Germans selling drinks on the Victorian goldfields

German diggers selling drinks on the Victorian goldfields

Eduard Thonen, the Eureka rebel in Ballarat, was not the only digger to earn money by selling lemonade on the goldfields. It may seem strange now for someone to be known as a "lemonade-seller", but on the goldfields water (and certainly clean water, rather than water that was half-water/half-mud) was fairly scarce. Diggers used the water in the creeks for washing their "washdirt" in order to find any specks of gold in the earth they had dug up; they washed their clothes in it, and urine etc could also find its way into the water. "Safe" drinks like lemonade and cordials were popular, and on each major gold field there were a considerable number of "lemonade sellers". Sometimes, though, these drinks weren't especially clean; they were usually made with the dirty water that the digger was trying to avoid drinking, but made more attractive by the addition of flavourings like lemon syrup.

During the drought of the early part of 1852 on the Mount Alexander diggings (present-day Castlemaine region) a bucket of water that had been carted up from the Loddon River cost a shilling. On Adelaide Flat at Forest Creek this price was heavily undercut by a group of German diggers from South Australia, who sank a hole about 21 metres deep and found a good supply of brackish water, which they hauled up and sold on the spot for sixpence a nail-can.

(Source: Annear, Robyn. 1999. Nothing But Gold. The Diggers of 1852, Text Publishing, Melbourne.)

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