to Hobarton, and join your ship if you have one, which I don't
believe. You can't humbug an old salt like me. You are a pair of
runaway convicts, and I'll give you in charge as sich. Here,
constables, put the darbies on 'em, and take 'em back to Hobarton.'
"Two men who had been awaiting orders outside the door now entered,
armed with carbines, produced each a pair of handcuffs, and came
towards us. But Jonathan drew back a step or two, clenched his big
fists, and said:
"'No, you don't. If this is your little game, captain, all I have to
say is, you are the darndest double-faced old cuss on this side of
perdition. You can shoot me if you like, but neither you nor the
four best men in Van Diemen's Land can put them irons on me. I am a
free citizen of the Great United States, and a free man I'll be or
die. I'll walk back to Hobarton, if you like, with these men, for I
guess that greasy old whaler has gone to sea again by this time, and
we'll get another ship there as well as at Launceston.'
"Captain Massey did not like to venture on shooting us off-hand, so
at last he told the constables to put up their handcuffs and start
with us for Hobarton.
"After we had travelled awhile Jonathan cooled down and began to talk
to the constables. He asked them how they liked the island, how long
they had been in it, if it was a good country for farming, how they
were getting along, and what pay they got for being constables. One
of them said: 'The island is pretty good in parts, but it's too
mountaynyus; we ain't getting along at all, and we won't have much
chance to do any good until our time is out.'
"'What on airth do you mean by saying "until you time is out?" Ain't
your time your own?' asked Jonathan.
"'No, indeed. I see you don't understand. We are Government men,
and we ain't done our time. We were sent out from England.'
"'Oh! you were sent out, were you? Now, I see, that means you are
penitentiary men, and ought to be in gaol. Jack, look here. This
kind of thing will never do. You and me are two honest citizens of
the United States, and here we are, piloted through Van Diemen's Land
by two convicts, and Britishers at that. This team has got to be
changed right away.'
"He seized both carbines and handed them to me; then he handcuffed
the constables, who were so taken aback they never said a word. Then
Jonathan said, 'This is training day. Now, march.'
"The constables walked in front, me and Jonathan behind, shouldering
the guns. In this way we marched until we sighted Hobarton, but the
two convicts were terribly afraid to enter the city as prisoners;
they said they were sure to be punished, would most likely be sent
into a chain gang, and would soon be strangled in the barracks at
night for having been policemen. We could see they were really
afraid, so we took off the handcuffs and gave them back the carbines.
"Before entering the city we found that the whaler had left the
harbour, and felt sure we would not be detained long, as nothing
could be proved against us. When we were brought before the beak
Jonathan told our story, and showed several letters he had received
from Boston, so he was discharged. But I had nothing to show; they
knew I was an Irishman, and the police asked for a remand to prove
that I was a runaway convict. I was kept three weeks in gaol, and
every time I was brought to court Jonathan was there. He said he
would not go away without me. The police could find out nothing
against me, so, at last, they let me go. We went aboard the first
vessel bound for Melbourne, and, when sail was made, I went up to the
cross-trees and cursed Van Diemen's Land as long as I could see it.
Jonathan took ship for the States, but I went shepherding, and grew
so lazy that if my stick dropped to the ground I wouldn't bend my
back to pick it up. But when I heard of the diggings, I woke up,
humped my swag, and ran away--I was always man enough for that--
and I don't intend to shepherd again."
When Philip returned from his excursion down the gully, he gave me a
detailed report of the results and said, "Gold mining is remarkable
for two things, one certain, the other uncertain. The certain thing
is labour, the uncertain thing is gold." This information staggered
me, so I replied, "Those two things will have to wait till morning.
Let us boil the billy." Our spirits were not very high when we began
work next day.
We slept under our small calico tent, and our cooking had to be done
outside. Sometimes it rained, and then we had to kindle a fire with
stringy bark under an umbrella The umbrella was mine--the only
one I ever saw on the diggings. Some men who thought they were witty
made observations about it, but I stuck to it all the same. No man
could ever laugh me out of a valuable property.
We lived principally on beef steak, tea, and damper. Philip cut his
bread and beef with his bowie knife as long as it lasted. Every man
passing by could see that we were formidable, and ready to defend our
gold to the death--when we got it. But the bowie was soon useless;
it got a kink in the middle, and a curl at the point, and had no edge
anywhere. It was good for nothing but trade.
A number of our shipmates had put up tents in the neighbourhood, and
at night we all gathered round the camp fire to talk and smoke away
our misery. One, whose name I forget, was a journalist,
correspondent for the 'Nonconformist'. Scott was an artist, Harrison
a mechanical engineer. Doran a commercial traveller, Moran an
ex-policeman, Beswick a tailor, Bernie a clogger. The first lucky
digger we saw, after Picaninny Jack, came among us one dark night; he
came suddenly, head foremost, into our fire, and plunged his hands
into the embers. We pulled him out, and then two other men came up.
They apologised for the abrupt entry of their mate. They said he was
a lucky digger, and they were his friends and fellow-countrymen. A
lucky digger could find friends anywhere, from any country, without
looking for them, especially if he was drunk, as was this stranger.
They said he had travelled from Melbourne with a pack horse, and,
near Mount Alexander, he saw a woman picking up something or other on
the side of a hill. She might be gathering flowers, but he could not
see any. He stopped and watched her for a while and then went
nearer. She did not take any notice of him, so he thought the poor
thing had been lost in the bush, and had gone cranky. He pitied her,
and said:
"My good woman, have you lost anything? Could I help you to look for it?"
"I am not your good woman, and I have not lost anything; so I don't
want anybody to help me to look for it."
He was now quite sure she was cranky. She stooped and picked up
something, but he could not see what it was. He began to look on the
ground, and presently he found a bright little nugget of gold. Then
he knew what kind of flowers the woman was gathering. Without a word
he took his horse to the foot of the hill, hobbled it, and took off
his swag. He went up the hill again, filled his pan with earth, and
washed it off at the nearest waterhole. He had struck it rich; the
hill-side was sprinkled with gold, either on the surface or just
below it. For two weeks there were only two parties at work on that
hill, parties of one, but they did not form a partnership. The woman
came every day, picking and scratching like an old hen, and went away
at sundown.
When the man went away he took with him more than a hundredweight of
gold. He was worth looking at, so we put more wood on the fire, and
made a good blaze. Yes, he was a lucky digger, and he was enjoying
his luck. He was blazing drunk, was in evening dress, wore a black
bell-topper, and kid gloves. The gloves had saved his hands from
being burned when he thrust them into the fire. There could be no
doubt that he was enjoying himself. He came suddenly out of the
black night, and staggered away into it again with his two friends.
One forenoon, about ten o'clock, while we were busy, peacefully
digging and puddling, we heard a sound like the rumbling of distant
thunder from the direction of Bendigo flat. The thunder grew louder
until it became like the bellowing of ten thousand bulls. It was the
welcome accorded by the diggers to our "trusty and well-beloved"
Government when it came forth on a digger hunt. It was swelled by
the roars, and cooeys, and curses of every man above ground and
below, in the shafts and drives on the flats, and in the tunnels of
the White Hills, from Golden Gully and Sheep's Head, to Job's Gully
and Eaglehawk, until the warning that "Joey's out" had reached to the
utmost bounds of the goldfield.
There was a strong feeling amongst the diggers that the license fee
of thirty shillings per month was excessive, and this feeling was
intensified by the report that it was the intention of the Government
to double the amount. As a matter of fact, by far the larger number
of claims yielded no gold at all, or not enough to pay the fee. The
hatred of the hunted diggers made it quite unsafe to send out a small
number of police and soldiers, so there came forth at irregular
intervals a formidable body of horse and foot, armed with carbines,
swords, and pistols.
This morning they marched rapidly along the track towards the White
Hills, but wheeling to the left up the bluff they suddenly appeared
at the head of Picaninny Gully. Mounted men rode down each side of
the gully as fast as the nature of the ground would permit, for it
was then honeycombed with holes, and encumbered with the trunks and
stumps of trees, especially on the eastern side. They thus managed
to hem us in like prisoners of war, and they also overtook some
stragglers hurrying away to right and left. Some of these had
licenses in their pockets, and refused to stop or show them until
they were actually arrested. It was a ruse of war. They ran away as
far as possible among the holes and logs, in order to draw off the
cavalry, make them break their ranks, and thus to give a chance to
the unlicensed to escape or to hide themselves. The police on foot,
armed with carbines and accompanied by officers, next came down the
centre of the gully, and every digger was asked to show his license.
I showed that of William Matthews.
It was not that the policy of William Patterson was tried and found
wanting. He was at work on his claim a little below mine, and
knowing he had no license, I looked at him to see how he would behave
in the face of the enemy. He had stopped working, and was walking in
the direction of his tent, with head bowed down as ifin search of
something he had lost. He disappeared in his tent, which was a large
one, and had, near the opening, a chimney built up with ironstone
boulders and clay. But the police had seen him; he was followed,
found hiding in the corner of his chimney, arrested, and placed among
the prisoners who were then halted near my tub. Immediately behind
Patterson, and carrying a carbine on his shoulder, stood a well-known
shipmate named Joynt, whom poverty had compelled to join the enemy.
He would willingly have allowed his friend and prisoner to escape,
but no chance of doing so occurred, and long after dark Patterson
approached our camp fire, a free man, but hungry, tired, and full of
bitterness. He had been forced to march along the whole day like a
convicted felon, with an ever-increasing crowd of prisoners, had been
taken to the camp at nightfall and made to pay 6 pounds 10s.--viz.,
a fine of 5 pounds and 1 pound 10s. for a license.
The feelings of William Patterson, and of thousands of other diggers,
were outraged, and they burned for revenge. A roll-up was called,
and three public meetings were held on three successive Saturday
afternoons, on a slight eminence near the Government camp. The
speakers addressed the diggers from a wagon. Some advocated armed
resistance. It was well known that many men, French, German, and
even English, were on the diggings who had taken part in the
revolutionary outbreak of '48, and that they were eager to have
recourse to arms once more in the cause of liberty. But the majority
advocated the trial of a policy of peace, at least to begin with. A
final resolution was passed by acclamation that a fee of ten
shillings a month should be offered, and if not accepted, no fee
whatever was to be paid.
It was argued that if the diggers stood firm, it would be impossible
for the few hundreds of soldiers and police to arrest and keep in
custody nearly twenty thousand men. If an attempt was made to take
us all to gaol, digger-hunting would have to be suspended, the
revenue would dwindle to nothing, and Government would be starved
out. It was, in fact, no Government at all; it was a mere assemblage
of armed men sent to rob us, not to protect us; each digger had to do
that for himself.
Next day, Sunday, I walked through the diggings, and observed the
words "No License Here" pinned or pasted outside every tent, and
during the next month only about three hundred licenses were taken
out, instead of the fourteen or fifteen thousand previously issued,
the digger-hunting was stopped, and a license-fee of forty shillings
for three months was substituted for that of thirty shillings per
month.
II.
As no man who had a good claim would be willing to run the risk of
losing it, the number of licenses taken out after the last meeting
would probably represent the number of really lucky diggers then at
work on Bendigo, viz., three hundred more or less, and of the three
hundred I don't think our gully could boast of one. All were finding
a little gold, but even the most fortunate were not making more than
"tucker." By puddling eight tubs of washdirt I found that we could
obtain about one pound's worth of gold each per day; but this was
hardly enough to keep hope alive. The golden hours flew over us, but
they did not send down any golden showers. I put the little that
fell to my share into a wooden match-box, which I carried in my
pocket. I knew it would hold twelve ounces--if I could get so much
--and looked into it daily and shook the gold about to see if I were
growing rich.
It was impossible to feel jolly, and I could see that Philip was
discontented. He had never been accustomed to manual labour; he did
not like being exposed to the cold winds, to the frost or rain, with
no shelter except that afforded by our small tent. While at work we
were always dirty, and often wet; and after we had passed a miserable
night, daylight found us shivering, until warmth came with hard work.
One morning Philip lost his temper; his only hat was soaked with
rain, and his trousers, shirt, and boots were stiff with clay. He
put a woollen comforter on his head in lieu of the hat. The
comforter was of gaudy colours, and soon attracted public attention.
A man down the gully said:
"I obsarved yesterday we had young Ireland puddling up here, and I
persave this morning we have an Italian bandit or a Sallee rover at
work among us."
Every digger looked at Philip, and he fell into a sudden fury; you
might have heard him at the first White Hill.
"Yesterday I heard a donkey braying down the gully, and this morning
he is braying again."
"Oh! I see," replied the Donkey. "We are in a bad temper this morning."
Father Backhaus was often seen walking with long strides among the
holes and hillocks on Bendigo Flat or up and down the gullies, on a
visit to some dying digger, for Death would not wait until we had all
made our pile. His messengers were going around all the time;
dysentery, scurvy, or fever; and the priest hurried after them.
Sometimes he was too late; Death had entered the tent before him.
He celebrated Mass every Sunday in a tent made of drugget, and
covered with a calico fly. His presbytery, sacristy, confessional,
and school were all of similar materials, and of small dimensions.
There was not room in the church for more than thirty or forty
persons; there were no pews, benches, or chairs. Part of the
congregation consisted of soldiers from the camp, who had come up
from Melbourne to shoot us if occasion required. Six days of the
week we hated them and called "Joey" after them, but on the seventh
day we merely glared at them, and let them pass in silence. They
were sleek and clean, and we were gaunt as wolves, with scarcely a
clean shirt among us. Philip, especially hated them as enemies of
his country, and the more so because they were his countrymen, all
but one, who was a black man.
The people in and around the church were not all Catholics. I saw a
man kneeling near me reading the Book of Common Prayer of the Church
of England; there was also a strict Presbyterian, to whom I spoke
after Mass. He said the priest did not preach with as much energy as
the ministers in Scotland. And yet I thought Father Backhaus' sermon
had that day been "powerful," as the Yankees would say. He preached
from the top of a packing case in front of the tent. The audience
was very numerous, standing in close order to the distance of
twenty-five or thirty yards under a large gum tree.
The preacher spoke with a German accent, but his meaning was plain.
He said:
"My dear brethren' 'Beatus ille qui post aurum non abiit'. Blessed
is the man who has not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money or
treasures. You will never earn that blessing, my dear brethren. Why
are you here? You have come from every corner of the world to look
for gold. You think it is a blessing, but when you get it, it is
often a curse. You go what you call 'on the spree'; you find the
'sly grog'; you get drunk and are robbed of your gold; sometimes you
are murdered; or you fall into a hole and are killed, and you go to
hell dead drunk. Patrick Doyle was here at Mass last Sunday; he was
then a poor digger. Next day he found gold, 'struck it rich,' as you
say; then he found the grog also and brought it to his tent.
Yesterday he was found dead at the bottom of his golden shaft, and he
was buried in the graveyard over there near the Government camp."
My conscience was quite easy when the sermon was finished. It would
be time enough for me to take warning from the fate of Paddy Doyle
when I had made my pile. Let the lucky diggers beware! I was not
one of them.
After we had been at work a few weeks, Father Backhaus, before
stepping down from the packing-case, said:
"I want someone to teach in a school; if there is anyone here willing
to do so, I should like to see him after Mass."
I was looking round for Philip among the crowd when he came up, eager
and excited.
"I am thinking of going in to speak to the priest about that school,"
he said. "Would you have any objection? You know we are doing no
good in the gully, but I won't leave itif you think I had better not."
Philip was honourable; he would not dissolve our short partnership,
and leave me alone unless I was quite willing to let him go.
"Have you ever kept school before?"
"No, never. But I don't think the teaching will give me much
trouble. There can't be many children around here, and I can surely
teach them A B C and the Catechism."
Although I thought he had not given fortune a fair chance to bless
us, he looked so wistful and anxious that I had not the heart to say
no. Philip went into the tent, spoke to the priest, and became a
schoolmaster. I was then a solitary "hatter."
Next day a man came up the gully with a sack on his back with
something in it which he had found in a shaft. He thought the shaft
had not been dug down to the bedrock, and he would bottom it. He
bottomed on a corpse. The claim had been worked during the previous
summer by two men. One morning there was only one man on it; he said
his mate had gone to Melbourne, but he had in fact killed him during
the night, and dropped him down the hole. The police never hunted
out that murderer; they were too busy hunting us.
I was not long alone. A beggarly looking young man came a few days
later, and said:
"I hear you have lost your mate Philip, and my mates have all gone
away and taken the tent with them; so I want to ask you to let me
stay in your tent until I can look round a bit."
This young man's name was David Beswick, but he was known simply as
"Bez." He was a harmonious tailor from Manchester; he played the
violoncello, also the violin; had a good tenor voice, and a talent
for the drama. He, and a man named Santley from Liverpool, had taken
leading parts in our plays and concerts on shipboard. Scott, the
artist, admired Bez; he said he had the head, the features, and the
talent of a Shakespeare. He had a sketch of Bez in his portfolio,
which he was filling with crooked trees, common diggers, and ugly
blackamoors. I could see no Shakespeare in Bez; he was nothing but a
dissipated tailor who had come out in the steerage, while I had
voyaged in the house on deck. I was, therefore, a superior person,
and looked down on the young man, who was seated on a log near the
fire, one leg crossed over the other, and slowly stroking his
Elizabethan beard. I said:
"Yes, Philip has left me, but I don't want any partner. I understand
you are a tailor by trade, and I don't think much of a tailor."
"Well," replied Bez, "I don't think much of him myself, so I have
dropped the business. I am now a sailor. You know yourself I sailed
from Liverpool to Melbourne, and, anyhow, there's only the difference
of a letter between a tailor and a sailor."
There was a flaw somewhere in the argument, but I only said, "'Valeat
quantum valere potest.'" Bez looked solemn; a little Latin goes a
long way with some people. He was an object of charity, and I made
him feel it.
"In the first place this tent is teetotal. No grog is to come inside
it. There is to be no mining partnership. You can keep all the gold
you get, and I shall do the same. You must keep all trade secrets,
and never confess you are a tailor. I could never hold up my head
among the diggers if they should discover that my mate was only the
ninth part of a man. You must carry to the tent a quantity of clay
and rocks sufficient to build a chimney, of which I shall be the
architect. You will also pay for your own tucker, chop wood, make
the fire, fetch water, and boil the billy." Bez promised solemnly to
abide by these conditions, and then I allowed him to deposit his swag
in the tent.
The chimney was built in three days, and we could then defy the
weather, and dispense with the umbrella. Bez performed his part of
the contract well. He adopted a rolling gait and the frown of a
pirate; he swore naval oaths strong enough to still a hurricane.
Among his digging outfit was a huge pick; it was a two-man pick, and
he carried it on his shoulder to suggest his enormous strength. He
threw tailordom to the winds; when a rent appeared in his trousers he
closed it with pins, disdaining the use of the needle, until he
became so ragged that I ordered him into dock for repairs.
One day in passing Philip's school I peeped in at the flap of the
tent. He had already acquired the awe-inspiring look of the
schoolmaster. He was teaching a class of little boys, whose
wandering eyes were soon fixed on my face, and then Philip saw me.
He smiled and blushed, and came outside. He said he was getting
along capitally, and did not want to try digging any more. He had
obtained a small treatise called "The Twelve Virtues of a Good
Master," and he was studying it daily in order to qualify himself for
his new calling. He had undertaken to demonstrate one of Euclid's
propositions every night by way of exercising his reasoning
faculties. He was also making new acquaintances amongst men who were
not diggers--doctors, storekeepers, and the useful blacksmiths who
pointed our picks with steel. He had also two or three friends at
the Governmnt camp, and I felt inclined to look upon him as a traitor
to the diggers' cause but although he had been a member of the party
of Young Irelanders, he was the most innocent traitor and the poorest
conspirator I ever heard of. He could keep nothing from me. If he
had been a member of some secret society, he would have burst up the
secret, or the secret would have burst him.