When Europeans and Chinese came to the Castlemaine district in the 1850s in great numbers to look for gold, many of them also came to look for a home. The idea of settling in central Victoria may not have been uppermost in their minds, and of course many came with quite the opposite intention of making a fortune with which to return to their real home; however, it was not easy to return home on the old terms after such an experience. Some who did return found that they preferred the new settlement, after all. Others stayed for a short period around Castlemaine and then followed a better opportunity in some other district. Others again built permanent homes and stayed for the rest of their lives. How did this complicated, multifarious project of making a new home unfold?

The registers of the district police courts of Castlemaine, Chewton and Fryerstown¹ offer one way of recovering stories of making a home. Through the cases before the police court (otherwise known as the Court of Petty Sessions), it is possible to see the legal framework which underpinned the success of some people in making their home in the district, as well as the exclusion of others. The registers convey a strong picture of those who operated at the margins of success and respectability, with the court acting as a kind of sorting machine, apportioning guilt, innocence and consequence to the men, women and children who stood before it. To appear in the police court as a defendant on one of the more serious charges was to cross the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and, usefully for the historian, to have the clerk carefully record it in the register and the newspaper make it the next day's news. I have examined the police court registers of Castlemaine, Chewton and Fryerstown from 1860 until the mid-1890s as a way of better understanding the period of settlement after the centre of the goldrushes had moved away from the district.

The court could exclude in very direct and disastrous ways: imprisonment for vagrancy, removal of a neglected child from home and parents, eviction from property, denial of a deserted wife's claim for financial maintenance, denial of access to land or employment on the basis of race. They could also exclude in more insidious and less absolute ways, such as the dismissal of cases brought by some residents - cases others had no difficulty in winning when they brought the same type of complaint. Even in the more trivial charges that many residents occasionally faced, such as failing to register a dog or being overdue in the payment of an account, which do not in themselves indicate much of the social position of the respondents, the registers reveal layers of detail about nineteenth-century lives. For example, that there were Chinese men among the list of debtors to a particular European storekeeper shows that this storekeeper allowed credit to the group so despised by many Europeans. This may then raise questions about the conventional understandings of the separateness of the Chinese population in the goldmining towns.

Success and inclusion when acted out through the police courts were quite subtle. Those who had the law on their side tended to appear less often in the courts and, when they did, it was more likely to be as complainants or administrators of law. As just one example, it is possible to read on one page the long lists of Council rate debtors - men and women who were having difficulty paying the tax that entitled them to occupy their homes - and on another that Ernest Leviny of Buda, one of the largest property owners in the district, made a successful case for the reduction of the amount that his twelve residential and commercial properties would be rated. Charles Tolstrup, who served for periods as Town Clerk as well as Justice of the Peace in the same Castlemaine Court of Petty Sessions that heard his application, made an even more financially successful appeal that day and had to pay only half of the original £70 rate on his block of offices.²

The court records are a useful indicator of relative influence and success, while the outcomes recorded in the registers also form part of that process of building or losing power. The advantageous position of wealthy settlers such as Tolstrup and Leviny, or the already existing disadvantage of others, influenced the court's consideration of their cases. At the same time, the position of those appearing before the court was further consolidated - to their advantage or disadvantage - by the way their cases fared in court. Perhaps those who most gained social position through the local police courts were the men who served on the Bench as Justices of the Peace. As Shapely has argued in his analysis of the committees of charitable institutions in nineteenth-century Manchester, the performance of such a role accrued more 'individual social capital' to those already in a position to be eligible for the part.³

Although it is certainly possible to see some people falling unequivocally into the category of 'winner' or 'loser' in their dealings with the police courts, more often the situations were blurred. For instance, defendants, even in quite serious cases, often also used the court to prosecute their own cases against other people. A good example of this complex arrangement can be seen in the court appearances of Ann Ah What (or Awot or Ah Wat or A Wat) who was sent to prison on three occasions as the keeper of a brothel. She nevertheless used the same court to charge Hock Fon with assault, William Clough with illegal detention of goods, Elizabeth Scantlebury with injury to property, and her husband, James Ah What, for failure to provide maintenance.⁴ Similarly, many of the Chinese men who had been treated so harshly by the administration of the Chinese Residence License and, at least in one district police court, by the vagrancy legislation, used the courts to recover debts and prosecute both Europeans and Chinese who assaulted them.

Even well after the turmoil of the goldrushes, nineteenth-century residents of the district came before the police courts at a quite astonishing rate, charging or answering a great range of matters, from debt collection and licence applications, through offensive language, maintenance, child neglect, lunacy, vagrancy and drunkenness, to assault, rape and murder. The police court was apparently viewed as an accessible means of settling a grievance as well as a place you were very likely to have to answer to at some stage. For our period the courts were busiest in the early 1860s when the population was high but also less established. The attempt to exclude the Chinese through the enforcement of the Chinese Residence License also created a huge spike in the number of cases; for example, the Fryerstown court heard 1,139 cases in 1860 compared to 341 in 1863 after this legislation was repealed. As Fryerstown lost population and became more settled, the cases fell so that there were 142 cases in 1870 and only 14 in 1890. However, the decline in court cases was much larger than the decline in the number of residents, indicating that the terms under which people lived also became more stable.

The police court played a particularly active role in the regulation of behaviour between husbands and wives. Cases of wife and child desertion and domestic assault can tell us a great deal about the effort of making a successful home and of the centrality/marginality of men in domestic life. In many respects, the cases that women brought against their husbands were also about defending the material wealth and social standing necessary for maintaining a home. Women were very often present in the police court to defend cases brought against them that could radically alter their material circumstances and social status. Frequently these were charges of being drunk and disorderly, of assaulting another woman, or of using obscene or offensive language.