New Beginnings

‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ Jane sighed to herself as the rickety cart thumped over the muddy ridges left by yesterday’s Cobb and Co mail run, ‘but it’s done now, and it can’t be undone.’ Looking back over her shoulder at the barely visible sea of grubby white tents flapping in the summer breeze, she resolved that there would be no more looking back, and turned away from the goldfields of Victoria, her past, and her marriage to Denis Fagan, the sparkly-eyed, champagne tongued Irish gold miner who had lost himself in the booze and despair of many a destitute miner on the Ballarat diggings.

‘Where’s Papa? Why isn’t he coming with us?’ the shrill voice of Alice, not yet four, woke Jane from her stupor.

‘I’ve already told you, remember?’ Jane said numbly, steeling herself for the inevitable onslaught of hysteria, ‘Papa’s sleeping. And he can’t wake up. He’s watching over us from Heaven now’.

‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! PAAAAAAAAAAAAAPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…….EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…’Jane’s grip on the reins tightened, her teeth automatically clenching along with her gut in response to her toddler’s distressed scream.

‘Hush child!’ she hissed at Alice through clenched teeth, ‘lest the Natives hear your howling and steal you away to feed to the dingoes!’ Jane quieted the feelings of motherly guilt in favour of enjoying the brief moment of peace her not entirely empty threat had brought about, in the now heavy still of the summer dawn. Although either friendly or hesitant for the most part, a rag-tag group of natives had recently been sighted loitering on the outskirts of the tent city, looking half-starved and treacherous. One never knew what ‘they’ were capable of, she thought, shuddering.

‘Lie down on the blankets child, and see if you can get some sleep’, she shushed in a more motherly tone, hushing both child and guilt with a motion of her hand, ‘we’ve a long trip ahead of us’.

“What happened to Papa, mother?’ the timid voice of her eldest daughter, Ellen Jane, just turned eleven, broke through the dawn. ‘Did the drink finally get him? You always said it would, I know that. Or did he fall down an abandoned mine and break his neck? Or was he shot by a bushranger? Or did that nasty Jimmy Owens come after him again? Or, or… or did he fall in the river again? He can’t swim you know… ’ Ellen Jane’s voice, quiet at first, had risen with excitement at the thought of her father, her father, facing off with one of Victoria’s notorious bushrangers, before dropping suddenly upon the realisation that this was her life playing out and not one of those romantic tales her father would often read aloud from the newspapers. Her beloved, soft voiced, full of love Papa was sleeping. Forever. But really he was DEAD, just plain dead, she thought with a sob.

‘What happened Mama?’ Ellen-Jane appealed, her emerald green eyes turned up toward her one remaining parent. ‘Please? I must know’.

Supressing the urge to curse at her daughter’s intelligence and inquisitiveness, public displays of which had not served a woman well in the motherland, and would sometimes serve the Irish women even less well here in the rough and tumble of the colonial Victorian goldfields, Jane instead grasped at one of the straws offered by her daughter. ‘Yes my love,’ she whispered quietly, as though one overcome with emotion, ‘yes, I’m afraid the drink finally did get to him.’ Despite her inwardly churning emotions, she smiled softly as she watched her oldest daughter calm her youngest with one hand and somehow also feed baby Patrick with the other. Outwardly at least, she was shaping up to be a fine wife and mother one day. Finding a fine husband would be another matter entirely, she thought with a grunt.

‘If only he’d listened!’ Remembering herself, Jane sobbed for good measure, not entirely without reason. There had been a time she had been truly wild for the young Denis Fagan and would have done anything for him, followed him anywhere – well, she had done that, hadn’t she? Followed him to the other end of the world based on nothing more than faith, love and the burning desire to escape the abject poverty, starvation and death offered up by their homeland, cursed by famine.

Jane’s silent reverie was interrupted by Ellen-Jane tutting, in impressive imitation of Irish women she had been surrounded every day ‘Ah, tis very sad indeed, to be sure’. Immersed in circumstances of general squalor, never ending dysentery, death, alcoholism, domestic abuse and poverty, with conditions sometimes worse than those faced by the convicts in the much maligned ‘female factories ‘of New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land, the Irishwomen on the goldfields were nonetheless grateful. Here in the colony of Victoria the food was plentiful and usually fresh, the weather, for the most part, good, and if the gold wasn’t as plentiful as first thought, it was at least still there in amounts enough to sustain a family for those who were willing to work hard.

There seemed always to be hope here in the colonies too -there was not one among those residing in the great tent city who had not seen or heard of someone striking it lucky on the goldfields of Victoria, and even those who couldn’t make it here had choices – the other colonies also had opportunities a plenty and this land seemed to be a place where even a convict could rise to become a member of the upper classes. Although born into a land of famine, and raised in hard times and squalor, there was far more than intelligence and inquisitiveness in Ellen-Jane Fagan’s breeding – she had been raised on the goldfields of the colonies at the breast of the women who would rise from nothing to become the resilient backbone of Australian womanhood. ‘Yes,’ thought Jane to herself, ‘married or not, Ellen-Jane will do just fine for herself, for in this land, anything is possible’.