Responses to Gold

- How did people imagine Australia’s future in light of the gold discoveries?
- What anxieties did the gold-rushes inspire?

In this response I will focus on the David Goodman article Making an Edgier History of Gold

During the Australian gold rush, the future seemed bright and prosperous to many hopeful diggers, who flocked to the fields of Victoria in the anticipation of making their fortunes quickly and easily. A digger in 1857 declared: “let the lands be opened in order that we may settle down in peace and quiet, and make the land flow with wine and milk, and become lords of the soil” (p 30). But the truth was obvious from the beginning to those who were concerned with the moral health of society; to some social commentators of the time it was “by no means –self-evident that prosperity would be the result of an increase in the supply of gold” (p 25).
The influx of new settlers to the area, combined with many owners abandoning their businesses in order to take up the search for gold, meant that the importation of foodstuffs rose exponentially. The gold rush created a booming population, but one that was, for a large part, dependant on foreign imports. This dependence was seen as a sign of “national vulnerability” (p 26). Furthermore, anxiety surrounding the increase in what was seen as immorality was growing; to some “gold digging seems an addiction, provoking a level of excitement which meant that men lost any sense of other goals or values” (p 27).
Added to this was the fact that Victorian work ethics were quickly vanishing with the growing belief that luck would guide the diggers to prosperity, rather than the traditional belief that wealth came with hard work. Coupled with the atmosphere of drunkenness and the “frenzied pursuit of individual wealth”, what society feared most occurred- the apparent abandoning of social class. In 1854, Dr John Milton made the observation to a Legislative Council that there were many gentlemen in the city court cells, in “rags” or “labourers garb” because they had been attempting to find wealth on the gold fields. The disproportionate ratio of men to women was also a concern for Victorian sensibilities; the male dominated atmosphere was seen as one that was abound with drunkenness and immorality to the neglect of all else.


Left/Above: [photograph] 1886 Teetulpa Gold field. Men flocked to the gold fields in the hope of finding prosperity. However, wealth was difficult to find. Settlements on the fields imported foodstuffs as the populations had greatly increased, and many business owners had abandoned businesses in order to mine. Miners came from all socialy classes, and were often indistinguishablly dressed in similar "labourers garb".

Image source: http://www.pictureaustralia.org/apps/pictureaustralia?action=PADisplay&mode=display&rs=resultset-1242845&no=12

Frontier or History Wars?

Why is it difficult to assess the nature and extent of Aboriginal resistance?

For this response I have used the Henry Reynolds article Aboriginal- European Contact History: Problems and Issues.

The nature and extent of Aboriginal resistance to the settling of Australia is difficult to assess. There are many reasons that the Aboriginals have been marginalised in the pages of history, and this in turn impacts upon how their ‘resistance’ is interpreted. According to Reynolds, Hancock had published the most popular historical view of the Aborigines at the time of settlement in the 1930s; they were typified as helpless in the face of European settles. And later, Reynolds claims, the opinion was that Aboriginal resistance had been so ‘weak’ that settlers had walked into the Australian interior barely armed. The most common opinion was that Aboriginals posed little or no threat to settlers of Australian, and for the most part, any massacres that may have occurred have been unacknowledged by society.
However, the truth of Aboriginal resistance is difficult to access because Australian history, for the large part, has been one-sided. Aboriginal accounts of events that have been passed down orally are not considered to be reliable, and accounts taken contemporaneously with events that may or may not have been construed as resistance, were taken by Europeans, who were in turn able to bias those written accounts in any way. Furthermore, the nature of resistance by the Aboriginals is ambivalent as there are a number of issues that must be taken into consideration. Reynolds makes the point that while the Aborigines may have been unhappy with settlers taking over the land, their acts of violence towards Europeans may have been the results of trespass into sacred Aboriginal grounds. Alternatively, acts that had been traditional to the Aborigines, for instance the burning of large tracts of land, may have been interpreted as acts of violence, where no hostilities were actually intended.
Moreover, as Reynolds suggests, once the European’s had settled, and Aboriginals had begun to come into ‘sustained contact’ with them, the Aborigines “tended to try and incorporate the newcomers into their system of kinship, expecting as a result a share of the material abundance” (p. 57). When they took livestock and apparently stole supplies, they were realistically taking what they assumed was owed. The records and accounts of these occurrences label them as “manifestations of concerted resistance”, when realistically these events were misunderstood and misconstrued. Massacres did occur, there can be no doubt about that, but the motivations behind the attacks of aboriginals upon Europeans, and the nature of resistance against settlements may have actually differed from the accounts that were taken at the time.


Above/Left: [print: wood engraving] May 18, 1864; 'Natives Attacking Shepards' Hut'. This image is a negative depiction of Aboriginal Australians during a later period of settlement, that was published in the illustrated Melbourne Post. This portrayal suggests that Aboriginals were unneccessarily violent, and frequently attacked Europeans. There is no suggestion that there is any consideration of the reasons behind the attack, if it ever occured.

Image source: http://pictures.slv.vic.gov.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=4265

Convict Lives

How does Garton attempt to reconcile these two different approaches to convict history?

Garton attempts to reconcile the two different opinions of Australian convicts by showing the cycling link between the treatment of criminals and the resulting responses and behaviours of those convicted. He proposes that ill or rough treatment or punishment of convicts contributed to their continued rough behaviour which in turn produced harsher punishments. Garton suggests that the “legacy” of “the prevailing view... that the convicts, especially women, were a depraved, drunken and corrupt band of ‘incorrigible rogues and villains’”, produced fear of that taint of immorality in society, especially during the nineteenth century. This led to an increase of police presence and which in turn contributed to “the consistently higher rates of incarceration for crime, poverty and delinquency” in early Australian settlements.
In comparing the two views of convicts; that of the good worker forced into crime by social situation and that of the ‘incorrigible rogue and villain’, Garton finds that both arguments focus their attention to the “debate of Australian national character” rather than taking into consideration criminological theories about the ‘origins’ of the convicts. Wood’s idea that the “influence of wider social and moral circumstances” had forced convicts to turn to crime and “vicious habits”, ignores the fact that many of the criminals were repeat offenders, who had little to do with politically protesting the social situation in Britain. Similarly, Clark’s original argument, that “far from being the victims of economic want... the convicts... [were] criminals by choice and training” and were “members of a professional criminal class”, ignores the problems that are raised by the very point of promoting the idea of a ‘criminal class’.
Garton instead suggests that attempting to distinguish between the ‘incorrigible rogue’ and the victim of social repression as the source of the Australian national character is essentially meaningless. Ultimately, for Garton, “these dichotomies, and the struggles over the relative size of each category, have diverted attention from the diversity of convict experience”, the importance should instead be placed on the “effects of policing practices in the construction of criminal groups, the discursive construction of the ‘criminal class’ and the role of crime within the political economy of working class life.”


Left: [Negatives]Two convicts in chains. Most convicts sent to Australian penal colonies were set to work through assignment to settlers. Repeat offenders and the worst of the criminals were sent to harsher penal settlements such as Port Arthur in Tasmania. Under the governance of Captain Charles O'Hara Booth [1833-44] prisoners experienced forms of coporeal punishment that was specifically designed to reform: criminals were considered to have originated from a 'class' that lacked the morals and sensibilities of the upper classes in Europe.

Image source: http://mview.museum.vic.gov.au/paimages/mm/679/67967.htm

Europeans & the Australian Envirnoment

- What aspects of Hancock's argument provide clues that it was written in the 1930s?

There are several elements of the text by W.K. Hancock that provide clues that show it was written in the 1930s. Firstly, Hancock states that; "a bare six generations" had been recorded in Australia under British rule. Furthermore, Hancock claims that the Australia had been populated by a civilisation that was “ready-made”; one that came ready to impose their culture and domination with no qualms about suppressing any Indigenous populations, and one that was quite ready to accept that life in Australia would in nearly every way, be exactly comparable to life in England.
Hancock also displays the influence of early theories of Aboriginal culture, primarily the concept that the Indigenous Australians were a fundamentally incapable race who “never imagined that first decisive step from the economy of the chase which would have made them masters of the soil”. To the early observers Indigenous Australian cultures, the “advance of British civilisation made inevitable the ‘natural progress of the aboriginal race towards extinction.’” Hancock calls Aboriginals “primitive people”, whom the Australian democracy, in its benevolence, had absent-mindedly forgotten. They on the whole were expected to die out except for a remnant few who could be ‘saved’ by being moved to “well-policed local reserves in Central and Northern Australia.”
Hancock also displays the naive opinion that was shared by settlers all over Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century, that “if a balance could be struck, it would probably be reckoned that alien men and animals and vegetation have enriched the soil more than they have impoverished it.” Hancock essentially shows no acceptance of the fact that fundamentally the Australian environment is different from that of Europe, that Australian land is fundamentally incapable of supporting traditional methods of farming. Instead he proposes that Australian land is “unique among raw materials because, abuse it as we may, given time and knowledge it is generally possible to rectify even the most profoundest errors of the past”; essentially Hancock presumes that no matter how much damage had been inflicted by the greed of the settlers who knew nothing of the fragility of the environment, the vast continent had the eternal ability to rejuvenate. Furthermore, Hancock suggests that the damage that had been inflicted was abating, healing as “impatience to possess slackens into true partnership.”

Left: [Date unknown] This image depicts exposed tree roots in the Mallee region, caused by land-clearing and unsustainable farming methods that expose the topsoil to erosion from wind and rain. The stump extends two and a half feet from the earth. The damage that was done, and is still being done, to the land was begun by early settlers, who, eager as they were to farm and log timber to export, ignored the possible consequences and cleared vast tracts of land, that may now never recover.

Image source: http://mview.museum.vic.gov.au/paimages/mm/005/005256.htm