News of the Australian gold rush did not escape the Chartist movement. Stories of prodigious finds and the enormous wealth to be had reached England soon after gold was discovered in Victoria in July 1851, and within a matter of months fresh discoveries at Ballarat and Castlemaine had begun to draw in thousands of prospectors.
Former Chartists And Chartist ideas would later figure large
in histories of the gold miners’ rising at the Eureka Stockade and in the early
days of Australian democracy. But right at the start, it was the London
Chartist Ruffy Ridley who brought the story of the gold rush to England’s
declining Chartist movement.
On the Chartist Ancestors website: Whatever happened to Ruffy Ridley?
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| Star of Freedom, 22 May 1852. |
In May 1852, the Star of Freedom (as the Northern Star had become) carried an extract from a letter received from Melbourne and dated 17 January (NS, 22 May 1852, p6). It told of the apparently ‘inexhaustible’ reserves of gold to be found around Mount Alexander, claiming, ‘I saw four men lifting a seamen’s chest into a dray half an hour ago almost too heavy for their united strength. The chest contained the product of six weeks’ labour, and contained 250lb of gold.’
To this the Star added extracts from three later
letters from the ‘diggings’ supplied by friendly society and emigration club
manager Daniel William Ruffy, better known in his political activities as Ruffy
Ridley. The letters’ author is not identified.
‘I suppose you have heard by this time of the gold mines
being discovered out here,’ she began. ‘My husband Harry, and little George,
have gone with a party to Mount Alexander; they have been there twelve weeks
and are doing pretty well. Jobbins and Harry have sent me down a pound weight
of gold each. It is at the Treasury. It came down last week. You have no idea
what excitement this gold has caused in Melbourne. You hear nothing talked of
but the gold diggings. I can assure you money is lavished away here as if it
were dirt.’
In 1851 Ruffy had set up the British Empire
Permanent Emigration and Colonisation Society to buy land and settle colonists
in Canada and America. There is no evidence he ever crossed the Atlantic, but he was
interested enough in the news from Australia to check things out for himself.
Leaving his pregnant wife Mary Ann at home in England, he set off from Deptford
in the late autumn of 1852, arriving at Port Philip, Melbourne, on the
steamship Persian that December.
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| Australia, Gold Rush, 1852. Forest Creek. Mount Alexander. From Adelaide Hill. By George French Angas, 1852. |
The scene that greeted him would have been one of gold-encrusted
squalor. Over the previous year, the town’s population had doubled. With
nowhere to live, recent arrivals set up a tent city on the banks of the
polluted River Yarra. Choked with dust, stifled by heat and a quagmire when it
rained, Canvas Town had quickly become a slum, with disease and death
everywhere.
At the same time, the reports of easy fortunes to be made
were true. The Star of Freedom had headlined its original reports, ‘Glorious
times for the workers’, and up to a point they were. At Mount Alexander,
deposits of gold were just below the surface, and in seven months, 2.4 million
pounds of gold was unearthed and banked, but this was not without its problems.
As Ruffy’s correspondent had told him, ships were lying idle
at Melbourne because their crews (along with building workers, hotel and shop
staff, servants and pretty much everyone else) had gone prospecting. And those who
struck lucky were in a kind of fever. ‘They actually, at Christmas time,
lighted their pipes with £5 notes, and in another place they would be eating
notes between two slices of bread and butter.’
The outcome of Ruffy’s trip remains a mystery, but he appears
not to have stayed long as he was back in London by July 1853 when he spoke at the tenth anniversary dinner of his benefits society. Unfortunately, there is no report of his adventures. It is possible that Ruffy was
horrified by the living conditions that greeted him in Melbourne and decided
this was no place to set up home with his wife and new son, Mazzini Kosuth
Ruffy, who had been born in May that year.
Ruffy did eventually return to Melbourne with his family,
but not for five more years. And by the time they arrived for good in the
summer of 1858 Melbourne had been transformed.
Canvas Town had been cleared, and new suburbs were springing
up (to the enormous detriment of the land’s original inhabitants). In the wake
of the Eureka Rebellion in 1854, there had been major improvements in working
conditions, and Australia was firmly on the path to democracy. The town was now
connected by telegraph and rail. It had schools, and even a university. And
thanks to the wealth generated by the gold finds, the town would prosper for the
remainder of the century.
Which, sadly, is more than could be said for Daniel William
Ruffy.
On Chartist Ancestors…
Read about Daniel William Ruffy or Ruffy Ridley.
Read about Chartism and the Chartists in Australia.
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