The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright

the site of the Melbourne Arts Centre). Like the township of Melbourne itself, Canvas Town was laid out in an orderly grid. Interspersed with tent dwellings were tent stores, bakers shops, butchers stalls, restaurants, sly grog shops and barbers shops. Inhabitants paid five shillings for a plot.
    It sounds like a fine solution, but the way of life for its eight thousand inhabitants was anything but idyllic. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE had warned immigrants about Canvas Town, the epitome of misery and costliness . The land here was unforgiving: boggy in winter, baked dry in summer. The only available water supply was the foetid Yarra River, downstream of the tanneries and soap factories of Collingwood and Richmond. Colonial fever, dysentery and crime were rife.
    Martha Clendinning paid a ghoulish visit to Canvas Town one day, perhaps lured by what Charles Dickens called the ‘attraction of repulsion’. The begrimed and unrecognisable children who roamed about in packs, dodging and weaving carts that were loaded with firewood, rumbling between the tents with their wretched occupants , horrified Martha. Everyone and everything was covered in dust. Henry Mundy provided the soundtrack: children squalling, women shrieking and men shouting, the noise was uproarious .

    There may have been mud, filth, flies, teeming accommodation, gaudy dresses, drunken revellers, exorbitant prices, ominous diseases and absent husbands, but we should not confuse this bedlam with Hollywood’s version of the Wild West. There is a significant difference. Melbourne was a far-flung but loyal satellite of the British Empire, built by and upon British institutions. By 1854, Melbourne already had a public library and a university. Within thirty years, it would become an exemplary international metropolis. And in the imperial metropolis, unlike Dodge City, one expected to be governed—and governed judiciously.
    On the American frontier, Judge Lynch was the only paternal figure, and Darwinian logic—the survival of the physically and spiritually fittest—was remorseless. During the Californian gold rush, the ideology of order was based on the morality of the individual rather than the institutions established by the ruling elite: individual honour counted for more than an externally imposed social order. By contrast, British citizens expected to be governed by the organisations and ethos of British justice. As the MARCO POLO CHRONICLE reassured its readers, the Genuine Spirit of British Generosity, Nobility and Earnestness exists in the brave young city. They would not need to fend for themselves; the mother country had their back.
    But prevailing British social mores would be tested. Tent living didn’t only let the dust in. Like a sea voyage, mass camping brought unexpected, and potentially uninvited, familiarity. William Kelly described an indelicate drawback of tent living: if your candle at bedtime happened to be extinguished first, you might probably be startled by the shadowy phantom of Mrs or Miss A B C, next door, in her night-dress, preparing for the stretcher. There’s a certain ribald piquancy to Kelly’s sketch, but the fact is that camping life, like ship life, made for a community of intimate strangers.
    Boundaries were as steadfast as the flicker of candlelight. In this, the material conditions of living reflected the metaphysical aspect of social change. One female sojourner wrote that Australian conventions were quite an elastic, compressible thing, and give to the touch like anything. William Westgarth reflected that such flexibility could catch a fellow off guard; over-weening aspiration lurked in the shadows and threatened customary notions of decency. Ambition , he observed, writing about the gold rush population, may rear its head from any social grade, unchecked by conventional barriers . It’s no wonder that colonial anxiety did not turn on how to employ or house the restless throng daily washing up