(piano music)

00:09 PENNY: This podcast was recorded on Aboriginal land, the land of the Wurunjeri people of the Kulin Nations. This episode also discusses events that occurred on the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. We pay our respects to their elders past and present.

00:25 Piano music

00:34 PENNY: Hello Christina.
CHRISTINA: Hi Penny.
PENNY: Welcome back to 'In Those Days'. I've got some Trove chat today that's really more just general library chat.
CHRISTINA: Okay.
PENNY: Okay. We record this at the State Library Victoria.
CHRISTINA: We do. We feel very fancy when we come here.
PENNY: I know. and sometimes people think that, like, it must be because I'm special or whatever but actually just anyone can book the room.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, you're not special.
PENNY: I'm not actually associated with the library in any way. But I do appreciate it, and the library has a lot of stuff it's got a lot of collections. And if you just look in the catalogue, little bit overwhelming sometimes. So one thing that the very nice librarians do is that they make research guides, which are based on certain topics and collections.
CHRISTINA: Oh okay.
PENNY: So, if you go on their website they've got a whole list of research guides. And the one that I looked at for today, is they have one called 'Gold Miners and Mining'. And that is very useful because it's got links, not just to stuff in their own collection, but links to other places.
CHRISTINA: That is very helpful.
PENNY: Yeah, so if you are interested in a topic, like it's a good place to start. Cos it'll send you off to all the, all the good places.
01:37 (piano music).
01:47 PENNY: Our guest now is my friend Tim Carruthers.
TIM: Hello
PENNY: Who I went to school with. And he is a proper person.
CHRISTINA: Well that's good to know.
PENNY: He's an editor and publisher in educational publishing.
TIM: Oh, well I,
PENNY: Well, he was. And now.
TIM: Now I have a slightly
PENNY: He produces educational software. So he's meant to be smart and know stuff.
CHRISTINA: In an educational way.
PENNY: Educational way. And when I invited him onto this podcast he did research.
CHRISTINA: Wow, he's done more than I have.
TIM: I feel like you're talking me up maybe a bit much there. I'm also not willing to say who I work for in case I say something completely wrong.
PENNY: Ah no, that's fine.
CHRISTINA: You can find him on LinkedIn.
PENNY: Tim Carruthers. Tim and I, Christina, we went to school together.
CHRISTINA: Wow Penny.
PENNY: We went to Castlemaine Secondary College together.
CHRISTINA: That is amazing.
PENNY: We were in the same year, and then we moved to Melbourne at the same time.
TIM: Not in the same place.
PENNY: No.
TIM: No, we never shared a house even though we, I think we possibly, did we share houses with people who then shared houses with each other?
PENNY: Did we, who?
TIM: I'm not sure, there was a whole
PENNY: Georgina, maybe. Could have.
TIM: There was this whole crew of people from Castlemaine who moved down to Melbourne and
PENNY: People used to call like, Lygon street, Little Castlemaine.
TIM: Who said that? Only people from Castlemaine.
PENNY: Yeah, people from Castlemaine! Maybe it wasn't Lygon, they called Brunswick Little Castlemaine. It's actually much bigger than Castlemaine. Do you go back to Castlemaine much? Your parents still live there.
TIM: Yeah, my parents still live there. I go back every so often.
PENNY: As often as you should?
TIM: Probably not as often as I should.
PENNY: I feel like I don't go as often as I should.
TIM: It's a lovely place to visit though. Every time you say you're, like it used to be when we moved to go to university in Melbourne and you'd, people would say, 'Where are you from?' and you'd say, 'Oh, I'm from Castlemaine'. And they'd go 'Oh what?' Now you say Castlemaine and everyone says 'Oh what a lovely little town.' So everyone's heard of Castlemaine.
PENNY: Yeah, everyone knows it now. It's very expensive to live there now.
CHRISTINA: In the heart of spa country.
PENNY: Well, actually, it is the heart of goldfields country.
CHRISTINA: Yes.
TIM: Slightly north-east of spa country.
PENNY: Although, I'm from Newstead so it's very much on the cusp of goldfields/spa.
CHRISTINA: Golden spa.
PENNY: Exactly...ew.
CHRISTINA: That sounds a bit weird.
PENNY: And so Tim, do you still think of yourself as a Castlemaine person?
TIM: I do. Particularly because I'm clearly a blow-in to Castlemaine. I moved there when I was like two years old.
PENNY: You're not even local.
TIM: I know, I'm not even local. My parents have lived there for not-quite 40 years and they're still not locals. I think you need a family that goes back very far to be a real local.
PENNY: But I still, like, if I meet someone, I'm like 'Oh that's a Castlemaine person'.
TIM: Yeah.
CHRISTINA: You can tell by how their eyes are set.
PENNY: Yeah, but the thing is Castlemaine people never get excited about things. I often feel, 'Oh we're from Castlemaine!' and they're like 'Mmmm'.
CHRISTINA: They don't want to associate with you.
PENNY: That's right. But Castlemaine, it's a gold-rush town.
CHRISTINA: Yes, full of gold-diggers.
PENNY: Not anymore. One thing that people always used to say about it was that the reason why Castlemaine has such wide streets, is because it was nearly Melbourne. In the 1850s it was going to be the capital of Victoria, it really was. And I remember when I was growing up I felt like that was very special about our town, that actually it could have been Melbourne.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, but didn't quite make it.
TIM: I used to hear that story as well.
PENNY: Is it true?
TIM: Every history book I've ever read says no. But I don't know. There's lots of history books I haven't read, so, maybe.
PENNY: Look, I think it was just something people in Castlemaine like to say, to be honest. I don't reckon it's necessarily true.
TIM: It was, legitimately, very big and rich. Not as big as Melbourne. But there was a big period of time when it was at least the second biggest place.
PENNY: Like, bigger than Ballarat?
TIM: I think so. Whenever you read books and statistics all the statistics are completely all over the place guesswork because obviously there's lots of people moving around from place to place and they'd spend a week on some digging and then they'd go off to somewhere else. So it's really hard to tell how large because you're relying on these isolated newspaper reports and stuff.
PENNY: Yeah, and really temporary populations as well, so yeah.
TIM: But it was definitely very big with lots of people for quite some time.
PENNY: Yeah, so gold was discovered, I think in 1850, is that right Tim?
TIM: Thereabouts.
PENNY: Or 1851?
TIM: Well, from what I've read, whenever we think of gold in Australia we always think of the Central Victorian Gold Rush but actually gold was discovered in Bathurst in New South Wales.
PENNY: Right.
TIM: So a whole bunch of people from Victoria were leaving Victoria to go there, because there was gold there.
PENNY: Yeah, I always thought that the gold rush was a very organic, natural thing. Gold was found and then people moved towards it anarchically. But actually, what Tim told me, it was very much created and encouraged by the government because they didn't want people going to New South Wales to get the New South Wales gold.
CHRISTINA: Did they plant some gold?
PENNY: Even though
TIM: Well before that it was because everyone was going to California, so that's the thing that always comes up in this. California had the big California Gold Rush, which started in 1848, just a couple of years before. And that was like the first big gold rush that people called a gold rush and wrote newspaper stories about and became a big meme of like, 'There's a gold rush, you can go there'. And because it was 1848 people had the freedom to travel and you travel on a boat and it wouldn't take you that long, so it actually, you had hundreds and thousands of people going to California. Including leaving from Australia to go there and to the point that the authorities in New South Wales were like, 'Hang on, this is not good. We've probably got gold, maybe we should find some gold in Australia and then people will stay.' So they had this basically a prize for whoever could discover gold in Australia, to stop people leaving.
PENNY: And then they did discover gold. And then in Victoria there was actually genuinely heaps of gold. I think in New South Wales, maybe not so much.
TIM: No, no, no. They found a bit in Bathurst and then the thing that was happening at the exact same time in sort of 1850 was that Victoria was becoming it's own colony because when the British settled originally they had like, New South Wales, which wasn't just today's New South Wales, it was New South Wales and everything that's part of Victoria and I think Queensland as well. That whole east coast area was all New South Wales. And of course the people who were actually living in Melbourne were like 'We don't want to be, have people from Sydney in charge of us. This is ridiculous. Let's write a big petition to London to say make us separate.'
PENNY: So it started that early the Sydney/Melbourne
TIM: But it happened at exactly same time
PENNY: Only according to Melbourne people. Sydney people don't care.
CHRISTINA: That's where the rivalry started.
TIM: Yeah, yeah, basically.
PENNY: So, I found this article that's from 1852, it's about someone travelling to the Goldfields near Castlemaine, or to Mount Alexander as they called it. And I thought it would be interesting to talk to Tim about this because we're both Castlemaine people and also because Tim, himself, once attempted a journey from Melbourne to Castlemaine, on foot. Like, how did this come about Tim? Why did you try to walk from Melbourne to Castlemaine?
TIM: Because. Well, the short answer is because I was in my early 20s and very stupid. The longer answer is that a friend of mine got drunk and made a bet with somebody that of course you could walk from Melbourne to Castlemaine in a couple of days, because obviously the gold-diggers had done it. So how hard could it be?
PENNY: So there was a time limit on it too?
TIM: Yes, that was the important part of the bet. That it could be done in two days. Because I think that the disagreement that had originally come up in this conversation, was well, would it be two days or three days. Surely you couldn't do it in two days, that would be too far. Hence the challenge. So my friend had made this bet. My brother and I, we hadn't made a bet. We had no skin in the game, we were like, 'Well that sounds like fun. Let's go along and do this.' So the three of us.
PENNY: Set off. Well, that is a beautiful parallel. We're gonna read this article and we're gonna look at your journey compared to this guy's journey. Cos I think there'll be some good comparisons but I will warn you about this article, it's written in 1852, well before the discovery of brevity. And it is wordy. And there's absolutely no way that we're going to get all the way through it today, cos he liked to describe things in a lot of detail. But we'll just do our best, okay?
TIM: Sounds good.
10:36 PENNY: This is "A Sailor's Trip from Melbourne to Mount Alexander". And it was published I think on the 10th of May 1852. He begins;
“This long looked for, half dreaded event was now to come off; the ride of eighty miles "outside of a horse " was to be undertaken; and as my two friends and fellow travellers came up to the gate fully equipped for the road, I felt a slight misgiving as to the result of this my first serious essay as a horseman."

Obviously, different to you Tim, this guy's riding. So he's got a horse, which is a great privilege, I feel, at this time. Cos lots of people were walking. What were your feelings before you started your journey Tim? As you set off.
TIM: I think we were optimistic.
CHRISTINA: Blindly optimistic.
PENNY: You were optimistic!
TIM: We were definitely optimistic. Well, we'd done some practise.
PENNY: I didn't realise.
CHRISTINA: To the shops and back.
TIM: No, no, even more ambitious. We knew that we were starting from North Melbourne because that was where my friend, who had made the bet, lived. We were curious to be like, 'Well can you even sort of walk, is there, are there roads that you can walk on?'
CHRISTINA: Beside the highway.
PENNY: that's a really good point though, yeah.
TIM: Yeah, so we started with some practices where I was like, well I'll walk from North Melbourne to Watergardens, to the train station there, to see if it's actually possible. And it turned out it was. You have to do this weird route sort of going on footpaths and then through some paddocks and things, but anyway, it all worked out. And we looked at maps. I think this was probably before Google maps so we, got out the Melways and figured it out.
CHRISTINA: Photocopied pages.
TIM: Yep. And we planned out a whole route, going from North Melbourne to the goldfields. There's a train line.
PENNY: Yes.
TIM: They didn't have a train line in 1852.
PENNY: No, they didn't.
TIM: Well, okay, so we'll follow the train and then the train line goes off in a way where you can't follow it as a pedestrian, it goes through bushland and stuff, so we're like.
PENNY: It also goes over a bridge at one point that I think you wouldn't want to be on.
TIM: You can't do that. But you can walk basically along the railway line up until a point where it sort of diverges.
PENNY: So it's a little 'Stand by Me'.
TIM: Yes. And then there's the freeway, the Calder Freeway.
PENNY: Yes.
TIM: And we were like, well, can you walk alongside a freeway, is that legal or not? And we looked that up and we seemed vaguely confident that it was legal, that you could walk along a highway. So we're like 'we'll give it a go'.
13:07 PENNY: This is excited. Okay, so I'm going to keep reading.
"Sundry visions floated before my eyes of the wild ungovernable steed running away with me, or, still more terrible, giving me a specimen of buckjumping. This I have been told is purely a colonial accomplishment. Whether that be the case or not, mattered little to me then. I had often seen it exhibited, and though wonderful in appearance, like the motion of a ship in a head sea, to which I had been tolerably well seasoned, I felt would in reality be a different affair, and that my sea legs would "advantage me nothing" in that sort of motion, but over the bows of the horse I should be certain to go."
PENNY: It's like he had a bag full of commas that he had to spend before dinner.
CHRISTINA: Just say 'I was hoping the horse didn't buck'.
PENNY: Yeah, exactly.
"I was no judge of horse-flesh, or I need not have driven myself the slightest concern; for the one-eyed charger which was to carry me was quite incapable of any such feat of agility.”
TIM: One eyed? He had a horse with one eye.
PENNY: I don't know. I think he's exaggerating.
CHRISTINA: Pirate.
PENNY: So, basically he’s worried about being bucked off his horse, and then he’s sad he’s not gonna to be bucked off his horse.
CHRISTINA: Mixed emotions. Just get on with it.
TIM: You know a lot about horses, Christina.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, I do.
TIM: Do you know anything about boats, and are they similar?
CHRISTINA: I feel there is no real correlation whatsoever.
PENNY: Lot of people, not just Tim and his friends, I think a lot of people in 1852 were just walking.
TIM: There's lots of reports.
PENNY: And then later people walked even further because then when they introduced that awful ten pound import tax on Chinese people in Melbourne they would then arrive in Adelaide to avoid the tax and walk across from Adelaide. Which people have recreated recently in memory of their ancestors and stuff.
TIM: Yeah, there was also a tax on people coming from Tasmania for awhile.
PENNY: That's fair.
CHRISTINA: That should still exist.
PENNY: We'll get to them actually. We're going to get to them don't worry.
15:19 “Well, having got fairly under way, we scampered out of town at a tolerable rate. The weather was oppressively hot, one of those clear hot wind days, when the rays of the sun seem to reach you through a burning glass, and every puff of air, instead of cooling and refreshing, comes as if it were a hot blast from a furnace, raising with a whirlwind those singular pyramids of dust, which however interesting and picturesque as they may appear, as they unquestionably do in the distance, are anything but pleasant when whirled over you, filling your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and shirt collar, with dust.”
So the article was published in May but I think the trip happened in January based on.
CHRISTINA: It took him that long to get the words down.
PENNY: Well, it's very long (whispering). Tim, what was the weather like when you guys set out?
TIM: You know, very similar to that. Because we had
CHRISTINA: It was university holiday time.
TIM: Yeah, very foolishly we did this in summer. Which was,
PENNY: Maybe the first mistake.
TIM: This was absolutely the first mistake. I think the problem was that there was a time limit on the bet because they didn't want to sort of let this drag out forever. It was not just you had to walk to Castlemaine in 2 days, it was like and you have to do it within a month or two. Plus yeah, it was holidays.
PENNY: And it was really, it was a hot day?
TIM: It was, it was summer. But you know, we were students with nothing to do, so.
PENNY: It's amazing. And I guess that's when you would have had the time to do this. Okay.
16:50 "Under these circumstances, of course we had to stop at the first available place to " clear the cobwebs, out of our throats. There was at the Inn at Flemington, two miles out of Melbourne.”
CHRISTINA: So, really put in the hard yards.
PENNY: Now, Flemington, not everyone lives in Melbourne. It's not exactly, it's not
CHRISTINA: You haven't left Melbourne if you're at Flemington Racecourse.
PENNY: You haven't left Melbourne and it's not an inner-city suburb now, but it's pretty close. Did you guys have any rules about where you were allowed to stop. Like, were you allowed to go to the pub? Like what? Because there would have been heaps of pubs on the way.
TIM: There were, but no we were worried about the timing because we were on this 2 day limit. So we were like, 'No, no, no, no stopping at pubs.'
CHRISTINA: So you just walked through.
TIM: We stopped, I'll wait until you get to it, where we stopped. But Flemington is one station away from North Melbourne so I think we got from where we started to Flemington
PENNY: So you got past Flemington before you had to have a muesli bar or something?
CHRISTINA: Stop at a 7-11.
PENNY: Have a Slurpee.
"Where while we were discussing our lemonade, some of the numerous loungers outside the door, managed to steal my whip, so that my horse, who had already begun to re-quire it, was likely to have it all his own way.
A few miles further on the road, we fell in with a friend returning from the diggings, with several pounds weight of gold strapped on the pummel of his saddle, in his blanket. He had been keeping company with the escort through the most dangerous part of the road, and was now pushing on for town, having left them a few miles behind.”
Now in this article it does make it seem like gold is very abundant.
TIM: Everything I've read is like, this was the most gold that had ever been found anywhere. And I think it was. There are records of, that escort, it was talking about. From what I've read, people generally didn't take the gold themself to a bank. There was this whole system you take the gold to the authorities and they'd give you a note to say yes you've given me a pound of gold. And then all that gold would be collected together in a big escort and would just go in this big military escort all the way back to Melbourne, where I guess it would go to like the bank or something.
PENNY: Yeah.
TIM: So you had these, basically an army escort of hundred weights of gold. Apparently the biggest lot they ever did was 2 and a half tons of gold in one. Just, insane.
PENNY: I read that in the 1850s, Victorian gold was like a third of all the gold in the world. The found, so. But at the same time, it's not everyone who's getting to share that. Continues - this is still about the friend that they've run into. Did you run into anyone that you knew on the way?
TIM: No.
PENNY: No, Melbourne's a lot bigger now. It's a lot less likely.
TIM: Also, walking on footpaths next to a railway line, is not the best way
CHRISTINA: Not many pedestrians, 'Morning!'
PENNY: "Knowing the qualities of my steed better than I did, he kindly offered me one of his spurs, telling me very significantly that I should soon want it, and having in my short experience arrived at the same conclusion, I gladly accepted it.”
He's very negative his poor little horse.
CHRISTINA: He really is. I think he should have just walked and dealt with it. Or been grateful that he had a horse to sit on.
PENNY: Exactly.
20:21 "Another heave-to, to " whet our whistles " at an inn a few miles further on our road kept by a Vandemonian”
CHRISTINA: Is this just the pub tour version.
PENNY: It basically is. So, a Vandemonian. I'd never heard that word before.
CHRISTINA: Is that someone from Tasmania.
PENNY: Yes.
TIM: From Van Diemen's Land.
PENNY: Yes, and actually then I found out that it was pretty much an insult. Vandemonian. And could use it like an adjective like 'He had a Vandemonian appearance'.
CHRISTINA: Like Neanderthal.
TIM: They had such a terrible reputation because not only was it almost entirely convicts, but they were apparently the worst convicts, ones who were sent Van Diemen's Land. That's why they changed the name to Tasmania because the name had such a bad reputation. They were like, okay if we're not going to be a convict colony anymore then we can't call it this name.
PENNY: He continues. Sorry, they're in this pub, kept by a Vandemonian.
"Where the entertainment for travellers was of rather a rude description"
Sounds nice
"and the landlord, landlady, and the whole houseful of customers seemed brutish in the extreme, and quite at variance with my pre-conceived notions of the quiet of a country inn; but I was only a sailor, and had a great deal to learn.”
He's a very snobby sailor, in my opinion.
CHRISTINA: I don't know what ship he's been on.
PENNY: Yeah, exactly. And I don't think he was just a regular sailor. I think he was some kind of upper class captain.
“However, great allowance must be made for golden times, as each of these publicans must be making a rapid fortune, and as a general rule my experience of the world has taught me, that in proportion as the money comes in, among uneducated men at least, so common civility goes out."
So 'Don't give poor people money, it'll make 'em worse', is basically what it was.
TIM: Yeah, this doesn't sound like your typical salt of the earth sailor.
PENNY: No.
TIM: Salt of the sea, I should say.
PENNY: But there was a lot of worry about the goldfields and the effect of this money on people. And I think a lot of it was that kind of fear of changing social status and that all of sudden these people would get money who shouldn't have it and might have power therefore.
TIM: I think that was one of the things about why the gold rush, the one in California beforehand and the ones in Australia, were so weird. Because people had the freedom to just go where they wanted and to go dig up gold, which even a hundred or two hundred years earlier you couldn't really do that because your town needed you to get the harvest in, or whatever. Or you owed fealty to a lord back in the middle-ages or whatever. When anybody can do what they want because it's the 1800s and we're into full-on capitalist times, yeah, it must be very anxiety inducing for the people who are used to being rich.
PENNY: And then he;
"Stopped to dinner at the Deep Creek Inn, about a dozen miles out of town.”
Which, I think is poor, actually, only getting to, only getting there, a dozen miles out of town.
CHRISTINA: Well, you stopped at 20 pubs. The fact he even got there is impressive.
TIM: What's that like?
PENNY: I looked it up. It's like 40km out of Melbourne, I would have said. Depends on where you start though obviously. What did you do for food Tim?
TIM: We had optimistically sort of carried sleeping bags and things, so that we'd be able to...you know because this is an overnight
PENNY: Two days. You had two days to get there.
TIM: So we had a whole lot of food in our packs. We were carrying big, heavy packs in the middle of summer. We ate muesli bars.
PENNY: Muesli bars. Did you have some scroggin?
TIM: I think we did. I think we did have some scroggin. And some sandwiches. And like, big bottles of water. This is what we had figured out during our practice walks.
CHRISTINA: Your planning meetings.
PENNY: This is what you need.
TIM: Yes, water. Because when it's hot, it's ridiculous. So, yeah we had not only bottles of water but had sort of tried to figure out places to find water.
PENNY: This was a very well-planned excursion Tim.
TIM: Well, we had a lot of free time.
PENNY: So this Deep Creek Inn.
24:32 “This is another of those houses, which evidently had never been the resort of any but the genus " bullock driver " prior to the discovery of gold, and ought never to have risen above that level. Here we dined with three gentlemen, unmistakeable gentlemen by their conversation, though their long beards, blue over-all shirts, and muddy trousers, if dress were a standard of gentility, would rather have led to the supposition that they belonged to the class for whom the hospitalities of the Deep Creek Inn were evidently originally intended."
So basically, we could tell from talking to them that they were posh but they didn't look posh. And he doesn't, and that's confusing cos they're used to being able to just look at someone
CHRISTINA: Identify who's who.
PENNY: Yeah.
TIM: Is this why big beards became more fashionable in this era? Early 1800s everyone's all clean shaven, Mr Darcy, and then from the 1850s and 60s all the big politicians in portraits have got big beards. Is that linked to this.
PENNY: But linked in what way?
TIM: Gold rushes are the cool thing.
CHRISTINA: A gold fields trend.
TIM: This is like the trendy fashion.
PENNY: Cos you can't shave.
TIM: I have no idea.
PENNY: Look, it's a theory. You can back to get your phd.
TIM: Fashion on men, who knows.
PENNY: Well that's a whole other episode, let's do it.
"They were returning from the diggings, where they had done well, but complained much of the scarcity of water for washing out the gold,"
CHRISTINA: See Tim knew. He was taking his own.
PENNY: "and even for drinking purposes, the latter causing much illness. Two out of the three were suffering much from inflammation of the eyes, caused as they supposed by the flies, which they told us were very numerous and excessively troublesome, and judging from appearances I would say extremely painful also.”
TIM: So the flies were landing in their eyes? Is that what that's saying?
CHRISTINA: It just sounds gross.
PENNY: I think so. It's not great.
CHRISTINA: Did you pack Aerogard on your trip Tim?
TIM: I think there's nowhere near as many flies as there used to be.
CHRISTINA: No. Probably because they had no sort of sewage control.
PENNY: So were insects a problem? Were there any?
TIM: No actually. I don't remember insects being a problem at all, which is either a tragic thing about the loss of biodiversity or just really lucky.
PENNY: Oh, and in terms of there not being enough water for them in the goldfields. I think there probably was actually before enough water, certainly for the people who were living there but I think for the Dja Dja Wurrung people who were living there before I think it was absolutely fine and then all of these people moved in and started dredging the waterways, muddied it all up, just completely trashed the place and then they're like, 'Oh, there's not enough water and we're all getting sick.'
CHRISTINA: Yeah.
27:33 PENNY: “During our meal two "gentlemen" of another kidney arrived, handcuffed together, and under the charge of two mounted policemen, who having left their horses, immediately entered the room where we were, took the irons off their prisoners and "sans ceremony" all four sat down together at the same board with ourselves; one of these men it appeared was committed to take his trial for a felony, the other, in default of bail to keep the peace, was to serve six months in gaol for an assault.
Both were travelling to Melbourne on foot in that oppressively hot day, and each endeavoured to obtain permission from the sergeant in charge to remain where they were for the night : the assaulted tried his most pathetic powers of persuasion ; the felon tried what in colonial parlance is expressively termed "bounce""
Have you ever heard of bounce? I'd never heard of it.
CHRISTINA: I've never heard of it.
PENNY: And now I've heard of it in two completely different contexts. Bounce it means giving it a bit of attitude, being a bit assertive, impudent. Can be quite a humorous thing and then I was watching Philomena Cunk and she uses bounce.
CHRISTINA: I might start using it about kids I work with.
PENNY: Yeah I know what it is now.
CHRISTINA: He showed a fair bit of bounce.
PENNY: Yeah, I know what it is, like, I can imagine it now but I'd never heard of it. So in the goldfields crime was a big thing. Like, people really worried about, like they were so worried about people going to the goldfields and like break down of law and order and all of that.
TIM: Well supposedly what had happened was as soon as people announced that gold was discovered and it was published in the newspapers so that more than one or two people knew about it all the, most of the police quit their jobs so that they could go and mine the gold. And then, you had not as many police, which is a problem for crime. But then apparently the authorities were so desperate to get more people to join the police, they hired ex-convicts and crims to be the police and then there's reports after reports of people complaining that all the police on the goldfields were basically just stand-over guys who were extorting money from people and not really upholding the law at all. Everybody hated them, that seems to have been a big factor in, like, you know the Eureka Stockade, but also the protests that happened in Castlemaine. That everyone hated the authorities because they were corrupt and violent.
PENNY: Yeah, so nothing's chang - no. I think these guys went off, they did have to keep walking that night, the criminals with the police so. Off they went again.
30:06 "At eight o'clock, being just after dusk, we arrived at the Bush Inn, thirty-five miles from Melbourne.”
And so I think they’re now in Gisborne. And before 1851 Gisborne was always known as ‘bush inn’. Because there was one inn there called Bush Inn so it was just always called that and then it obviously expanded a lot after that. And they stayed there for the night.
PENNY: So this is the point I think I'll ask Tim, so where did you guys, what did you guys. So they're in Gisborne and where did you stay the night Tim? On your two-day journey.
TIM: Well, we didn't make it as far as Gisborne. We got to Diggers Rest, and we had a rest. And then we thought, 'oh we'll keep going. We'll see how we can go.' We got to about Sunbury and we'd been walking for about 8 hours and knew that we were about two thirds of the way to about half-way, that we'd need to keep walking for another 4 hours if we were going to make this thing and we were all unanimous that we couldn't walk for another 4 hours. We did have a good excuse.
PENNY: Yeah?
TIM: The excuse was that because it was summer we could only wear like, sort of normal socks in our shoes, which meant that our feet were just dead from that much walking. I think if it had been winter and we'd been able to wear big thick proper socks
CHRISTINA: Yeah, proper boots and stuff.
TIM: Maybe we could have gone another couple of hours. But also, who knows?
PENNY: I have to tell you, I think you did really well, because I think the two days was very ambitious because this guy took 3 days on horse.
TIM: I mean, he was stopping at a pub every.
PENNY: Yeah, I mean
CHRISTINA: On the hour
TIM: In retrospect, that's what we should have done. But we did make it a third of the way. So we felt it had been a kind of a moral victory.
PENNY: It's just disappointing that you were technically still in Melbourne.
TIM: Is Sunbury still in Melbourne?
CHRISTINA: I feel that's far-fetched Penny. Have you been to Sunbury lately? That's not Melbourne.
TIM: No, no, we were a third of the way. We felt that had proved that you could do it in 3 days.
CHRISTINA: How did you get home from there?
TIM: We called our friend.
CHRISTINA: 'Help!'
TIM: Our one friend who had a car and we waited on the side of the highway.
CHRISTINA: Yep, like the winners that you were.
TIM: We'd been stopped by police earlier, because we'd been walking down, you know the big grassier area between both sides of the highway. And the police came up and they were like,
PENNY: 'Fellas'.
CHRISTINA: 'Boys, what are you up to?'
TIM: I can't remember the exact phrase, but something like you know, 'Do you know if you're allowed to be walking here?' and we all piped up, 'Oh yeah, we looked it up!'
CHRISTINA: 'We're university students on holiday.'
TIM: And they were like, 'Oh right well, yes.'
CHRISTINA: 'Carry on then.'
TIM: And they let us go.
PENNY: 'Thank you for doing your own research boys.'
CHRISTINA: 'Because we really weren't sure. It's a bit of a grey area for us.'
TIM: That was definitely the vibe I got.
CHRISTINA: Yeah.
PENNY: And you know what's disappointing and what I'm not sure what to do about now is the fact that we're not even in the Black Forest, which is the next part of this story where this guy goes into
CHRISTINA: Do you think he'll get a special cake in the Black Forest?
PENNY: I feel like we'll get Tim back another day.
CHRISTINA: I think it needs to be 2.0.
PENNY: So Tim, we have only got, you got to Sunbury, this guy's in Gisborne. He's got 2 more days of travel left to go and then he's gonna come home again, which was also a fairly eventful journey. Do you think you could come back another day and we'll continue?
TIM: I would love to.
PENNY: Excellent that would be great.
CHRISTINA: Thanks Tim.
PENNY: Thanks Tim.
33:46 (piano music)
PENNY: Yeah, so that's kind of just information really.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, thank you.
PENNY: Alright.
CHRISTINA: I learnt from that.