Responses to Gold

The discovery of Gold in Australia was a defining factor in the development of all colonies but with particular emphasis on Victoria and later Western Australia. Gold was first discovered by a man named Edward Hargreaves in New South Whales in 1851, in a landscape that was likened to the gold fields of California which also was found to harbor gold deposits underground.  However it was Victoria that experienced the largest ‘gold rush’ of all the colonies during the 1850s. During this period there was mass movement amongst the population of the Australian colonies as well is immigration from abroad, with people coming in search of gold. The population of Victoria swelled by almost seven hundred percent in the decade following the discovery. By the end of 1851 over half of the male Victorian population was working on the goldfields and by the end of 1856 over one hundred thousand men. The sudden discovery of gold and mass migration that came subsequently brought up a number of problems and anxieties and fears about Australia’s future and it also brought about an arguably racial sentiment to Australian culture.

The discovery of gold provided an opportunity for people to financially better themselves, based purely on luck. As there were chances of ordinary working men striking it rich in the gold fields, there was a high possibility for a redistribution of wealth within society. This may not have been the case for all minors, but for a select few who were lucky enough to find gold it was. Thus there was a positive outlook of the future for the poorer working classes as an opportunity to gain wealth and social standing. However conversely it would undoubtedly have been an intimidating prospect for the wealthier upper classes as they were faced with the possibility of losing their high place in society to minors who found gold and became wealthy. This anxiety of the upper class was portrayed in John Leech’s painting entitled ‘Topsy Turvey’ created in 1854. This painting depicts elites of colonial Australia waiting upon common miners who are dressed in lavish clothes eating and drinking expensive commodities. The chance of ‘striking it rich’ also posed a problem to the Australian ideals of hard work with reward following. The ideal of hardwork and subsequent reward was shattered due to the fact that a minor could go out into the gold fields and find a gold nugget worth a fortune and his success can be solely put to sheer strength and luck.

This is an image of two 'diggers' searching through the soil they have unearthed in the hope to strike it rich and find gold. 

http://www.pictureaustralia.org/apps/pictureaustralia?action=PADisplay&mode=display&rs=resultset-3720313&no=18

During the gold rush period it is argued that an anti-immigrant attitude developed within the colony, which was most visible when looking at the experience of the Chinese immigrants. Upon hearing of the gold to be found in Victoria many Chinese men immigrated to Australia to try their luck and make better lives for themselves, as did many other men. There were over forty thousand Chinese arrivals between 1852 and 1889, however there were also thirty six thousand departures. At one stage during the 1850s, when the gold rush was at its highest peak nearly one in ten of the men in Victoria were Chinese. These Chinese immigrants were accustomed to working for very poor wages in their homeland and as such were willing to work for less than the average white digger working for a mining company. This fact brought much opposition to the Chinese and on a number of occasions broke out in riot. In 1873 violence towards the Chinese miners erupted in Riot in a town called Clunes where a minor company director, Peter Laylor was employing Chinese minors to work for him at a cheaper rate than white men would work for. The men were fed up with the Chinese stealing, what they believed, to be their work and riot broke out resulting in the deaths and injury of many Chinese men. The Victorian government accepted these feelings, whether they were racially fuelled or simply economic, and introduced a Restrictive Immigration Policy which limited the number of foreign workers, mainly Chinese, who could come to Australia to work in the gold fields. Another issue with regard to the Chinese miners was that they money they made from the gold they found was sent back to China and was not put back into the Victorian market through purchase of goods and other services which generated profit. It has been said that these anti-immigration sentiments lead to the ‘White Australia Policy’ which was implemented following federation. 

Frontier or History Wars?

Following the settlement of Australia by the British was a series of conflicts, which could also be called minor wars between the white settlers and the native aboriginals. The aboriginals attempted to resist the dispossession of their lands that were being taken by the settlers who were setting up farms and other similar initiatives. This resistance was met with armed force by the settlers which resulted in much aboriginal blood shed across all areas of Australia. However the worst violence towards aboriginals occurred in Tasmania. In the year of 1824 the population of aboriginals in Tasmania was at around fifteen hundred, this number was greatly reduced to about three hundred and fifty in the following years. This was due to groups which assembled and went out on hunts to kill aboriginals. In 1830 Governor Arthur assembled ‘the black line’, this was a line of over one thousand men stretched across an area of Tasmania which conducted a sweep across the land to round up any surviving aborigines.

Historians have overlooked this frontier conflict for a long time, up until the 1970s it was rarely found in any literature. There are a number of suggestions as to why this was. Firstly indigenous history is oral, their history is told through oral interpretation not written accounts of events, it is told from generation to generation. This means that there is the potential for history to be changed as the story is passed from generation to generation which is something historians have always avoided; they tend to rely on written and documented sources. Aboriginals were not recognised as a people until the 1960s when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in places like America as well as in Australia. Aboriginals had no platform from which to speak out about the injustices there people incurred in the early settler period of Australian colonisation. The 1960s finally gave them rights at citizens and thus they were given the opportunity to speak out about the aforementioned injustices. Australia had been a very conservative nation up until the 1970s, before then it had only been natural to look at white history. The nation already had heroes of the time, the ‘white colonists’ such as Captain Cook and other various figures, it would be contradictory for historians to then write about the bloody conflict which occurred between the settlers and aborigines in which much of the aboriginal population was wiped out, rendering this heroic myth of the settler invalid or tarnished. 

This is an attack by Aboriginal men on the Barrows Creek Telegraph Station. Just one of the many conflicts to take place between local Aboriginals and the Settlers. 

http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?ct=display&doc=SLV_VOYAGER1693778&indx=4&fn=search&ct=search&vid=MAIN&indx=1&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=aboriginal%20attack&srt=rank&vl(10247183UI0)=any&vl(1UI0)=contains&frbg=&tab=default_tab&vl(11480836UI1)=images&mode=Basic&scp.scps=scope%3A(SLV_VOYAGER)%2Cscope%3A(SLV_DIGITOOL)%2Cscope%3A(SLVPRIMO) 

Europeans and the Australian Environment

The Australian landscape and environment was heavily impacted, in a largely negative sense by the Europeans upon arrival and settlement. Australia was vastly different from what the European settlers knew back in Britain, with regard to environment. Australia was different from Britain in so many ways; it was a great continent that spanned for thousands of miles with very few large inland water sources. The climate was also immensely different, as it got extremely hot unlike Britain which was generally a much colder climate. The elements faced were much harsher in Australia; there could be periods of intense drought, followed by flood and also the possibility of bushfire that could ravage the bush land that extended across the continent.

In 1848 explorer Thomas Mitchell provided an uncharacteristically sensitive study of the impact colonists were having on the Australian landscape. Mitchell states that fire, grass, kangaroos and the aboriginal people all seem to be dependent on each other to exist in the Australian environment. The fire opens up forests, which in turn creates grass for the kangaroos to eat, which are then eaten by the aboriginal people cooked on fires. All the elements seem to co-exist. That was until the Europeans came and disrupted the Australian environment. The running of cattle had destroyed much of the top soil where grass would grow after the land had been burned and as such the grass woud not grow, subsequently the kangaroos would not be drawn to the grass and the aboriginal people of that area would have lost their main food source leading to their extirpation. There are other elements of the British occupation of the land that would have had devastating impact to the environment and the echo-system. There was mass deforestation; the clearing of trees which often were the natural habitat to a number of wildlife and native animals. Mining as well as irrigation also altered the natural make up of the land, but the settlers were ignorant of this that they did not realise the destructive flow on effect it had on the local aboriginal population which resulted in their almost total extirpation. 

The deforestation of the Florentine Valley. This was just one of the many negative environmental impacts Europeans had on the Australian environment. 

http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/item/?id=673144

Convict Lives

The idea that the Australian convicts were members of a ‘criminal class’ has generated much debate in the past. Various historians believe that the convicts were ‘professional criminals’ as opposed to ‘casual criminals’. The idea that the majority of the convicts were casual criminals is based on the premise that they were forced to commit crimes such as theft of a loaf of bread in order to feed their families, due to the economic changes occurring in Britain that saw people struggle to survive financially. However historians such as Manning Clark suggest that this was not correct, he contends that the majority of convicts were of a criminal class comprised of professional criminals. There is a widespread consensus that the convicts were mainly agricultural workers who had been crushed by cruel landlords and a monstrous criminal law which transported people for minor crimes. Clark states that the idea that pioneers were more ‘sinned against, that sinners’ was a comforting idea for an Australian nationalist sentiment, than facing the fact that the founders of Australia were professional criminals.

The best source of classification of types of convicts is the indents that were recorded on the convict ships coming from Britain, these indents record information regarding the convict such as; name, gender, occupation and previous criminal record. The indents show that the majority of convicts were transported for thefts, they were drawn from the working class comprising men such as butchers, hatters, shoemakers, engineers as well as many other occupations. The majority of women were domestic servants. Between 1797 and 1815 5546 males and 1799 females were transported, having a ratio of three to one. Another important statistic is that the ratio of town to country workers was five to one, respectively. Another source Clark refers to is informed opinion from Britain. Patrick Colquhoun, an observer of British Society states that the class of thieves in London was comprised of ‘young men, abandoning business, or being bred to no profession, having been left to a life of idleness indulged in things such as gambling and debauchery, and thus must resort of crime in order to finance such habits’. Clark also refers to the opinions of the Constabulary Commissioners in 1839; that states that ‘we find scarcely in any cases it is ascribable to the pressure of unavoidable want or destitution, and that in the great mass of cases it arises from the temptation of obtaining property with a less degree of labour tan by regular industry’. This is essentially saying that men have wants but wish to obtain them more easily than working for money and buying such things, so they resort to simply stealing them. Clark concludes in saying that most ideas regarding convicts as casual criminal have erred on the premise that they committed crime due to the economic challenges that were present between 1788 and 1850. He states that the evidence looked at confirms that the majority of convicts were from professional criminal classes of the towns of Great Britain and Ireland and that they actually chose to commit crime due to idleness and selfish nature, they were not forced into crime due to economic factors. 

British convicts leaving their homeland, bound for the new penal colony in Australia

http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/item/?id=100742

Outpost and Empire

There is much debate as to why Australia was chosen to become a British outpost in the Southern hemisphere. In August of 1786 the British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney decided that Botany Bay would be the location for a new British penal colony to ease the empire’s overwhelming prison population.  The prison system in England was in a dire situation due to the constant increase in prisoners. There were over two hunderd offences which resulted in the death penalty. Between 1717 and 1776 over thirty thousand prisoners were sent to the British colonies in America. Between 1772 and 1778 the population of England’s prison system almost doubled. Something had to be done to release the strain on the prison system; Australia was Britain’s answer.

There are conflicting views and opinions as to why Australia was chosen to become a British outpost and penal colony. However there are four dominant and differing theories that have appeared to best explain the reason for the decision. The first is the so-called ‘Dumping Ground’ Theory. This theory, as stated above, is based on the idea that as the British prison system was over-populated and it needed somewhere to send its convict population. It was in this period that the British had faced the American’s in their war of independence and had been defeated, this meant that they could no longer send their excess convicts to the American colonies which posed an obvious problem. However this leaves the question as to why Australia was chosen to replace American colonies as a dumping ground. While it would provide a perfect place for British convicts to be sent, Australia was on the other side of the world, it would have been extremely expensive and timely to use Australia as a replacement penal colony. This is the main argument opposing this theory as to why Australia was chosen.

This is a panoramic wide view of the Port Arthur convict settlement from behind the Church. http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/item/?id=PH30-1-4157

A second theory is the ‘Empire’ Theory. This theory revolves around the notion of Empire building and national pride. The British Empire was the largest in the world at the time and it seemed to have no intention of slowing its rate of expansion. It had recently lost its colonies in America which would provide a perfect chance and reason to set up a new colony. The British and French had both been wanting to build strategic and trading networks in the southern hemisphere but wanted to avoid invasion of already established foreign colonies as neither was in a good economic position to wage a war against another nation. The British also wanted a new base that would increase its ability to defend its colony in India (British India), Australia would be a perfect location from a geographical perspective. This theory poses some valid points as to why Britain may have chosen Australia as an outpost on the other side of the world.

Another theory which has also been put forward as a reason for the decision for Australia to become a British outpost is that relating to flax and timber. Along with the ease of the prison system in Britain, Lord Sydney also stated that Australia had several enticing articles of commerce. The first of these was flax, a plant used for the making of canvas and sailcloth and superior to Baltic hemp for the making of ships cables. Sydney said that sure supply of flax ‘would be of great consequence to us (Britain) as a naval power’. He also stated that the tall trees which grew to the waters edge in New Zealand and in islands near Australia such as Norfolk Island would yield masts of unparalleled size and quality for the British fleets in India. The supplies of flax and timber needed for the British Navy were dwindling and without them the Navy may suffer. This was an enormous problem for the British as its Navy was the strongest in the world and its most powerful weapon. Australia seemed an option which would provide them of a place to send their excess convicts but more importantly it would provide them with the necessary materials needed to keep their prestigious Navy at full strength.