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4. Tents or buildings are not to be erected within Twenty feet of each other, or within Twenty feet of any Creek.

5. It is enjoined that all Persons at the Gold Fields maintain and assist in maintaining a due and proper observance of Sundays.22

A continual object of contention between the diggers and the commissioner’s inspectors, the license later became an instrument of revolt. For the time being, it was a necessary evil and a costly inconvenience. Paid based on the fines they collected, the gun-toting inspectors, or “traps,” hounded the miners with carefully orchestrated “licence hunts.” Raiding the diggings with military precision, “they stretched out across the gullies and worked their way from one end to the other. A digger caught between the shaft and his tent without his licence in his pocket would be immediately chained like a dog to other unfortunate fellows, and driven back to the Commissioner’s Camp to be . . . chained to logs or the trunks of trees, with the excuse, real or pretext, that the lock-ups were full, and often left outside all night and in all weather.”23

Prospectors were often fined even before they set up camp. Always on the lookout for newcomers, an ornery thug undoubtedly targeted Isaac and John. Arabella and Ludlow attracted attention as well. When the gold rush began, few women were seen near the fields. Sightings of skirts incited whistles and yelping. Diggers dropped tools, and sunburned heads popped out from the mining holes. Apart from diversion, women were also valued as treasure keepers. Prized was the woman willing to carry a man’s stash in a money belt at her waist, carefully tucked under a corset or petticoat. Additionally, women weren’t charged license fees even if they worked the fields, thus avoiding both fees and nasty collector confrontations.

When she wasn’t chasing sons Henry James and Benjamin across the muddy red clay, Arabella helped Isaac dig. Ludlow happily provided grandmotherly care, especially when Arabella was pregnant again in late 1853. Arabella gave birth to her third child in a tent on the Bendigo goldfields. Tossing cloths and towels into boiling water over a campfire, former Nurse Ludlow sterilized what she could and prayed for the best. In the role of midwife, on July 19, 1854, she delivered her newest grandchild, named Arabella Ludlow. There was no room in the hospital because injured miners held priority and filled every bed.24

Life around the tents took on a domestic simplicity. Women “baked bread, churned butter, made curtains, bedspreads, rugs, lace-work and clothing. They made their own candles, spun their own wool and crocheted . . . whatever it took to make a home in this unforgiving country.”25 They gathered gum leaves to stuff mattresses, stewed mutton, and made simple bread from flour and water.

Everyone looked alike, dressed in moleskin trousers and waterproof boots, and everyone blended in, including the freed convicts. “It was impossible to tell a man’s background from his appearance. No one asked any questions and all diggers were, for the time being, of the same class.”26 Each tent, however, took on a unique personality, marked at the entrance by a hanging boot, a billy pot, or a bright piece of cloth. A handy ax-man like William would have built a more elaborate structure from sturdy slabs of timber. A society unto themselves, the tented towns transformed on Sundays when mining was forbidden. The faithful gathered around converted tree stumps used as pulpits by the traveling preachers. By day, the tents were quieter with the men in the fields. But all hell broke loose with their return at night.

Under the Southern Cross

When Agnes and William reached the fork at the Black Forest trail in 1854, they chose the western route, deciding to try their luck in the Ballarat goldfields. There, they would witness an event that shook the continent, a rebellion that many called the birth of Australian democracy: the Eureka Stockade.

Dissension had been brewing for quite some time. In 1851, Governor La Trobe tried to raise licensing fees