In a Great Southern Land

by Mary-Anne O'Connor

  ‘He said it was useless to try to deal with Hotham through legal means because he refused to even listen to their petition.’

  ‘Did you see him the day after that?’

  ‘Yes. I saw him armed with a double-barrel shotgun. He called his men “gentleman soldiers” and asked them to come forward and volunteer to stand up and fight for their rights and liberties. Then I saw him drill them the next day.’

  Stawell looked more than satisfied with those comments and sat down as Ireland took over.

  ‘Mr Goodenough, didn’t you state previously that Hayes actually said to the men that it was “necessary to take the law into their own hands”?’

  ‘I may have done.’

  ‘Will you swear it?’

  ‘…well, no, I won’t swear it…but he said something like that…’

  ‘But you won’t swear they were the exact words?’

  ‘What’s the difference anyway?’

  That caused a stir court-wide and Dave looked over at Hayes’s wife, muttering, ‘Because it’s a fecken man’s life.’

  Goodenough was dismissed under glares and hisses and the next witness, Andrew Peters, came out, wearing civilian clothes. After stating under Stawell’s questioning that Hayes acted as a sergeant and instructed that sharp pikes be used in order to pierce men on horseback, Ireland came out with a completely different line of questioning that had the court instantly entertained.

  ‘What clothing were you wearing when you went to these meetings?’

  ‘Same ones I’m wearing now.’

  ‘But you’re a policeman, are you not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think someone was spying…’

  The crowd rippled with amusement and Ireland had a little more fun with this for a while, unsettling Peters further before deftly returning to the central reason for the trial.

  ‘Did you hear anyone say anything against the British constitution or about establishing a republic?’

  ‘I…couldn’t swear that I did…’

  ‘Hmm. And was there a search for licences that Thursday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you hear that shots were fired by the troopers at men that didn’t have them?’

  ‘Not by the troopers…by the ground police…’

  There was a loud reaction from the crowd now and several of the jury shook their heads as Ireland cornered the man further. He tried desperately to backtrack but he couldn’t change his own words. Police had shot at unarmed men for not having licences days before the stockade had ever taken place. Unprovoked. It was simply now a fact.

  There was a recess not long after that controversial moment and Liam and Dave piled out with the crowd onto the street to find Macca and tell him all the news.

  ‘Apparently there’s a priest taking the stand testifying Hayes was with him that morning and wasn’t even at the battle, let alone armed, but I think the fact miners were shot upon days before gives him enough justification for retaliating, regardless,’ Liam reported, having eavesdropped on the journalists as they’d left the courts. Dave, Macca and his fresh-out-of-gaol mate Roger listened on with interest. ‘Mind you, this isn’t some unsophisticated miner we’re talking about. Hayes represents everything the government doesn’t want Australia to become. He’s an anarchist and he’s particularly dangerous to them because if he gets off it tips back some of the control to commoners…and Hotham knows it.’

  ‘Yeah, well I hope ’e does get off,’ Roger put in. ‘Those bastards treated us like animals in that hospital gaol.’

  ‘Yes, Macca was telling us about your…er, stay,’ Liam said.

  ‘Did they tell you about me screaming blue murder? The poor bloke next to me couldn’t even object, all shot up in the neck as he was. They wouldn’t even let ’im have a pencil and paper to write down what he wanted to say. Now how can ya treat a man like that? He don’t have no voice, at least give ’im that.’

  ‘Aye,’ Dave agreed. ‘How’s he supposed to even get word to his family that he’s okay if he can’t…’ Dave’s expression froze. ‘…He can’t…’

  He paused then, staring over at Liam.

  ‘…speak,’ Liam finished the sentence as his heart began to race. ‘Did…did this man have dark hair and…and eyes…like mine…’

  Roger looked closer at him. ‘Yeah, I’d say so. And he was wearing his Sunday best too, or what was left of it, which I thought seemed a bit odd if he was down at that stockade.’

  ‘What makes you think that’s where he’d come from?’ Dave said and Liam held his breath.

  ‘Because I heard a guard say it one day, that he’d been shot in the neck because he was galloping over towards the rebels yelling “stop” at the top of his voice. Said it was the shot of the day, according to the traps,’ he told them all, ‘the gutless bastards.’

  Liam and Dave jumped up as one to grab their coats and Macca did likewise.

  ‘Hey…hey, where are you all going?’ Roger asked, confused.

  But no-one bothered to answer him as they ran for the door. It wasn’t every day you found a man once thought dead.

  He’d been listening to the guards discuss the trial from his usual position at the window, glad to hear that Hayes was being defended so well and feeling encouraged that the miners might all be acquitted in the end. It boded well for when he could finally state his own case for freedom too. But then three men appeared below and the time to do so suddenly arrived with urgency. He’d need to find his voice today even if it did feel as if razors were engraving each sound on the inside of his throat.

  It was Liam again, this time with Dave and Macca, and they were running, which meant only one thing: they suspected he was inside.

  Kieran made his way to the guards, something he’d never done before, and they paused mid-sentence from their animated discussion.

  ‘What d’y’want?’ asked one, a particularly lazy man Kieran knew as Sullivan, and the moment of truth arrived as Kieran worked harder than ever before to get words out.

  ‘I…I…am…’

  The man began to laugh. ‘Oh, this should be good. Go on, you’re what? A filthy Paddy? A colonial bastard? A dirty digger who’ll rot in here forever?’

  ‘I…’

  Voices came from below as his brother and friends pleaded on his behalf but even Macca didn’t seem able to persuade the guard to allow them entry.

  ‘Don’t waste our time, lad,’ said a slightly more reasonable man named Reynolds. ‘When you’re ready to speak come to us then, but now obviously isn’t the time.’

  ‘Kieran,’ called Liam desperately from below as the guard ordered them away. ‘Please…’ he begged.

  Kieran closed his eyes and took a deep breath, drawing on every piece of strength that lay inside.

  ‘I…am…Kieran…Clancy.’

  Forty-Six

  They’d worked all night and all morning but the Hayes verdict would dictate whether or not they’d go ahead with their plan. It was a risk, a big one, but Kieran wanted it this way and Liam could well understand why. Between grunted sentences and written ones, they’d pieced his story together in the presence of the lawyer Parsons had recommended and Liam had written to months ago, Lincoln Ellis. He was a smart man, and a compassionate one. It had only taken a matter of minutes to convince him to come to the prison hospital and assert Kieran’s legal rights to be charged and go to trial, or have the matter dropped altogether, the injustice of his brother’s story speeding his actions.

  ‘You’re sure it’s him?’ was his only hesitation.

  ‘They only brought him out to the top of the stairs, just so we could identify him, but aye, I’d never mistake him for another, Mr Ellis,’ Liam had told him, unable to halt tears at the sweetness of the memory. He was thin, bearded and unkempt but his eyes held the soul of the most precious man in Liam’s world: his only brother. ‘They said they couldn’t do any more than that without a lawyer.’

  ‘Well,’ Ellis had said, ‘you’ve got on
e of those now. Come and let’s see what we can do for him.’

  The guards were completely outmanoeuvred from there on and Kieran had finally been allowed to talk to them all, well as best he could anyway, but firstly Liam had needed just to embrace him. All the grief and worry of the past months had emptied as they both broke down, and Liam was so grateful he was alive he could barely let him go, but there was freedom to be claimed and this was the moment to claim it. When most of Australia was sympathetic to its cause.

  And so Liam sat in the courtroom once more, alongside Dave, who’d never left his side and was still red-eyed from the tears he’d shed in finding out Kieran had been shot because he’d been trying to protect him.

  ‘To save the best mate I’ve ever known,’ he kept saying, echoing the words Kieran had written down when the lawyer had asked why he’d finally rushed to the stockade. ‘I can’t believe he risked his life for me, in the end.’

  But Liam could believe it. Kieran had lived his whole life passionately and impetuously, almost like it was all a game, however serious or dangerous things may be. The challenge, if they could set him free with their plan, would be to stop him running off and searching for Eve straight away, when he was still so weak, and Liam knew he’d have a battle on his hands too when he told him no-one knew where she had gone. Kieran had already told Ellis all urgency lay in getting word to, then marrying, his fiancée, but Liam couldn’t focus on that next hurdle right now. All that mattered was Kieran being heard at last, acquitted from any charges, then set free from the hospital prison. The timing of when best to attempt that was everything.

  The judge came in and they rose collectively to watch history unfold, but Liam’s eyes were on the side door where Ellis would appear at the day’s end, to throw Kieran’s fate into the winds of change. But only if they blew favourably today.

  It was the defence’s turn for witnesses and Ireland had a few more confirm the fact that bullets had been fired at unarmed miners before the stockade and that Hayes had been there, forced to watch but unable to help. The potential for Hayes’s acquittal felt strong to Liam now but he watched Stawell stand and approach the witness nervously, just the same.

  Stawell started with a different line of questioning, on a subject that Liam had always known he would eventually hone in on: that brilliant Southern Cross flag.

  But Ireland was well prepared for this part of the case.

  ‘Your Honour, would Mr Stawell please confirm that he himself gathered under a similar flag that was not of this colony’s a mere three years ago as part of a group?’

  Stawell gaped. ‘Your Honour, that was for the abolition of convict transportation to this colony.’

  ‘So, you did meet under a non-colonial flag…’ Ireland continued.

  ‘Your Honour, meeting with positive intentions under another flag is hardly the same as arming yourself behind a stockade with plans to overthrow the law.’

  ‘It has not been proven Mr Hayes was armed or even at the stockade.’

  Stawell faced him now, livid. ‘I have six witnesses saying he was.’

  ‘And I have witnesses stating he wasn’t. And I have evidence that proves these men were shot upon, unarmed, days before, then attacked at Eureka under government orders, which makes the stand self-defence, not an overthrow attempt,’ Ireland countered, facing him too.

  ‘I have court records, facts that the miners fired first…’ Stawell yelled.

  ‘You know the truth, Stawell!’ Ireland yelled back.

  ‘Silence!’ thundered the judge. ‘Counsel will direct conversation through me, not towards each other.’

  There was a moment of mutinous glaring before they conceded.

  ‘Your Honour,’ Ireland said, calmer now, ‘it is my intention to show that the miners were forced to erect a stockade, a place of safety where they could not be shot at, beaten and abused by soldiers and police for being unable to pay exorbitant licence fees. We already know for a fact that the ground police attacked several men three days prior to the morning of the third of December…’

  ‘It is not a fact!’

  ‘He was your witness, Mr Stawell,’ Ireland said, not even looking at him now. ‘As I said, they were forced to erect a place of safety and when they did they were attacked there by heavily armed Crown men, without any warning. And I can prove this with a single document which I would now like to read out loud…’

  ‘Objection, Your Honour,’ Stawell said.

  ‘Your Honour, it is simply a copy of the Government Gazette.’

  ‘If it isn’t already submitted as evidence you cannot read from that, Mr Ireland,’ the judge replied.

  Ireland appeared frustrated but said: ‘Then I will endeavour to deliver its content from memory as best I can.’

  ‘Your Honour,’ Stawell objected again but the judge allowed Ireland that much and it was Stawell’s turn to look frustrated.

  ‘It is a memorandum printed on the fifth of December that reads as such: “On the second of December I was informed that the rebels had taken up arms and formed a stockade. As such, I ordered back-up forces from Melbourne to attack this camp at daylight and the troops were ordered to assemble at two-thirty in the morning.”’ Ireland paused and held the gazette up to the jury. ‘Who wrote this report, you may be wondering? It was penned by a good friend of the prosecution, as a matter of fact…Governor Charles Hotham.’

  The court erupted in a maelstrom of outrage, the judge unable to silence the noise this time, and a swell of fury swept through Liam too. These men, friends of his own brother and even his brother himself, had been attacked and many slaughtered under orders from their very own governor. Dave looked at him with pained eyes, the grief and loss from the violent massacre still freshly written there, and Liam simply shook his head at what he and those other miners had endured. It could never be justified now.

  ‘They had taken up arms,’ Stawell tried to argue over the mayhem.

  But Ireland’s voice was loud and clear. ‘It was an attack, designed by the Governor…’

  ‘You always knew it was so, Stawell!’ a man shouted from the crowd.

  ‘Order!’ called the judge. ‘Evict that man!’

  ‘Hotham is a murderer!’ cried out another.

  A few were indeed evicted, and silence was eventually restored but the atmosphere remained heavily charged now that the full extent of the government’s tyranny had been revealed. By the time Ireland had concluded his case Liam could already sense a victory in the air, but it didn’t stop Stawell from making one last, desperate attempt to convince the jury otherwise. Then he turned to his old friend, Judge Barry, as his last hope. Perhaps he would urge the jury in the prosecution’s favour, as had the first judge.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ the judge began, ‘from the evidence presented to you, you must irrevocably conclude two things: that treason has been committed and that Timothy Hayes is guilty of it. If you believe the prisoner has committed this treason then you should convict him.’ He paused then. ‘However, I have an opinion on this matter, one that you may choose to disregard but nonetheless: I believe that you should not convict this prisoner.’

  Shock rippled across the courtroom and Liam looked over at Dave in amazement, who began to shake his head in disbelief. Then they both turned to observe Symes and Blair who were sitting back with enormous satisfaction at the expression on Stawell’s face, which was alternating somewhere between outrage and disbelief. The jury left to deliberate but most observers didn’t bother to move for sure enough they were back swiftly and Timothy Hayes stood to await his verdict.

  ‘Not guilty!’ came the cry and there were tears from his wife as Hayes came out of his cordoned-off cell. He held her close and the noise in the court near deafened those within, so euphoric was the crowd at the tenderness and elation of the moment. Ireland beamed and lawyers shook hands but Stawell merely stared into space in shock as the enormity of what had transpired seemed to hit him.

  He had lost a case most cons
idered impossible to lose; an Irish rebel, an anarchist who had taken up arms and helped raise an army against government soldiers would walk free. It made the Irishman in Liam want to shed tears of joy. And, as the day wore on, one by one other miners were set free as well, each trial more farcical than the last. Finally, the day was done, the judge looking immensely relieved as he left, and the lawyers gathered their papers and shook hands, although not Stawell who’d left straight away, unsurprisingly, his chin low.

  There was a sense of completion and jubilation for most but Liam and Dave sat on the edge of their seats, staring hard at that side door. Then he came, Mr Lincoln Ellis, and they watched with pained breath as he approached Ireland and his associates, begging God that the defence would extend their generosity to just one more miner this day.

  Liam watched as discussion ensued in hushed tones and at one point looks were extended their way.

  ‘Aye,’ he heard Ireland say, and one of the junior lawyers left, carrying a letter Ellis had handed over. Liam closed his eyes, praying that he would succeed.

  It seemed an eternity but it was certainly only a matter of minutes because Ellis was still chatting away with Ireland and the others when the young man returned. More hushed conversation ensued until Ellis suddenly left the group and walked over towards Liam and Dave.

  ‘It seems the judge is very tired of this whole affair after today –’ Liam felt disappointment well, ‘– so tired, in fact, he said there was no point in the police even bothering to press charges against an unarmed man at the stockade. Kieran is free to go.’

  He handed over a letter that the judge had signed to confirm it and Liam broke down as he took it into his hands. ‘I can never thank you enough…’