The Welsh in an Australian Gold Town

Ballarat, Victoria 1850-1900

Robert Tyler

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783161737
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

This book provides an analysis of the Welsh immigrant community in an Australian gold mining town during the second half of the nineteenth century and considers all aspects of the Welsh immigrant experience.

1

Settlement Patterns

Ffurfia Ballarat a rhai o’r maesdrefi, megis Sebastopol, fath o Dywysogaeth fechan Gymreig. Y Gymraeg a siaradir, a ysgrifenir, a bregethir, ac a genir yno, a rhoddir cerddoriaeth Gymreig, a chynelir cyfarfodydd llenyddol yno o bryd i bryd, lle y bydd y teulueodd mawr Cymreig, Jones, Davies, Thomas, Evans, Lloyd, a Williams, yn difyru eu hunain mewn modd a fuasai yn llawenhau yr hen feirdd gynt.1

(Ballarat and some of its suburbs, such as Sebastopol, form a sort of small Welsh Principality. There, Welsh is spoken, written, preached and sung, Welsh music is performed, and from time to time Welsh literary meetings are held where the great Welsh families, Jones, Davies, Thomas, Evans, Lloyd and Williams, amuse themselves in a way which would please the bards of old.)

Any study of nineteenth-century Welsh immigration must first acknowledge the numbers involved. Indeed, Alan Conway has described the Welsh in the United States as constituting ‘little more than a corporal’s guard’, and it is true to say that Welsh emigrants have always been few in number.2 This was due not only to the small size of the Welsh population, which did not register as more than one million until the 1841 census, but also to the rate of emigration from Wales, which was significantly lower than that from England, Scotland or Ireland.3 Nevertheless, table 1.1 indicates that, although relatively few people from Wales emigrated to the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century, by the third quarter of that century Welsh-born individuals were to be found in almost every colonized part of the continent.4

Despite this widespread penetration, the Welsh presence in Australia was largely concentrated into relatively few areas. Besides the existence of small groups of Welsh people in the major cities, immigrants from Wales tended, initially at least, to congregate in the various mining centres; the copper mines of Burra Burra, Kapunda and Wallaroo in South Australia, the coal-mining districts of Newcastle in New South Wales and at Ipswich in Queensland and, most notably, the gold-bearing regions of Victoria.5 Table 1.1 shows that in Australia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the colony of Victoria which attracted the largest numbers of Welsh immigrants.

Contemporary Welsh newspapers and periodicals identified the Welsh amongst the earliest immigrants to the Victorian gold fields.6 Yr Amserau, on 27 October 1852, contained a poem on the occasion of the marriage between D. H. Evans (Daniel Ddu o Fôn), who was to become a well-known figure in Welsh literary circles in Victoria, and Miss Rachel Evans, Bassaleg, Monmouthshire, and their departure with friends to Australia.7 Similarly, Y Cymro reported, in August 1854, that ‘Over twelve young men left Holyhead and its neighbourhood last week, from which port they took their passage to the diggings . . . They are strong and powerful and likely to earn their living in the colony.’8 The Revd J. Farr, a Congregational minister from Aberdare, Glamorgan, who was to serve for many years in Ballarat, whilst bound for Melbourne on the Monarch of the Sea in 1857, was ‘agreeably surprised to find that there were from eighty to ninety other Welsh people amongst the passengers’. Farr took the opportunity to preach in Welsh to his fellow countrymen and in English to English and Scottish passengers, his ‘first attempt to speak publicly in the resonant language of the conquering Saxon’.9

Table 1.1: Welsh-born in Australia

The Welsh were in evidence both in Melbourne and on the diggings from the earliest days. In a letter to a friend in Wales, dated 19 May 1854, Robert Lewis, who was to become a prominent Ballarat businessman and politician, wrote from Melbourne: ‘There are great many Welsh people in this Colony.’ Four months later he wrote: ‘I have not regretted coming here myself, there are a great many Welsh here.’10 In September 1854, Griffith Jones wrote from the diggings at Mount Alexander:

There were about 4000 people working there, and those who had come first were doing excellently. There is the rumour about that the Welsh generally do not do as well as other nationalities but in this place the Welsh are the best, or at least they are as good as the best. There were here too quite a number from Pontypridd and other districts in Glamorgan, but most of them were an ungodly and shameless crowd . . . Many do well, and very well, in this place, but many more are making nothing.11

In March 1855, Daniel Evans of Llanberis, Caernarfonshire, wrote from the Castlemaine area:

There are many scores of Welshmen in this place. I hear Welsh and see Welsh people as if I was there in Wales. There are people here from every part of Wales, and, as far as I know, from every part of the world too.12

Welsh immigrants also recognized familiar faces. In Melbourne, Robert Lewis encountered people from his home town of Aberystwyth on a daily basis.13 Similarly, a letter from Mary Jones, who went from Merionethshire, north Wales, in 1856 and lived in Ballarat between November 1858 and March 1861, mentions and names several acquaintances from Meirioneth who were living in the district.14

As tables 1.2 and 1.3 indicate, however, even in Victoria, the colony attracting the largest number of Welsh immigrants in the decades following 1850, the Welsh were swamped by representatives of the other UK nations.15 As early as 1854, however, census returns also indicated a concentration of Welsh migrants within Victoria itself. As table 1.4 shows, while those born in Wales comprised only 0.98 per cent of the colony’s population, within the gold fields they made up 1.66 per cent of the total. This was in direct contrast to the Irish and Scottish whose gold-field presence was weaker than that in the colony as a whole. The propensity of the Welsh to concentrate in the goldmining districts was again underlined by the returns of the 1857 census. While the Welsh-born comprised a mere 1.12 per cent of the colony’s population, they made up a more significant 1.61 per cent of those resident in the gold fields (table 1.5). This tendency is further highlighted by table 1.6, which shows the extent to which each national group was concentrated on the gold fields in the 1850s. As is apparent, the Welsh, with around 50 per cent of their number resident on the gold fields, far outstripped the English, Scots and Irish.

Table 1.2: Numbers of Welsh-, English-, Scottish- and Irish-born in Victoria

Table 1.3: Welsh-, English-, Scottish- and Irish-born in Victoria as a percentage of total population

By the late 1850s, therefore, a pattern had emerged which saw a small Welsh presence made more visible by its concentration in gold-mining areas and within these areas centres such as Ballarat were becoming noted for their Welsh populations. Robert Lewis was not wrong when he wrote from Ballarat, in June 1857, ‘there are great many Welsh people here’, and by the late 1850s the town had emerged as the major focal point for Welsh immigrants and their presence was commented upon by many contemporary observers.16 The Ballarat newspaper, the Miner and Weekly Star, in its issue for 1 January 1858, contained an article describing the Christmas celebrations at the Welsh Church on Bakery Hill. This event drew people from ‘all parts of this district. Every gold lead furnished its quota, from the Durham to the Eureka leads, and the little Chapel was too small to accommodate the numbers present, the tables were filled and emptied several times in succession.’17 At the celebrations in honour of Wales’s patron saint, St David, held on 1 March 1859, the assembly at the Welsh Chapel in Sebastopol was entertained by the Sebastopol Welsh Choir, the existence of which suggests the presence of a vibrant Welsh community.18 Welsh cultural vitality in the area was further revealed by the activities of the Ballarat Welsh Literary Society, formed as early as January 1857, which was described at the end of the decade as ‘the most flourishing Welsh Literary Society in Australia’.19 In April 1859, the Welsh periodical, Seren Cymru, stated that in Ballarat and its neighbourhood one-third of the colony’s six thousand Welsh were to be found.20

Table 1.4: Percentage by birthplace in each region, 1854

Table 1.5: Percentage by birthplace in each region, 1857

Table 1.6: Percentage of each nationality found on the gold fields, 1854 and 1857

The year 1861 saw the number of Welsh-born individuals in Victoria standing at 6,055 and comprising 1.12 per cent of the total population. The census, while again revealing a disproportionate Welsh presence in the gold fields, 1.71 per cent (table 1.7), also provided details which indicated ...