San Franciscans feared them collectively as the Sydney Ducks. Many Ducks bore the mark of the branding iron on cheek or thumb, and the scars of the lash across their backs. By late , one in every five men in San Francisco was from Australia. They made the Australian quarter, Sydney Town, the most dangerous district in the most violent city in the world. In , the lack of women in California forced men to dance with men in the crowded dance halls.
Miners playing the part of the female wore bandannas on one arm, or coloured patches on their trousers. Gay, in more ways than one, hey? Gambling was rampant and many English criminals from Australia were accomplished cardsharps, who cheated the more innocent American gold miners out of fortunes.
This, too, added to the general resentment in California against Australians, already being sown by the Sydney Ducks, even though British-born convicts were causing the mayhem. Sex-starved miners crowded into rowing boats in their hundreds to get at the women, fighting amongst themselves as they clambered aboard. Many married prominent citizens and became leading society ladies of the day.
Their features were concealed by slouch felts or tattered cabbage-tree hats. Visitors, unless well protected by bodyguards or the bribed law, found it easy to get their heads bashed in and their pockets emptied. They all lived along the waterfront between Broadway and Pacific Streets in an area they called Sydney Town. They were even more depraved than the Hounds and more adept at rabble-rousing. Dozens of murders had gone unsolved that spring of and none brought to justice.
Of the first 16 white men arrested in San Francisco in , 12 were ex-cons from Sydney. It was illegal for people with criminal records to enter California, so some respectable Australians living in San Francisco made a point of boarding incoming ships and identifying their convict countrymen, to stop them entering the port. But so few could do little against so many. The Sydney Ducks soon vastly outnumbered the New York Hounds, who were run out of San Francisco late in by San Francisco vigilantes for one attack too many and one rape too many on Latinos.
