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MINING FOR GOLD - RESEARCHING THE GOLDMINER'S SISTER

7/10/2020

 
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Before I begin let me say that nothing in my background has really equipped me to write stories set in gold mines. I completely bombed out of the maths and science stream at school at the age of fifteen. My world was always history and literature and the creative arts. I studied Law (and history) at university.

I’ve worked as a lawyer and also served in the armed forces so I am eminently well qualified to write about war and soldiers. I understand that world! I can knock over a book set in the English Civil War as if it were an integral part of my DNA, but hard rock gold mining…? This requires hard rock research!

So why on earth would I choose to set a series of books around a gold mine and how, did I go about researching the technical aspects of nineteenth century mining?

I am fortunate (some would say… blessed) to be married to a mechanical engineer. Now if any of you have a mechanical engineer in your life, you will know what I mean when I say they know everything about everything… and they really do.

Mr S, my engineer, comes from a long line of tin miners in Cornwall. We have visited Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall where his ancestors worked for generations and nothing quite beats the experience of going down into those hand-hewn tunnels. I can see why they emigrated to Australia! Sharp eyed readers will note the odd reference to Geevor in the book. (see pic of author in Geevor Mine below)
The instinct to fossick for gold is in Mr S’s blood and that is how we first came to Walhalla one February many years ago, armed with gold pans and ambition. Needless to say, in all our many trips to Walhalla he has never found a speck of gold… except once and that incident still rankles. (He found a lump of quartz and broke it open… being a good host he gave it to the young tourist who was with him who threw it away claiming it had to be fools gold. Every time we go back to Walhalla Mr S looks for that lump of quartz. C’est la vie.)

So, I have resident expert on all things mechanical and gold related and to give him credit, he’s been brilliant… in fact never has he been so engaged with anything I have written as these Maiden’s Creek books. So much so that he ‘suggested’ it would be wonderful to show the world that mechanical engineers are true hero material. After 35 years of marriage, I am still starry eyed about this wonderful man so I agreed and this is why the hero of THE GOLDMINER’S SISTER, Alec McLeod, is an engineer.

But, between us, there were a number of times I nearly gave up on poor Alec. When Ian (Alec’s brother) says to him: 
‘She’s strong and healthy and properly raised. That’s all you need in a wife.’
‘No it’s not. I need a companion who shares my interests.’
Ian laughed. ‘Machinery and mines? Really, Alec?’
‘My point exactly, Ian.’
That was me, silently screaming at my hero…

However, he comes good in a solid, engineer way and turned into one of my favourite heroes. Is he modelled on Mr S? Not really… Mr S is not a tall, good looking Scotsman (Mr S is a tall, good looking South Australian!).

However even a detailed blow by blow description of the gold mining process (see my eyes glaze over?) is no substitute for seeing the real thing in action and, being a visual person, I took myself off for a day’s research at our fabulous Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. Apart from indulging myself in a little ride in a coach (authenticity is very important), I braved the wonderful volunteers who keep the authentic gold processing equipment running. These men are fanatics… they live for their steam driven engines and to have a tame visitor who seems genuinely interested in steam boilers- see pic below-, piston engines and battery stampers is their idea of heaven (cue lots more explanation!).

I have to say SEEING these great machines in action is worth a million words. It has left me in awe of our nineteenth century forebears and their inventiveness. What staggers me more than anything is how they moved what were ENORMOUS pieces of heavy equipment into the inaccessible sites of the Walhalla goldfields. I give you as an example… the wheel from the Morning Star mine (pic below) can still be seen and has, amazingly, survived bushfires. Walking in to get to it is no mean feat today, let alone carrying it in piece by piece and assembling.

Much of the equipment for the Walhalla mines was shipped to Port Albert, loaded on to bullock drays and hauled over the mountains. No train reached Walhalla until the early 1900s by which time the mines were in decline. And I can't go without mentioning the fabulous guides at Walhalla's own LONG TUNNEL MINE (on which the Maiden's Creek Mine is closely based). They are so knowledgeable and so passionate about this amazing tribute to the tenacity of our forebears. If you get to Walhalla... put this top of your visiting list! 

And mining was inherently dangerous. In THE POSTMISTRESS I touched on one of the risks of the hand drilling operation. In THE GOLDMINER’S SISTER, Alec worries about the new, more efficient pneumatic drills that are coming and he is right to be concerned. These drills would be nicknamed ‘the widow makers’ because the dust they produced killed so many miners. But by far the biggest risk to the mines were collapses and I spent some time researching one of Australia’s worst mine disasters, the Creswick Mine Disaster.

When the Australasian Mine collapsed in December 1882, 22 men lost their lives. And to get a taste of what it would have been liked to be a miner trapped in a mine, Sovereign Hill has a recreation of the Creswick Mine Disaster experience. Nothing, but nothing, beats a sensory experience – even though you may only be in the dark for a few seconds with rushing water coming at you…

The other joy at Sovereign Hill were the schools and being term time, they were in full swing with modern children at the desks and terrifying teachers in crinolines. I remember taking my own sons to a school there and they were very grateful to be schooled in modern times, although in some ways my own schooling of the 1960s hadn’t really progressed much further! The living museum provided me with plenty of material for Eliza’s school in Maiden’s Creek.
​
Even though I am writing about matters outside my direct experience, the wonderful thing about research is access to good books, knowledgeable people and, if you are lucky, hands-on three-dimensional experiences. I hope I was somewhat successful in bringing all of that together in the book but most of all I hope you love my schoolmistress heroine, Eliza and my engineer hero, Alec, as much as I do!

When Smallpox came to a small town...

7/9/2019

2 Comments

 
PictureThe lonely grave of Sarah Hanks - to be found near the Walhalla Cricket Ground
​“You have been made aware that we have been visited by the plague of small-pox,and that the case has resulted in the death of the patient…" So begins an article in the Gippsland Times dated 30 March 1869.

Today smallpox has been eradicated (existing only in a secure vault somewhere in a far off land, never to be released), but in the nineteenth century it was the plague. Highly infectious and in 30% of cases, fatal, it was no respecter of social station. It was spread by contact and despite vaccination being available (thank you Mr. Jenner), in the 1870s not everyone would have been routinely vaccinated as they are now.

The introduction of smallpox into a small closed community such as the township of Walhalla in Gippsland, Victoria, could have had devastating consequences. In researching THE POSTMISTRESS, I came across the following tragic tale, which I incorporated into my own story

In late 1868, smallpox came to Melbourne, resulting in the infection of 42 people and the death of at least 9. In February 1869 A young bride, 21 year old, Sarah Ann Hanks, recently married in Melbourne, returned to Walhalla with her new husband, a miner, Thomas Hanks. She and her husband stayed for a few days in one of the hotels in town but on 14 March, feeling unwell, the town’s resident doctor, Henry Hadden was sent for. Dr. Hadden had some first hand experience of smallpox and when the first tell tale signs (spots around the mouth) appeared, he acted fast. The town authorities were alerted and the hotel where the Hanks were staying was locked down. 

The police located an empty house some way out of town where the patient could be placed in isolation, but her husband refused to co-operate. Instead he spirited Sarah out of the hotel to his own residence, a cottage just north of the township. On the advice of the doctors (Dr. Boone and Dr. Hadden), the town authorities erected an eight foot high palisade around the house, effectively isolating the inhabitants.  In the meantime the doctors set about a radical vaccination programme to ensure everyone in the town was protected from the disease. Only Dr. Hadden was permitted to enter the infected house and despite the best care he could give the woman, she died in agony (her screams could be heard throughout the town) on the 23rd March.

The authorities faced a dilemma. The cemetery was to the south of the town and they could not in all good conscience, permit the carrying of her coffin through the major population centre so Sarah Ann Hanks was interred in a ten foot deep grave on top of the hill above her home. Her lonely grave can still be seen today near to the Walhalla Cricket Ground. 

Her husband and his son had by this time contracted the disease. They were removed to the temporary hospital well out of town and the house and everything in it was burned to the ground. The surviving Hanks family did not succumb to the disease and left town shortly after being cleared. 

From The Leader (Melbourne 3 April 1869):  “A correspondent at Walhalla, writing on the 25th of March, relates some additional particulars connected with the death of Mrs Hanks from smallpox, near that township : — ' Drs.Boone and Hadden say that this case was one of thd worst they ever met with, and Dr. Boone was a medical inspector to a smallpox hospital in America. The building in which Mrs Hanks died, and that adjoining it, were burnt to theground, and Mr Hanks, his child and nurse, have been removed by the police to some empty buildings at the Britannia Ree , three miles from Walhalla, approaching the end of Stringer's Creek.'

Dr. Hadden, the hero of the hour, did not live long to enjoy his moment. On 29 May, returning from Melbourne to Walhalla, he was found dead on the coach between Buneep (Bunyip) and Shady Creek. No cause was established, but it is widely assumed he died of alcohol poisoning. 

In an odd twist of life imitating art, at the time I began writing THE POSTMISTRESS, and the characters of Caleb and Doctor Bowen came to life, I hadn’t read the story of the smallpox scare. I had no idea that Walhalla’s real life doctors during that period were an alcoholic Irishman and a dissolute American… sometime fiction mirrors fact in the oddest ways!

References:  
For a detailed account of the Smallpox scare: A tale of Old Wallhalla - How we fought the smallpox in Wallhala by Henry Thomas Tisdall
Trove (for contemporary newspaper accounts of the smallpox scare) and Henry’s Hadden’s Eventful Life and Unusual Death


THE POSTMISTRESS is out now and available at all good booksellers around Australia and as an ebook at your favourite store. Click HERE to purchase 

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Welcome to Maiden's Creek and the world of THE POSTMISTRESS

7/1/2019

 
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If you are familiar with my earlier books, you may be wondering why the move from the trouble and strife of the English Civil War to the wilds of the Australian bush.

Growing up my head and heart were firmly in English history and like, I suspect, many Australians, I considered Australian history a bit ho hum… no castles, kings, civil wars. Just dust and dirt and convicts!

However like Australia itself, I have grown up. I have travelled to the remote and lonely corners of this country in the company of my husband who has a passion for the Australian bush. Together we have stood in ruined homesteads and wondered about the life led by the people who settled a country that had no softness to spare for the weak. I have also explored my own family history - convicts, sailors and entrepreneurs.

What tipped my passions was reading a very badly researched historical romance set in my own home town of Melbourne. The story was so inaccurate, it was funny, but what upset me were the comments of reviewers on Amazon thanking the author for introducing them to this hitherto unknown history of Australia.

PictureA great place to dream up a new world...
This got me thinking and over a good bottle of red wine, while camping on the Snowy River, my husband and I started to mull over what sort of Australian story I could tell. 

We decided that a small town with a set cast of characters offered the greatest scope for a series of historical stories, but where?

On our way home from that camping trip we stopped, as we often do, in Walhalla - a tiny town deep in the valleys of the Great Dividing Range. A pretty, peaceful place with a permanent population of only twenty people. Following the discovery of gold in Stringers Creek in the 1860s, Walhalla became a gold mining town and at the time of Federation one of its mines was the highest yielding gold mine in Australia (and was honoured with being shown on one of the first stamps of the new Commonwealth). It ticked all the boxes for my fictional town. 

And why a fictional town? Quite simply I didn’t want to be constrained by the geography and history of a real town, but there are strong elements of Walhalla in my fictional Maiden’s Creek that anyone knowing the town may recognise and I have had fun researching some incidents in the early history of the town that fitted uncannily into my own narrative (more on those in future posts). 

So I had my town, the next step was to build the world of Maiden’s Creek. Who were the people who inhabited the town? What did the geography of the town look like?

What I loved about creating this world is the mix of nationalities (English, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Americans, Italians, Germans, Russians…) and personalities that were drawn to the gold fields. Shopkeepers, brothel owners, bakers, general stores, undertakers, livery stables and of course the gold miners all coming together against incredible physical odds to scrape a living from the earth. 
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So take yourself back to 1871...when the Sale coach leaves Melbourne and stops at a genuine stop on the old coach road called Shady Creek, the Maiden’s Creek coach driven by Amos Burrell arrives, ready to whisk you over the hills, across the Thompson River and down the steep, treacherous roads that will take you to Maiden’s Creek…  

THE POSTMISTRESS is on sale now in all good booksellers and retailers... 

Images of present day Walhalla and surrounds... 

    Alison Stuart

    Alison writes historical romances and short stories set in England and Australia and across different periods of history.
    ​She also writes historical mysteries as A.M. Stuart.

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