Chapter 7: Applying Historical Research to Heritage Conservation: A Case Study of the Miner’s Cottage

Charles Fahey

Introduction

Late in his life the successful clothing manufacturer David Fletcher Jones recalled his childhood growing up among miners in the Bendigo suburb of Golden Square. The son of a gold mine employee, one of Fletcher Jones’ strongest memories was the rows of weatherboard cottages that lined his street as a child. For the Jones family, life was often lived on the economic margin. When his father suffered from a depilating carbuncle on his neck the family was without a source of income for many weeks. Yet food regularly appeared on their verandah, donated anonymously by neighbours. In his teen years, Jones was presented with a vial of quartz dust by his father. This was a potent message that mining was a dangerous occupation and that his son should fight the injustice of industrial illness. For the young Fletcher Jones the dangers of mining were all too obvious. One of his strongest childhood memories was of bed sheets draped over the verandahs of the Golden Square cottages; behind the sheets miners lingered during the day, racked with coughs from ‘miners’ complaint’ or silicosis. In 1915, Jones joined the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and saw action at Fromelles in August 1916. In one battle he was buried alive for several hours. He was repatriated to Australia in 1917, and on his return to Golden Square he found his old suburb in dire economic stress due to the collapse of goldmining during the war. Again the cottages of Golden Square were a feature of his post-war memories; in this case he recalled cottages lifted onto drays bound for soldier settlers clearing dense scrub in the Mallee. This was another sign that his home community of Bendigo offered little prospects of advancement. Fletcher Jones left Bendigo and eventually established a successful clothing manufacturing and retail company, with a factory in Warrnambool and almost 50 shops across Australia. The experience of growing up in a working-class community never left him and was instrumental in forming his radical views on profit sharing and working cooperatively with his employees.^[1]

Since the mid-1970s great strides have been made to protect the built heritage of Bendigo, Ballarat and other Victorian goldmining cities and towns. Pall Mall in Bendigo or Sturt Street in Ballarat offer magnificent Victorian streetscapes and are a lure for tourists. In recognition of the importance of the Victorian goldfields, the Victorian government and a group of local councils are currently preparing a case to have the goldfields serially listed as a World Heritage Area.^[2] A serial listing acknowledges that individual sites may not rank on a world scale, like the Sydney Opera House or the Parthenon, but looked at collectively they may demonstrate a historic era or event. A number of convict sites in Australia have been listed for their ability to help us understand the forced migration of convicts across the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.^[3] A significant theme of the goldfields bid is the world importance of migration in the 19th century and of mineral discoveries as one of the factors pulling migrants to settler colonial nations. The mass movement of people meant housing new arrivals, and suburbs such as Golden Square, with small, weatherboard houses on Crown land, provided a solution to this problem. A critical feature in the economic and social development of the Victorian goldfields – the miner’s cottage – has only slowly been recognised as a significant cultural artefact. Inadequate historical research or the failure to link history with architectural fieldwork has downplayed the importance of ordinary working-class housing.

Gold was discovered in Bendigo late in 1851 and the surrounding valley was rapidly filled with eager prospectors seeking their fortunes. Alluvial gold provided only short-term riches; in the long run the creation of an enduring city of Bendigo was based on the exploitation of gold locked in quartz reefs. By the end of the 19th century capitalist mining companies and a handful of wealthy goldmine owners had chased these reefs over 1000 metres below ground. In the process the valley of Bendigo became an intense focus of industrial mining; in the 1880s Bendigo boasted perhaps the greatest array of steam engines in the Australian colonies, and head frames, which stretched 8 kilometres south-north across the city, stamped the district as one of the world’s great mining centres. Mining was the economic base on which a regional city was built. The colonial and municipal governments and commercial interests endowed this city (and other goldfields) with an array of splendid Victorian and Edwardian buildings while a local middle class – mine owners, engineering proprietors, merchants, shopkeepers and professionals – built elegant villas. Conservation studies from the mid-1970s did much to protect this grand architecture. These studies failed to protect working-class timber architecture, and its preservation was stalled for over 30 years.

This chapter has three major sections. First, I examine the historical evolution of housing in 19th-century and early 20th-century Bendigo – a form of housing that was built across the Victorian goldfields and indeed on farms and in many Melbourne suburbs. I pay particular attention to the use of Crown land for mining and home building. I explore the evolution of land law relating to building residences on Crown land and the impact this had on the style of houses built and the morphology, or physical shape, of the city. In the second section, I analyse the failure of early conservation studies to undertake detailed analysis of housing. I conclude in the third section by examining a belated recognition of the importance of the miner’s cottage and the eventual development of planning machinery to protect the domestic architecture of mining. The story of the preservation of the miner’s cottage emphasises the need for detailed historical research in heritage conservation.

I am not a native of Bendigo and grew up in suburban Melbourne. I was drawn to the study of the goldfields by my first thesis supervisor, Weston Bate, whose portrait of 19th century Ballarat in book Lucky City remains our most complete account of a goldfields city.^[4] I only began to appreciate the heritage riches of the goldfields when I worked as a public historian in the 1980s researching historic sites on Crown land. My doctorate, looking in part at the goldfields, was heavily focused on archival sources. I spent a year in a basement in Melbourne examining probate records (now digitised), and I was the first academic researcher given access to records from the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. I extended this demographic research when I worked with Professor Patricia Grimshaw on a study of families and community in Castlemaine. Papers from this research appeared in an important collection called Families in Colonial Australia.^[5] While I remain proud of these papers, I must admit that when I wrote them, I really had little understanding of material culture or place. This came when I worked as a civil servant with Jane Lennon, an historical geographer, researching Crown land. This work pushed me out of Melbourne and into the goldfields and rural Victoria. As part of this work I researched, among other sites, mine mullock heaps, old flour mills at Smeaton and Murchison, and the Barmah forest. Jane Lennon always urged me ‘to read the landscape’, one of the best lessons I learned as a young historian.

In 1990 I took up a position at La Trobe University’s Bendigo campus and moved from Melbourne to what my colleagues condescendingly called ‘the regions’. My focus as an academic historian turned from public history to teaching undergraduates, supervising postgraduate students and publishing in scholarly journals. Living in Bendigo I grew to appreciate northern skies and my neighbourhood, and I continued to research the goldfields. By collecting genealogies, tracking down letters and diaries and continuing to use statistical sources, I have written extensively on the social history of the goldfields.^[6] Bringing this research to a wide audience has remained important to me. I have indulged myself writing about Happy Valley and Victoria Hill, where I walk my dog. Nonetheless this is a popular historical site, enjoyed by local residents, and my work aims to convince readers that there is more to the site than old mining machinery. The site was home to an array of migrants – Scots, Germans and the Cornish, to name a few – and their struggles to make ends meet help us understand the migrant experience. Moreover, Victoria Hill was a part of an international diaspora; gold rushes were global, a theme I took up with Lionel Frost and Keir Reeves in a special issue of the Australian Economic History Review.^[7] Around Victoria Hill, settlers built humble weatherboard houses.^[8] These vernacular home builders helped to found an Australian tradition of owner building that Tony Dingle has researched on the goldfields, in rural Australia and in metropolitan settings.^[9] Home building was not just an Australian phenomenon. In a recent study of US housing, Thomas Hubka has argued that working-class housing became modern through retrofitting and enlarging small, weatherboard, vernacular housing.^[10]