Isaac Mattson was a Finnish shipwright and gold miner who fought at the Eureka Stockade.
Early years
Isaac Mattson was born in Finland in 1818 and worked as a shipwright before migrating to America as a young man. He worked to support Zachary Taylor's presidential campaign, but gold lured him west.
Mattson took the long journey as one of the 300,000 “forty-niners” who rushed to California in 1849. He had no luck in California so joined a ship to Australia and onto another gold rush. He set up in the growing tent city of miners, fossickers and gold panners in Ballarat.
He was friends with several fellow miners of note. He knew Peter Lalor, the Irish rebel and politician, and James Esmond, the first to make a claim in the area. Esmond's find, near Clunes in 1850, sparked the rushes to Western and Central Victoria.
The Eureka Stockade
In 1854, the miners joined together to protest excessive licence fees and taxes. They also called-out the heavy-handed methods used by police and corruption.
At Bakery Hill in Ballarat in December 1854, Mattson and the miners faced off against police. Up to 27 people died when their stockade was overrun. Police imprisoned 120 people and charged 13, although the charges were later dropped.
Many associate these events with the birth of Australian democracy. (Although, while male colonists got the vote, universal suffrage was still some time away.)
Personal life
Mattson met Mary Morgan on the goldfields and married her in 1854 when the gold rush was at its peak. They lived in Ballarat for years before moving to Beaconsfield in northern Tasmania.
They raised 4 children together and lived in Tasmania for 35 years. When they were both over 80, Isaac and Mary moved to North Fitzroy in Victoria.
Isaac did not find his fortune on the goldfields, but he did find some gold. His family still have some jewellery made from the nuggets he found at Ballarat.
Sources
Adapted from material supplied by historian Dr Jan Penney, GMCT Trust member 2010-2020 and by the Friends of Coburg Cemetery Inc.
The Age (2006) Eureka – where multiculturalism was born, The Age 3 December 2006 [website]
Culture Victoria (n.d.) Eureka Stories [website]
The Evening Echo (1917) ‘Obituary’, The Evening Echo 29 September 1917 (in Trove) [website]
Fitzsimons P (2012) Eureka: the Unfinished Revolution, Penguin Books
Moloney J (2001) Eureka, Melbourne University Publishing
O’Brien B (1992) Massacre at Eureka, Australian Scholarly Publishing
