Free The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright Page B

weeks at sea when all that was solid melted into air, there were only two things the unmoored passenger could use for ballast: the watery horizon and the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which everyone did, before electricity) kept passengers in touch with a familiar reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations to orient oneself, to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. And then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even that stellar certainty was stripped away. At the equator you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set, giving access to the entire celestial sphere: another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched further south towards Australia, it would provide a new reference point: passengers began to fix their mental compass on the Crux Australis. Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the equator on 15 July 1853: Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different to an English sky.
    The Southern Cross was a beacon in more ways than one. It told of a new political identity, divested of old allegiances. But as a symbolic object—what Kleinian psychoanalysts might call ‘a good object’—the Southern Cross offered new immigrants the reassuring embrace of affective belonging. Though the constellations ranged across the night sky, and the moon waxed and waned in primordial rhythm, they were permanent anchor points on an otherwise shifting shore. As the horizon is for disoriented seafarers, the Southern Cross became a hitching post for existential certainty when all else was in mortal flux. Before long, that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.

    After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into the South Atlantic, following the natural circulation of winds and current, heading towards the Cape of Good Hope and the roaring forties. The dancing and music making on deck came to an abrupt halt as ships entered the arctic trade winds of the Southern Ocean. Heavy seas and strong winds buffeted the ship. Passengers were forced to find their sea legs all over again. On a day that was blowing a perfect hurricane , Fanny Davis stayed below but one of her cabin-mates fell over trying to get on deck and knocked several teeth in. To avoid getting out of bed, Fanny and her friends huddled together under mantles and coverlets, telling fortunes in teacups to pass the time .
    It was the little ones who suffered the worst in this final leg of the voyage. One boy on James Menzies’ ship had a shocking fit. The doctor worked quickly to extract five worms from the lad’s gut, each measuring eight inches long. On Fanny Davis’s ship, one pregnant woman had lain in the hospital since departure. She delivered her baby in the middle of a fearsome storm only a week out from Port Phillip. It was a night of terrors , with waves flooding the berths and snow blanketing the deck. The baby died as soon as it was born; the mother followed not long after. Another traveller, Mrs Graham, witnessed the sea burials of a baby and toddler from the one family, dead within two days of each other, and wrote: the body fell with a splash and all was over but the cries of the Parents who felt deeply the loss of the child. 14 Four children died on John Spence’s ship. The babies, he wrote pragmatically, were nursed on the spoon, always more easily injured than those who nurse on the breast .
    Sarah Raws witnessed another morbid scene. A lady died this morning in our cabin. Her death came as a great shock ; she had only been confined to bed for one day. The woman left ten grieving children. She was much respected in our cabin and had become very intimate with Sarah’s mother and father. The woman’s husband was a Baptist