The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [134]
Entering the tent city, Agnes, William, and five wide-eyed children were thrust into a hodgepodge of newcomers speaking in foreign tongues of all flavors. This was the staging area for hopeful miners preparing to fan out across the goldfields. Adventurers from China, France, Italy, Germany, the West Indies, and the Americas joined in the melee caused by gold fever.11
A rural family was better prepared than most for the spartan facilities in the temporary village. Agnes and the children were accustomed to hauling water and scrounging wood for a fire. The dirt floor in their riverside cabin was not much different from the dusty ground they laid their blankets on now. Mosquitoes and flies plagued the camp. The worst of their worries, however, were sideward glances from neighboring tents, from those suspicious of Vandemonians.
When night fell on “Canvas Town,” a thousand fires sprang to life, and motley human creatures gathered round in a chorus of singing, swearing, and carousing. Armies of dogs barked incessantly, and revolvers crackled everywhere until sunrise brought some semblance of silence.12 It’s doubtful the tight-knit family from Franklin got much sleep their first night under the stars in Little Adelaide.
William easily found employment as a craftsman in the bustling, expanding Melbourne. His expertise in woodcutting, carpentry, and building was in high demand because so many skilled laborers had fled to the goldfields. Reports of incredible finds further fanned the fevered flames.
As people sat around blazing fires in the tent city and digging camps, they told and retold tales of incredible luck. In January 1853, a French sailor unearthed the 132-pound “Sarah Sands” nugget (so named for the ship carrying it back to England). Within sight of Melbourne, he had jumped ship with the rest of its crew and, on a whim, persuaded his mates to lower him on a rope into the first abandoned hole they encountered. A few minutes of working his inexperienced pick, with peals of laughter echoing from his chums aboveground, yielded the unmistakable sound of metal on metal. Leaning into the hole, he spied gleaming yellow just below where previous diggers had given up. As he shoveled deeper, his naïve tenacity paid off. The monster nugget sold for two hundred thousand francs, a hefty profit for two days’ work. Word of the lucky Frenchman’s find created a frenzied return to this once-abandoned patch of mines. Two more giant chunks were found within a week, “including one nugget weighing 94 lbs and another of 78 lbs.”13
Melbourne may not have smelled the freshest, but it was anything but boring. While William worked in the city, Agnes and their children settled into life in Canvas Town, a thousand-ring circus teeming with treasure hunters and money-hungry entrepreneurs. Entertainers also found fortune on the fields, though certainly less spectacular than the Frenchman’s trove. Jugglers and musicians were showered in gold nuggets if they pleased the right audience or pelted with stones if their performances fell short. The infamous Lola Montes, dubbed “the darling of the diggers,”14 left California to take Victoria by storm. Traveling across the gold settlements, she performed her “tarantula dance” to packed houses of cheering miners.
Conspicuous consumption and downright madness were symptoms that gold fever had infected another victim. A British woman who visited the Australian goldfields with her digger fiancé recorded in a diary what she heard, saw, and smelled along the way. When riches came fast and furiously, she observed foolishness of outrageous proportions:
At times, you may see men, half mad, throwing sovereigns, like halfpence, out of their pockets into the streets; and once I saw a digger, who was looking over a large quantity of bank-notes, deliberately tear to pieces and trample in the