The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [132]
Several samples of fine gold were shown to the company by Mr. Hargraves, weighing in all about four ounces—the produce, he stated, of three days digging. The amount thus earned by each man he represented to be £2 4s. 8d. per day. . . . From the nature of some of the country explored by him, he is of opinion that gold will be found in mass, and would not be surprised if pieces of 30 or 40 lbs. should be discovered. He had seen no country in California which promised metal in such heavy masses.4
With golden visions dancing before their eyes, men deserted farms, crews abandoned their ships, and husbands left wives in a blind rush for the promise of prosperity. Shovels and picks in hand, laborers walked off their jobs, grabbed a wheelbarrow, jumped on a cart, or threw a sack over their shoulders. They streamed out of Victoria to the digging fields in New South Wales to a little patch of ground called Ophir. In hopes of drawing people back to the newly formed Victoria, the colony’s governor offered a reward to the first person who found gold in the territory. Within the first month, three claimants presented specimens, vying for the prize. The rush was on. By Christmas 1851, two hundred fifty thousand ounces of gold had been pulled from the Victoria goldfields.5
News reached Van Diemen’s Land shortly after the initial finds, in a rather unremarkable announcement, buried on page three of the Colonial Times, May 23, 1851: “Gold—We understand that Dr. George Bruhn, the celebrated German mineralogist, on his mineralogical excursions from Mount Macedon to the Pyrenees, has been fortunate enough to discover the existence of gold.”6 These initial reports were greeted with skepticism in Hobart Town and Launceston, but more and more stories touting stupendous windfalls began to appear. Word of mouth delivered the news up the Huon River and to campfires around the forests of Franklin. Supper conversations inevitably turned to gold—gold for the taking along a fast road to riches.
In 1852, Ludlow and Arabella Tedder joined the fortune seekers exiting Van Diemen’s Land, each in the company of a new husband. For a few years after her release from the female factories, Ludlow’s life had seemed settled. Then suddenly she lost another husband. William Manley Chambers either died or deserted her, most likely the latter. A few years later, a man by his name applied for a Hobart Town liquor license for a pub on Old Wharf called Sailor’s Return.7
Soon after William’s departure, Ludlow met John Atterwell, an ambitious “hawker” who peddled his wares from house to house in Launceston. Still determined to live a full life at fifty-three, she married John on January 20, 1847. A year later, Ludlow had good reason to celebrate the holidays with abandon. On December 21, 1848, ten years after the Old Bailey judge sentenced her into exile for stealing eleven spoons and a bread basket, prisoner #151 held her Certificate of Freedom. The next year, Ludlow became a proud grandmother when nineteen-year-old Arabella gave birth to a son she named Henry James Tedder. The family of four lived together in Launceston. In 1851, Arabella delivered another son called Benjamin Waters, his surname taken from the man she planned to marry, a freed convict from England.
Following news of gold fever, Ludlow’s husband, John, and Arabella’s fiancé, Isaac Waters, sailed from Launceston to Melbourne aboard the Shamrock. Their eyewitness assessment of the diggings was better than imagined, and the two men quickly returned to Launceston, eager to return to Bendigo’s goldfields. In the autumn of 1852, Arabella married Isaac, twenty-six years her senior and full of plans for the move to Victoria. Now business partners, John and Isaac sold everything lock, stock, and barrel, booked passage, and headed straight for the diggings. The new bride and groom, their two young sons, Ludlow, and her