The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (25 page)

How to explain the demographic spike? Most obviously, the population of Victoria was—overwhelmingly—young. In 1854, sixty-two per cent of the population was between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, and the majority of these were between twenty and thirty. The trend was even more pronounced on the goldfields, where the character of the population was seen as inextricably bound to its remarkable youth. Robert Caldwell described the digger genus as
young, impulsive, generous and restless [with] amazing energy
. To James Bonwick, the demographic profile of Victoria was a metaphor for statehood.
Once we were a sheep walk
, he wrote,
now we are a gold field. So young and yet so celebrated…already the talk of the world
. Elizabeth Massey saw nothing but romance in Victoria's
young people of active energetic habits
.

Others saw danger. Excitement can mean enthusiasm, but it can also mean agitation.
⁹
Canadian Samuel Huyghue was employed as the chief clerk to Resident Commissioner Robert Rede at the Ballarat Camp in 1854. He doubted the government was up to the task of responding to the
mixed multitude, eager for enterprise and revelling in a sense of freedom and anticipation
. Instead of finding constructive ways to deal with
the progress of the tide
, he feared the government would do its best to
restrain these new born impulses
. So far, its chosen method of sandbagging was
an exorbitant tax enforced at the point of the bayonet
.
¹⁰
Those wielding the weapons, as well as those making the rules, were themselves young men. The average age of the soldiers of the 12th Regiment, permanently stationed at Ballarat, was 21.7 years; the average age of the 40th Regiment, later brought in as reinforcements, was 28.2 years. Huyghue described the soldiers of the 40th as
half weaned cubs of the Lion Mother
.
¹¹
Both Huyghue and Resident Commissioner Rede were positively ancient at thirty-nine years old. Assistant Commissioner James Johnston—
dear Jamie
—was twenty-eight when he married Margaret Brown Howden in August 1854 and took her to Ballarat as his bride. By the time they arrived, twenty-three-year-old Margaret was pregnant. Her honeymoon conception would soon turn into a nightmare gestation.

The majority of the goldfields population laboured under a common illusion of youth: the idea that honest industry and good intentions would bring just rewards. They were wrong.

The well-being of a colony
, wrote James Bonwick in 1852,
is intimately associated with marriage.
This is just what the state wanted its restive citizens to believe. The discovery of gold might have resulted in moral chaos, but it had been noted since the 1840s that the lack of women's ‘civilising influence' had led to sodomy, prostitution, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women and killing of mixed-race babies, as well as that thorny old perennial of social control, drunkenness. Governor La Trobe's vision was that social stability would result from equal numbers of the sexes. From 1852, the government's interest in importing women into the colony changed from supplying labour to rectifying the gender imbalance.
¹²
Boatloads of young assisted female immigrants would arrive, they hoped, to be snapped up at the wharves by the hordes of eligible bachelors. Statistically, the design worked. In 1850, there were 2668 marriages registered in Victoria. In 1853 this had skyrocketed to 6946
recorded
nuptials. But then a curious thing happened. Despite the steady increases in population, the targeted migration programs and the hefty demographic bulge in the twenty to thirty age bracket, the marriage rate remained remarkably flat. There were only 7760 marriages in 1854, 7816 in 1855 and 8254 in 1856. This suggests that although it was a seller's market, women were choosing not to put up their wares.
¹³

There's no doubt that women in Victoria felt a power in the marriage stakes that they had never experienced before. Ellen Clacy arrived in Victoria in the winter of 1852 as a single woman accompanied by her brother, and departed in April 1853 on the arm of her husband. On her return to England, she wrote an advice manual for women desiring to emigrate.
Do so by all means
, she counselled,
the worst risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England.
The reason for this unaccustomed reverence? According to Ellen, the imbalance of the sexes meant
we may be pretty sure of having our own way.

Englishman Henry Catchpole, who arrived in Melbourne in February 1854, wrote home to encourage his sisters to emigrate and get
a Golden Husband
.
Tell them that it is a first rate opportunity for them
. After six months in the colony, he was still on message.
There are many young chaps looking out in Melbourne when the ship comes in
, wrote Henry.
I shall soon begin to think about doing the same for I am really sick and tired of so much male society.
Henry expressed unease that men of thirty to forty years of age were
actually marrying girls at 15 and 16 on these diggings
due to the numerical disproportions.
¹⁴
It was a competitive market for wives. Some women talked of men as if they were prize studs, assessing their attributes with an air of studied detachment.
There is a hardiness and manliness about the colonial gentlemen which I find pleasing
, wrote Mary Bristow.

If women could pluck husbands like so many wild flowers, why do the marriage statistics suggest they were reluctant to do so? For some daughters, life in the colonies meant the blessed chance to escape—at least for a defined period of their choosing—the cloying family obligations and small horizons of parish life. Most of them literate, with an exalted sense of entitlement, these harbingers of change no longer looked to the past (or their parents) for example. Catherine Chisholm, a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman from rural Scotland, was constantly chided by her family for not sending more news of her comings and goings in Victoria, including her marriage in 1857, four years after her arrival.
We are greatly astonished at you for not mentioning anything concerning your husband,
scolded Catherine's brother Colin, taking up the paternal authority of her recently deceased father.
Even what is his name, is he a native of the colony, or is he a native of Britain and what is he at for his daily bread
. Away from prying eyes, some gold rush women enjoyed the anonymity of distance.
¹⁵

The fact that women of humble birth could make discerning (and secretive) choices about their prospective partners bordered on the subversive. The imperial anxiety caused by this unexpected development is perfectly captured in another of John Leech's cartoons for London
PUNCH
. In ‘Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off to the Diggings', Leach depicts the preposterous idea that instead of men choosing their brides at the wharf, the women were thumbing their noses at offers from decent, upstanding gentlemen and electing to head to the goldfields on their own.
A cottage! Fiddle de dee Sir!
exclaims one pretty bonneted lass.
Bother yer Hundred Pounds and House in the Public line
, says an imperious woman with head held high. The women help each other to debark from the ship, to the confusion and consternation of the men who thought they could prance in as shining knights and wander home with a full-time cook
gratis
.

Englishman Henry Catchpole revealed what men were forced to do when they could neither afford domestic help nor snare a wife. He wrote home to his mother,
I can now roast meat, make plum puddings, pies and tarts…I'm a first-rate washerwoman, or if the lasses like, washerman…I am also a capital chambermaid
. Instead of digging for gold, young Henry was left shovelling his own shit.

In the anything-goes early years of the gold rush, tying the knot became a favourite avenue for conspicuous consumption.
Fortunate diggers
, observed Jane McCracken,
would do anything to spend money and so be seen that they have it
. What better way for a young man to prove to his peers that he has thrived and prospered than to show off a trophy bride? Saturday night in Collins Street, Melbourne circa 1854 was like a weekly Brownlow Medal count: a spectacle of tarted-up horseflesh arrayed in celebration of virility.
¹⁶
Here, lucky diggers would come to town to parade their good fortune in the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Digger's Wedding'. Ellen Clacy reported that diggers' weddings were
all the rage
. Thomas McCombie described the event as
an exhibition so fantastic and absurd
that it symbolised
the convulsion under which the social system of Victoria was at the time labouring
.

This is the staging. A newly cashed-up digger would pay a woman to act as a
model bride
. He would deck her out in the finest wedding couture a nugget could buy, hire carriages and coachmen in gaudy livery, and purchase half the stock of the nearest pub. Very commonly, according to McCombie, the girl was a domestic servant (not a prostitute),
a fat, stumpy girl, redolent of the most odious vulgarity
, who would delight in being plucked out of an obscure kitchen and
thrust into a situation of temporary notoriety
. A crowd of intoxicated digger mates would march alongside the carriage all the way to the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where there would be a
champagne dinner
for all. The women drank too, leading McCombie to demur that
the after-dinner orgies therefore need not be minutely detailed
.

Like the line-crossing ceremony at sea, this was Carnival. Cinderella without the sentimental ending. Performance art. The sham wedding cocked a snook at the modes and morals of conventional respectability. In a mock wedding, the prosperous gent got to flaunt his success (without actually assuming the responsibilities of marriage) and the lucky lady got to keep her gowns and jewels (with a minimum of mutual obligation). James Bonwick had placed his civilised faith in the institution of marriage, but now found that the
freedom of marriages
led to
grotesque and immoral scenes
. It was not unheard of to spend £200 in a single evening. By the next morning, the carriage had turned back into a pumpkin and the digger returned to the goldfields to chase the next windfall. In the elaborate theatre of the Digger's Wedding, the inversions and reversions happened virtually overnight. The only lasting change occurred if the ersatz bride contributed another entry to the expanding ledger of ex-nuptial pregnancies.

Remarkably, in 1854 there were seventy registered births in Victoria for which the name of the father is listed as unknown. The baby is given his or her mother's surname. For some women, the father's identity truly may have been a mystery. Others were simply unmarried. Registering the birth of a legally illegitimate chid was an extraordinary public disclosure and suggests that women were less eager to cover the tracks of ex-nuptial conception, and less likely to see another man's child as an impediment to future marriage prospects, at a time when it was a seller's market. It was also not uncommon for single mothers to apply to magistrates for maintenance orders for their children. Court reporters conveyed such cases without an overtone of scandal. This is fascinating, suggesting a lack of shame—even a sense of implied legitimacy—on the women's part. In an era when the demand for popular rights and freedoms was a mounting clamour, even a woman beyond the pale of respectability might draw public attention to her quest for justice—and expect restitution.

The moment did not last. In 1855, fifty births were registered with an unknown father and in 1856—none! (Less than half a dozen ex-nuptial births per year were recorded over the next decade.) You can bet your last Trojan that ex-nuptial conception was still happening. But women were no longer prepared to out themselves. Cue the long reign of illegal abortions, shotgun weddings and benevolent homes for fallen women.