The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (6 page)

It wasn't until early in 1853 that, as one early settler put it,
a huge tidal wave…the memorable rush from England and everywhere else
began in earnest.
¹⁵
If the first flood of inter-colonial gold seekers wasn't enough to change Victoria's fortunes—and alter things irrevocably for the land's first inhabitants—this inpouring of the world's schemers and dreamers was without doubt an immutable turning point.

News of Victoria's seemingly infinite supply of alluvial gold permeated the newspapers and market squares of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw, Munich, Washington, Toronto and Shanghai. Entrepreneurial American George Francis Train was eager to volunteer as the Australian correspondent for the
BOSTON POST
. He wrote from New York on the eve of his journey in February 1853 that
the Australian fever seems to be raging here as well as Boston
. Twenty-four-year-old Train would later become a flamboyant presidential candidate, profligate financier and inveterate world traveller. But now, staring out over the wharf at Ellis Island, the dapper Bostonian was consumed by a singular mission: to capitalise on the mercantile potential of
a wonderful country where in a single hour the poorest beggar is worth his thousands, by a happy freak of fortune.
Train would not dig, but buy and sell.

By his side on the dock stood his new bride, Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis. The couple were an odd match. Willie was ten years George's senior, and the daughter of Colonel Davis of Louisville, Kentucky—a slave owner and unlikely confidant of Abraham Lincoln. George was a voluble supporter of progressive causes, from Fenianism to women's suffrage; Willie was a southern belle. They were united by love and the grim memories they shared.

Willie and George were married in October 1851 and they had a new baby girl when they made the decision to reap the commercial rewards of what Willie termed
England's El Dorado
. But shortly before their departure tragedy struck, and it was with a grief-stricken heart that Willie hauled herself on board the
Batavia
.

Many and sad the changes through which I have passed
, she wrote to a friend:

our beautiful babe was too fragile to stem the current of life—and only a week before we were to sail for Australia we were called upon by God to ‘render up to him the being that was his' and instead of a pleasant voyage with our little daughter to while away the weary hours we lied her in Mount—and turned our faces towards ‘the Southern Cross' with hearts crushed almost to the earth.

For the Trains, a cruel twist of fate had turned a thrilling adventure into an odyssey of despair.
¹⁶

If
the Australian fever
was raging across the globe, it seemed destined not to break. Reports of the continuing success of the early diggers confirmed that the gold in the hills of Victoria wasn't a mere flash in the pan. It would be worth it—well worth it, said correspondents like Train—to uproot families, dismantle homes, flee employers, abandon villages and join the mass movement of people to Australia. Gold was ‘the lubricator of world trade during a period of great industrial and commercial expansion', as historian Weston Bate puts it.
¹⁷
As fiscal capital, gold was a pure currency, unsullied by the usual monetary trappings of borrowing, regulation and control. With gold, there was no middleman. The seemingly insatiable demand for the yellow mineral meant that prices remained high and stable. As social capital, gold symbolised the alchemic possibility of personal transformation. Anyone with the Midas touch was instantly master of his own domain.
¹⁸

The viral spread of enthusiasm for gold's life-changing potential is most readily apparent in the population statistics for this era. In 1851, Victoria had a population of 77,000 people. That number skyrocketed to 237,000 by 1854 and 411,000 by 1857. By 1861, the population of Victoria was 540,000—half the total population of Australia. About a quarter of this meteoric multitude lived in Melbourne and the rest were scattered across the goldfields. In his official account for 1853, Victorian Government immigration agent Edward Bell reported that 77,734 unassisted immigrants had arrived that year: 33,032 from the United Kingdom, 35,834 from other colonies and 8868 from other countries. In addition to this, 14,578 people had arrived through the government assistance schemes that had been introduced in the late 1830s to rid Great Britain of its surplus labour and supply the colonies with an economically advantageous mix of settlers.
¹⁹

A comparison with the population flows to the United States shows just how the tide of human ambition had turned towards Australia's shores. In 1845, 518,538 people emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. In the same year, only 830 found their way to Australia. By 1853, the number of people going to America had only increased by 21,183. Australia had received 87,424 new souls.

The glowing reports of the rivers of gold flowing through central Victoria couldn't have come at a better time for the world's fortune hunters: by 1853, the Californian gold rushes of '49 had buckled under the law of diminishing returns. The imagination of the world, ignited by the romance and adventure of gold seeking, now had somewhere else to blaze. In New York, according to George Francis Train,
Australia was the only topic on the street, on 'Change, at the club, or in the counting house
. The Victorian gold rush was nothing short of
a commercial revolution
. As Train breathlessly reported after his arrival in Victoria, nowhere else in the world did
such a go-aheadative
place exist.

What is most striking about the profile of gold rush immigrants is their youth. It was the world's young people who most readily grasped the opportunity to seek the wider horizons of Victoria's golden frontier. Going ahead—getting ahead—became the motto of the mid-1850s, as if the old world was a glutinous bog, dragging down aspirations and suffocating dreams. Now there was an empty land far from home where one could break free of the quicksand of economic stagnation and the mire of tradition. George Francis Train, at twenty-four, was typical. Not an upstart or an ingénue, but genuinely representative: young, newly married, starting out, getting ahead. He was also a man who would not be fazed by cataclysmic change. At the age of four, George had been orphaned when his parents and three sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans.

Charles Evans too felt the primal tug of new beginnings and was young enough to make the transition. Charles James Evans was born in 1827 in Ironbridge, Shropshire, a town that calls itself ‘the Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution' and takes its name from the famous thirty-metre, cast-iron structure that was built across the River Severn in 1779. Charles was the second in his family of four boys: brother George Bassnet was senior by two years. Charles and George's father, Charles, worked as an excise officer, postmaster and printer. He was a learned man who raised his sons to value education and their Wesleyan faith.

But when Charles Sr died prematurely, the family's fortunes plunged. His widow Jane took her youngest sons and set up shop as a milliner in nearby Wellington. At fourteen, Charles was working as a farm labourer and sixteen-year-old George was down a coal mine. The Evans boys spent their adolescence in and out of the homes of relatives and friends: drapers, printers, stationers. On learning of the discovery of gold in Victoria, Charles and George were ready and willing to exchange a life of hard labour in the English midlands for the opportunity, as George recorded in his diary, to
make mother independent of others assistance
. The brothers were twenty-five and twenty-seven when they arrived in Melbourne on the
Mobile
in October 1852. Statistically, they were right on the money.

The Victorian Census of 1861 shows that approximately forty per cent of the population of Ballarat was between twenty and thirty-four years old. Another forty per cent were children aged under twenty. Visitors to Victoria often commented that there were no old people to be seen. Merchant Robert Caldwell noted that the gold rush cohort was one of
amazing energy, young, impulsive, generous and restless.
Leaving New York with his brother Davis in April 1853, twenty-two-year-old Dan Calwell assured his sisters back home in Ohio that they could not imagine
how our hearts bounded in anxious anticipation of soon overstepping the long limited boundaries.
Even in the Land of the Free the impatient Calwells felt the weight of family expectation and middle-class convention.
We are young
, reasoned Dan,
and must do something to give ourselves a start in the world. We have human hearts.
²⁰

The restive hearts of the impetuous new arrivals remained buoyant in the giant open-air camp grounds of the early diggings. In 1851 there were 3851 births recorded and 2724 marriages officiated in Victoria. By 1855 these figures had more than trebled to 12,626 and 7816 respectively. In Ballarat, there were five babies born in 1851. In 1857 there were 1665 recorded births. Approximately one-fifth of the babies born in Ballarat in 1854 were ex-nuptial.
²¹
‘Boundary riders of modernity' is how historian David Goodman has characterised the Victorian gold diggers, a neat encapsulation of the mobility, vigour, liberalism and confidence of a generation of rule-breakers. For them, no barricade was too solid to penetrate.

Thomas and Frances Pierson, late of the Pennsylvania Olive Lodge, were, at thirty-nine and thirty-two years of age, swimming against the demographic tide. But surely they were not too old for an adventure. In fact, Thomas would write in his diary,
something novel
was just what they needed. In any case, the Piersons had always been a bit peculiar: only one child, fifteen-year-old Mason. And Frances with her photographic equipment and talk of setting up a daguerreotype studio in Victoria. On 30 September 1852, the 480-tonne clipper
Ascutna
left Staten Island
to shouts of hurahs, cheers, waveing handkerchiefs, hats tc tc fireing of pistols and farewell music
. With little else but news of Australia in the American papers for months now, Frances and Thomas were lucky to get a berth. One hundred and seventy other passengers and a mountain of merchandise joined the Piersons on the
Ascutna
.
²²

But as Thomas Pierson noted, even on the ships departing from New York, the passengers were not all of one hue.
Nearly every nation of the world is represented on our ship
, wrote Thomas.

One way or another, the racially and ethnically diverse bunch had all come for one thing.
We are beginning to see the elephant
, reported Pierson with pride, as land became a distant vision and the chill of a New York fall gave way to the untimely heat of the Caribbean. Frances and Thomas understood now why, in the Californian gold rush, it was said that prospectors went to ‘see the elephant'. In the early nineteenth century, the arrival of a travelling circus in a small American town was a singular occasion. Folks would come from all parts to sample the bizarre attractions: wild beasts from Africa, fabled creatures like the Wolf Boy and other sideshow freaks. The major drawcard at these carnivals was the elephant: an animal larger than any native to North America.

By the 1830s, to ‘see the elephant' had come to mean ‘to experience all that there is to see, all that can be presumed, known and endured'. It spoke of deprivations, but also rewards. ‘Did you see the elephant?' parents would ask their prodigal son. Did you go where you set out to go? Did you see what you set out to see? In time, the catchphrase acquired a military usage, suggesting a loss of innocence with first combat: a ritual transition from naivety to experience.

In the mid-nineteenth century—a time before passports, credit cards and rigorous records—innocence came in many guises. It could be refabricated too. Many of the women who came to Victoria had already lived a thousand colourful, capricious lives.