Category: Tasmanian high country history

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‘The Digger’s Rest’ and ‘The Miner’s Delight’, or banking in bottles at Adamsfield

The Adamsfield sly-grog shop was anything but sly—on the contrary, it was an open secret. Commonly known as ‘The Boozer’ and ‘The Miner’s Delight’, it functioned so long as there were thirsts to be quenched, livelihoods to be drowned and punches to be thrown. For two decades it was the toast of south-western Tasmania. The greatest bottle dump in south-western Tasmania attests to osmiridium diggers’ habit of pissing their winnings away.

A pack-horse team on its way from Fitzgerald to Adamsfield – all the liquor was brought in surreptitiously. From the Tasmanian Mail, 23 September 1925.

Control the liquor, and you control the town—or so the theory went. In the absence of police, church, bank and any moral authority apart from a committee formed by the diggers themselves, a licensed hotel was surely the key to controlling the reputedly 800- or 1000-man-strong Adams River osmiridium rush of 1925. So it was that in December of that year a licence was granted to well-known publican Eldon Joseph. Lot 10 in the newly surveyed township of Adamsfield was set aside for his establishment, but it burned down during construction and never opened.[1] In its place, Bernie ‘Saviour’ Symmons, as he was known, built a billiard room and sly-grog shop which occupied Lots 9 and 10. Symmons’ partner was Ralph Langdon, and there was a bit of history between them. Langdon had previous convictions for running Hobart gaming houses, including one with Symmons.[2] When the Adams River rush began the pair first operated a ‘refreshment’ hut—that is, a sly-grog and accommodation house known as ‘The Digger’s Rest’—as the first staging post along the 42-kilometre track.[3] Gladys Langdon was the cook and manager there.[4]

‘The Digger’s Rest’, the first Symmons and Langdon sly-grog shop on the Adamsfield Track, 1929. Cropped from NS1914-1-29, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.

Now Symmons and Langdon were doing the same thing in Adamsfield itself. This establishment, known officially as Symmons’ Hall, was rocked by a bomb in June 1926. The device probably consisted of sticks of gelignite placed inside a jam tin under a bed, and such was the explosion that it rocked a diggers’ camp kilometres away at the Boyes River.[5] Most likely it was not a big job to rebuild ‘The Boozer’ after that, since it would only have been a large paling hut, and soon, inevitably, it was the scene of further ruckuses, fist fights and raids by visiting police.

The most celebrated altercation at ‘The Boozer’ was the one in which digger Arthur Blacklow had the end of his nose bitten off in a drunken brawl, a case which played out as a grievous bodily harm charge in the New Norfolk Police Court. The alleged nose biter was acquitted after a piece of proboscis in a bottle was presented as evidence. Blacklow chose this time to reveal that he could not recognise his own nose:

‘He could not … say that the flesh in the bottle was the piece of nose he gave to the sister [Nurse Johnson, the Adamsfield bush nurse]. The piece given to the sister would be bigger.’[6]

Symmons and Langdon remained partners until 1930, when both left the field. Remarkably, neither was ever busted for selling liquor without a licence. ‘Remarkably’ refers in particular to a 1926 raid on the two buildings that sat on Lots 9 and 10. Sergeant Arnol entered the building on Lot 10, which appears to have been an alcohol warehouse, something akin to a Russian supermarket. Inside he found

  • 26 bottles of brandy
  • 30 half flasks of brandy and whisky
  • 15 bottles of Schnapps
  • 1 case of gin
  • 1 case of brandy
  • 8 bottles of gin
  • 8 bottles of ‘special’ whisky
  • 13 bottles of rum
  • 50 flasks of gin and Schnapps
  • 3 bottles of ale
  • boxes consigned to R Langdon, Fitzgerald

Arnol charged John Holder, who was on the premises, with selling liquor without a licence, but he could not prove that Holder was the owner of the premises.

Sergeant Arnol also went next door to the building on Lot 9, where he found Ralph Langdon, plus a counter with 14 empty beer glasses on it, a bottle of gin, a bottle of rum, a 9-gallon cask of beer and other empty casks. He charged Langdon with selling liquor without a licence. However, because the premises were registered in the name of Bernie Symmons, the charge could not be sustained.[7] Failure to convict in the face of overwhelming evidence probably did nothing for Arnol’s career prospects.

Ralph Langdon’s story has other priceless elements. One is that when he sold his business in Adamsfield he got into an argument with the buyer, John Gladstone, and the sale of a sly-grog shop ended up being adjudicated on in the Supreme Court in 1931.[8] The second is that Langdon put his takings from his Adamsfield business into buying the lease of the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Hobart.[9] Did he wow the Licensing Board with ossie field testimonials?

Langdon’s successors in the Adamsfield sly-grog trade, John Gladstone and Elias Churchill, were both nabbed for selling liquor without a licence at ‘The Boozer’ in 1930.[10] Churchill followed Langdon by becoming a Hobart publican. In 1934 Langdon had the Wheatsheaf and Churchill had the Duke of York.[11] William Francis Powell, an old Victorian digger who had come to Adamsfield via Savage River, replaced them in the senior apprentice position at ‘The Boozer’. Powell’s sly-grog shop, which slowly disintegrated among the bracken ferns after his death in 1946, is still marked by an impressive bottle dump—last resting place of ‘The Miner’s Delight’, or the true ‘bank’ of Adamsfield.[12]

[1] ‘Hotel for Adams Field [sic]’, Mercury, 10 December 1925, p.10.

[2] ‘Successful police raid’, News (Hobart), 6 January 1925, p.3.

[3] ‘The “Ossy” field’, News, 5 November 1925, p.1

[4] ‘Whose property?’, Mercury, 1 December 1933, p.6.

[5] ‘Sensation at Adamsfield’, Mercury, 3 June 1926, p.6; ‘Adamsfield: the recent bombing case’, Mercury, 9 June 1926, p.9.

[6] ‘Adamsfield affray’, Mercury, 19 November 1931, p.2.

[7] ‘Alleged sly-grog selling’, Mercury, 8 January 1927, p.2. ‘Registered’ does not refer to holding a liquor licence. Under the various Crown Lands Acts, a residence licence could be obtained to take possession of and occupy up to a quarter of an acre of land.

[8] ‘Supreme Court’, Mercury, 16 September 1931, p.11.

[9] ‘Whose property?’, Mercury, 1 December 1933, p.6.

[10] ‘Sly grog at Adamsfield’, Advocate (Burnie), 30 June 1930, p.5.

[11] ‘Licensing Courts’, Mercury, 29 October 1934, p.2.

[12] ‘Family notices’, Mercury, 9 March 1946, p.10.

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On the trail of Hooky Jack, Portuguese ossie digger

John Baptiste (left), a female visitor and a fellow digger at camp, Savage River, in 1924. Fred Smithies photo, NS573-4-4-1, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.
John Baptiste, aka Hooky Jack, hides his metal hook hand, Savage River, 1924. Fred Smithies photo, NS573-4-2, TAHO.

 

Old Hooky was no new chum—

All his life he’d chased the gold.

And judging by his ‘skiting’

Won—and squandered—wealth untold.

He’d chased it in the Yukon,

In Alaska’s ice and snow,

And north from hot Coolgardie

Where the toughest only go.[1]

The toughest also tackled Tasmania, chasing osmiridium, and that’s where ossie digger Henry Humphries penned these words about his old mate ‘Hooky Jack’. The one-armed prospector, born as John D’Ahren Baptiste, spent at least three decades on Australian shores chasing everything that glittered. And he had a way of finding it:

A lucky man was Hooky and,

In truth, no matter where

He sank the most unlikely hole

There’d be some ‘metal’ there.[2]

Luck or skill? I fancy the latter. You don’t storm goldfields without learning the how, where and why of finding precious metals.

But who was Hooky Jack, and where did he come from? He is said to have inherited the equivalent of £30,000 ($60,000) in his home town of Madeira, Portugal, back in the 1880s, before embarking on his tour of world goldfields.[3] Perhaps squandering his inheritance was the start of a dissolute life, a rollicking refrain of tramp steamers, bars, brothels and all the trappings of the wild west.

It seems unlikely that Baptise made a fortune on Australian gold or Tasmanian osmiridium, although, admittedly, he is a hard man to track on local soil. Prospectors of a century ago often managed to elude electoral rolls, censuses and other public records. Although ships’ logs, gazetted mining leases and court cases are the historian’s allies, the John Baptistes of Australia take some sorting. Newspapers of his day bore so many references to the biblical John the Baptist, to St John the Baptist churches, guilds, fetes, lodges and French statesmen that following the prospector’s life is a painstaking affair. He wasn’t John Baptiste the Portuguese sailor executed for murder at Perth in 1900.[4] Nor was he the Sydney nurseryman John Baptist, and as for the Parisian sausage maker and confectioner from Wagga Wagga … let’s just say that these would be surprising career moves for a carousing wastrel.[5]

Happily, John D’Ahren Baptiste had some distinguishing characteristics which aid identification. One was his love of rum, another the colour of his skin. Baptiste was referred to as a ‘coloured gentleman’ and a ‘half caste’. There was hilarity in a North Melbourne courtroom when in 1895 he was summoned to answer a paternity suit. Baptiste’s defence submitted that the complainant, Annie Boddington, had no proof that he was the father of her newborn. Boddington’s response was to produce the dark-skinned infant, shouting, ‘Haven’t I! He’s a black man—and there’s no mistake about this lot’. The judge seems to have accepted this rather flimsy ‘evidence’, ordering Baptiste to pay maintenance.[6]

Baptiste’s most distinctive trait was his hook. Various prosthetics led the way on the osmiridium fields. ‘Peg Leg Ted’ Loughnan climbed Mount Stewart on one good leg to peg a reward claim in 1917.[7] Lost Adamsfield schoolteacher Tom Cole was tracked along the Gell River by indentations left in the soil by his wooden leg in 1938.[8] It helped carry him into eternity. Baptiste’s metal hook beat those wooden legs for versatility. It raked the fire, served as a fork in food preparation and hoisted the billy from the hot coals. He could saw with it, swing a pick and chop with it.[9] In a brawl he was even said to have used his hook as a club.[10]

Exactly how or when he lost his hand is unknown. Certainly he had the hook during his time on the Gippsland goldfields, Victoria, during the early 1900s.[11] Max Dyer described Baptiste as

‘probably the best miner to ever sluice gold along the Mitta Mitta. Folks used to say that Hookey [sic] could smell gold, as he was never known to have a useless claim. He had a drinking problem as well, and my mother had often told me of Hookey waving his hook in the air and cursing all and sundry … when he was in town on a bender. This only happened occasionally and when he was working his claim he gave it his undivided attention’.[12]

Yes, Hooky Jack knew his business and had plenty of nous. This was apparent when he arrived on the Nineteen Mile Creek osmiridium field nineteen miles west of Waratah. In 1914 stockpiling caused a dramatic slide in the osmiridium price, so he stashed nineteen ounces at the Waratah Post Office and returned to Gippsland, where he registered the Hard to Seek gold claim.[13] Negotiations over sale of that osmiridium stash continued while he was in New Zealand 1916–17, and he probably disposed of it in 1918 when the price almost doubled.[14]

With Russia engulfed in civil war, Tasmania suddenly had a world monopoly on the point metal osmiridium used to tip the nibs of gold fountain pens. Baptiste hit the new Mount Stewart ossie field in the foothills of the Meredith Range. Later he tried Savage River, working firstly with Harry Stanley, then with Charles Connors. His partnership with the latter ended in 1923 after the Portuguese spent nineteen days in the Waratah Hospital recovering from several blows to the head with a vase.[15]

John Baptiste (back to camera) working a sluice box for osmiridium at Keep it Dark Gully, Adamsfield. From the Tasmanian Mail, 11 November 1925, p.40.

Baptiste fared better with former policeman Percy Marsh. The pair was among the first diggers to follow the Stacey parties to the Adams River osmiridium field in June 1925. There the Adamsfield poet ‘Mulga Mick’ O’Reilly claimed to have found Baptiste doing so well that he employed two men: one carried his stores in from the Florentine River, while another ‘did his cooking, fetched his whisky from the sly-grog shop, and put him to bed at night’. One report was that he sold his claim for a bottle of rum.[16] Another had Baptiste making £8000 in three months with Marsh at Keep it Dark Gully—a sly reference to his skin colour?—before selling the claim for £350.[17] Again, however, rum may have been his downfall, as he claimed to have been robbed of £200 of his winnings in Hobart in December 1925.[18] Perhaps this is what caused him to default on payments for a block of land at Prince of Wales Bay, Glenorchy, in 1927, losing his investment.[19] By then Hooky Jack was back on the west coast, prospecting for tin in the Norfolk Range.[20]

Baptiste was done with the ossie, but what happened to his winnings? Was it a case of easy come, easy go in a string of Hobart pubs and brothels? And what happened to him? He was not the supposed 64-year-old Frenchman John Baptiste who died at Broken Hill in 1938.[21] Nor did he go missing on the Great Depression gold trail like Harry Bell Lasseter. Baptiste appears to have seen out his days prospecting for gold in Gippsland, a naturalised Australian who passed the age of 80.[22] Perhaps, like Sammy Dwyer, last man at the Nineteen Mile, he was content to scrape a subsistence living from an old field he knew well, cooking in a camp oven, growing a few vegetables and reading about a world that had passed him by.

 

[1] Henry Humphries, ‘Hooky Jack’; poem printed in the Advocate (Burnie), 31 March 1962, p.13.

[2] Henry Humphries, ‘Hooky Jack’; poem printed in the Advocate (Burnie), 31 March 1962, p.13.

[3] ‘Along the “ossy” track’, News (Hobart), 10 September 1925, p.1.

[4] ‘The Ethel mutiny and murders’, West Australian (Perth), 18 June 1900, p.2.

[5] See, for example, ‘Progress of the suburbs’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 1914, p.8; and advert, Wagga Wagga Express, 15 August 1895, p.4.

[6] ‘A black bit of evidence’, Age (Melbourne), 18 October 1895, p.6.

[7] For Loughnan’s application for a monetary reward for his and Stanton’s discovery, see Edward Loughnan to Sir Elliott Lewis 23 December 1920, AB948/1/98 107B ‘Correspondence: osmiridium’ (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Hobart).

[8] ‘Feared that missing prospectors have been drowned’, Advocate, 17 June 1938, p.6.

[9] Henry Humphries, ‘Hooky Jack’; poem printed in the Advocate, 31 March 1962, p.13.

[10] ‘Waratah assault case’, Advocate, 19 November 1923, p.5.

[11] The Commonwealth of Australia electoral rolls for 1903, 1908 and 1909, State of Victoria, Division of Gippsland, roll of electors for the Subdivision of Omeo, described John Baptiste as a miner at Mitta Mitta. In 1911 his 30-acre gold lease on the Bemm River, Gippsland, was gazetted as abandoned (‘Gazette notifications’, Bairnsdale Advertiser and Tambo and Omeo Chronicle (Victoria), 2 September 1911, p.2). He was naturalised on 29 November 1911 at the age of 49, Victoria, Index to naturalisation certificates, no.12861, https://www.ancestry.com.au/interactive/60711/44441_346529-02210?pid=16656&backurl=http://search.ancestry.com.au/cgi-bin/sse.dll?_phsrc%3DAEX134%26_phstart%3DsuccessSource%26usePUBJs%3Dtrue%26gss%3Dangs-g%26new%3D1%26rank%3D1%26gsfn%3Djohn%26gsfn_x%3DNIC%26gsln%3Dbaptista%26gsln_x%3DNN%26msbdy%3D1865%26msbpn__ftp%3DPortugal%26msbpn%3D5184%26msypn__ftp%3DMelbourne,%2520Victoria,%2520Australia%26msypn%3D97862%26cpxt%3D1%26cp%3D2%26MSAV%3D1%26MSV%3D0%26uidh%3D2l5%26pcat%3DROOT_CATEGORY%26h%3D16656%26recoff%3D6%25208%26dbid%3D60711%26indiv%3D1%26ml_rpos%3D1&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=AEX134&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true, accessed 17 June 2017.

[12] Max Dyer, Hot air, bee stings & echoes: more bush yarns, the author, Bairnsdale (Victoria), 2006, pp.5 and 49.

[13] HB Silberberg to Bert Osborne, 8 May 1914, File 64-2-14, HB Selby & Co Papers (Noel Butlin Business Archive, Canberra); advert, Snowy River Mail (Orbost, Victoria), 11 December 1914, p.2.

[14] HB Selby to John Baptiste, 14 December 1916 and 19 January 1917, File 64-2-17, HB Selby & Co Papers (Noel Butlin Business Archive, Canberra);

[15] ‘Waratah assault case’, Advocate, 19 November 1923, p.5.

[16] MJ O’Reilly (‘Mulga Mick’), Bowyangs and boomerangs: reminiscences of 40 years’ prospecting in Australia and Tasmania, Hesperian, Carlisle (Western Australia), 1984 reprint, p.160.

[17] ‘The sifting out’, Examiner, 25 December 1925, p.5; ‘Adams River osmiridium field’, News (Hobart), 9 September 1925, p.1.

[18] ‘The morning after’, Daily News (Perth), 30 December 1925, p.1.

[19] Advert, Mercury, 16 November 1927, p.12.

[20] ‘Reported missing: prospector returns to camp, Mercury, 29 July 1927, p.6.

[21] ‘Wilcannia-Forbes Diocese’, Catholic Press, 22 September 1937, p.27.

[22] The Commonwealth of Australia electoral rolls for 1931, 1934 and 1943, State of Victoria, Division of Gippsland, roll of electors for the Subdivision of Leongatha, described John A Baptista as a prospector at Walkerville, via Fish Creek.

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Osmiridium and anonymity, or Jewelled nights and gender identity

More like a manicurist than a miner: Louise Lovely as Dick Fleetwood (right) and Gordon Collingridge as Salarno (left) in the 1925 movie Jewelled nights. JH Robinson photo courtesy of the late Nancy Gillard.

In November 1922 Nineteen Mile Creek osmiridium digger Charlie Prouse slapped a record-breaking lump of metal on the bar of Bischoff Hotel in Waratah, the nearest town. Prouse’s sale of his father Tom’s all-time-Tasmanian-record nugget probably brought them much needed, instant cash—and paid off their tab.

Metal as frontier currency fed into the old gold rush romance of a roistering wild west. This image and the rugged landscape appealed to Hobart romance writer Marie Bjelke Petersen, who found ‘nuggets’ of a different kind—human ones—on the ‘ossie’ fields. Some of her nuggets were female. In her best-selling 1923 novel Jewelled nights, gender bending on the Savage River osmiridium field enabled a Melbourne society belle to evade a marriage of inconvenience.[1] The runaway bride, Elaine Fleetwood, hid out on the Tasmanian frontier in the guise of a man, Dick Fleetwood. When, eventually, her clever disguise of slicked-down hair and dungarees failed her, the heroine submitted to fellow digger Larry Salarno, nature’s true gentleman. They married in nature’s own cathedral, a beautiful button grass area known as Long Plain, which today, unfortunately, is not quite so romantic, being occupied by the settling ponds of the Savage River iron ore mine.[2]

Bjelke Petersen was already a best-selling author when she wrote Jewelled nights. The irony of gushing heterosexual romance peddled by an unmarried virgin with a live-in female companion seems to have been lost on swooning young female fans across the English-speaking world. In the course of her research, Bjelke Petersen had established a reputation for venturing into the masculine realm at the frontier of civilisation. In 1921 she and her companion Sylvia Mills took a grand tour of the western mining fields. Based at the Whyte River Hotel, and with Vic Whyman as their guide, they had many thrilling experiences while visiting the Rio Tinto (Savage River bridge), Burnt Spur and Nineteen Mile osmiridium fields.[3] Bjelke Petersen gushed that

‘we often wondered if we should ever return. The precipitous mountain tracks were so dangerous, snakes were most numerous, we had to drive with horses that had never been in harness before, and were out in thunderous storms of tropical severity …’

She claimed that on one occasion, only the intervention of Joe O’Connor, manager of the Jasper mine, saved the pair from being backed off the edge of a mountain track by a frightened horse during a storm. While crossing Long Plain en route to Burnt Spur, the author was struck by

‘the most gorgeous forests of giant myrtles and sassafras, the densest in the world, with alluring fern gullies and trickling streams, all along the five miles of awe-inspiring grandeur till the river was reached, deep down in the heart of a huge ravine’.[4]

Members of the Humphries family, Rendelsham, South Australia, 1905, including four future osmiridium diggers: the amateur poet Henry (back row, second from left), Allan (standing, extreme left), Bob (standing, extreme right) and Frances Hazel (aka Frank, the girl in the centre of the front row). Photo courtesy of the late Olive Plapp.
Frances Hazel Humphries (in wide-brimmed hat) as a young woman. Crop from a Stephen Hooker photo courtesy of Phil Rolton.
Frank Humphries as a man (standing, at left), 1932. Crop from a photo courtesy of the late Olive Plapp.

At Burnt Spur, where her novel was later set, she met one of the osmiridium field’s two women, Eva Tudor. A local legend, however, preferred another local, Frances Hazel Humphries, as the model for Bjelke Petersen’s heroine Elaine Fleetwood.[5] Humphries, born a girl and known by her middle name Hazel, eventually took a male name, wore men’s clothes, and performed traditionally male labour—including a stint on the Mount Stewart osmiridium field. Former Waratah resident Eric Thomas believed that as a young woman Hazel fell pregnant and, after having the baby at a Salvation Army maternity home, returned to Waratah as Frank Humphries, with hair brushed back and wearing a felt hat. He milked cows for the Penney family and delivered the milk by cart around Waratah. Thomas remembered that after a short stint working at Mrs Delphin’s ‘eat up shop’ in Waratah, Frank tried his hand at the osmiridium fields. It was there that Thomas met him while packing supplies for Tom Cumming and Ray Whyman.[6] In his book Taking you back down the track, Humphries’ contemporary Harry Reginald Paine recalled his ability with horses, cross-cut saw and pick and shovel.[7] In the years 1926‒31 Frank Humphries was an employee of the Burnie Dairy Co.[8] Later he became a Burnie shopkeeper, and ‘married’ a female partner with whom he relocated to Melbourne.

There were female diggers and miners’ partners on several osmiridium fields. Frank–Hazel’s story is more unusual yet, but there is no evidence of it being the inspiration for Marie Bjelke Petersen’s romance. It is unknown whether Bjelke Petersen even met Humphries. Yet one can imagine the novelist admiring a woman who refused, as Bjelke Petersen did herself, to conform to a prescribed gender role. Career, social standing and much wider scrutiny would have prevented Bjelke Petersen venturing beyond this role in Hobart—but the western mining fields, as the author found, offered a non-conformist almost anonymity. Perhaps that discovery was the real inspiration for Jewelled nights.

[1] Marie Bjelke Petersen, Jewelled nights, Hutchinson & Co, London, 1923.

[2] Button grass (Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus) is a native Tasmanian sedgeland plant so named because of its button-like seed heads.

[3] Vic Whyman claimed he was the singing coach driver who was immortalised in Jewelled nights. See Maggie Weidenhofer, ‘Marie Bjelke Petersen: forgotten writer of passion’, This Australia, Spring 1983, p.42.

[4] ‘In the wilds of the west’, Advocate, 29 January 1921, p.3.

[5] See Harry Reginald Paine, Taking you back down the track … is about Waratah in the early days, Somerset, 1994, p.98.

[6] Letter from Eric Thomas, undated, 1990s. The 1919 and 1924 assessment rolls show H Humphries occupying a cottage in North Street owned by HP McCreery (Tasmanian Government Gazette, 10 November 1919, p.2122; and 24 November 1924, p.2280).

[7] Harry Reginald Paine, Taking you back down the track … is about Waratah in the early days, Somerset, 1994, p.98.

[8] ’15 witnesses examined yesterday’, Advocate, 2 September 1931, p.6.