The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright Page A

on the colony’s shores, but rather on how to restrain this ‘downside up community’. 5

    All a lie , thundered Thomas Pierson. He was merely committing to his diary what many people discussed over tea and damper. The crashing discord between expectation and reality quickly became apparent to most immigrants. Just think of those three months or more at sea. It’s a long time to defer gratification. To stare at the horizon with only the wide-open future ahead. All those promises of prosperity—milk and honey and manly self-regard—conjured up at will to crowd out the oceanic stench of vomit, piss, maggots and death. And then, finally, you’re there. Thomas Pierson was not the only new arrival with a gnawing sense that he’d been hoodwinked. And Martha Clendinning was but one of many chroniclers who spoke of their intense anxiety.
    Anxiety, as today’s psychiatrists will tell you, can be a symptom of the dissonance between two fundamental states of being: a clash between inner conception and outer manifestation, or between the idealised and the actual. Could we diagnose a mass emotional decompensation among Victoria’s immigrants? Commentators certainly evoked the language of disease to describe the social pathology created by the cascade of gold rushes. The yellow fever , it was called. Melbourne is a dreadful place , wrote Henry Mundy, everybody seems to be going mad either with too much money or too little . The entire colony was infected , according to John Capper: the gold fever raged here more generally and more violently than in New South Wales.
    George Evans analysed the root of the malady: poor fellows who went up [to the diggings] with bright hopes and golden dreams are coming down with empty pockets and desponding hearts. George Francis Train was apt to agree, despite the fact that he was well on his way to establishing one of Melbourne’s most successful trading houses. Lying reports. Yes—I repeat, lying reports , Train wrote on 7 November 1853, lying reports that went home from Melbourne and Sydney…reports made to catch the eye of every adventurer. Train believed that the reports were planted by parties interested in land and sales commissions, then echoed by newspapers with an eye to their own profits. After six months in the colony, Train had decided that Victoria was not the Southern El Dorado, but the South Sea Bubble. I know of no instance in commercial history , he railed , when so large a business has been transacted without any reliable information .
    Thomas Pierson also thought it was people with interests who trafficked in false hope; he fingered the shipowners—and merchants like G. F. Train.
    Not everyone experienced their internal ructions as maddening. Willie Davis Train, a southern belle plucked from the plantation, might have been expecting to find life in the South Sea Bubble arduous. But after a year in Melbourne, she wrote in a long letter to her father, Colonel George Davis, a friend of Abraham Lincoln: The extraordinary change which has been effected in Melbourne within the past year can scarcely be credited by those who have not like myself witnessed the wonderful revolution . For Willie, the external pace of change had swept through her like a tonic, tempering her grief at losing her only child just weeks before sailing. As I advance in years and experience , she wrote to her brother on the same day, I find myself undergoing such a wonderful revolution that at times I marvel at my own thoughts .
    An inner riot; a symbiotic uprising of spirit and circumstance. Willie’s only misgiving was the amount of time George spent at work, absorbed in business, building a new stone warehouse or clinching another deal. He was also infamous for occupying a personal chair in gin-slinging at the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street, run by American proprietor Sam Moss. I rarely see him , she confided, but must I suppose make no complaints . Willie