Hunting Humans
The following 3 quotations are from William Howitt:
My friend, the digger, said, that what he felt as one of the greatest evils of the digging life was the constant and close contact into which they were brought with the police … ‘Three and four times a day I have been summoned to show my licence, and threatened with handcuffs if I murmured. It is’, he added, ‘a common saying, A man has no home in this country. His only chance is to get money, and spend it elsewhere.’ The system of hunting up licences was styled ‘Man hunting’, and the foot-police ‘Man-catchers’ and ‘Bloodhounds’. It was a system that raised the indignation of high-spirited freeborn men, and excited the universal hatred of the people. The mode of collecting this tax, however, has done more to make it unpopular than the amount of the tax itself. In levying it, the tax gatherer and the tax-payer are brought too violently, and nakedly, as it were, face to face. In England, twice a year suffices for seeing the face of the tax gatherer … You are not liable, any day and any hour, and for any number of times on any one day, to be called on by this not very fascinating character, and compelled again and again, and as often as he pleases to demand it, to show your last receipt. The following quotation is from William Kelly: As I gained the surface everybody was in commotion, diggers with their licenses lowering down their mates without them … some ‘stealing away’ … The police, the mounted portion, under the commander-in-chief commissioner occupying commanding positions on the elevated ridges to intercept escape or retreat. A strong body of the foot force, fully armed, swept down the gully in extended line, attended by a corps of light infantry traps … But the orders of the officers could not be heard, from the loud and continuous roars of ‘Joe! Joe! Joe!’ – ‘Damn the b----y Government! The beaks, the traps, commissioners and all – the robbers, the bushranger’, and every other vile epithet that could be remembered. Definitions- ‘lowering down their mates’: lowering them down a mine shaft Joe: police Beak: judge, magistrate Trap: police |
The diggers put up with the thirty shillings while those who could get away with not paying suffered almost no consequences. But as time went on, the government started to get its act together and staff their goldfields offices with gold commissioners, magistrates, and police, most of them mounted troopers.
Initially, many of the troopers were First Australians. But as time went on they were replaced by former convicts from Tasmania with a very well deserved reputation for violence and brutality, and invalids from the army who were doing this instead of being invalided out. This mob developed a strong reputation. But not for policing, for boozing and whoring. And then the digger hunts began in 1853. Once a month, mounted troopers would charge over the the goldfields, the cry of "Traps, Traps", or "Joes, Joes" would go up, the latter allegedly an epithet for the troopers derived from LaTrobe's given name, Joseph. The troopers were able to spot the blokes who hadn't paid their fees because they were the ones who ran for their lives, or who dived, often blindly, into mine shafts. The latter would have to suffer the consequences of their actions. And they could be arrested when they were forced to make their inevitable way out of the shaft. The former, the runners, were the reason for the horses. A hard, brutal whack on the scone from a heavy wooden baton wielded by the chain gang muscled arm of a man who didn't care if the runner lived or died, and with the force of a galloping horse behind it, would usually slow them down, until they could be chained to their unlucky comrades. But worse, some fool decided to pay the troopers 50% of each fine earned from each licence dodger brought in. Consequently, miners were arrested for not having a licence when, on a hot day they took off their shirt and the licence was in their shirt pocket, or they accidentally left their licence in their tent, or as their shafts were often incredibly wet, they sometimes needed to change clothes several times a day and sometimes left their licences behind in the rush to get back to work, and so on and so on. The troopers were, without any doubt, mostly a right bunch of bastards. All chained together, the unlucky men would be marched off to the government camp, where they would be charged and processed, dragged before a magistrate, often corrupt, not that that was of any value to a man without money, and without representation because they couldn't, of course, afford a lawyer. Inevitably, with no real chance to present an argument contrary to the police, they would be hit with a £5 fine, which everyone knew they couldn't pay, upon which they would be thrown into a rotting jail for a month or three, and perhaps provide free labour on the government's roads. Unfair, unreasonable, rotten, wrong. None of these come anywhere near adequately describing what was going on. |