Free We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright

decencies
of the home life of a gentleman . But it was slow in coming to fruition.
    This gave Martha a legitimate reason to pursue her excessive folly , despite her
husband’s concern that he might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it . While
she was making money and George wasn’t, Martha would do as she pleased.

EVERYTHING THAT COULD BE WANTED
    It is possible to live in most cities of the world and not have a clue how the other
half lives. Usually the poor don’t live anywhere near the rich. But in the tent
city of Ballarat, an unlucky digger could see very clearly that his neighbour was
feasting on German sausages and Cheshire cheese while his own family ate damper
and maggoty mutton—yet again.
    Advertisements for stores reveal the astounding range of goods available for sale:
red herrings, fresh salmon, Chilean flour, Havana and Manila cigars, fresh oysters
and lobster, preserved partridge, grouse, woodcock, lark, plover and hare.
    Mrs Willey ran the Compton House store on Bakery Hill. She advertised parasols, china
crape and French cashmere shawls, Irish linen, widows’ caps, ladies’ and babies’
underclothing and French kid boots. Refreshment tents sold ginger beer and cordials
over the counter, and whisky and porter under it. You could get a dozen bottles of
French Champagne if you could afford it. The stores were astonishingly well stocked
with everything that could be wanted , wrote Mrs Massey, [with] the most conspicuous
display of dresses, bonnets and quantities of china . The wife of any digger who hadn’t
struck it lucky knew exactly what she was missing out on.
    Not that the storekeepers were happy either. Their taxes were going up. On 1 March
1854, there was a monster meeting of disgruntled storekeepers protesting against
a new law to tax storekeepers £50 a year or £15 for three months. In late February,
60 storekeepers had been taken to court and fined £5 for being unlicensed. It was extortion , railed Thomas Pierson, who by now had joined the throng in Ballarat and
ran a shop with his wife Frances.
    The storekeepers resolved to stick together and refuse to pay the licence fee. By
the end of March they had all caved in.
    But if the government officers up there in the Camp were on their toes, they’d have
realised that the short-lived protest was a sign of things to come.

MATES
    Some historians think Australian mateship began on the Victorian goldfields. Russel
Ward, for example, talked about a ‘curiously unconventional yet powerful collectivist
morality’ and thought it had something to do with teamwork—the fact that one miner
often acted as a tent keeper and cook while the rest of the team worked the mine.
This group solidarity was reinforced when the authorities bullied and harassed miners
in the hated practice of ‘licence hunting’.
    But Ward did not explore another unusual fact: this companionable environment included
women. As more women flocked to the fields, the traditional feminine activities of
housekeeping, cooking and laundering increasingly fell to them.
    And a curious thing happened. Instead of these domestic jobs being devalued as women
stepped in (a trend modern economists call the ‘feminisation of labour’, in which
both the pay and the status of the job go down), the goldfields women found themselves
highly prized.
    I have become a sort of necessity , remarked Irish-born Harriet, who travelled to
the diggings with her brother and quickly became a helpmeet to his single buddies.
Harriet was paid in gold nuggets for her puddings and pies and earned great respect
for her conversation and companionship too. In closing her letter home, Harriet echoed
the words of many other former blue-blooded girls after a stint on the goldfields: I almost fear to tell you, that I do not wish it to end!

THE SERVANT PROBLEM
    For working-class women on the goldfields, being paid for domestic work without having
to enter service—no contract, no term of duty, no master—was a