By 1860 whole plains in New South Wales had been ringbarked, and now large sections of forest all over Australia were ghostly trunks instead of the once green, leafy trees.
In the early colony sheep and cattle had been guarded by convicts. But in the 1870s farmers started to use fencing wire. This was a revolution! Instead of carting rocks for stone walls, or cutting timber for wooden fences, you just had to cut a few posts and stretch the wire from one to the next! Slowly the open landscape began to be carved up into fenced rectangles.
By the mid-1870s Tasmanian axemen had turned their woodchopping skills into a competition sport.
In 1860 there were six million sheep in the colonies.
In 1891 there were 62 million!
Fences meant that squatters didn’t need as many shepherds to keep their flocks from straying. It also meant they could look after their sheep better, and breed sheep that gave exactly the sort of wool the factory owners back in England wanted. Big wool scours in the towns replaced washing sheep in the creeks.
Settlers were also doing their best to make the land look like Europe too, not just by building European-style houses and farms and planting ornamental trees, but by bringing in European plants and animals that went wild.
The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria (ASV) was formed in 1861 to bring in exotic plants and animals to make Australia look like a Little England. In 1862 the Society released 10 canaries, 2 quail, 18 blackbirds, 24 thrushes, 2 partridges and 6 skylarks at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, hoping they’d go wild.
The blackbirds thrived in urban areas and became a terrible pest, pushing out native birds. Six nightingales released in 1857 died, disappointing settlers who’d hoped for their sweet night songs.
But the salmon and trout released into Tasmanian streams survived—finally. (Three lots of fish eggs brought out all died on the ship from England.)
Often the new introductions became terrible pests like blackberries, gorse and foxes.
Hawthorn brought in for hedges choked out native plants. European carp muddied rivers so that native fish died. Foxes and feral cats and dogs drove some Australian animal species to extinction.
Baron Ferdinand von Mueller spread blackberry seed from his saddlebag as he rode through Victoria.
But possibly the most destructive animal of all was the cute little bunny.
THE CURSE OF THE BUNNY!
Farmers had to cope with drought, floods, distance and attacks by the people they had dispossessed. But now they had to face a new threat—from rabbits!
There were no rabbits in Australia when European settlers arrived. By 1850 a few people in Australia bred rabbits for their meat, but rabbit meat was still a luxury and rabbits had been difficult to farm in England. People called warreners were employed to try to keep rabbit colonies healthy and productive.
In 1859 a Victorian squatter, Thomas Austin, brought 24 rabbits, 5 hares and 72 partridges from England and released them on his sheep run near Geelong. Within ten years the rabbits has escaped from his property and spread all over the neighbourhood, and every year they spread further.
By 1879 rabbits were a plague across New South Wales, destroying thousands of acres of grazing land and starving out many native animals as well as causing massive soil loss and erosion. Rabbit meat was cheap and rabbit fur made cheap fur coats too. Hawkers took freshly-killed rabbits from door to door calling, ‘Rabbit—oh!’
WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE MEAT?
Early farmers in Australia had to sell most of their meat in Australia. There was just no way to send it overseas, except by smoking or salting, or boiling down the carcasses to render fat for tallow to make candles and soap.
In 1870 you could buy canned corned beef, spiced beef, oxtail, ox tongues, tripe, rabbit, sheep’s kidneys, lambs’ tongues, loin of mutton, canned vegetables and jams.
Then in 1847 Sizar Elliot, a Sydney grocer, decided to try a new French method for keeping meat—canning the cooked beef in whale oil. It worked—but hardly anyone tried it, except American whalers who had eaten canned foods back home.
Elliot had to give up his little cannery. But slowly, sea captains grew to rely on tinned meat instead of salt meat, and during the war between France and Prussia in 1870–71 Australian tinned meat was prized and the canned meat industry was thriving. In 1870 you could buy canned corned beef, spiced beef, oxtail, ox tongues, tripe, rabbit, sheep’s kidneys, lamb’s tongues, loin of mutton, canned vegetables and jams.
Cans of boiled mutton were called Harriet Lane after a woman who was murdered and cut into pieces!
Faster ships now meant it was safer to send wheat and other crops overseas too—even Tasmanian apples.
THE FARMS SPREAD OUT
By the 1870s farmers were roaming far beyond the fertile, grassy plains. They’d discovered that sheep could survive on the dry saltbush country. Squatters even pushed north into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
All of Tasmania, most of Victoria and New South Wales and large parts of southern Western Australia and South Australia were now owned by European settlers. The cattle kings such as Smith and Elder sponsored explorers including Giles, Warburton and Gosse to find new land for grazing. The Indigenous people of Queensland and the Northern Territory were being driven from their lands—though they were still fighting back.
But the seasons were good through the 1870s. It looked like farming and grazing was going to bring the country greater and greater riches. The good rains would continue to bring good grass and wealth.
Or would they?
CONCLUSION
The gold rushes had turned Australia from a cluster of stagnating colonies, peopled by convicts and British squatters, into a bustling nation. The equality and mateship of the goldfields had as much of an effect as the riches and the increased population. The diggers had defied the government. And even though they’d lost that battle, there’d be others they would win.
Australia would never again be like the United Kingdom still was, with an aristocracy and a rigid social order in which everyone knew their place. Australia was different.
Till now, though, Australia’s story had been one of many Indigenous nations, and then separate British colonies. But already there was a movement to turn the collection of old colonies into a single nation.
The next chapter in Australia’s story would be very different indeed.
HOW TO CONVERT IMPERIAL MEASUREMENTS TO METRIC
(These are rough calculations only. Don’t use them in Maths!)
DISTANCE
1 mile = 1.600 kilometres
1 yard = 90 centimetres (about an arm’s length)
1 foot = 30 centimetres (a foot is about as long as most men’s feet are in a boot)
1 inch = 2.5 centimetres (about a finger joint)
AREA
1 acre = A hectare
1 square mile = 640 acres
1 square mile = 259 hectares
Here are some good approximations that you might be able to keep in your head:
Five centimetres is just less than two inches.
Five millimetres is just less than a fifth of an inch.
A foot is slightly more than 30 centimetres.
A metre is a few inches more than a yard.
A kilometre is over half a mile (about 5/8 if you don’t mind fractions).
A hectare is about two-and-a-half acres.
WEIGHT
1 ounce = 28 grams
1 pound (=16 ounces) = .45 kilogram
1 ton = 1.01 tonnes
VOLUME AND CAPACITY
1 fluid ounce = 28.4 cc
1 pint = 570 cc
1 gallon (= 8 pints) = 4.5 litres
CURRENCY
1 pound (= 20 shillings) = $2
1 shilling (=12 pence) = 10 cents
Sixpence = 5 cents
Threepence = 2 cents
1 penny = 1 cent
Halfpenny (ha’penny) = .5 cent
Farthing (= a quarter of a penny) = .25 cent
&n
bsp; RECOMMENDED READING
FOR GOLD, GRAVES AND GLORY
Australian Dictionary of Biography 1993, Carlton, Melbourne University Press.
The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture 1994, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press for AIATSIS.
Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names Norman Tindale, 1974, Canberra, Australian National University.
Settlers and Convicts: Or Recollections of Sixteen Years Labour in the Australia Backwoods by Alexander Harris, an Emigrant Mechanic. (First published 1847, London.) 1964 edition, forward by Manning Clark, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.
Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland From Adelaide to King George’s Sound, with the Sanction and Support of the Government Edward John Eyre, (facsimile edition, 1964), Adelaide, Libraries Board of South Australia.
Manning Clark’s History of Australia abridged by Michael Cathcart, 1993, Carlton, Melbourne University Press.
Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia edited by Iain MacCalman, Alexander Cook and Andrew Reeves, 2001, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press.
The Golden South: A History of the Araluen, Bell’s Creek and Major’s Creek Gold Fields Barry McGowan, 2000, self published.
Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 Richard Broome, 2005, Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
Eureka Stockade: A Pictorial History Geoff Hocking, 2004, Melbourne, Five Mile Press.
INDEX
A
Aboriginal peoples, see Indigenous peoples
Acclimitisation Society of Victoria, 176
Afghans, 139, 153
Ararat, 61–62
Austin, Thomas, 177
Australian Rules Football, 172
Ayers Rock, 161
B
Ballarat Reform League, 34, 36
Bentley, James, 32–33
Black, George, 34
‘blackbirding’, 113–117
Bowen, Sir George Ferguson, 103
Brahe, William, 143, 145–146
Buckland River riot, 60–61
Burke, Robert O’Hara, 140–148
Burke and Wills expedition, 138–149
Burke and Wills search parties, 149
bushrangers, 71–72, 77–80, 82–87
Bussell, Grace, 121–124
C
camel handlers, 138–139
camel trains and companies, 135
camels, 136–140, 153–155
Campbell, William, 9
canned meat, 178
Carboni, Raffaelo, 36, 38
Catalpa (ship), 122
Chapman, William, 130
Chartists, 34
Chinese anti-Chinese legislation, 56, 59, 62, 109
anti-Chinese riots, 60–66
envied and abused, 54–55
as expert gold miners, 49–53
as indentured labourers, 47–48, 121
labourers in Western Australia, 121
numbers in Victoria, 12, 51
on Queensland gold fields, 109–110
riots against, 60–66
as vegetable growers, 56
coaches, 24
‘cockys’, 17
convicts Van Diemen’s Land, 93
Western Australia, 118–122
cricket, 173
crinoline skirts, 3–4, 41
curfew bells, 119
D
Daggett, Captain John C., 115
Daintree, Richard, 106
Dalungbara people, 99
deaths, of babies, 2
denim, 21
Denison, Sir William, 103
the ‘Dig’ tree, 145
diggers, 11–12, 18, 21, 23
diggers’ language, 23
Dost Mohomet, 143, 148
Drake-Brockman, Frederick, 124
E
Elder, Thomas, 153–154, 163
electric light, 170
Ernest Giles, 163
Eureka flag, 35
Eureka rebellion causes, 30–36
consequences, 44–45
deaths and arrests, 40, 42
the stockade battle, 38–42
Eureka stockade, 38–40
European plants and animals, 176–177
explorers and exploration Burke and Wills, 138–149
Ernest Giles, 163
Forrest brothers, 126–128
Francis Thomas Gregory, 125–126
John McDouall Stuart, 149–151
map, 164–165
Peter Warburton, 163
W. C. Gosse, 160–162
F
fencing wire, 175–176
food, on gold fields, 21, 24–25, 52
football, 172
forests, destruction of, 174–175
Forrest, Alexander, 126–128
Forrest, John, 126–128
Fraser, Billy, 101–102
Fraser family massacre, 100–101
G
gambling, 55
Gardiner, Frank, 78
gaslight, 169
Georgette (shipwreck), 123–124
Gibson, Alf, 163
Gibson Desert, 163
Gilbert, Johnny, 78–79
Giles, Ernest, 163
gold panning of, 9
gold discoveries New South Wales, 5–9
Queensland, 105–109, 128
South Australia, 129
Victoria, 9
gold rushes, 10–11
effect on Indigenous people, 88–91
effect on South Australia, 132
effect on squatters, 73
getting to the diggings, 17–18, 51, 57–58
Melbourne during, 15–17
goldfields anti-Chinese riots, 60–66
food, 21, 24–25, 52
illnesses, 52
jumping a claim, 30
licence fees, 29–32
life on, 21–22
miners’ rebellion, 29–45
Welcome Stranger nugget, 25
Gosse, William Christie, 160–162
Goyder, George Woodroffe, 131–133, 153
the Goyder line, 133–135
Granny Smith apples, 28
Gray, Charles, 143–144, 149
Gregory, Francis Thomas, 125–126
Griffith, Sir Samuel, 117
H
Hall, Ben, 72–80
‘Hampton’s Cheeses’, 120
Hargraves, Edward, 5–8, 131
Hayes, William ‘Bully’, 116
Henry, Ernest, 106
Herschel, Benjamin, 130
Holyoake, Henry, 34
Hotham. Sir Charles, 32, 34, 44–45
Humffray, J.B, 34, 45
indentured labourers, 47–48, 111–113
Indigenous peoples discrimination against, 167
effect of gold rushes on, 88–91
gold found by, 90
as guides for explorers, 126–127
massacres of, 99, 101–103
Native Police force, 97–100
no land rights, 4
at school, 171
Irish rebels, 122
Isaacs, Sam, 123–124
J
joss houses, 53
K
‘kanakas’, 111–117
Kelly, Ned, 82–87
Kennedy, Tom, 36, 38
King, John, 141–148
L
Lalor, Peter, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 45
Lambing Flat riot, 63–66
lamps and lighting, 169–170
land legislation, 74
Landells, George, 139, 140–142
Landsborough, William, 149
Lister, John, 6–7
M
McKinlay, J
ohn, 149, 152, 154
meat, canned, 178
Melbourne, 15–17
Melbourne Cup, 55, 173
Morehead, Boyd, 117
morse code, 158
Mueller, Ferdinand von, 176
Mulligan, James Venture, 106, 108
N
Native Police forces, 97–100
Northern Territory camel trains, 154–155
exploration, 160–163
gold discoveries, 159
Native Police force, 100
proclaimed, 151
settlement at Palmerston, 152–153
O
O’Meally, John, 78
Ophir goldfield, 7–8
overland telegraph line, 155–160
P
Pacific Islanders as indentured labourers, 111–113
kidnapping of, 113–117
Palmer River gold field, 106–108
Palmerston, 152–153
Patterson, Robert, 157
pests, 176–177
population Australian colonies, 24
of Chinese in Victoria, 12, 51
Port Arthur, 93–94
Q
Queensland annexes Torres Strait, 104
creation, 103
gold discoveries, 105–109
gold discovery, 105–109
Native Police force, 98–100
Pacific Islander workers, 111–117
sugar cane, 110–111
Quong Tart, 68–70
R
rabbits, 177
ringbarking, 174–175