The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [131]
The year Mary died was the same year Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania, after first explorer Abel Tasman. As many citizens hoped to erase the “convict stain,” the women and men who’d suffered forced migration forever changed the complexion of the growing population in Tasmania and New South Wales, becoming the heart and soul of a unique cultural identity.
Bridget received her Certificate of Freedom shortly before the Christmas holidays in December 1862. Like Janet Houston, she lived in Tasmania for the rest of her life. However, when Bridget first arrived on the Blackfriar in 1851, people were leaving the island in droves. Nearly eight thousand people, most of them former convicts, had left Van Diemen’s Land over the previous three years.72 Something quite spectacular had been discovered across the Bass Strait.
10
Bendigo’s Gold
Canvas Town
Gold was discovered in 1851 at Summerhill Creek and Bendigo, two small towns in a new territory on the mainland, the Colony of Victoria. Among those credited as the first to find Bendigo gold were Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell, when postings announced that “women were getting quart-pots of gold on Bendigo Creek.”1
The shape of modern Australia began to take form at the same time the promise of gold electrified imaginations around the world. When news spread of the riches lying just inches beneath the thick scrub, a huge confluence of hopeful and often hapless immigrants headed for Australian shores. For many, Port Phillip and the township of Melbourne was their first destination.
One man, in particular, took credit for starting the gold fever that first swept over the continent and then around the world. Born in Hampshire, England, Edward Hargraves arrived in New South Wales on a merchant marine ship in 1832. He married in Sydney but was unable to earn a living. In 1849, hoping to change his luck, he set off for the California goldfields. While there, Hargraves noticed a striking similarity between the hills surrounding his home in the Macquarie Valley and the claims that were yielding so much gold near Sacramento. Before boarding his ship to return to Australia in 1851, an American digger admonished the British dreamer: “There’s no gold in the country you’re going to, and if there is, that darned Queen of yours won’t let you dig it.”2 The quickwitted response from the egocentric Hargraves became legendary, soon reaching mythic proportions. Answering the American digger, he reportedly removed his hat and struck a well-rehearsed pose of triumphant confrontation, proclaiming: “There’s as much gold in the country I am going to as there is in California; and Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, God bless her, will make me one of her gold commissioners.”3
Hargraves’s confident statement proved prophetic. Anxious to collect a reward from the government for locating a goldfield, he shortly found the bounty he anticipated and received the commission he sought. The announcement of his discovery in the newspapers started a deluge of enthusiastic, and mostly inexperienced, treasure hunters from adjoining colonies into New South Wales.
A May 1851 news release in the Bathhurst Free Press was reprinted in newspapers with broad distribution:
DISCOVERY OF AN EXTENSIVE GOLD FIELD
The existence of gold in the Wellington district has for a long time been an ascertained fact, but public attention has never until now been seriously drawn to the circumstance. . . . Mr. Hargraves states . . . that from the foot of the Big Hill to a considerable distance below Wellington, on the Macquarie, is one vast gold field, that