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.

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 problem with poo: Why the Ovens gold rush was a shi**y time.

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by jacquidurrant in Californian gold rush, Gold rush, Gold rush diseases, Gold rush health, Gold rush sanitation

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Blowflies, Chlamydia, Cholera, Dogs, Dysentery, Flies, Fly-blown, Ophthalmia, Sandy Blight, Toilets, Trachoma

As a historian, it’s difficult to write about peoples’ toilet habits during the gold rush, because no one at the time mentioned something so unmentionable in their letters, diaries or newspaper reports. Nevertheless, I’ve been threatening to write about this topic for a while now — so here it is.

(Image: Soebe)

I can tell you with confidence that each one of the 8000 or so diggers on Spring and Reid’s Creeks in the summer of 1852-3 took a shit at least once but probably twice a day (despite the widespread constipation, due to lack of dietary fibre), which made at least 50,000 bogs over the course of January alone. You can probably add to that at least another 10,000 dog shits. There were no toilets, so the Ovens diggings must have been a shitty place.

In all honesty, I don’t know what happened to all that human and dog waste. As yet, I haven’t come across a single first-hand reference to what people did when they needed to go to the toilet on the Ovens goldfields. I can only extrapolate — on the basis of the health status of most individuals on the goldfields — that the shit flowed freely, as literally everyone got a dose of something special.

‘Troubled with the backdoor’

Imagine something like the Folk Rhythm and Life Festival, but set in a natural disaster zone, where our local turd tosser par excellence Hamish Skermer has given up on his concept of Pootopia for festival goers. (That’s the closest analogy I can come up with when I think of the gold rush.) The first thing that happens is that everyone gets ‘Troubled with the backdoor…’ which is how American digger Gordon Tucker described the effects of the dysentery he experienced on the Spring Creek diggings [1]. Of course, Tucker didn’t record in his diary where he went to relieve himself when he experienced the diarrhoea which accompanied his fever and abdominal pain, but he was surrounded by gold diggings, so there were plenty of holes when he was in a hurry, and of course the Creek itself.

If we remember that in November 1852, the faecal-oral transmission of disease wasn’t yet understood, we might understand how young Scottish-born Policeman William Murdoch managed to conclude that everyone getting diarrhoea wasn’t much to do with contaminated water:

I think this is a very unhealthsome place — everyone has had a sort of influenza accompanied with dysentery — I have had a good touch but I think I have got the better of it yet the water is good here and plenty of it. The creek at the side of our camp is very fast and runs very deep but I daresay butcher’s meat is a great cause of it. [2]

The butchers’ meat might have been a problem for other reasons, but what clean water there was (visually, at least) in Spring Creek didn’t last long. A month later, William Howitt described it and the water of Reid’s Creek as ‘fetid’ and ‘Stygian’, and the holes in which the diggers laboured as being filled with ‘sludge, filth and confusion’ [3]. ‘Stygian’ is a term easily lost on us today, but it refers to the river Styx, which in ancient Roman mythology flowed from Hades (the underworld). In other words, Howitt was saying that the water looked and smelt like it had been ejaculated from the bowels of Hell; and to one degree or other, everyone worked in it.

Let’s add some general context to this picture: It would still be a few years before toilet paper was commercially available, and many of those who came to Australia aboard English clipper ships had instead used a communal rag, soaked in vinegar. At the same time, the British had levied a tax on soap, which had done little to encourage its general use. Given the situation, you’d imagine that people would have thought twice when someone passed them a piece of food with their bare hands in 1852, except that no one knew about pathogens like bacteria. Plenty of people still thought that diseases were caused by miasmas — bad air.

Fortunately, dysentery was rarely fatal (unlike the more virulent cholera, which had taken out thousands of diggers en route to the California gold rushes just a few years before). Nevertheless, a few diggers on Spring Creek died alone in their tents, while others were saved only by the goodwill of strangers. Wrote A. Waight in a letter to his sister Elizabeth,

we worked here pretty well for new beginnings for the first week & then I was taken ill with the Dysentery & the other 3 left off work and said they had enough of it & so they took the Horse & Cart & left me to my fate although I was near Dying in fact if it had not been for the kindness of a Woman who is near my tent I do not think I should have recovered. [4]

Maggots and matter

The other thing that happens when you have shit absolutely everywhere (human, dog and horse shit too) is that you end up with oodles of blowflies. This meant that everything on the Ovens diggings that could be, was, fly-blown. As Murdoch explained, ‘Flesh must be eaten two hours after butchering or else it is crawling with large maggots. As soon as the fly blows [a piece of meat] they seem to live and grow almost as you eat a meal — the piece will be alive before you stop eating.’ [5] In fact, things were flyblown, dead or alive. William Howitt told a story of how one man, ‘hurt his eye with the handle of a windlass; and the next morning, feeling a strange creeping sensation in it, he got up and to his horror saw it alive with maggots.’ [6]

The flies also spread what the diggers called ophthalmia or sandy blight, which we now call trachoma: a bacterial infection of the eye caused by Chlamydia trachomatis. On the goldfields, the dusty conditions left peoples’ eyes scoured by dirt particles, making them more susceptible to infection; and this, combined with the lack of sanitation, meant that when a fly carrying Chlamydia landed someone’s eye, the chances of them getting trachoma — with irritation, discharge (conjunctivitis), swelling of the eyelids, and temporary loss of vision — were high.

William Murdoch offered this graphic account of the disease:

I again have got sore eyes which is called sandy blight which is very irritating and annoying besides half blinding one. The eyes gush with matter continually and some time in quantities of small pieces like butter among churned milk. So it is anything but pleasant besides the disfiguration. [7]

To this we can add Howitt’s description:

Almost every third man that you meet up the country in summer is half blind… Some of our party have had their eyes much inflamed for a week or more, when they have swelled up like two great eggs, just as if their owner had been fighting; and then they turn black. In a morning the sufferers cannot open them till they have been washed with warm water. Our dogs have suffered too. [8]

And once again, people were ignorant of the bacterial source of the disease. Mrs Campbell wrote:

This very common complaint upon the gold-fields is said by some to be caused by the flies laying eggs in the corners of the eyes; others, however, attribute it to the hot sand-storms. In my case, I cannot say what brought it on, but know that I had a narrow escape from blindness. For a week, I could not even see a gleam of light; and the fear of remaining in that state made me cry so much, that it aggravated the disease, so that when we moved, G. had to be my guide, leading me from room to room. [9]

But at least they recognised that flies and dust played a role in the disease — so most people on the goldfields wore gauze over the face: ‘everyone wears green, black or brown veils; the ladies shades also.’ [10] So if you’ve ever wondered about the development of the Akubra hat with wine-corks hanging from the rim, you can probably thank Chlamydia.

These days in Beechworth, we’re a lot wiser to principles of disease and basic sanitation. But if you happen to be going to the Beechworth Music Festival or Folk Rhythm and Life this summer, be thankful for the modern conveniences of porta-loos; and if you’re camping there, maybe take some sanitised hand-wipes. And remember, we still have Chlamydia — which these days is predominantly a sexually transmitted disease (readily treatable with a single dose of antibiotics), so maybe take some condoms too.*

*First manufactured in 1855, when they were about the same thickness as a bicycle inner-tube.

Notes

[1] Gordon Tucker, Journal, 1853 Apr. 12-1857 June 6. Manuscript 10649, State Library of Victoria. This entry: Thursday 8 – Sat 10 December 1853.
[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 is from an entry dated: 20 November, 1852.
[3] William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, Or Two Years in Victoria, Lowden Publishing Company, Kilmore, 1972 [original first published 1855], pp. 95, 99.
[4] A. Waight, Letter to his sister Elizabeth, 20th Nov 1852, National Library of Australia, MS:2279.
[5] William Murdoch, 20 November, 1852.
[6] William Howitt, op cit, p.100.
[7] William Murdoch, op cit, 6 March, 1853.
[8] William Howitt, op cit, p. 128.
[9] Mrs A. Campbell, Rough and smooth, or, Ho! for an Australian gold field, Hunter, Rose & Co., Quebec, 1865, p.104-5.
[10] Mary Spencer, Aunt Spencer’s Diary (1854): A Visit to Bontharambo and the North-east Victorian Goldfields, Neptune Press, Newtown, 1981, p.42.

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.

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

15 Thursday Sep 2016

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

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Australian bustard, Emily Skinner, Freshwater Mussels, Murray Crayfish, Seweryn Korzelinski, Trout Cod, Wild Turkey, William Howitt

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.

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). 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.

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)

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).

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.
Mary Spencer, Aunt Spencer’s Diary (1854): A Visit to Bontharambo and the North-east Victorian Goldfields, Neptune Press, Newtown, 1981, p.46.
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.
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
Edward Duyker (ed.), A Woman On The Goldfields, Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1852-1878, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p.69

Life on Spring Creek

Category Archives: Gold rush

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).

Diggers Rise Up: a precursor to Eureka Stockade

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

The problem with poo: Why the Ovens gold rush was a shi**y time.

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?

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