Fusty, yet lusty Sovereign Hill

Press, 26 January 1988, Page 13

Fusty, yet lusty Sovereign Hill

recreating the roaring 1850 s

KEVIN SINCLAIR visits Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, in Victoria, a living museum of the gold-rush days.

Coaches drawn by gigantic matched Clydesdales creak wildly through the muddy streets of Sovereign Hill. A constable of Queen Victoria, after whom the infant Australian colony was proudly named, walks across the mire, armed with a long sword and hefty baton. Down at the nearby ochre creek, Asians pan for gold. In the United States Saloon, busty barmaids proffer foaming pints as Irish minstrels sing of home. Things haven’t changed much since 1851.

In those days, Sovereign Hill was the scene of frantic diggings as men from all over the world descended on the remote downs, deep in the Australian bush.

Freed convicts from Ireland were there, along with Scots soliders who took to the diggings instead of sentry duty, and gold rush veterans from the Californian stampede who had crossed the Pacific in search of easier fortunes.

There were Germans, Danes, Chinese, Dutchmen, French, Austrians; the dregs of the Pacific made their way to Ballarat in hopes of becoming instantly rich.

Most didn’t. But the town where they tried their luck is now a rich lode of history, preserved almost exactly as it was in the days when gold was king.

Replica of a Chinatown

Down over the dreary flats where thousands of optimistic Cantonese miners once dug like moles for gold, a replica of a canvas Chinatown rises anew. Based on old photographs, paintings and diaries of the miners and merchants who peopled the crammed and jostling muddy lanes of gold-rush Ballarat, the settlement is as genuine as man can make it.

Crowded, draughty, uncomfortable, insanitary and awkward, with tents pitched wherever there was a tiny space between deep vertical shafts driven into solid quartz, the Chinese diggings replica is devoted to historical accuracy.

So is the nearby temple, where traditional popular gods of the Pearl River Delta frown with menacing vigour over a land that

was once humble home and hopeful place of toil for thousands of men from Sai Yap. The distinctive dialect of Taishan can still sometimes be heard here, not an echo of the past but a rousing chorus of the present which sees another army of Chinese — this time wealthy tourists — come from all over Australia and South-East Asia to see this often-overlooked phase of Australia’s history.

The Chinese tent village and temple is part of one of the most ambitious (and most successful) historical theme parks on Earth. Two reasons for the huge success of Sovereign Hill, on the fringe of the city of Ballarat 90 minutes drive out of Melbourne, are a passion for accuracy and an insistence that the town of the 1980 s be a mirror image of the wild, unruly, rough and tough, gold town of the 1850 s. Just as miners slaved frantically to claw alluvial gold from

the gritty yellow clay topsoil, so today do scores of permanent staff who populate Sovereign Hill work to retain the feeling of the turbulent age when gold was king. Headed by a fanatical accountant turned historian named Peter Hiscock, the staff includes many men and women who are experts in work disciplines long since forgotten.

The blacksmith hammers at ~his forge, the cooper bends steel bands around barrels, the farrier grooms the huge, stately draught horses that pull heavy stages guided by men more accustomed to steering four pounding steeds than driving their Holden station waggons.

A chemist who knows old herbal remedies works in the pharmacy shop, and a local lady who has recipes for boiled sweets of the 1850 s stands behind the counter of the confectionary store.

In the bakehouse, old loaves and cakes made to recipes brought out to Australia from Mother England are cooked. In the bar of the United States Saloon, visitors can get a cup of rum slid over the broad wooden bar by a waitress dressed in distinctively unprim Victorian clothes that flash an impressive cleavage. And, of course, there are miners. Back in 1851, there were few people in Ballarat. Scattered

bands of Aborigines had largely disappeared after brief and fatal confrontations with white settlers hunting for grazing land. Then a gold nugget was found in a creek bed.

It was the era when mere mention of the metal could send an electric message round the world. All over the infant colony of Victoria, men dropped ploughs and pens and rushed for the diggings. Word spread fast. The fever soon had the other Australian colonies in a ferment, and men from all of them added to the toiling army of hacking and shovelling troglodytes. The Californian rush had passed its first, frantic pitch and many there dumped shovels and spent their lodes on passages across the Pacific to the latest lure.

The China, the Pearl Delta in those days was a depressed, poverty-stricken, over-populated plain harassed by pirates in the riverways and roaming bandit bands on land.

For many young men from Guangdong, the prospect of many weeks in the hold of a rolling sailing ship, a hard slog from Melbourne up-country to the diggings and endless toil at the bottom of a shaft was a prospect better than anything he could see at home.

Racism and banishment

The Chinese in Victoria were the victims not only of the customary diseases and bad diet, but were also the target of other miners. ’ There were, examples of racial hatred, injustice and persecution. They were banished from the main body of the gold fields to their own settlement. It is not far from where the .Cantonese staked their claims 'that the tent city stands today.

It is a dismal sight, cold, dank and chilly. I walked the streets of this embryonic birthplace of Australia’s now-powerful and

wealthy Chinese community in the depths of a Victorian winter. A consistent, dreary drizzle made the day grey. The water in the creek was icy. The roads were ankle-deep in yellow mud, churned into the consistency of the miners barley soup by the constant array of coaches, drays, buggies and horse-drawn heavy carts that still rumble and sway through the streets of Sovereign Hill.

That is the way things were in the 1850 s and that’s the way Peter. Hiscock and his staff strive to keep things in the 1980 s. Even Hiscock’s office looks like something from a time capsule. Old prints line the walls, the furniture is all early Victorian. Sovereign Hill, he says, is living history. Every aspect has been kept as accurate as possible, from unpaved streets to the original recipes prepared at the bakehouse.

In summer, visitors get blasted by clouds of dust. In winter, you tramp through the mud. Once the obvious nuggets and specks of gold had been worked from the rivers, it was time for miners to start burrowing deep into the Earth. They followed seams of ore-bearing rock through the milky quartz. Then the era of. optimistic prospectors who scratched the surface was over, and it was time for big business to move into the mining industry.

It took millions of investment dollars, even then, to drive shafts deep, to pump out water with slow-sucking, steam-powered pumps, and to crush the ore. A lucky few who dug for gold made a mint. The majority of the 20,000 miners who scooped dirt and mud in a frenzy made a few dollars which were spent swiftly paying exhorbitant sums for the necessities of life. The ladies of the fields, prostitutes who plied their trade in shanty and shack, probably put considerably more in the bank than 90 per cent of the fossickers. Peter Hiscock talks about the Ballarat rush with vivid enthusiasm. His words bring back to life a time of teeming energy, of roaring, drunken excitement. In 1968, a group of local people, fascinated by their past, decided to bring some of it alive at Sovereign Hill. After all, Ballarat was the scene of the only civilian uprising (by whites, at least) in Australian history, a clash that erupted when fiery

miners fought a pitched battle with police and troopers. They raised a blue and white banner bearing an emblem of the Southern Cross over their wooded breastworks. British bayonets soon put paid to their protests.

From discovery to rail era

Causes of the Battle of Eureka Stockade (named after one of the nearby shafts) were regulations which sought to administer, govern and tax the diggers, and the often-brutal, corrupt and inefficient way in which they were applied. Sovereign Hill is confined to the thunderous decade of 1851-

1861, from the time gold was discovered to the era when the railway brought prosperity and a degree of respectability. Diggers fighting for a fortune gave way to miners working for a salary. One mistake Hiscock and the other planners made was to erect garish Chinese temple in the town. When visitors from Asia said it was a modern, incongruous structure, the management of The Hill spend thousands of dollars to pull it down and replace it with a genuine rebuilt copy of an old temple. To get the second building right, old documents and photos were consulted. Historian-detec-tive Mary Akers wrote to the Delta region to check facts on how temples were built 14 decades ago. The result is a more modest Chinese temple that would have been familiar to Chinese diggers. —DUO copyright