Should they survive infancy, life for children was particularly grim. If not carried off by one of the regular epidemics of cholera or diphtheria, the youngest poor could expect to meet their end in a variety of horrendous and exploitative industries. Children as young as eight were employed as ‘piecers’, standing next to the textile machines repairing breaks in the thread, or as ‘scavengers’, crawling underneath the moving mechanisms to clear obstructions. The cities employed thousands who had not yet reached their tenth birthday as chimney sweeps, but perhaps nothing was more unspeakable than what was found in the hundreds of coal pits mushrooming across the country. An inquiry into mining in Britain in the 1840s revealed that 1189 women and 1152 girls under the age of eighteen were toiling in wretched conditions in eastern Scottish mines alone. Accidents were commonplace, and caused barely a ripple outside the victims’ immediate families. In 1838, a sudden downpour flooded a coal mine in Barnsley, Yorkshire, killing 26 boy and girl child miners, only one of them over the age of thirteen.[7]
In addition, crop failures, economic depressions, and rural enclosures—particularly in the Scottish Highlands, which endured its own unique human catastrophe—led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of those left to sink to the bottom of the Empire’s ocean of prosperity, or be swallowed up by the shadows of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’.
Fifty years earlier, convict transportation was seen as effective social engineering—the means of surgically removing an entire underclass to the Australian colonies on the other side of the world, a place so removed from Britain that they would be of no bother to society ever again. By the 1850s, however, the penal transportation system was falling out of favour, not least among the colonials themselves, who had quite early come to the conclusion that their country had far greater potential than its role merely as a dumping ground for felons would allow. Now it was seen as necessary to induce—even assist—large numbers of selected persons to leave voluntarily. In any case, Australia needed them—and badly.
4
Australia 1851: Gold versus wool
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Australia’s growth in wool was hemmed in by an acute shortage of labour. Squatters and landholders became desperate. In 1840, a shepherd in Australia could earn up to £45 a year, three times what his counterpart back in England could bring home, with the deal usually sweetened further by free board and lodging and a generous weekly food allowance that included mutton, flour, sugar and tea.[1]
The depression flattened off the demand in the mid-1840s, but with the discovery of gold and the rush of the early 1850s, thousands of men walked off jobs in towns and cities alike to flock to the goldfields in search of instant—and usually elusive—wealth. The rural labour problem suddenly became a crisis. The question of who exactly would service the wool industry became an obsession with Australian growers and politicians, particularly as the gigantic clip of 1852 loomed. Luckily, however, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his Colonial Reformers had a plan.
While the Great Exhibition was holding Britain enthralled, 1851 was also a tumultuous year for Victoria. In July of that year, under a large eucalypt near the southern bank of Melbourne’s Yarra River in what is now that city’s Botanic Gardens, the long-cherished dream of the city’s patrons was realised when the Australian Colonies Government Act 1850 came into effect. The Act transformed Victoria from the Port Phillip District of New South Wales to a Crown colony in its own right, with full independence to arrive by 1855. The erudite French and Swiss-educated poet and painter Charles La Trobe was to be Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor. That year, Victorian sheep farmers produced 18 million pounds of wool from 6 million sheep; the whole clip was baled up and sent to fuel the voracious mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Nothing, however, was as dramatic as the announcement that gold had been discovered.
In fact, gold had already been found at various places around Victoria and elsewhere, going back to 1839 when the explorer Paul de Strzelecki stumbled across it in the Victorian Alps. Various sheep farmers had uncovered it too, but rightly fearing a flood of crazed and undesirable diggers, they had kept it to themselves. Having listened in dread to the descriptions of chaos that had followed the Californian gold rush of a couple of years earlier, the authorities were likewise loath to let the secret out. Only when the goldfield discoveries in New South Wales threatened Victoria’s economy did La Trobe relent and attempt to face the matter front-on by offering a reward of £300 for anyone who could find gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. The announcement acted as the starting gun to a stampede that would last for years, transforming Victorian colonial society forever.
A complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community, and as a natural consequence, there has been a universal rush to the diggings. Any attempt to describe the numberless scenes—grave, gay and ludicrous—would require the graphic power of a Dickens… People of all trades, callings and pursuits, were quickly transformed into miners, and many a hand which had been trained to kid gloves, or accustomed to wield nothing heavier than the grey goose quill became nervous to clutch the pick and crow-bar or ‘rock the cradle’ at our infant mines.
So proclaimed the Bathurst Free Press in May 1851, which, like everyone else, was at a loss to process this sudden derangement that had turned society on its head overnight.
With the discovery that the area around the sleepy inland settlements of Castlemaine and Bendigo in fact sat atop one of the world’s richest shallow alluvial goldfields, it seemed that the entire population of Melbourne, then Australia, immediately wanted to go there. In just two years, this antipodean El Dorado yielded around 4 million ounces, almost all of it found within 5 metres of the surface. In a few years, the largest nugget in the world was revealed: a 69-kilogram monster wryly dubbed the ‘Welcome Stranger’; it was so enormous that it had to be broken on an anvil into three pieces in order to weigh it.
In the following ten years, Victoria produced more than one-third of the world’s entire gold output, bewitching the imaginations of the public and press alike, particularly in London, where newspaper articles declared that ‘their stores of gold surpassed the wealth which the stately galleons brought to Spain from South America in the days of Sir Francis Drake’. The arrival of a gold ship in the Port of London would often lead to scenes of mayhem on the Thames, as described by The Times in October 1852:
The ship Medway has arrived in the Thames from Melbourne, Port Phillip, with no less than 67,000 oz. golddust, valued at 270,000 pounds. Immediately on the vessel arriving at Limehouse she was surrounded by a complete fleet of small boats filled with crimps, lodging-house keepers, and other of the longshore fraternity, who made numerous ineffectual efforts to get on board to remove the seamen’s effects under the impression, from the valuable nature of the ship’s cargo, that the men must be equally well stored… The Medway brings one of the most valuable cargoes ever imported by a private vessel into the port of London. It amounts in the aggregate, with cargo and golddust in the hands of passengers, to nearly 600,000 pounds.
By early 1853, armed vessels were each week escorting into London ships from Melbourne carrying gold worth between £170,000 and £200,000.
The rush was not simply one of gold, but of people. From an office in Regent Street, positioned strategically close by that of the Board, crowds assembled daily to undertake the great voyage and visit the diggings—if only in their imaginations. They gazed in wonder at moving panoramas extolling the beauty of the Antipodes, painted by popular artists of the time. There were also seascapes and pictures of exotic Australian animals, as well as handsome scenes of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, Goulbourn and Geelong, as well as the Parramatta River and Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The wonders of the voyage itself were extolled in colourful images of flying fish and porpoises, as well as the many stops along the way: Madeira, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. The fact that these had now largely been by-passed by the Great Circle route seemed of little consequence to those displaying their images to the captivated spectators.