Category Archives: Gold rush

Diggers Rise Up: a precursor to Eureka Stockade

01 Thursday Dec 2016

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

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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 and its licensing system, including several on the Beechworth diggings over two years earlier.

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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 week 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, if that. [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]

The exact order of events seems that there was an initial five foot police who were driven away, and then 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.’ [6]

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.’ [7]

A news report of the event explains that when Assistant Commissioner Clow came to the diggings he was immediately ‘subjected to a storm of invective, and finally of personal violence, such as has not occurred in the somewhat anarchical annals of digging history,’ and in response ‘asserted that he had not come to enforce the payment of the licenses.’ This was taken by the diggers as a mark of cowardice, ‘for persons naturally asked themselves what else could be the object of his mission.’ (In other words, they believed he had come to check for licenses, and was now furiously backtracking.) [8]

What followed? Why, what might have been expected, the usual punishment of cowardice and imbecility. The unfortunate man was struck, pelted, hooted, and cursed by the infuriated  mob without mercy. Offal was brought up to shower on him; revolvers were pointed at him; a ducking in the creek was threatened him and finally shots were fired over the heads of himself and party as a parting salute. [9]

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].’ [10]

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.

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.’ [11]

Clearly, the diggers had put sufficient fear into the Commissioner’s Camp to win a temporary reprieve from license fees, and wisely the Commissioners had conceded to their point of view. 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. [12]

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] ‘Disturbances at the Diggings’, The Argus, 1 December 1852, p.4.
[4] ibid.
[5] Thomas Woolner, op cit.
[6] The Argus, ‘Disturbances at the Diggings,’ op cit.
[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. These entries as dated the day they occurred.
[8] ‘The Ovens Diggings. (From our special commissioner.) Royal Hotel, Albury, Nov. 28th,’ The Argus, 3 Dec 1852, p.4.
[9] ibid.
[10]  ‘Disturbances at the Diggings,’ The Argus, op cit.
[11] William  Murdoch, op cit.
[12] ‘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.

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

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush diseases, Gold rush health, Uncategorized

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In last week’s post I’d written: ‘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.’ 

I was, of course, meaning that there was no real evidence that people shit willy-nilly. I imagined it was probably the case, only that people of the Victorian-era were too polite to discuss such matters — or so I thought! Since then, two items have come to my attention.

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Thomas Woolner, Pre-Raphaelite artist and one-time gold digger.

Thomas Woolner was a digger on the Reid’s Creek diggings during November of 1852. His diary of the adventure was published as a part of the book Thomas Woolner: His Life in Letters. Only when I read Angus Trumble’s blog post (he’s now the director at the National Portrait Gallery) did I realise that in the book version, ‘most of the best bits [had been] ruthlessly excised prior to publication in 1917 by his industrious daughter.’ Fortunately, the original diary survives in full, and is available on microfilm from the National Library, which will send it to Wangaratta for you — for a fee. Today I had a look at that diary.

On the 18th of November 1852, Woolner’s diary entry starts, ‘We are encamped beside a little creek seven miles from the diggings… ‘ (which is the place we now know as Golden Ball), and ends with ‘I hate flies and human buttocks.’ This last sentence has been crossed out by his censorious daughter, but I think we know what Woolner was trying to say about Golden Ball at the time, which was a popular camp-site en route to the Ovens diggings.

The other point: local historical re-enactment aficionado Will Arnold helped me realise another direct reference to shit that I had entirely missed. William Howitt, who was on the Ovens diggings in December, wrote that the place smelled like a ‘tanyard’. I knew that people used wattle bark in the tanning process, and I had always assumed Howitt was referring to the smell of rotting sheets of bark that the diggers used to line some of their shafts. Will told me that one of the key ingredients in the tanning process of that era was dog shit, which was mixed with water to form a substance known as ‘bate.’ According to that great font of knowledge wikipedia, enzymes in the dog shit helped to relax the fibrous structure of the hide before the final stages of tanning. (And I’ve since read — in Alan Frost’s marvellous Botany Bay, The Real Story — that ‘dog shit collector’ was actually a profession in Britain.) So in saying it smelled like a tanyard, Howitt was saying the Ovens diggings smelled like shit.

I count those firsthand references as historical proof — that the Ovens diggings was a shitty place.

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

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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

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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.

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(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. [2a]

A reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald likewise concluded that the prevalence of illness on the diggings was something to do with meat:

With regard to the physical condition of the people here, I am sorry to say that a great deal of sickness prevails here. A low billious fever very generally prevails, with some lingering remnants of influenza, of which last I am myself suffering under a severe attack. There is also a great deal of blight, and dysentery, the last arising I doubt not in great measure from the meat, which is frequently cooked in a hot and quivering state. [2b]

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.
[2a] 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.
[2b] ‘The Ovens Gold Field (From our special reporter) S[ring Creek, Ovens district, January 13, 1853,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 24 January 1853, p 2
[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.

 

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

24 Monday Oct 2016

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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush clothes

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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.

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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 in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush firearms

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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]

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A English pepperbox revolver. (Photograph by Rama)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did these sounds mean to those who heard them?

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

 

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

15 Thursday Sep 2016

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

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

proud-australian-bustard-pic.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Gold Rush Medicine Chest

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Beechworth, Gold rush, Gold rush health, Gold rush medicine

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Anyone living on the Spring Creek diggings at the height of the gold rush in late 1852 put themselves at risk of serious and potentially fatal illness. Dysentery, ophthalmia (trachoma), and infection from injury were commonplace, as was an unidentified and often fatal illness described as ‘low fever’. This led me to wonder exactly what medicines the gold diggers had to treat illness, and more importantly, if any of them actually worked.

bottles of ingredients for pharmacy

(This post is quite long, so I have put each medicine in bold type to allow you to skim read.)

Let’s start with what seems to have been the most commonly sold item for the gold digger’s medicine chest: the laxative Senna leaf. On one hand, the gold diggers’ diets lacked vegetables and fibre, so they must have suffered terrible constipation; and on the other, dysentery was probably the single biggest medical issue on the goldfields. Accordingly, almost everything the gold diggers could buy to ‘physic’ themselves worked to relieve bowel problems or stomach upsets of one kind of another (either indigestion, constipation, diarrhoea or flatulence). You can still buy Senna leaf laxatives in the supermarket today.

The next two most common items seem to have been Laudanum (a tincture of opium) and Powdered bark. Although one might imagine that the Powdered bark so commonly advertised was willow bark (from which Aspirin was synthesised in 1853), it was in fact the bark of the Cinchona tree (hence its other name, Peruvian bark), which contains Quinine. This was both anti-malarial and more significantly for the Victorian gold diggers, antipyretic (fever-reducing). Quinine is still used medically today, and you’ll also find small quantities of it in tonic water.

Laudanum was a powerful analgesic (painkiller), and could also be used as a sedative. (Battley’s Liq. Opii Sed. [ie: “Liquor Opii Sedativus”] — a patented preparation of macerated opium in distilled water, preserved with alcohol — was advertised specifically as a sedative.) Although it is not openly stated, Laudanum may also have been used as an antipropulsive medicine as it slows down the movement of the gut, which could have been beneficial in cases of acute diarrhoea. Another opium-derived drug, Morphia (Morphine) would become more popular after hypodermic syringes were invented in 1853, and has been in use ever since.

A detailed advertisement by a Chemist warehouse in the Geelong Advertiser (Friday, 10 January 1851, p.1) addressed ‘to settlers, bush surgeons, storekeepers, others’ provided a substantial list of its stock, which enables me to expand this basic list of medicinals. All of the medicines (even patented ones) were either chemical compounds, or herbal — in which case they were sold either in a raw form, such as bark, leaves, roots, balsams (resinous saps), and seeds; or as processed plant materials in the form of oils and tinctures. There were also patent medicines, the most famous of which was the cure-all Holloway’s Pills.

It’s probably no mistake that laxatives assumed even greater significance when the opium-based analgesics of the day caused constipation. Other than Senna leaf, strong laxatives included Milk of Magnesia (a white suspension of hydrated magnesium carbonate in water, used as an antacid or laxative), Turkey Rhubarb (Rheum palmatum root), Castor Oil (obtained from castor beans), Epsom Salts, and Seidlitz powders (similar to Rochelle Salt)— a patented medicine, combining tartaric acid, potassium sodium tartrate, and sodium bicarbonate.

Given that almost everyone on the goldfields experienced dysentery, people also took various herbs to reduce the severity of digestive problems. Cape aloes (Aloe vera) was taken to relieve digestive discomfort and Caraway seeds and oil were thought to help with intestinal irritation and digestive problems. Peppermint oil could be used to settle the stomach and combat flatulence. Other digestive tonics included Gentian root (Gentiana lutea) now found in Angostura bitters; Cascarilla bark (Croton eluteria), which was often made into a tincture as a digestive tonic, stimulant and fever reducer, and today is used to flavour the digestif Campari and the apéritif Vermouth; and Columbo root (Jateorhiza sp.) and Angostura bark (Cusparia febrifuga) were both used as tonics. I wondered why Ginger wasn’t sold at chemists for the purpose of calming the stomach, but this is probably because it was so widely available in Ginger Beer.

Clove oil, an analgesic and antiseptic, was used to relieve the pain of toothaches, just as it is today. Myrrh balsam (a resin obtained from the Commiphora myrrh tree) was likewise used as an analgesic for toothache, and as an antiseptic in mouthwashes (in a tincture with borax), throat gargles and toothpastes.

Various herbal preparations were used as topical skin treatments, either for their anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, anti-fungal and/or anti-puritic (anti-itching) properties. Lavender oil is mildly antiseptic, as is Myrrh and possibly Burgundy Pitch — a resin from the Pini burgundica tree. Peppermint oil or tincture of peppermint could be used topically as an anti-puritic because it is cooling, and Cape aloes (Aloe vera) was also employed for its soothing effects. However, it is likely that one of the most popular preparations was Friars balsam, now commonly referred to as Compound Benzoin Tincture. This contains Benzoin (the resin that is exuded from the bark of the Styrax benzoin tree), Cape aloes, Storax (Liquidamber resin) and sometimes Tolu or Peru balsam (obtained from the Myroxolon balsamum tree). Compound Benzoin Tincture’s main medical use is still as a treatment for damaged skin, as it can be applied to minor cuts as a stypic (stops bleeding) and antiseptic (an effect of both the benzoin and its alcohol solvent). It is technically a ‘medical varnish’ forming a sealing over raw tissue to protect wounds from ingress of bacteria (but by the same token it can ‘seal in’ bacteria). Applied to itching and inflamed areas of skin, it reduces inflammation and calms and cools. Applied to broken blisters, cracked nipples, anal or heel fissures, or even chillblains, it protects against infection and promotes healing.

Muscle aches and pains, sprains and rheumatism could be relieved with liniments incorporating Burgundy Pitch, Camphor (from the wood of the Cinnamomum camphora tree) and/or Myrrh. Also in common use were mustard plasters — a poultice of mustard seed spread inside a protective dressing and applied to the body to promote healing. It would warm muscle tissues and was used for chronic aches and pains.

Treatments used to relieve the symptoms of cold and flu included Camphor, often appearing as Camphorated spirit of wine (a tincture of camphor), which along with Peppermint oil (from which menthol is derived), was used as a nasal decongestant. These are still used in steam vapour products today. Both Aniseed oil and Spanish liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra) were probably used as expectorants to loosen up and liquefy mucus. As a stimulant to mucous membranes, Cascarilla bark was also used as an expectorant. Tolu balsam, tapped from the living trunks of the South American tree Myroxylon toluiferum, is still used in certain cough syrup formulas. Plain Tincture of Benzoin was also inhaled in steam as a treatment for bronchitis and colds.

Lavender oil was used for treating headaches; and along with Camomile purchased as dried flowers, was thought to help relieve insomnia and stress.

Trachoma (a contagious bacterial infection of the eye) was a huge problem on the goldfields, so Dr Parke’s Eye Lotion, and Russell and Turner’s Celebrated Eye Water, would have found large markets, despite the fact that they were probably ineffective. I have no idea what went into them.

Although advertised as a treatment for consumption (tuberculosis) and ‘general debility,’ Cod liver oil was actually useful in preventing rickets in children because of its high levels of Vitamin D.

One medical idea that no longer holds currency is the notion that purging people with emetics (to make you vomit), and diaphoretics (to make you perspire), could halt the advance of fevers. The Ipecacuanha powder (obtained from the dried rhizome and roots of Carapichea ipecacuanha) that was used for this purpose, is still used as an emetic today in the syrup form, Ipecac. Along with Opium, Ipecacuanha was the other key ingredient in Dover’s Powder, designed to induce vomiting and sweating. James’ Antimonial Fever Powder was yet another proprietary medicine which induced vomiting and voiding of bowels. When taken in large doses, Angostura bark also caused diarrhoea, and so was often used as a purgative. With its diuretic, diaphoretic, and antispasmodic properties, Spirit of Sweet Nitre — a tincture of ethyl nitrite — was also used.

Chemists of the day also sold ammonia-based smelling salts to arouse consciousness such as Sal Volatile, and similarly, Spirit of Hartshorn — a distillation of horn shavings that produced ammonia, in a tincture.

Treatments for venereal disease comprised the toxic Calomel (Mercury(I) chloride): yet another purgative and laxative that was both taken internally and used topically to treat syphilis (it may have been more useful topically, as Mercurochrome is also mercury-based). Copaiba balsam, a stimulant oleoresin tapped from the trunk of South American Copaifera tree, was taken as a liquid, as it was thought to the sooth inflammation caused by gonorrhoea. Sarsaparilla Root (Smilax regelii) was also believed to be a treatment for or preventative against venereal disease, possibly because of its diuretic effects of flushing the urethra after intercourse. (On a related note, the first rubber condom would not be produced until 1855.)

Finally, in 1852 you could buy the general anaesthetic Chloroform over the counter… and hope no one would ever have to use it, as aseptic conditions for surgery (partly through the use of Phenol), would not be developed for at least another twenty years.

Cradling for Gold in the Woolshed Valley

02 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Beechworth, Californian gold rush, Gold rush

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When I said I wanted to try gold mining 1850s-style, friend Derek Polderman built a gold cradle based on an original in the Eldorado Museum. Last Tuesday, we took it ‘down the Woolshed’ to try our luck.

All methods of separating alluvial gold from wash dirt used on the Spring Creek diggings in 1852 — the pan, the cradle (aka. rocker) and the long tom (aka. Californian sluice) — relied on the fact that gold is heavier than anything else it is mixed with in the ‘wash dirt’ (also referred to as ‘washing stuff’ or sometimes just ‘stuff’). On the Ovens diggings, the washing stuff generally comprised (and still does) some regular sand and pebbles ideally containing as higher proportion as can be got of fine whitish-grey or dark grey ‘pipeclay’ containing the tell-tale ‘black sand’ (tin dioxide). Sometimes the clay needed to be worked in a ‘puddling tub’ (usually, a half hog’s head barrel, with an agitator) to loosen it before it could be cradled.

gold_cradle_creek

Gold cradle at Reedy Creek, in the Woolshed Valley near Eldorado. (The hessian base has been pulled out for washing.)

With a design imported from the Californian gold fields, the cradle was a simple but effective hand-operated device used by diggers to separate gold from washdirt by means of a rocking motion. At the very top of the cradle is a classifier sieve (usually with half-inch or quarter-inch openings) which screens-out larger pieces of rock and other material, allowing only finer sand and gravel through. Between the sieve and the lower section is a baffle with riffles, which acts as a trap for fine gold and also ensures that the aggregate material being processed is evenly distributed before it enters the bottom sluice section. The baffle sits at an angle, pointing down towards the closed back of the box. The inside bottom of the box is lined with a carpet (ours has hessian), which also has riffles. The entire device sits on rockers at a slight gradient, which allows it to be rocked from side to side by its handle. The rocking motion, along with a stream of poured water, washes the earthy matter and the gravel through the sieve, down the baffle and out the end of the cradle. This leaves the gold, mixed with heavy, fine black sand, concentrated either above the first riffle at the bottom of the box, or as we were to find, also caught in the hessian fabric, or washed to the bottom plate of the box itself.

gold_cradle_sieve

The classifier sieve is made from an old rubbish bin, but traditionally the sieves had evenly-arranged round holes.

gold_cradle_baffle

The first baffle with wooden riffles. The second riffle of the lower sluice section (sewn into the hessian) can be seen below. 

For maximum efficiency, at least four men were required to work this system: One dug the stuff from the ground, another carried it to the cradle and emptied it on the sieve; the third gave a rocking motion; while the fourth dashed on water from the stream itself, using a ‘dipper’ (a large can on the end of a rod). This team could be expanded to include someone to ‘puddle’ the stuff before placing it on the sieve.

Derek had found us a fair ‘prospect’ at the Kangaroo Crossing campground on Reedy Creek in the Woolshed Valley (about 10 minutes from Eldorado), but first I had to buy a Miner’s Right, which cost me $17.50 for ten years at the Beechworth Visitor Information Centre. After lunch we set up Derek’s cradle [1] in the creek bed, and took turns at digging and rocking the cradle. It turned out that the cradle could process about 10 ‘easy’ shovels-full at a time, and that the classifier sieve had to be emptied of the heavier material about every third shovel-load. We found that the method for cradling for finer gold — explained by Edward Ridpath, who was on the Reid’s Creek diggings in 1852-3 (ie: upstream from where we were located) — was the most effective:

…soon after beginning to wash our stuff, Whitelaw and G— had a quarrel which rose from the latter finding fault with the former’s method of cradling, at Forest Creek, whereby G— had learned to cradle, the gold is coarse and nuggety, slow cradling and plenty of water is generally used there, on the other hand at the Sydney diggings where Whitelaw had learned to cradle, the gold is extremely fine which requires fast cradling and very little water, so as not to wash away the finer particles; now the gold on these diggings happened to be of the same kind as that on the Sydney side, therefore it should be washed like it: an experience of more than two years has proved this to be the most effectual way, yet G— would persist in maintaining that the cradling for one class of gold would do that for the the other, and words rose between them on the issue of this dispute, which ended in a separation when the stuff was washed… [1]

Gold_cradle_woolshed

Pouring water into the cradle. The grey clay being washed through the cradle can be seen exiting the cradle’s end and flowing into the creek.

Derek and I put ten shovels through the cradle, cleaned the cradle and repeated the same, with minimal effort. We didn’t have anything to ‘puddle’ the stuff in before cradling it, and as it turned out, this would have been preferable as some of the clay was extremely sticky and stiff, and had to be loosened by hand.

To clean out the cradle, first the sieve was removed, and the baffle was pulled out and held over a large plastic tub on its side (riffles facing down), where we washed any trapped sand/gold into the tub with splashes of water. (We also found that it paid to be careful when pulling out and replacing the baffle, as this can become jammed-in by sand.) In the very bottom of the cradle, a lot of washdirt could be scooped out by hand. This was panned-off, and there it was: gold. Then we were left with the remainder — stuff caught in or beneath the hessian fabric. Historically the fabric was nailed to the bottom of the box, but Derek had made the hessian in this cradle detachable (it is held in place by a metal clamp which is secured/loosened by wing-nuts), so we removed the hessian and washed it in the large plastic tub. Finally we washed the dirt from the very bottom of the cradle into the same tub. The contents of the tub were panned-off and found to be far richer than the other panned material (panning for gold is another story [and another blog topic] altogether). The system was fiddly, but remarkably effective. We had recovered as much as 100 specks of fine gold — and this from a creek that already has been mined and dredged for 163 years.

gold_cradle_gold

The result. We won’t be rich anytime soon, but there’s gold.

  1. Derek built the cradle with a little help from Howard Phillips at the Eldorado Pottery. While it is based on the cradle in the Eldorado Museum, he gave it a few modern modifications. The cradle will be donated to the museum for educational purposes.
  2. Edward Ridpath, Journal, MS 8759, Box 1012/4, State Library of Victoria manuscripts collection, pp.21-22.