In February 1864 The Australian News for Home Readers published an engraving by Frederick Grosse depicting Woods Point, a gold mining settlement on the Upper Goulburn goldfields in north-east Victoria on the land of the Taungurung people. In Grosse’s engraving below, we can see that he populated the settlement with several figures digging holes in the ground with axes and shovels, chopping wood, and chatting to one another outside the hotels and stores. When we look more closely, we find that these figures are all men. Grosse’s view of Woods Point—at least from this vantage point—was a goldfield without women. Where were all the women?
Although not as well-known or accessible as the central Victorian goldfields, the Upper Goulburn goldfields were another stop on the well-trodden trail of gold that extended across the globe in the nineteenth century.
From the mid-1850s, small parties of miners had been working the Goulburn and Big Rivers south of Chenery’s station near Mansfield, but limited returns and difficulties getting into the steep and thickly timbered ranges meant there was less interest in this region than there was in central Victoria or further north on the Ovens goldfields.
From 1860 new gold discoveries on tributaries of the Goulburn River saw the trickle of gold miners—and the packers and storekeepers who supplied them—gather momentum. With them came a small number of women and families. It was a difficult journey. The tracks to the goldfields were too steep and narrow for wheeled coaches, and so travellers had to walk, ride or cling to a pack horse. Some women and children travelled in panniers strapped to the side of a pack horse as it was thought to be safer, but others made the journey on foot, sometimes in the rain and snow. Despite the rugged terrain and alpine climate, when Grosse’s engraving was published in February 1864 larger numbers of women and families had already joined the miners, packers and storekeepers and were helping to make homes, families and communities on the Upper Goulburn goldfields.
Among the families who settled in Woods Point were my great-great grandparents, John Knopp and Catherine Foley, who emigrated separately from Germany and Ireland in the 1860s. In 2006 I inherited a scrapbook that their daughter Margaret began compiling in 1884 when she was living in Woods Point. As I studied this intriguing family heirloom I became curious about Margaret and the 1860s gold rush that brought her parents to the region. My initial research on the scrapbook (now in the collection of Museum Victoria) led me to complete a doctorate in history at Monash University with a thesis on Women and Community on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields.
Within the collections of libraries, archives and museums I found accounts of women holding tight to pack horses as they were carried up and down the steep tracks that miners and packers had cut through the forest to reach the diggings. I studied illustrations and descriptions of the canvas tents and timber huts women furnished from belongings they’d carried with them, made by hand, or purchased from storekeepers on the goldfields and nearby towns. Using my family history skills, I cross-referenced birth registrations and inquest files and pieced together an informal network of mothers and midwives, some of whom had probably met on other goldfields. Reading one miner’s letters to his mother and siblings in England I was captivated by the ordinary intimacy of family life on the nearby Raspberry Creek goldfields. I scrolled through the local newspapers on microfilm and searched Trove looking for evidence of women’s work in hotels and stores, as well as their unpaid fundraising activities for schools, churches and hospitals. I may have become more than a little obsessed with one performer who entertained goldfield audiences and ran hotels, and who later found herself stranded on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for several months in 1872. Reading men’s recollections of the Upper Goulburn goldfields, I observed that women were often depicted as flirtatious barmaids or disreputable hotel keepers, while a poet and journalist who grew up in Woods Point looked beyond these archetypes to the varied circumstances that brought her mother and other women to the region.
When I visited Woods Point for the first time—a township irrevocably changed by the Black Friday bushfires in 1939—I saw a different view to that of Frederick Grosse.
My Woods Point had been populated by fascinating, complex women of all ages and from a variety of backgrounds who—for short or long periods— raised their families in the timber cottages that once lined the banks of the Goulburn River, who tended the terraced gardens on the hillsides, who navigated the unmade streets at all hours to care for other women and children whose families could not afford a doctor’s fee, who worked in the hotels and stores along Scott and Bridge streets, who trod the boards or made the refreshments for the fundraising concerts that supported the churches, schools, and hospital, as well as those who found themselves deserted, destitute and imprisoned for vagrancy.
On this site you will find more stories about the fascinating women who made homes, families, and communities on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields.
If you would like more information or have stories you’d like to share, please contact me.