We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright Read Free Book Online

an instant breadwinner. Eliza Lucus wrote home, When immigrant
ships came in, the Diggers came down to meet them, to try and induce women to marry
them and go back to the diggings with them .
    The offer of marriage and a dray ride to the diggings was not every girl’s idea of
a good time. But for many it was just another form of assisted passage. And single
women had an alarming degree of autonomy, able to choose between domestic service
and marriage.
    Even more disconcerting for bystanders, these newly empowered young women were choosing
to go it alone and carve their own route to freedom and independence. Many found
themselves on the road to Ballarat.

THE ROAD
    It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9
November 1853, he and his travelling companions dragged a bullock dray up long,
steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became hopelessly bogged on some
stretches of the road. On others, it was all they could do to keep the cart from
overturning in the potholes created by all the traffic. Thousands of fortune-seekers
were walking the same well-worn dirt track.
    The road to Ballarat stretched west from Melbourne, through the outlying suburb of
Flemington and on to the wide plains of Keilor and Melton. It’s the same route that
you would take today. Now there is a tangle of arterial roads, truck depots and grey-faced
factories, but under all that it’s the same flat, open terrain it was then.
    William Westgarth described these plains as an ocean of grass . Charles Evans saw
the landscape the same way: stretching as far as the eye could reach were immense
grassy plains undulating in emerald folds like the swell of the ocean. It was fertile
ground above as well as beneath: open hunting lands that had sustained the region’s
Indigenous inhabitants for tens of thousands of years.
    Fifty kilometres from Melbourne, in the basin of Bacchus Marsh, travellers were forced
to navigate a deep jagged cut-out known as The Gap. This landmark provided a lucrative
winter industry for bullock drivers, who charged a king’s ransom to haul out drays
piled high with gear from the swollen river at the base of the gorge. Some mud-drenched
parties were held up for days waiting to be dragged up the slippery face of the cut-out.
(Today, cars whiz along this ravine on a nifty roller-coaster stretch of the Western
Highway.)
    A solitary messenger on horseback could make the journey in a day of furious riding.
An average cart trip took three days in dry weather and cost £25—a princely sum.
But for anyone on foot, like Charles Evans, it was a week-long hike.
    There are innumerable accounts of the epic journey to the goldfields. Most of them
say that, after the muck, dust and overcrowding of Melbourne, the open road was a
revelation.
    Twenty-two-year-old Emily Skinner, who travelled to the Ovens diggings in 1854, was
immediately won over by the beauty and healthiness of the country .
    Mary Bristow was rendered speechless. I cannot describe the bush , she wrote. It means
such an extent of country covered with trees, some large, some small, no sign of
human habitation except here and there a few camps or tents, some inhabited by blacks .
She found the scenery beautiful and the black people exquisitely made . To her astonishment,
Mary felt that the Australian bush was the incarnation of Eden .
    Mrs Mannington Caffyn was also rhapsodic but observed a downside. Australian sunlight ,
she wrote, is quite original, and only flourishes in Australia. It is young and rampant
and bumptious, and it is rather cruel, with the cruelty of young untried things .
    Ten-year-old Lucy Birchall, travelling with her parents and five siblings, did what
all young families do to pass the time on a long journey. We were very merry, we
sang all the songs we could collect , Lucy wrote. It took their minds off being up
to our knees in mud, perishing with cold and soaked by nasty drizzling [rain] that
beat in our faces . A