Women on the goldfields
by Mark Thurtell
While a lot has been written about the trials and tribulations of men on the Australian goldfields, very little has been said about the many hardships faced by the women who accompanied their husbands in the quest for gold. Fortunately, some women kept a day-today diary of life and events on the diggings in the 1850s, and one in particular, an English lass by the name of Ellen Clacy, gives us a birdseye view of what it was like. She writes that while her brother and his friends walked to the Bendigo diggings, she rode on the dray they had purchased which contained all the provisions needed for their adventure. The vehicle was laden with food, camp ovens, tents, cooking utensils, tin plates, pannikins, blankets, and opossum rugs, and she made the trip walled in by canvas and tent poles, leaning against a bag of flour, and with her feet resting on a large cheese. Ellen also states that she was dressed in a common dark blue serge, a waterproof coat and wore a wide-a-wake hat (this was a soft widebrimmed low-crown felt hat). On their arrival at the diggings she describes hearing the rattle of cradles as they swayed to and fro, the sounds of picks and shovels, and the hum of thousands of voices. She mentions the stores, noting that they stocked everything, including East Indian pickles, ankle jack-boots, baby caps, sugar candy, cradles, potted anchovies, needles, and picks, while at one store a pair of herrings lay dripping into a bag of sugar. Ellen noted that an average digger’s tent was a dreary place, the only contents being bedding, which lay on the dirt floor, and his table, which was a block of wood on top of a box. From this primitive piece of furniture, a miner ate his meals of mutton, damper and tea. However, if a miner was lucky enough to have his wife with him, she would make it more comfortable by placing dry sacking or pieces of carpet on the ground, the beds would have had sheets and blankets, and some women kept a pet cockatoo chained to a perch outside their tent so as to have some company while the husband was working their gold claim. Coming to terms with life on the goldfields was far from easy, and while some woman became frightened and angry with the outcome, leading to fights and quarrels with their partners, most settled down with a grin and-bear-it attitude.
A sly grog shop on the diggings
DANGERS ON THE DIGGINGS
An eyewitness account sheds light on a typical night on the diggings: “Imagine some hundreds of revolvers almost simultaneously fired. There was murder here, murder there, revolvers cracking, blunderbusses bombing, rifles going off, balls whistling, one man groaning with a broken leg, another shouting because he couldn’t find the way to his hole, and a third equally vociferous because he has tumbled into one.” There was an abundance of sly grog shanties on the diggings, where an unwary miner might be served a spiked drink, and wake up with his hard-earned gold gone from his pockets. A lot of these illegal dens were thinly disguised as coffee tents but the real source of income came from the business of selling grog. The grog was sometimes watered down and adulterated with herbs or even tobacco to give it a stronger taste to the unsuspecting patron. Ellen writes of a typical female serving grog at a sly grog tent, saying “A dirty, gaudy coloured dress hung unfastened about her shoulders, coarse black hair unbrushed, uncombed, dangled about her face, over which her evil habits had spread a genuine Bacchanalian glow.” Because the crinoline dress was the fashion from the 1850s to the late 1860s, women wore them on the diggings. These were large bell-shaped dresses supported by a cage of spring steel hoops and petticoats, and they were a most dangerous item in themselves. Many women often suffered horrible injuries, and some even died, when these dresses caught fire while they were simply stoking the camp fire or cooking a meal. An example of just such a disaster occurred in June, 1862. A Mrs Steele, the wife of the bootmaker at Rutherglen, was cooking with a camp oven when she made the mistake of turning around and letting her crinoline dress come in contact with the oven. The material caught fire and in a short time she was engulfed in flames. Alerted by her screams, her husband and two other men ran to her aid and did their upmost to smother the flames, sustaining severe burns in the process. But they were too late to stop the poor woman being roasted about her legs and lower body. A doctor was sent for and medical aid administered, but to no avail. According to the newspaper report at the time, Mrs Steele “lingered in great agony until four o’clock the next morning when death mercifully put an end to her suffering.”
ANGELS ON THE DIGGINGS
One prospector with a reporter’s interest in women on the goldfields, was Mark Hammond, who mined for gold at Forbes in 1861-62. He writes about the women who worked in the saloons and states that “The hotels with dancing saloons employed girls. The dancing saloon in such places was every night decorated out like a first-class ballroom, some of the girls appearing in ball dresses as rich and beautiful as money could procure. In short, the women so engaged were as a general rule of good appearance, well behaved, handsomely dressed, and for their services were well paid by the proprietor. “Let us take a peep into one of those first-class saloons during the dancing of a set of quadrilles. The ladies are beautifully dressed, but who are their partners? Not one well-dressed gentleman is to be seen. They are mostly miners in their moleskins. Some are young squatters wearing riding boots and breeches. We as miners on the field understand this, but as a stranger, would hardly think that the man making his fortune would be found dancing with these girls in his clay-coloured moleskins and a Crimean shirt with a coloured sash around his waist, wearing polished or patent boots with a silk handkerchief around his neck.”
Hammond also writes that even though he was a stranger, a woman came to his aid while he was on his way back to Lambing Flat from Forbes. It appears he was suffering from an abscess in one ear and he says, “That evening as I lay down under one of the wagons, an administering angel came to where she heard me moaning. She had a look at me and found the whole side of my head was swollen to a fearful extent. The abscess had broken several times but always appeared to get worse as it came on again. The angel was the good woman who had driven one of the teams all day. She went to her own wagon and brought a little oil and bluestone. She fed a drop into my ear, then she gave me some pills and left. By the next night the pain had ceased and the swelling had almost disappeared. That woman’s kindness did not cost her much, but it won in me a lasting respect which in memory will never be forgotten.” Historian are indebted to another woman who kept quite a meticulous record of what life was like on the Victorian goldfields during the 1850s and ’60s. Her name was Emily (Fillan) Skinner (c1832-1890) who left her middle-class London family in 1854 and courageously sailed, unchaperoned, as an unassisted immigrant, halfway around the world to Melbourne, to be reunited with and marry her finance, William Elliott Skinner, with whom she had previously worked in service. She showed her resourcefulness by quickly befriending a married female cabin companion, to protect her middleclass respectability.
Carte-de-Visite photograph by Richards of Ballarat of a well-dressed woman of the 1850s
When Emily arrived in Melbourne, William had already been moderately successful at the Forest Creek (or Castlemaine) goldfield but was then working in the retail trade. However, four months after their marriage, he decided to try his luck again, this time on the Ovens gold fields, leaving Emily in Melbourne. In May 1855, despite her awareness of stories of murderers, bushrangers and lawlessness in the bush, Emily showed great pluck and determination by traveling alone to Beechworth (or Spring Creek) to join her husband. She was five months pregnant and took the 8-day trip with 11 other passengers, over rough jolting roads, in a light American wagon. The Skinners made several subsequent moves around the Ovens goldfields where they lived for 12 years. In early 1856, they were on the Woolshed before returning to Spring Creek in 1857. They spent eight years in the Buckland Valley from 1859 and then moved back to Beechworth at the end of 1867. These frequent moves were not exceptional for goldminers’ families and the fact that Emily had nine children from 1855 until l880, three of whom did not survive did to adulthood, was also unremarkable. Her variety of homes on the diggings – a bark hut at Spring Creek; green baize-lined tent at the Woolshed; and wooden houses at Spring Creek, Beechworth and the Buckland Valley, as well as the frequent establishment of a garden – were also quite usual. Many women on the goldfields supplemented the family’s variable mining income by washing, ironing, sewing clothes or cooking meals for unpartnered gold diggers. What was remarkable about Emily is that she used her literary skills to write a journal during her sea voyage to Australia and later wrote a manuscript about life on the Ovens goldfields. These were not published but kept, copied and passed down to her descendants for more than 100 years, until Dr Edward Duyker, an academic, researched Emily’s life and in 1995 edited and published her handwritten manuscript. In her shipboard journal, Emily identified fellow passengers by name. Duyker used this to discover the identity of the pseudonyms used for her goldfields manuscript characters. By disguising the identity of her characters, using pseudonyms, Emily could be absolutely frank, accepting, warm and compassionate in her writings, which are matter of fact, like those of working-class women and non-judgmental, as well as empathetic, unlike the critical writings of superior middle-class authoresses.
Her writings are devoid of ethnic or religious prejudice. Her story is free of the verbal contortions designed to maintain the writer’s respectability “as a lady”. She sometimes does not mention events, likely to compromise respectability and so avoids perpetuating the double sexual moral standard of the time. So, she omitted any mention of her marriage to William three weeks after her arrival in Melbourne, when they both lived in the new suburb of Collingwood. She also ignored the possibility of the girls, working in goldfields hotels and restaurants who attended the balls as miners’ companions, being prostitutes. But Emily felt safe in revealing that while on route to Spring Creek in 1856, in one small fully-booked hotel where she was forced to share a room with two fellow female passengers, she had screamed with fright when she woke to find a strange man undressing in her room. In 1998, Joy Hooton included a part of Emily Skinner’s memoirs in her collection of Australian autobiographical writings titled Australian Lives. Emily’s story of her and William simultaneously contracting a fever at the Woolshed diggings and Emily hovering close to death for weeks, while their first-born baby son died and was buried in an unmarked grave by strangers, is judged to be “one of the most graphic and reflective of goldfields narratives”. Emily claimed that her experiences on the goldfields were those of hundreds of miner’s wives. However, women and their experiences were virtually invisible on the masculine goldfields, the predominant male view being that it was not an appropriate place for respectable women. Emily’s presence and actions and those of other women on the goldfields, challenged this.
After William’s retirement, the Skinner’s gypsy life continued when, in 1888, they went to Melbourne to live on William’s government pension, first sharing a house in Brunswick West and then in Sydney Road where 58-year-old Emily died in March 1890 as a result of a stroke. Her death certificate describes her as a “housewife” however she was much more than that. She was a spirited, intelligent, determined, hard-working woman who endured illness, poverty, loneliness, great personal loss and sorrow as well as hard domestic labour. She also left an engaging, authentic, first-hand account of life for a woman on the Ovens goldfields during the goldrush era. She was buried in the Church of England section of the Coburg cemetery in Melbourne. For other women, life amidst the isolated, male-dominated goldfields proved a lonely, alienating experience. Elizabeth Skinner, who suffered as a result of her husband’s unsuccessful pursuit of gold, recalled being lonely and sick and fainting while attending to her children, and wrote: ‘How one longed for mothers and sisters at such times and envied the poorest women at home who in sickness generally have some relative near.’ Copies of the book A Woman on the Goldfields. Recollections of Emily Skinner 1854-1878, edited by Dr Edward Duyker, are readily available online.
Emily Skinner was a remarkable woman of her age