversation and companionship besides. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields:
I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end!
¹⁷

Being paid for domestic work without having to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a revelation to working-class women on the goldfields. It was like freelance domestic service. Public housekeeping. Many women found regular employment as tent keepers for single men. Some older women, often widows, set themselves up in business as boarding-house keepers or licensed victuallers. As a result, women left their bonded service in towns and on stations and headed to the diggings. They may have wound up doing the same work—cooking, child minding, wet nursing—but they did it on their own terms, informally aligned to a team rather than a single master or mistress. The going rates were good too, set by a bull labour market for domestic services. Mrs H. Fitchett, who ran the Victoria Labour Market, an employment service, regularly posted the fair price for servants in the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
in 1854. Housemaids could expect £26 to £30 per annum, cooks £30 to £40, laundresses £30 to £35 and nursemaids £20 to £24.

These rates were still low compared to male wages—stock riders, bullock drivers and waiters could expect double the amount—but, due to the scarcity of female servants, they were noticeably superior to English wages.
¹⁸
Moreover, in the golden age of mineral excavation, there was one paid domestic worker for every three miners.
¹⁹
Australia might have ridden into existence on the sheep's back—and was then stampeded to international prominence with a resources boom—but in the mid-nineteenth century its prosperity was underpinned by the taxable value of women's work.

And women knew it. They had only to look at the latest issue of
MELBOURNE PUNCH
to realise that everyone knew it. It was called ‘the servant problem'. The social crisis wasn't so much that unprecedented numbers of women were being paid for their domestic labour, but that such women were calling the shots.
PUNCH
printed cartoons that illustrated the farcical implications of untutored young women telling urbane old masters where to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has not supplied her with copies of
PUNCH
to read. In another, the young servant expects her master to chop the wood.

It was what they call colonial bounce
, surmised Mrs May Howell when her newly hired servant couldn't decide on a suitable starting date.
She means to come, but thinks as this is a free country she must show herself independent.
William Westgarth summed up the new-found power of domestic servants with wry regard: Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid
agreed to a temporary trial of her new mistress
. But Westgarth's dry wit allowed him to make a more intoxicating point about the radical potential for change in a colony which exhibited
an equality of consideration for all classes, and by consequence a political and social inclusiveness
. He chose a decidedly gendered metaphor to illustrate this transformative process. In Victoria, traditional social gradations were
thrown off like a loose mantle
in an unabashed
disrobing process
. A sociological striptease.

Every folk tale has its wicked witch. In gold rush Victoria, the washerwoman represented the spectre of a world turned upside down. A new world where wives earned more money than their husbands, working women determined the parameters of their employment, and manual skills counted for more in the marriage and labour market than drawing-room refinement.

This world is magnificently captured in an illustration by John Leech titled ‘Topsy Turvey—or our Antipodes', issued as a frontispiece to London
PUNCH
in 1854. Here on the Victorian diggings is a cast of larks and heroes from an imperial nightmare. A group of ruffians play cards while a
Master of Arts
brings them beer. At the table sits a pipe-smoking woman. She is being served spirits by a genteel lass who is barefoot and sunburnt, her face blackened by exposure. Meanwhile, an
Intellectual Being
plays manservant to a bearded miner, while another gentleman takes off the muddy boots of a pistol-toting brute. Behind them, a fat, ugly old hag wearing pearls and self-satisfied smirk—here is our washerwoman—is being given piano lessons by a delicate English rose. It is a charming tableau of class, racial and gender mayhem.

William Kelly was quick to grasp the figurative dimensions of the washerwoman. His pen portrait has her
dressed for the washing tub.
Her hair is tied up in knot
and fixed with a huge gold pin with a father-o'-pearl head
. She's wearing a satin dress and an apron,
a pair of massive bracelets
clasped on her bulging wrists and a heavy watch chain around her neck,
stuffing a carved timepiece into her virtuous bosom
. Here, says Kelly, is
a colonial substitute for crochet-work, a contemptible economy
. Imagine a mere washerwoman decking herself out in satin and gold instead of her homespun. James Bonwick was positively apoplectic. The sheer muddy filth of mining meant that washing was a necessity, not a luxury. But could a man expect sympathy from a washerwoman? Apparently not.
These heartless creatures
, wrote Bonwick,
the laundresses, treat us in town with perfect disdain, and only occasionally and grudgingly favor us with a stony bosom. And what worse fates on the goldfields!
Bonwick had a remedy. He advised bachelors to
woo a wife
, then she would have
no option
but to wash his shirts. And, presumably, provide a more welcoming breast.

The real problem was not the airs and graces or the reluctant favours; it was the equal economic footing in a land that valued wealth above rank or status.
MURRAY
'
S GUIDE TO THE DIGGINGS
pointed out that in Victoria
carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks and washerwomen make nearly as good a living as the diggers
. Most were paid in gold dust, just as an earlier band of Australian upstarts had been paid in the scarce commodity of rum. Like domestic servants, washerwomen could afford to pick and choose their clients and set boundaries on their working lives. Unlike domestic servants, washerwomen were typically older, sometimes married, deserted or widowed, or someone's mother. They were unlikely to be wooed into marriage and rejoin the ranks of unpaid domestic officers. Washerwomen thus symbolised the social and economic power of working women on the early colonial frontier. They were the allegorical ‘gold-diggers' of '54, only they didn't dig or dance or sing for their supper. The source of their power was external. It was vested in a wafer-thin historical moment when women's scarcity and indispensible labour coincided with the culture of utilitarian democracy.

For all those men who didn't have a wife and couldn't afford to hire one, Sunday was washing day on the diggings.

No one expected any different.

SIX

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Spare a thought for Sarah Skinner.

By May 1854, Ballarat was under siege. The wet season had come early. The summer of 1853 had been dry, and now the heavens had opened themselves upon an impermeable earth.
Wind blowing hard for three weeks
, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary. Charles Evans wrote of the
dull cloudy atmosphere and almost incessant rain
. Mining operations had practically ceased. John Manning, the schoolmaster at St Alipius, where Anastasia Hayes was working as a teacher, complained that few of the seventy-four children on his roll were in attendance
owing to the severity of the weather
.
¹
Abandoned mine shafts used by the diggers as haphazard latrines became putrid cesspools. Miners who had slept rough during the warm months were suddenly vying for beds in the boarding-house tents that had been popping up as a result of the feminine exodus from the township. Bad weather meant good business for entrepreneurial women.

But Sarah Skinner was not one of those women. Sarah Skinner lay on her own rude cot in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain lash the useless fly as she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. In a delirium, driving rain can sound like fire. For Sarah, everything burned. Her brow ran with sweat. The tender, swollen skin of her vulva stretched like taut canvas. A final push sent a searing tear through her perineum. She screamed; the baby wailed. Their tandem howl floated into the spectral blaze of the night. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as ineffectual as a handkerchief in a tempest.