You got it Woomera, good on you. I thought this one would be a bit harder as there was not much info on her.
Clacy, Ellen
Ellen Clacy (1830-1901) was born in Richmond, Surrey. In 1852, she and her eldest brother Frederick sailed to Australia to seek their fortune. She visited the goldfields where she stayed for two months, but returned to England where she began a literary career under the pseudonym of Cycla. She earned her living till her marriage writing for newspapers and magazines. Her first book, while memoir, gives a valuable account of life on the Victorian goldfields, particularly for women A Ladys Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 18521853 (1853). She also wrote fiction, including the novels Lights and Shadows of Australian Life (1854), Passing Clouds (1858), and Aunt Dorothys Will (1860). In 1854, she married Charles Berry Clacy. She died in 1901 in London.
A Ladys Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53: Written on the Spot, Hurst and Blackett , London, 1853.
Bibliography:
Thompson, Patricia (ed) (1963) A Ladys Visit to the Gold Diggings in 1852-1853, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne
No place for a lady
Most of the men who flocked to the diggings in the early years of the Australian gold rush left their wives and family at home. The harsh life of the goldfields was considered too rough for a respectable woman. It was not long, however, before women travelled to the goldfields, and as early as 1851 there were women digging for gold alongside their husbands. An 1854 census of the Ballarat goldfields found there were 4023 women compared to 12,660 men living on the diggings and only 5 percent of these women were single.
A pocket edition adventure
Ellen Clacy, a young, single, middle class woman from England, panned for gold alongside her brother and their companions. At the height of gold fever she captured the imagination of Europe when she published memoirs of her adventure A Ladys Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia. Ellen wrote of the difficult and rainy journey from Melbourne to Forest Creek. She travelled on the dray, her back resting against a bag of flour and her feet on a block of cheese. At night she slept fully-clothed in a partitioned area of her brother's tent.
Neither mud and rain, nor frightening tales of bushrangers could dampen her enthusiasm for gold digging. Ellen describes the diggings as "a novel scene! thousands of human beings engaged in digging, wheeling, carrying, and washing, intermingled with no little grumbling, scolding and swearing". Along with her daily routine of cooking for the men in her mining party and panning for gold in the dirt they dug up, she managed a few adventures. Ellen, her brother and another of their mining party were lost in the woods after a storm one Sunday night when Ellen fell into a flooded hole. Although the hole was only five feet deep, the self-described "pocket edition" sized woman was completely submerged in mud and water. Many on the diggings drowned by falling into flooded holes, but Ellen survived with only a sprained ankle.
