Monthly Archives: September 2016

What did the gold rush sound like?

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush firearms

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

The Victorian gold diggings were exceptionally noisy, and the Spring and Reid’s Creek diggings were no exception. In this post, we will visit the characteristic sounds of the gold rush, and ask ‘What did those sounds mean to those who heard them?’ [1]

Pepperbox_IMG_5237.jpg

A English pepperbox revolver. (Photograph by Rama)

If you sit down by Spring Creek today, you’ll hear one or two cars on High Street, the distant buzz of a lawn mower, and birds calling (right now, three doors up from the creek, I can hear the incessant hooting of a Bronze-wing pigeon courting a mate). The creek itself makes a pleasant gurgling sound, which is a far cry from the Summer of 1852-53.

Perhaps the most quintessential sound of the gold rush was not the sound of dirt being shovelled or gravel being rocked in cradles, but that of gunfire. Almost everyone on the goldfields was armed, and whether it was a cheap single-shot Belgian or English percussion pistol, a multi-barrel English pepperbox, or a revolver like the Colt six-shooters, the diggers fired these guns nightly: partly as a deterrent to anyone planning to rob them, and partly in the belief that it was necessary to discharge their gun and reload it daily to make certain it wouldn’t fail if needed. [2]

[Check Museum of Victoria’s collection of Firearms in Gold Rush Victoria if you’re interested.]

‘The sound of shooting begins, at first single shots and then as the number increases it sounds like flanking fire,’ explained a wary, if not horrified Polish digger Seweryn Korzelinski, who was already a veteran of armed insurrections in his native country. [3]

Digger Edward Ridpath compared the diggings to ‘a bivouac of an army’:

…the similitude of the scene is heightened by the incessant discharge of guns and revolvers, leaving one almost to imagine the diggings were in a state of siege, this noise is frequently improved by a general watching and barking of the watch dogs, if one of these happened to begin, his example is followed by all the rest, until it swells into a full chorus [4] 

Just as almost all miners carried a gun, most kept a big mongrel dog to guard their tent while they worked, and to warn of approaching strangers as they slept: ‘Sometimes I sleep peacefully throughout the night,’ explained Korzelinski, ‘…but sometimes the dog leaps up suddenly, barks and disappears like an arrow into the darkness of the night.’ [5]

William Howitt, who arrived on the diggings on Christmas Eve 1852, noted yet another source of ‘abominable noise’ made by the diggers:

The diggers seem to have two especial propensities, those of firing guns and felling trees. It is amazing what a number of trees they fell. No sooner have they done their day’s work, than they commence felling trees, which you hear falling continually with a crash, on one side of you or the other. [6]

Comparatively, the low-tech industrial sound of actual gold mining was the lesser noise on the diggings, at least by volume. Still, William Murdoch (a young Scottish tent keeper stationed at the Commissioner’s Camp) seemed to despair at its sheer repetition. He wrote in his diary in Februrary 1853:

All is nearly the same day after day  … the constant grate grate of the cradles, the noise of the many dogs and the shouts of merriment or anger, such is every day noise with the “caw wa hoaring” of the black demon like raven — for I never behold one here but I picture an evil spirit for they float and skim about on the air making such melancholy and unearthly like noises… [7] 

What did these sounds mean to those who heard them?

Today in rural Victoria, we would not consider the sound of a tree being felled all that exciting (perhaps unless we were doing it ourselves). Only when you consider that Britain had run out of firewood in the 16th century [8] — more than 200 years before the gold rush — and had resorted to coal for cooking and heating ever since, do you realise that the sound of trees being felled was quite novel for British diggers in 1852. When explaining how cooking was done, Mary Spencer had to explain to her readers that at Bontharambo, ‘There are no stoves; all the fuel is wood’. [9] Compared to Britain, wood on the goldfields was a free-for-all, and the diggers went at those stringybarks and black cypress pines in a state of near frenzy.

Writers of the period suggest that firing guns was hugely entertaining for most diggers. Howitt thought them ‘like children… immensely delighted by the noise of gunpowder’ [10]. However, the gunfire made Seweryn Korzelinski nervous: ‘Those nightly salvos always made me feel uncomfortable, because many of the diggers have had little experience with firearms and were as proficient in handling them as I would be if told to change a baby… Sleeping miners have been killed by stray bullets. I nearly had it happen to me in Bendigo.’ [11]

To many conventional observers, this constant felling of trees, the chorus of barking dogs, and the gunfire, denoted chaos. It was a sound-scape that supported one of the commonest contemporary responses to gold rush society — which was to associate it with social decline. People worried about the kind of society that the gold rushes threatened to bring into being: one in which self-interest reigned, and in which there was no past and little prudent thought of the future. [12]

However, the noise of the gold rush was short-lived. By the 12 April 1853, William Murdoch reported that ‘a great many of the diggers have left for richer and better quarters’. Later that year a rush to the Buckland River carried off the remaining diggers, so that by late November — a mere 10 months after the peak of the Spring and Reid’s Creek rush — ‘scarcely 30 people’ remained working.’ [13]

Notes

1. This blog post was much inspired by the book chapter: Diane Collins, ‘A “Roaring Decade”: Listening to the Australian gold-fields’, in Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon (eds)., Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity, Essays on the History of Sound, ANU Press, 2007. http://epress.anu.edu.au/tal/mobile_devices/ch01.html
2. Seweryn Korzelinski, Memoirs of gold-digging in Australia, translated and edited by Stanley Robe, foreword and notes by Lloyd Robson, University of Queensland Press, 1979, p.64.
3. ibid.
4. Edward Ridpath, Journal, transcription of letters to his father, possibly in his own hand, 1850-53? [manuscript MS 8759], State Library of Victoria, Box 1012/4 [Box also includes his gold license from 3 August 1853], pp.p.27-8.
5. Seweryn Korzelinski, op. cit., p.62.
6. William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, Or Two Years in Victoria, Lowden Publishing Company, Kilmore, 1972 [original first published 1855], p.98.
7. William Murdoch, A Journey to Australia in 1852 and Peregrinations in that Land of Dirt and Gold, unpublished diary manuscript (digital form), held by the Robert O-Hara Burke Memorial Museum. This is from an entry dated 28 February 1853. I added in some commas to make it more coherent.
8. John U. Nef, ‘An Early Energy Crisis and Its Consequences’, Scientific American, November 1977, pp:140-150. This reference, p.140.
9. Mary Spencer, Aunt Spencer’s Diary (1854): A Visit to Bontharambo and the North-east Victorian Goldfields, Neptune Press, Newtown, 1981, p.43.
10. William Howitt, op cit.
11. Seweryn Korzelinski, op. cit., pp.64, 66.
12. David Goodman, Gold Seeking, St. Leonard, Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp.xvii, 9.
13. William Murdoch, op. cit.; 12 April, 1853; 28 November, 1853.

 

What did the gold miners eat? (Part 2: Did miners eat Damper or Sourdough?)

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Beechworth, Californian gold rush, Gold rush food

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , ,

About this time last year, my friend Sandy Bogusis and myself were elbow deep in our own sourdough starters. I’d worked up a minor obsession with the idea that there was no commercial baker’s yeast during the period of the Spring Creek (Beechworth) gold rush, which in my fevered mind begged certain questions concerning how bread was leavened in 1852.

Meanwhile, Sandy, who owns The Baker’s Cottage B&B in Eldorado, was exploring all things baking related: a state which tends to happen when the property you own includes a fully-functional historic Scotch oven bakery. (1)

After receiving some sage advice from Richard Verrocchio, chef at Wangaratta’s Cafe Derailleur (where kitchen staff regularly have to beat over-vigorous sourdough starters into submission), we were modestly successful. Having proved to ourselves that we could make a slurry of flour and water, use this to capture and culture wild yeast, and use this culture to leaven and bake tolerable sourdough loaves, Sandy and I let our sourdough starters go.

[If you’re just interested in tips for sourdough starters, skip to the last paragraph of this post.]

11209564_584463051696678_8319601708081684175_n-1.jpg

Inside the Scotch oven bakery at Eldorado, built c.1900. (Photo courtesy Sandy Bogusis.)

About damper

Since childhood, I’d held the assumption that in ‘the olden days’ bush people only made damper — because leavening dough (making it rise) with baking powder (a combination of bicarbonate soda and tartaric acid) was quick and easy. Like a million school kids, I’d even made damper on a campfire.

Given that commercial baker’s yeast was in its infancy at the time of the Victorian gold rushes, I subsequently imagined that all bread on the goldfields was damper. This supposition was supported by the fact that one of the key guidebooks of the period, written specifically for prospective gold diggers, James Bonwick’s Notes of a gold digger, and gold digger’s guide (1852), gives a (somewhat cheesy) explanation of how to make damper:

Take a washing tin dish, and clearing off the dirt a little, six or eight pannicans of flour are thrown in; half a tablespoon of carbonate of soda, the like quantity of tartaric acid, and a spoonful of salt are then mixed together in a pannican, and then well mingled with the dry flour. Water is then poured in, the whole thoroughly knuckled, rolled into a good shaped loaf, and tumbled at once into the warmed camp oven. Fire is applied beneath and in a couple of hours or less will turn out a loaf fit to set before a queen. (2)

About ‘yeast’

Then one day, I came across this historical account from Emily Skinner, a young English miner’s wife living in the Woolshed Valley in the 1850s. Initially, I ignored it. (However, I later realised that it is quite funny if you read it aloud with accents):

Soon after my arrival, one of the men (a Yankee and a baker by trade) working in the claim was in the house and said to me, “are you acquainted with the art of making bread, because if you like I will come and show you.” I was obliged to confess that I was not “that at home”. “Sakes alive, gal, don’t quote,” interrupted he, “This is your hum, and though by no means equal to our great and glorious America, still ’tis a very decent country and miles before your worn out old country over there.” I was obliged to keep quite, though I didn’t quite agree with him, so he gave me a very good lesson, showed me how to make the “risin’” or yeast, and very soon by practice I became quite expert. (3)

As I said, I ignored Emily Skinner’s talk of making yeast for years, until I came across another reference — this time written by Mrs Campbell, who was married to the police magistrate for the Ovens Goldfields, Alexander Campbell, and who had the luxury of a man servant to help her keep house at the Commissioner’s Camp in 1853. She described how:

Frederick and I having overcome our greatest difficulty—the making of yeast and bread—were bold enough to try muffins, cakes, pastry, &c.; and here I found myself more at home, as the latter I had often made, to please myself, in Canada… (5)

Exactly how this ‘yeast’ was made was unclear to me until I came across yet another reference, which really spells it out. This, from an English gold digger, Edward Ridpath, who lived on Spring Creek in 1852-3 and who seemed well-pleased with himself when he wrote in his journal,

…on my arrival here I was as ignorant of cookery in any shape as on the day of my entry into the world, now I am somewhat initiated into its mysteries, and might advertise in case of necessity to the situation of a plain cook, I can bake a tolerably good loaf in a camp oven, made to rise with yeast composed of flour, water, and sugar, this makes the bread so light that it will bear comparison with a French loaf… (6)

So here we have five people (three men, two women) during the Beechworth gold rushes, involved in making ‘yeast’ in a form which today we’d call a ‘sourdough starter,’ and using it to make bread. That they bothered to celebrate their efforts by writing about it suggests that they considered making ‘yeast’ a significant step towards self-sufficiency in their new environment. I doubt that they were alone in their efforts.

About sourdough

When the Californian gold rushes (1848-9) began to peter out, many Americans made their way to the Victorian diggings — so many, in fact, that within the first year or so, the Spring Creek diggings had its own ‘Yankee Hill’. (4) Sourdough bread was a staple on the Californian diggings, and apparently plenty of American ‘Miner Forty-Niners’ knew how to make it. I think there’s a fair chance that just as the gold cradle was a piece of technology imported from California to Victoria, so was the art of making sourdough.

Sourdough_Starter_(4524119623).jpg

A bubbling sourdough starter. (Image courtesy Veganbaking.net).

However, I still felt that I had to confirm whether making ‘yeast’ was really something so simple it could have been done in a tent or bark hut on the diggings. As it turns out, it’s so simple that you can do it: take a quantity of flour (say, a cup or two) and mix it with water until it is the consistency of loose pancake batter, cover the bowl with a piece of muslin or a tea towel, and put it somewhere warm. Every day, add fresh flour and whisk it in with more water (aeration is good) to ‘feed’ the mixture. Do not underfeed your starter! If it looks lame (brown liquid floating on top is a sign — just pour it off), up the amount of flour you feed it. It will become increasingly bubbly, and should smell vaguely fruity and pleasant, almost like overripe fruit that has fallen on the ground. The best results come from using organic flour which has not been over-processed, because it has a greater chance of containing the wild yeast spores, as well as the lactobacilli bacteria that create the distinctive sour flavour. Undoubtedly the flour on the gold diggings was not as sterile and bleached as today’s supermarket offerings, so it would have been ideal.

(1) Sandy Bogusis is currently researching a book on Scotch ovens in Australia.
(2) James Bonwick, Notes of a gold digger, and gold digger’s guide, R. Connebee, Melbourne, 1852, p.20.
(3) Edward Duyker (ed.), A Woman On The Goldfields, Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1852-1878, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p.54.
(4) Gordon F. Tucker, Journal, 1853 Apr. 12-1857 June 6. [manuscript MS 10649], State Library of Victoria. Sunday Oct 29, 1853: ‘moved our tent up on Yankee hill near the woods.’
(5) Mrs A. Campbell, Rough and smooth, or, Ho! for an Australian gold field, Hunter, Rose & Co., Quebec, 1865, p.89.
(6) Edward Ridpath, Journal, transcription of letters to his father, possibly in his own hand, 1850-53? [manuscript MS 8759], State Library of Victoria, Box 1012/4 [Box also includes his gold license from 3 August 1853].

 

 

 

 

What did the gold miners eat? (Part 1: Bush food in Beechworth)

15 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Aboriginal, Bush Food, Gold rush, Gold rush food

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Ask anyone what the miners of the Spring and Reid’s Creek gold rushes ate, and they will tell you it was boiled mutton and damper, washed down with plenty of black tea. While this isn’t exactly incorrect; it is a fantastic over-simplification. So for the next few posts, I want to look more closely at what the gold diggers ate. In this post, I will start with wild or ‘bush’ foods.

proud-australian-bustard-pic.jpg

An Australian Bustard or ‘Wild Turkey’ (image from birdwallpapers.com)

One of the reoccurring themes seen in letters and diaries from the early gold rush period (1852-3) is that of the diggers telling us what animals they’d caught. Initially I glossed this as newcomers to a strange land, fascinated with Australia’s unusual flora and fauna. However, eventually, I began to wonder why diggers so frequently remarked upon hunting and fishing. Only when I considered the broader social context of the period did this really make sense: In Britain, the right to hunt game had been restricted to the aristocracy and gentry from 1671 until 1831. After this, anyone could hunt, but a game licence was required — a ploy which once again restricted all but the wealthy. So it seems that the gold diggers in Australia were remarking out of sheer amazement: that anyone could hunt and fish, and do it for free!

When we think about wild food around Beechworth in 1852, we have to imagine the forests without Samba or Red deer, wild pigs, goats or rabbits; and the streams without trout or carp. There weren’t even honey bees (the Australian native bees that produce honey only live in warmer climates), nor edible mushrooms like the saffron milk cap or slippery jack. Still, there was plenty to eat.

Miners either hunted game themselves (usually on a Sunday when their gold licenses compelled them to down tools) or bought it — either from European or Indigenous suppliers (1). Mary Spencer, who stayed on Bontharambo Station during the gold rush, explained, ‘We are kept well supplied with quantities of fish and game; such as wild duck, turkeys, waterfowl, geese and black swan. The fish is very fine; fresh water trout, cod and a kind of salmon and various other kinds.’ (2)

The favourite feathered game species of the period seems to have been Wild Turkey, otherwise known as the Australian Bustard (Ardeotis australis). One of Australia’s largest birds, it became regionally extinct as its grassland habitat was taken over by grazing pasture. Hunting saw the end of local populations around Victoria, just as it had with Britain’s Great Bustard in the 1830s. However, the Australian Bustard can still be found inland today, and I’m reliably told that they taste like chicken.

The rivers and streams were abundant with delicious fish, shellfish and crustaceans. There are 38 species of freshwater crayfish in Victoria (27 of which are now threatened). Murray crayfish (Euastacus armatus) can still be found in Spring Creek, along with, of course, the humble Yabby (with the magnificent scientific name of Cherax destructor), which is more common in billabongs. Sometimes diggers could get a pail of Freshwater Mussels (Velesunio ambiguous), which are native to the Murray-Darling River system. Apparently they are tougher to eat than salt water mussels, being more like a clam in texture.

While en route to the Spring Creek diggings in late 1852, English author William Howitt wrote of how ‘The boys amused themselves with fishing, and caught what they call black-fish and trout, to us quite new fish, and a brilliant blue crawfish, with prickles all down each side of its tail.’ (3) He was probably referring to (in order) River blackfish (Gadopsis marmoratus), Trout cod (Maccullochella macquariensis) which was originally widespread in the south-east corner of the Murray Darling River system, and has spots like a rainbow trout (during the gold rushes, it was often called ‘bluenose cod’), and finally, the Central Highlands Spiny Crayfish (Euastacus woiwuru). Other prized fish included Golden Perch (Yellow Belly) (Macquaria ambigua), Murray Cod (Maccullochella peelii), and Short-finned Eel (Anguilla australis), which Indigenous people had been trapping and preserving by smoking, for millennia. Today Trout Cod is endangered, and it is prohibited to take them across the whole of Victoria, with the exception of two lakes at Beechworth: Lake Sambell and Lake Kerferd.

[Since writing this blog post, I had a conversation with fresh water fish ecologist Dr Paul Humphries, in which I learned that two species other were found in the local billabongs of the Ovens and Murray Rivers in North East Victoria, which were very good eating, and perhaps as a consequence, are no longer found here: Freshwater Catfish (Tandanus tandanus), and Silver Perch (Bidyanus bidyanus).]

When it came to red meat, possum was a popular meal. Seweryn Korzelinski, a Polish digger who visited Spring Creek in 1853, said of the diggers, ‘Some carry a gun and shoot cockatoos and possums on moonlit nights, which they bake on wooden skewers. Possums can be shot only at night, because they spend their days in holes in the trees. Only natives know how to find them in the day time.’ (4)

[Once again, since writing this original blog post, I have learned that local Aboriginal people sometimes wrapped the possum in clay before slow-baking them in an oven. Possums were the ‘go-to’ meal for most Aboriginal people of North East Victoria, although dozens of animal species were eaten — from Emu (with its deliciously oily skin that could be roasted until crispy), to slow-moving echidna which were only considered to be fair game for equally-slow moving elderly people. Even a humble handful of  tadpoles could make a quick meal.]

But bush foods weren’t all about blood and guts. Miner’s wife Emily Skinner collected Pink-flowered Native Raspberry (aka Small Leaf Bramble) (Rubus parvifolius) while living in the Woolshed Valley in the mid 1850s. She said, ‘The best of the native berries that I have seen is the wild raspberry, which nearly resembles its namesake in appearance, but its taste is more like the blackberry. We used to gather it in sufficient quantities to make tarts, a change from the preserved fruits.’ (5) Although Pink-flowered Native Raspberry is not as prolific now as the introduced blackberry, it can still be found in the Mount Pilot section of the Chiltern Mount Pilot National Park. And it’s not even the only native fruit: if you’re keen, you can try the red succulent stalk of the fruit of the Cherry Ballart (Exocarpos cupressiformis), along with the fruit of the Hairy Geebung (Persoonia rigida).

  1. Fred Cahir’s Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850-1870 (Australian National University, 2012) is comprehensive in providing firsthand period accounts of Indigenous people supplying gold miners with food.
  2. Mary Spencer, Aunt Spencer’s Diary (1854): A Visit to Bontharambo and the North-east Victorian Goldfields, Neptune Press, Newtown, 1981, p.46.
  3. William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, or Two Years in Victoria, Volumes 1 & 2, Sydney University Press, 1972 [first edn: 1855]. This reference: Volume 1, p.40.
  4. Seweryn Korzelinski, Memoirs of gold-digging in Australia, translated and edited by Stanley Robe, foreword and notes by Lloyd Robson, University of Queensland Press, 1979, p.63
  5. Edward Duyker (ed.), A Woman On The Goldfields, Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1852-1878, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p.69