Accounts from Ellen Clacy, Richard Henry Horne, Seweryn Korzelinski

Accounts from Canvas Town primary sources Ellen Clacy, Richard Henry Horne and Seweryn Korzelinski

Ellen Clacy

Ellen Clacy painted by her daughter Ellen Louise Clacy. Source.

Ellen Clacy and her brother are from England and are heading for the Victorian gold fields. She is unmarried, an adventurous, enthusiastic and quick-witted young woman who clearly revels in every new experience and challenge that comes her way. She records it all with humour and candour in her journal, which will be published and become a best seller when she returns to England in 1853. 

“And is this the beautiful scenery of Australia?” was my first melancholy reflection. “Mud and swamp — swamp and mud — relieved here and there by some few trees which looked as starved and miserable as ourselves. The cattle we passed appeared in a wretched condition, and the human beings on the road seemed all to belong to one family, so truly Vandemonian* was the cast of their countenances.”

“Melbourne is very expensive, but there are some positive aspects. It was "very well laid out; the streets are very wide but are incomplete. “On the riverside entrails, blood, gore and the stripped carcases of rotting animals trailed into the river, creating a malodorous welcome to the newly arrived immigrant. Revolvers were cracking in all directions until daybreak, giving one a pleasant idea of the state of society."

"The walking inhabitants are of themselves a study: glance into the streets — all nations, classes, and costumes are represented there. Chinamen, with pigtails and loose trowsers; Aborigines, with a solitary blanket flung over them; Vandemonian pickpockets, with cunning eyes and light fingers — all, in truth, from the successful digger in his blue serge shirt, to the fashionably-attired, newly-arrived “gent” from London, who stares around him in amazement and disgust." 

Ellen Clacy reflected traditional ideas about women of the time:

"To those of my own sex who desire to emigrate to Australia, I say do by all means, if you can go under suitable protection, possess good health, are not fastidious or 'fine-ladylike,' can milk cows, churn butter, cook a good damper, and mix a pudding […] But to those who cannot wait upon themselves, and whose fair fingers are unused to the exertion of doing anything useful, my advice is, for your own sakes remain at home."
* historical A convict transported to Tasmania

Richard Henry Horne

Richard Henry Horne. Source. 

Richard Henry Horne is a well-to-do Englishman who had not done well. As a young man he was sent to train as a military officer at Sandhurst, but left to try his hand as a mercenary sailor in the Mexican wars, then became a clerk in the public service, an published poet, and a contributor to Charles Dickens' magazine "Household Words". Now, aged 51, and like thousands of others, he gathers up his wife and children, and sails around the world to seek his fortune. He quickly realises that the goldfields aren’t for him and after being robbed tries many different roles from working on the road to holding various administrative roles, unsuccessfully running for parliament before returning to England in 1869. 

“We began our wanderings over the town in search of lodgings. All were crowded, expensive, and the great majority filthy and offensive to the last degree. Being now in despair we entered many lodging-houses to no avail, offering at last to sleep anywhere if they would take us in. At last one of them consented. The night we passed defies description, partly because so much of it is unfit to relate. Sleep was impossible for the fleas, bugs, mosquitoes, and a lively sort of beetle continually running over our hands and necks.”

“I paid four shillings each for our tea, four shilling each for our bed - floor inclusive - and four shillings each for our breakfast, at which there was plenty of fried beef-steak, but so tough that we could not eat a morsel. We hurried out of this respectable den, and I admit that there were hundreds much worse, and, meeting one of the passengers who came out with us on the same ship, he told us that he had pitched his tent on the South Yarra encampment among a great number of tents, and that he had slept very comfortably after the confinement of a cabin on so long a voyage. He said the encampment was called Canvas Town."

"Canvas Town, as the name implies, is a town of tents; it is on the southern side of the Yarra, and about a quarter of a mile distant from Melbourne. At the time I write there are between six and seven hundred tents - perhaps more - and the population amounts to five or six thousand souls. The tents are arranged in rows more or less regular, and with a squalid pleasantry some of them have been called after certain well-known streets in England – "Regent-street, Bond-street, Liverpool-street”

There are tailors, butchers, bakers, shoemakers, ironmongers, blacksmiths, hardware and crockery-stalls, tin men. Almost every tent exhibits for sale cast-off clothing slops, books, cabin furniture, or utensils, with other articles of which the owners have no need here. Nearly every second tent also sells ginger-beer, or lemonade. There are two physicians' tents; who of course are at the same time surgeons, dentists, corn-cutters, and apothecaries. Young gentlemen of family and education drive water-carts about the 'streets', and sell wood felled and brought from a mile or two off in the bush.

Close to every tent is a round or oval hole for the fire, to be protected from the wind; with the addition of an old saucepan lid or a sheet of tin from the lining of a case of goods. Over the hole a piece of bent or curled-up iron hoop is placed to sustain the pot, pan, or kettle. The front of each tent presents a conglomerate specimen of all its owner's worldly possessions. The whole surface of the encampment is strewn with the rubbish and refuse of those who are gone; some immigrants only staying a week. Cast-away coats, trousers, shoes boots, bonnets, hats, bottles - whole or broken, but mostly whole - by hundreds, broken articles of furniture, cooking utensils, all grimed with dust, if not battered or half buried in the ground." 

Seweryn Korzelinski

 
Seweryn Korzelinski. Source.

Polish digger Seweryn Korzelinski described the multicultural mix:

"Even today Australia is a queer mixture, on the one hand the dark skinned natives camping in the forests, giving a stamp of wilderness to the Country, and on the other the drive to get rich, to penetrate the mystery of the land, to taste adventure which brings in a variety of people from nearly all parts of the world, people of different temperaments, talents and aims."

"A happy-go-lucky German tailor, a brawny English smith, a slightly-built French cook, a Polish Jew, an American or Dutch sailor, watchmaker, confectioner, a Swiss hat-maker, an impoverished Spanish hidalgo, gather... one can see amongst them here and there a black Negro head, a brown Hindu face or the olive countenance with slanting eyes of a ‘child of the sun’. Elsewhere in a group a Swedish sailor away from his whaling ship, a Norwegian reindeer herdsman, a gaucho from La Plata, a Creole from Malabar or Mozambique and many others sit together. They amuse themselves with conversation about their countries of origin and its habits and describe events they have experienced, because everyone crossed many lands and many a sea before arriving in Australia".