How the gold was won: mining on Spring Creek, 1852.

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Californian gold rush, Gold mining, Gold rush, Ovens diggings, Spring Creek diggings, Uncategorized

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Californian sluice, gold cradle, Long Tom, Whip, Windlass

This blog post presents an eye-witness account of how gold was mined on Spring Creek (Beechworth) in the rush of 1852. If you want to know why the image of the solitary miner gently panning for gold by the side of the creek is a fallacy… read on.

WARNING: This is a monumentally long post. It is broken into headings, to facilitate skim reading and promote a modicum of sanity.

Note: this post is about mining on Spring Creek, which is now referred to on some maps as ‘Silver Creek’, and runs through the modern town of Beechworth.

As I said in my last post, one of the most exciting things about the gold rushes of the 1850s was that anyone with a small amount of capital and a few friends or acquaintances, could stake a claim and mine gold using basic equipment — the design of which had been refined on the Californian goldfields only a few year previous.

By far the best eye-witness account I’ve read of the activity of gold mining during the Beechworth gold rush was written by Edward Ridpath [1], who arrived on the Spring Creek diggings on 14 November 1852. At this point, the diggings were still quite fresh: Ridpath says he was ‘much surprised at their general appearance… that their operations were confined to a spot of ground about one mile in length, and about a hundred yards in breadth…’

An early drawing of the Spring Creek diggings around December 1852, by Edward LaTrobe Bateman. This view is taken from southern side of the Creek looking towards the Commissioner’s Camp, which was situated where the Police Station and Gaol are today (Image: State Library of NSW).

Alluvial mining

The mining on Spring Creek was ‘alluvial’ — meaning that gold was found in deposits of sand, gravel and soil that had been washed and transported by water. ‘[T]here are two sources whence gold is derived,’ Ridpath tells us, ‘one from the bed of running creeks, the other from the earth’.

Thus, at Spring Creek in early November, Ridpath noted, ‘the first parties that arrived here worked a bed of the creek which had proved uncommonly rich and well rewarded the adventurous discoverers, [and] the soil adjoining was now being tried…’ [2] By the time another Englishman, William Howitt, arrived in mid-December, ‘The creek, that is, a considerable brook, was diverted from its course; and all the bed of the old course was dug up.’

Staking a claim, sinking a shaft

To dig for gold along Spring Creek, Ridpath explained,

the preliminary step is to sink a shaft, which in these diggings varies from 6 feet to 46 feet in depth [i.e.: 1.8-14 metres] according to the nature of the surface, the shape of the shaft is according to the fancy of the digger, whether round, oval, square or oblong, the first is the most used, before sinking, he first marks out by a trench his claim, or ground he is entitled to, consisting of 12 ft square every way, then commences working with a pick and shovel, throwing the dirt up to the surface after picking it, till he obtains a depth of 7 or 8 feet.

Miners had to work their 12 ft square claim constantly, or else their claim was forfeited.

Using a windlass or whip

Once a depth of 7 or 8 feet was reached, ‘a wooden windlass is fixed, [and] the dirt is then pulled into buckets and hauled up.’ A windlass was a structure mounted over the shaft, fitted with a hand-cranked winch, which Howitt explained, was ‘rudely constructed out of the wood that grows about.’ Some miners preferred instead a structure containing a pulley mounted over a shaft, or even more simply, a pole centrally counter-balanced on a forked stick set into the ground, with the bucket attached by rope to one end, known as a ‘whip’.

Illustration of a windlass: ‘Edmond Armand, Chinaman’s gully, 23 November 1853’, which appears in A pioneer of the fifties: leaves from the journal of an Australian Digger, 18 August 1852-16 March 1854, drawn by Eugen von Guerard (Image: State Library NSW).

Finding the ‘washing stuff’

The shaft was dug until the miners hit the layer of wash dirt containing the gold, which Ridpath explains, was found just above

…the rock or pipe clay, the former consists of granite, sandstone, and slate, either rotten or hard, the stratum of earth that lies on this contains (if there is any at all) the gold, the depth of this stratum varies from 6 inches to 7 feet, the latter very rarely, sometimes a stiff clay extends down to the rock, in which no gold is ever found, the technical term for this stratum is washing stuff, its chief colours are red and white, it is strange that although the dirt above this should be free from any hard substance, this is mixed up with pebbles from the size of pin heads to that of a bullock’s, they are of all shapes…

Working the claim

Once the layer of wash dirt was found

…on coming to the rock the digger takes a tin dish full of the washing stuff to try and see if it will pay for his labours in working the whole claim… if, as I said before, there is any encouraging promise, he begins to make a tunnel with a small sharp pointed pick, from the shaft to the boundary of his claim, about four feet wide and three feet in height necessitating him of course to sit like a tailor all the time, this is continued all round the claim in order to secure it from encroachments of his neighbours who will always take advantage of less able work-men than themselves, after this is completed, the rest of the ground is picked away and supported by wooden pillars so that there is a complete excavation, as this is the case with all the claims on the diggings where the ground is good, you might crawl under it for several hundred yards with few interruptions, very much like a rabbit warren, candles are always used in the tunnelling; as the stuff is picked, it is shovelled forward to the shaft, put into buckets, and hauled up…

In deep claims being worked by candle-light, the air would be foul, so ventilation was provided by ‘a windsail, like those aboard emigrant ships, to carry down fresh air.’ This device was simply a sail terminating in a long canvas pipe, rigged to catch and direct breezes.

Howitt tells us that ‘The diggers themselves generally ascended and descended by a rope fastened to a post above, and by holes for their feet in the side of the pit.’

Washing the wash dirt

Once the claim had been worked out, with all the wash dirt containing gold brought to the surface and put aside, this was

either carted down to the creek or washed near the shaft, from a water hole, by the latter method, although the expense of carting is saved, yet the thickness of the water carries away the fine gold; before being washed in the cradle it is first thoroughly puddled or moistened in a long trough or common washing tub!

Ridpath also notes that the gold mined from the creek bed was ‘very easily sought, requiring only to be shovelled once into the cradle, to be washed,’ (i.e.: no puddling was required.)

Once the earth had been ‘puddled’, and the hard lumps had been dissolved, the gold was roughly separated from the wash dirt using one of three devices:

Gold Cradle, aka Rocker.

The gold cradle was both cheap and portable, making it the most common gross method of separating the gold from wash dirt in the early days of the gold rush. As Ridpath offers, ‘perhaps you are already acquainted with this machine, one could have no clear notion of it, unless it is seen illustrated’.

I detail the use of this ‘machine’ with photos in an earlier post, Cradling for Gold in the Woolshed Valley.

Cradling by S. T. Gill (Image: State Library of Victoria)

Long Tom

The second most common piece of equipment was the ‘Long Tom’, often shortened to ‘Tom’:

…there are two other machines on a more expensive scale used for washing gold, both Californian in origin, one is called a Long Tom, averaging 5 feet in length, /2 feet in breadth and half that in height, this is always fixed in a creek, so that there is always a stream of water running through it, the washing stuff is put into this, then shovelled backwards and forwards till it is thoroughly moistened, when the gold is carried down by the force of the stream to the other end through perforated sheet iron (to prevent the stones mixing with the finer dirt) into ripple box whence it is taken out and cleaned in a tin dish…

The ‘ripple box’ was a false bottom on the Long Tom, which was fitted with riffles — bars or cleats which would catch the heavier gold while the flowing water washed the lighter material away. (‘Ripples’ was the Australian term for ‘riffles’.)

Californian Sluice

Whereas Long Toms were essentially portable sluice boxes,

the other machine is a sluice, shaped like a Long Tom, but considerably longer, unlike the latter, the water is conveyed from a distance by means of a hose, the length of the sluice is about sixty feet sometimes less, it is usual for about two or three parties to own them, and to employ men to work them at the rate of one pound per day, their being able to wash so much stuff during the day enables them to make the rejected stuff of others profitable, who cannot get through so much in the same time, there was no sluice erected on this creek, until it was abandoned by everyone else’.

there was no sluice erected on this creek, until it was abandoned by everyone else

Washing the gold in a tin dish (gold pan)

The final step in the process was to take whatever remained in the the bottom of the Cradle, or caught in the ripples of the Long Tom or Californian sluice, and wash this in a tin dish, gently removing any heavier material that wasn’t gold (commonly tin dioxide, aka ‘black sand’). Then all that remained was to weigh the gold and divide the proceeds between the party.

The process of mining gold on Spring Creek was relatively simple compared to that on diggings known as Reid’s Creek — downstream from the Spring Creek diggings, about 4 miles distant. The Reid’s Creek diggings presented more arduous and complicated prospects for miners (which arguably also made them a grumpy and rebellious lot), for reasons I will detail in the next post. I promise it will be shorter.

Notes

1. All the quotes in this article come from between pages 9-16 of Edward Ridpath’s journal: 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], except where I have noted that they come from William Howitt, in which case they have been drawn from Chapter 10 of Land, Labour and Gold (1855).

A useful document when considering nineteenth century gold mining technologies is:
NEVILLE A. RITCHIE AND RAY HOOKER, ‘An Archaeologist’s Guide to Mining Terminology‘, AUSTRALASIAN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, Vol 15, 1997, pp:3-29.

Stuff that has nothing to do with the gold rush (which you might think does).

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Eldorado, Gold mining, Gold rush, Uncategorized, Woolshed Valley, Yackandandah

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Cock's Pioneer Dredge, Eldorado gold dredge, Lake Sambell, Rocky Mountain Gold Sluicing Company, Stamp Battery, Wallaby Mine

When most of us think of how gold was mined ‘in the olden days’, we think of a solitary miner washing dirt in his gold pan by the side of a creek. After that, the confusion and mythology sets in. In order to help simplify matters, this week’s post presents a list of mining methods and equipment NOT used during the Spring Creek and Reid’s Creek (Beechworth) gold rushes.

12 Head Stamp Battery at the Wallaby Mine (Image: Heritage Victoria)

Yes, I’m a grumpy historian. I get really annoyed when people ‘conflate’ (combine) different historical periods into one. The Victorian gold rushes are often conflated with later periods of gold mining, but the reality is that the major gold rushes of the era (which took place in Ballarat, Bendigo and Beechworth districts) belonged to a short period of time (1851-53), in which people used particular equipment and had a particular mind-set.

One of the most exciting and attractive things about the gold rushes of the 1850s was that anyone with a small amount of capital and a few friends or acquaintances, could stake a claim and mine gold using basic equipment. Contrary to popular belief at the time, gold wasn’t easily-won (it involved hard labour), but the great virtue of the gold rushes was that anyone with a reasonably strong physical constitution could become a ‘gold seeker’. At the height of the Spring Creek and Reid’s Creek gold rushes, which took place over a few months in the late Spring and Summer of 1852-53, no large scale mining equipment was used.

So here are some mining techniques and equipment that had nothing to do with the gold rushes:

Hard Rock Mining / Stamp Batteries — Hard rock mining did not begin in the Beechworth/Yackandandah area until all the (comparatively) easily-won alluvial gold was exhausted. The gold bearing quartz was crushed using stamp batteries. There’s a massive stamp battery at the Wallaby Mine, restored after the 2003 bushfires by Parks Victoria. There are other stamp batteries to be seen at Myrtleford and Bright. (Picture above.)

Gold Dredging — Gold dredges were used to dredge gold-bearing sands from creek and river beds, and process them. There’s a spectacular ‘bucket’ dredge at Eldorado. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you go see it; and remember, this machine began operating in 1936, long after the gold rush had finished.

Cock’s Pioneer Dredge at Eldorado, commenced 1936 (Image: Peterdownunder)

Open-cut sluicing — Some large open-cut mines existed in the Beechworth and Eldorado areas, in which gold bearing soils were broken down for processing, using high-powered hoses. The ‘clay banks’ on the side of Lake Sambell in Beechworth are the visible remains of one such open-cut mine, run by the Rocky Mountain Gold Sluicing Co, which formed in 1867. The pit which became Lake Sambell was the result of large-scale company mining, which started (in this case) 15 years after the gold rush.

Pine trees growing on the exposed ‘clay banks’ left by gold sluicing operations, on the side of Lake Sambell, Beechworth (Image: Jacqui Durrant)

Other forms of mining and gold processing that came much later than the initial gold rushes include Deep Lead Mining (which happened at Chiltern, and at Rutherglen where there was no hard rock mining, but mining of alluvial material found deep underground), and gold processing using cyanide (which happened at Chiltern).

In the next post, I will return to the 1850s and talk about how gold was mined during in the gold rushes, considering the different conditions on the Spring Creek and Reid’s Creek diggings. And I will be less grumpy.

Plum Pudding!

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Gold rush food

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plum duff, plum pudding, plum pudding recipe, spotted dick, stir-up Sunday, suet

Plum duff or spotted dick — by whatever name, it was the king of gold rush desserts. It’s getting close to Christmas now, which is a good excuse to talk about Plum Pudding.

Plum pudding. (Image: Lachlan Hardy)

Along with boiled mutton, plum pudding in one form or another was one of the most commonly cooked items on the gold diggings. It was ideally suited to the camp kitchens of the gold diggers for a number of reasons: the first of which was the style of cooking. As social historian Daniel Poole explains, ‘Plum pudding had the great merit of not needing to be cooked in an oven. Wrapped in a pudding cloth, it could be wrapped up into a ball and dropped in the cooking pot along with whatever else was cooking…’ [1]

Secondly, all of the dry ingredients (dried raisins and currants, spices, flour, sugar) were readily available on the goldfields. And thirdly, plum puddings are traditionally shortened with suet rather than the usual butter. On the goldfields butter was rarity, and even when it could be bought it was usually rancid, and always expensive. Fortunately, the alternative shortening, suet, could be had at any butcher’s shambles. Suet is raw beef or mutton fat — especially the hard fat found around the loins and kidneys. Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘I don’t want no kidney fat in my dessert,’ but trust me on this: it tastes great.

During her first day on the Spring Creek diggings in mid-1853, Mrs Campbell, Canadian wife of the new Police Magistrate, panicked about the lack of ingredients for cooking, but she was soon reassured by her male house-hand:

“Oh, dear!” I sighed, “no vegetables—eggs for a pudding, Barnes?” A shake of the head was the only reply. “Rice—you can surely get that?” “ Yes, ma’am, at two shillings a pound.” “Oh, then !”—and I breathed more freely—“milk; I know you can,” pointing to the half emptied milk-jug on the table. With a smile, Barnes said, “The milkman can only let me have a pint a-day, and it is half-a-crown a quart; but if you like I can make a plum-pudding—plenty of suet at the butchers, and raisins and currants at the store, though very dear.” “Well, then, that will have to do for to-day—boiled leg of mutton in rice, and a plum-pudding—not so bad after all,” I said, handing him some money, which he good-humouredly took, and walked off to purchase the needful.’ [2]

The pudding mixture was tied air-tight in nothing more than a square of calico, which (in an ideal world) had been boiled and thoroughly rubbed with flour to seal its surface. (Incidentally, a typical pudding cloth is about the same size as a square neckerchief, which is also amount of fabric needed to make an arm sling. It’s about 80cm or 2 1/2 foot square.)

There were two ways of making a pudding. One was to make a flat sheet of suet pastry sprinkled with dried fruit, which was then rolled up into a circular pudding; the other was to make the pudding with everything mixed at once.

Due to the length of time required for cooking, plum puddings were strictly Sunday fare, when the diggers were obliged (by the conditions of their licences) to down tools and observe the Sabbath. And of course, plenty were eaten when it was Christmas on the diggings of 1852:

Christmas-day we celebrated with the good old orthodox roast-beef and plum-pudding… and drank a Merry Christmas to all our friends in Old England, in a tumbler of brandy-and-water. We tried to believe it Christmas, spite of the thermometer at 120°, of diggers’ tents in the distance, and the bush around us. [3]

Here’s what I suspect the recipe would have looked like (and a recipe for suet pudding dough beneath that):

Traditional Plum Pudding

1/2 cup finely shredded suet
1/2lb (250grams) moist (soft brown) sugar
1lb (500 grams) seeded raisins
3/4lb (250 grams) sultanas
1/4lb (125 grams currants)
1/4lb (125grams) breadcrumbs
1/2lb (250grams) plain flour
2oz chopped blanched almonds
1/2 nutmeg, grated (or 1 level tsp nutmeg) (other spices commonly available may also have been added, such as cinnamon [cassia], mace and cloves).
1tsp baking powder (i.e.: combination of bicarbonate soda and tartaric acid [cream of tartare]
salt
4 eggs (I question whether these would have been readily available on the diggings; they may have been omitted.)
2 or more tablespoons brandy (Some recipes call for soaking the dried fruit in the brandy beforehand.)

Rub the suet into the flour, then add the sugar and breadcrumbs. Mix together the beaten eggs, and brandy, and add to the dry ingredients. The mixture should be reasonably stiff as you put onto the cloth; if it seems loose, just add a little more flour.

Your pudding cloth: A piece of unbleached, well-washed calico is excellent but anything can be used provided strong weave and with no holes! Have handy some string to tie the pudding cloth. It needs to be boiled and rubbed with flour to seal it.

Get help to tie your pudding – this is advantageous. Very important to ensure all ends are to top and will be included in the string tightly tied. If this is not done, water can get into the pudding and will create a soggy, spoiled end result. That’s very disappointing.

Be on guard to see water does not boil dry! Top up regularly throughout the cooking process with boiling water.

A good guide as to whether your pudding is cooked is that when you lift your pudding out of the steamer to hang, is that the cloth will very quickly show a drying appearance.

Cook for 6-8 hours, and to reheat, boil for one hour.

Suet Pudding Dough

The combination of suet and butter makes the flavour mellow and the texture flakey.

250g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp (50g) butter
75g suet, prepared or fresh grated
100-125ml water

Place the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and rub in the butter until it vanishes. Add the suet and water, then mix to a soft dough. This is ready to use straight away.

References
[1] Daniel Poole, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, 1994.
[2] Mrs A. Campbell, Rough and smooth, or, Ho! for an Australian gold field, Hunter, Rose & Co., Quebec, 1865, p.83
[3] William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, Or Two Years in Victoria, Lowden Publishing Company, Kilmore, 1972 [original first published 1855], (this reference is from Chapter 10).

Diggers Rise Up: a precursor to Eureka Stockade

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Californian gold rush, Eureka Stockade, Gold rush, Gold rush firearms

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eureka rebellion, gold commissioners, gold licenses, goldfields foot cadets, goldfields police, peter lalor

Everyone knows about the siege at Eureka Stockade in Ballarat in 1854. What you may not know is that this rebellion was preceded by many smaller armed protests against the government licensing system, including several on the Beechworth diggings over two years earlier.

The button from a police uniform found on the Sebastapol diggings in the Woolshed Valley. (Photo: Scott Hartvigsen Photography)

The first of these protests was on Thursday 25 November 1852. It started with a meeting of miners the night before, which was described by 27 year old Englishman Thomas Woolner, who was camped at Reid’s Creek:

‘Last night a great meeting of — miners, as they call themselves, was held near our tent to discuss and resolve regarding the license, whether the miners would allow their mates to be taken by a few police; it was agreed all should take licenses the beginning of next month, but in fact if the few remaining days of this no man should be taken off these diggings, they would resist to a man and use force if it were employed against themselves; immense hurrahs, chuckling and a general dispersion.’ [1]

To put Woolner’s comments in context, the Gold Fields Commissioner’s Camp at Spring Creek was barely a few weeks old, and police had only recently taken to patrolling the diggings to check whether diggers held licenses. The Reid’s Creek diggings were, at most, only two weeks old. [2] The diggers were dissatisfied with the fact that at this early stage they were expected to pay a license fee for the full month of November when most were only newly arrived on the diggings and had limited means. Already, some men had been fined, and the diggers now felt that ‘payment for the balance of the time should be resisted.’ [3]

The following day, when five armed foot police appeared to check for licenses [4], ‘the police were driven from the ground; the commissioner ditto, tho he came and said he meant not to enforce a license until next month: he was chased up the hills with hoots, sticks, stones and pistol firings.’ [5]

From the Commissioner’s camp, William Murdoch recorded in his diary that ‘the horse and foot police with the Commissioner… dared to enter the diggings… The diggers turning out in hundreds with their pistols, spades, etc. so that the police came home beaten. The diggers also threatened to fire the camp.’ [6]

After this (as reported by an anonymous eye-witness to The Argus), ‘An old Californian made a speech, the substance of which was that the diggers were intelligent enough to settle their own differences without the aid of a Commissioner: that they had no right to pay for working a country which belonged to the people, and not an imbecile Government, and that they would from that time forth, be an example which he hoped would be followed through the length and breadth of the [colony].’

In California, the diggers of the 1849 gold rush had worked almost wholly unregulated by government, and without police interference or protection. This background meant that a portion of the mining cohort on the Ovens diggings strongly resented the presence of government officials.

Between all accounts, the exact order of events is muddled, but it seems that after the initial five foot police were driven away, next, ‘Mr Commissioner Clow, accompanied by the Police Magistrate and two mounted police came on the ground and another muster took place. The former was surrounded… I afterwards heard it was to the purpose that for the rest of the month the license fee would be remitted. He was told that a lot of men had been chained up to a tree all night because they had not paid it. How far this is true I can not say.’ says the anonymous reporter, but Clow was still pelted ‘with sticks, stones… and finding it perfectly useless to do otherwise, he wisely left. He was once or twice hit, but not seriously, the mob following and hooting for upwards of half a mile.’ [7]

The next day, William Murdoch wrote in his diary from the relative safety of the Commissioner’s Camp:

‘The foot police with the inspector, one trooper and the Commissioner start[ed] against the diggings. One of the foot police before starting said they were too small a body and that he would not go. Was put under arrest filling the prison he had in the morning and fined a day’s pay to the bargain. Today the diggers were oil and conciliatory.’ [8]

Clearly, the diggers had put sufficient fear into the Commissioner’s Camp to win a temporary reprieve from license fees. However, this first uprising would not be the last on the Ovens diggings, nor the most violent. And although his presence is not directly linked, it is almost certain that the man who would become the militant leader of the Eureka Rebellion, Peter Lalor, was an observer of these events. [9]

References

[1] Thomas Woolner, Diary of Thomas Woolner, National Library of Australia, MS 2939, 25 November, 1852.
[2] Ned Peters, A Gold Digger’s Diary, typed manuscript of his diary, edited by Les Blake, MS 11211, State Library of Victoria, p.26. Peters states that when he arrived on the Reid’s Creek diggings, they’d only opened the day before. He’d departed for the Ovens diggings from Bendigo on 1 November 1852, and says he took ‘a fortnight on the road’ to reach the Ovens diggings, which puts his arrival around 14-15 November.
[3] The Argus, ‘Disturbance at the Diggings’, 1 December 1852 p.4.
[4] ibid.
[5] Thomas Woolner, op cit.
[6] 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. These entries as dated the day they occurred.
[7] The Argus, op cit.
[8] William Murdoch, op cit.
[9] ‘His first essay was on the Ovens goldfield, but in February, 1853, he migrated to Ballarat.’ — ‘The Late Mt Peter Lalor’ (an extract the following from the obituary notice by “The Vagabond” in the “Age”), Riverine Herald, 13 February 1889, p.2.

The Ovens Directory, 1857 — Woolshed to Eldorado, and Yackandandah

04 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Eldorado, Woolshed Valley, Yackandandah

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Ovens Directory 1857

As I said in my previous post, Dean from the Beechworth Ice Creamery found an original copy of the Ovens Directory from 1857, and he let me photograph it. I’ve already posted the sections covering the businesses in Beechworth 159 years ago, and some of you avid history geeks were also keen to see the Woolshed Valley to Eldorado sections of the Directory, as well as Yackandandah and surrounds — so here they are.

I don’t know why the Directory jumps from Woolshed to Devil’s Elbow and back to Woolshed, but a map is helpful to understand the localities in the Woolshed Valley as (East to West) Woolshed, Devil’s Elbow, Sebastapol, Napoleon and Eldorado.

Map courtesy of Sue Phillips of the Eldorado Museum.

The Ovens Directory, 1857 — Beechworth businesses

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Gold rush

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Ovens Directory 1857

Dean from the Beechworth Ice Creamery found an original copy of the Ovens Directory from 1857, and while I was getting a chocolate milkshake, he let me photograph it. So if you’d like to know the ‘who, what and where’ of businesses in Beechworth 159 years ago (doesn’t everyone?!), here it is…

In fact, the Ovens Directory of 1857 falls a little outside of the scope of this blog (i.e.: the gold rush of 1852-53). But it’s such a charming document, it seems wrong not to post some of it here. In this post, I’ve included only the pages relating to Beechworth businesses in the immediate township, including those ‘beyond the bridge’. I will put the businesses of the Woolshed Valley and Eldorado in a separate post.

The cover of the Ovens Directory, 1857.

I have removed several pages here relating to the Woolshed, so I can move straight onto Beechworth (Beyond the Bridge).

Wildlife during the Gold Rush: fauna in Beechworth, then and now.

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Chiltern-Mt Pilot National Park, Gold rush, Wildlife

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Bandicoot, Dingo, Greater Glider, Koala, Spot-tailed Quoll, Tiger Quoll

With the Chiltern-Mt Pilot National Park on our doorstep, the residents of Beechworth get to see some amazing wildlife. But has the local fauna changed since the gold rush? And is there anything still living in our forests that we don’t really know about?

Tiger Quoll (aka Spot-tailed Quoll) (Image: Joshua Cunningham)

It was an interesting thing to read, and yet also devastating: the diary entry of American gold digger Gordon Tucker from 4 July 1854, who says he celebrated American Independence Day in Beechworth by ‘killing native cats’. [1] The glorious cat-like creature he was referring to was the Tiger Quoll (Dasyurus maculatus, sometimes also referred to as a ‘Spot-tailed Quoll‘).

Until this point, it had never occurred to me that a large carnivorous marsupial like the Tiger Quoll had once lived around Beechworth, let alone in such numbers that hunting them could be considered a day’s sport. So you can imagine my excitement when Mick Webster (long-time Friends of the Chiltern Mt Pilot National Park member) and Cathryn Mahon (Southern Cross Wildlife and Vermin Management) came across several ‘scats’ that look like they’ve come from a Tiger Quoll, while walking near Mt Pilot last September (2016). These scats have been sent away for scientific analysis, so it is yet to be confirmed whether Beechworth still has Tiger Quolls roaming its forests. Let’s hope so.

Possible Quoll scat found near Mt Pilot, September 2016. Awaiting official confirmation. (Image: Mick Webster)

And there are other animals mentioned in the letters and diaries of gold diggers from the 1850s that are virtually unseen around Beechworth today. In November 1852, William Murdoch (a policeman stationed at the Commissioner’s Camp) wrote that, ‘One of the men shot a large flying squirrel its length from the nose to the tip of the tail four feet. The breadth from wing to wing two and half feet. Its back and upper parts outside the wings of a beautiful black fur. The belly white having a pouch.’ This is undoubtedly a reference to the Greater Glider (Petauroides volans), a huge glider with a long tail, that come in colours ranging from black and white to black and tan, and brown and white.

The Greater Glider is an arboreal species which is now under threat, for the reason that they don’t like to touch the ground ever, and have a huge ‘wing-span’, meaning that they need to continuously glide between very tall, widely spaced trees, just to get around. That Greater Gliders once lived around Beechworth also tells you about the forest that once existed: that Beechworth had old-growth forests of mammoth trees, mature enough to have the height and hollows that could sustain the Greater Glider. In any case, I’m told there are still some Greater Gliders in the hills at Barranduda.

Greater Glider (Image: Toby Hudson)

Having described the Greater Glider, William Murdoch continued, ‘[The men also] shot a kangaroo rat[,] like a rat in the head but shaped otherwise like a kangaroo[,] in size, not bigger than a rabbit with soft fur the colour of a Roe Deer. In its pouch was a youngster a new born.’ [2] This mostly likely would have been a Bandicoot, but it’s impossible to tell whether it was a Long-nosed Bandicoot (Perameles nasuta) or a Southern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus). I’ve only ever seen one Bandicoot in the last 25 years, running across a road at Whorouly. There’s also a small chance that the animal referred to here is not a Bandicoot, but a Rufous Bettong (aka, Rufous Rat-kangaroo, Aepyprymnus rufescens), which used to be found along the Murray River.

Dingo (Image: Kim Navarre)

Finally, the other animal occasionally mentioned in gold rush diaries that has now been hunted and inter-bred out of existence in the wild, is the Dingo. Wrote Murdoch, ‘Saw a tame native dog which if in a Scottish wild would pass for Mr. Fox his shape and fur being the same bushy tail with a white spot at the point. The only difference I could see might be a shorter nose and a more erect carriage.’ [3] A. Waight also reported in a letter to his brother, ‘There are plenty of what we call Curiosities at home in these parts, I have seen Kangaroos, Wallabys, Native Dogs, Cockatoos, both black and White.’ [4] Unfortunately, the days when the howling of packs of wild dingoes could be heard in the hills of North East Victoria at night, are long gone.

The diggers of the Beechworth gold rush mention a great many other animals which remain relatively common around Beechworth today, particularly the goanna (usually described as an ‘iguana’), snakes, and ‘opossums’. Strangely enough, I am yet to come across a single mention of the animal which growls like a zombie in the trees just outside my bedroom window at night, the Koala.

[1] Gordon Tucker, Journal, 1853 Apr. 12-1857 June 6. Manuscript 10649, State Library of Victoria. This entry: 4 July, 1854.

[2] 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 entry: 26 November 1852.

[3] William Murdoch. This entry: 23 February, 1853.

[4] A. Waight, in a letter to his brother, 20th Nov 1852, NLA MS2279.

‘Loose air and swagger’: beards of the Beechworth gold rush.

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush clothes

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Beards, Clothing, Style

Beards are back. Take a walk down the main street of Beechworth today, and you’ll see everything from your Hemingway sea-captain-look to your full-length bushranger. In fact, in terms of beards, Beechworth is starting to resemble the gold rush of 1852. And back then, as now, the beards weren’t all about practicality: for when a man grows a beard, he cultivates a style and attitude to go with it.

Diggers at Black Hill, 21 February, 1854, sketched by Eugene von Guerard.

It’s certainly true that on the gold diggings, growing a beard was more practical than attempting to shave, and yet beards were also emblematic of a man’s transformation from ‘new chum’ to digger. As a journalist in the Geelong Advertiser explained of an early scene on the Ballarat diggings, ‘Shaving is entirely dispensed with – all have turned ‘beardies’; soaping a chin, might lose a “nugget,” so beards luxuriate, and a ferocious crop of moustaches are coming on… Everyone is transmogrified, and the scene whirls on as though it were a dream or a phantasy.’ [1]

As historian Robyn Annear has observed (in her awesome book Nothing But Gold: The Diggers of 1852) the beard was not simply a practical response to working conditions but involved the conscious cultivation of a particular sartorial style [2], which today we might think of as ironic. Diggers were quite conscious of their own changed appearance, and some cultivated this change more than others. Englishman Edward Ridpath was clearly enjoying his own ‘transmogrification’, when he wrote from Spring Creek:

A resident of eleven months at these diggings has made some alterations in my appearance, it may perhaps raise a smile on your countenance on telling you that, by strangers with whom I have accidentally conversed, I have been mistaken for both a German and an American!! I am certain that if I walked into your house, till I spoke, you would not know me, my hair, beard, and moustache are of eleven months growth, I wear a broad brimmed crab hat, blue serge shirt, moleskin trousers, a pair of Indian rubber knee boots, and a belt with a bowie knife attached thereto, the incognito would be further aided by seeing a short black clay pipe in my mouth. [3]

Beards and long hair, like the Bowie knife and pipe, were a part of an overall ‘look’ that was an outward expression of freedom and independence. As Thomas Woolner — a Pre-Raphaelite artist who came to Spring Creek in November 1852 with the dream of striking it rich, or at the very least, temporarily escaping London’s caustic art critics — explained,

One can scarcely tell without looking closely that he is not in England. Everything seems arranged in much the same way: the people are the chief difference. They mostly wear beards, carry firearms and are immensely independent: they dress something like the prints you have seen of the red French Republicans, much of that loose air and swagger. [4]

(Meanwhile, back in London, fellow artist Dante Rossetti practically begged Thomas Woolner and his friends for hand-drawn selfies ‘in your present disguises’. Rossetti expected nothing short of a ‘metamorphosis’ to have taken place. [5])

While some diggers dressed more flashly than others, in general, their style promoted social equality. In this context, hirsuteness — especially in the form of a shaggy beard — was a social leveller, and a symbolic release from social expectations. As Seweryn Korzelinski said of his fellow diggers,

…their outward appearance does not signify their previous importance, worth or mental attainments. A colonel pulls up the earth for a sailor; a lawyer wields not a pen but a spade; a priest lends a match to a Negro’s pipe; a doctor rests on the same heap of earth with a Chinaman; many a baron or count has a drink with a Hindu, and all of them hirsute, dusty, and muddy, so that their own mothers would not be able to recognise them. [6]

I’m uncertain whether the spirit that went with growing a beard in 1852 compares to the current resurgence in beard-growing today. I have a feeling that today’s beards are nostalgic for earlier times when men had (or are imagined to have had) greater freedom. One thing I can say: right now, a bunch of blokes I know are having a beard-off; a competition to see not who can grow the longest beard, but simply who can keep a beard the for longest time, and not cave into pressure to shave. And yes, they do have something of a loose air and swagger.

[1] ‘The Ballarat Diggings’, Geelong Advertiser, 16 September 1851, p.2.
[2] Robyn Annear, Nothing But Gold: The Diggers of 1852, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999. Don’t ask me the exact page number right now!
[3] 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], p.48-49.
[4] Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner: His Life in Letters, Chapman and Hall, London, 1917, p.18.
[5] D. G. Rossetti, in a letter to Thomas Woolner dated 16 April, 1853, in Woolner, p.51.
[6] 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.55

What did the gold rush sound like?

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush firearms

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Dogs, Felling trees, Guns

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]

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 policeman 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.

Life on Spring Creek

Category Archives: Beechworth

How the gold was won: mining on Spring Creek, 1852.

Stuff that has nothing to do with the gold rush (which you might think does).

Plum Pudding!

Diggers Rise Up: a precursor to Eureka Stockade

More problems with poo: an up-date on last week’s blog post.

The Ovens Directory, 1857 — Woolshed to Eldorado, and Yackandandah

The Ovens Directory, 1857 — Beechworth businesses

Wildlife during the Gold Rush: fauna in Beechworth, then and now.

‘Loose air and swagger’: beards of the Beechworth gold rush.

What did the gold rush sound like?