The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  The Ballarat court held its General Sessions. Most cases pertained to horse theft; the real blame for this deeply rooted crime, wrote the court reporter, should lie with the auctioneers, a commercial gentry who were too liberally licensed. Horses were even stolen from the Government Camp, as if to hold up the vigilance of our guardians to public scorn. (Most of Ballarat’s auctioneers were Jewish but the reporter’s dog whistle largely fell on deaf ears, on this uniquely level playing field.) As the weather became more benign, thefts increased noticeably. Armed gangs and flash mobs skulked around tents, day and night. The chained dogs went ballistic.

  Spring, it seemed, unleashed all the passions.

  On 23 September, an assault and battery charge was heard in front of Robert Rede. The BALLARAT TIMES reported:

  It was proved that John Doyle and John Doyle’s wife threatened to rip open John Bidsil and John Bidsil’s wife, and John Doyle and John Doyle’s wife being unable to prove to the contrary, John Doyle and not John Doyle’s wife was bound to keep the peace towards John Bidsil and John Bidsil’s wife, and all within the realm of Victoria, for the term of six months, himself in the sum of £100 and two sureties of £50 each.8

  Slapped with such a ruinous fine, no doubt John Doyle wished he had been party to a recent milestone. On 8 September, a nugget weighing ninety-eight pounds was extracted from the Canadian Lead, the second most valuable lump yet extracted from Victoria’s underbelly. It was named the Lady Hotham Nugget, in honour of Her Excellency’s recent visit. Along with the gold from the washing stuff drawn from the same claim, the shaft produced over two thousand pounds of gold. Most claims around the area, reminded the GEELONG ADVERTISER, won’t pay the cost of sinking.9 But such finds always caused a fresh burst of enthusiasm and a new influx of cocksure diggers.

  Down at the Adelphi Theatre, Sheridan Knowles played the Hunchback to rapturous applause. It was the most intellectual treat we have had on the diggings, said the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE reporter. We congratulate Mrs Hanmer on the energy and ability of her management. There was acclaim for fourteen-year-old Julia Hanmer too: To see one so young as Miss Hanmer capable, not only of understanding but appreciating, and finely personating so delicate and difficult part as Julia demands our highest praise.10 Charles Evans was often in the crowd to watch Sarah Hanmer and her remarkable daughter perform. A time to laugh, a time to weep.

  In mid-September, a new detachment of the 40th Regiment arrived to relieve the old pensioners who had held the fort through the long winter. The departure scene was one of great amusement, reported the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE: nearly all of them were so drunk as to be scarcely able to stand, much less walk, in their proper order. The publicans will lose their staunch supporters, scoffed the paper. Captain Russell, who had been in charge of the Pensioners, was placed in the Camp hospital. He was so drunk he’d become deranged.11

  In the commissioners’ weekly reports to the Melbourne Goldfields Office HQ, new father-to-be James Johnston noted at the end of September that on the diggings the workings are progressing favourably but the want of good water is already felt at Eureka.12 Ballarat’s population would increase by nine thousand people between September and December. As new hopefuls continued to stream in, the tide of nature’s bounty was on its way out.

  The weather here is remarkably fine and bids fair to continue, predicted the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE on 16 September. Could the rhythm of life have continued to play out like this, under the clear, blue skies of a wide, brown, gold-laced land? An arrest here. A ball there. A death here. A new restaurant there. A nugget here. A play there. An intermittent changing of the guard. Good news. Bad news. Turn, turn, turn.

  Perhaps Ballarat was coiled like a spring, clenched from winter’s deep freeze of disappointment, frustration and grinding poverty. Like the eternal sting of insects, as German digger Frederick Vern put it, the petty tyranny and insolence of the administrators maddened the people.13 Among the traders, victuallers and entertainers, the competition for custom was intense. The people of Ballarat were not ready to thaw; they were ready to pounce. Everybody was ripe for anything, reckoned Vern. Primed. Wired. It only wanted the spark to explode.

  The night of 6 October was crowned by a full moon. James Scobie, a young Scottish miner, was encouraged by the bright evening to prolong his drunken revelries. Scobie bumped into his mate, Peter Martin, and the two proceeded to the Eureka Hotel. The day had been hot and the air was even now stagnant, sultry. It was well after midnight, but in Ballarat every businessman had his price. Surely they could get a nightcap from Bentley.

  The hotel was shut up when they arrived. Scobie knocked loudly on the door. Catherine and James had retired for the night, but Michael Walsh, the waiter, was still in the bar. He told Scobie and Martin to go away. Scobie continued to make his presence felt, kicking at the door, and smashing a pane of glass. Catherine came downstairs to the bar and told him to go away. Scobie, as Walsh testified at James and Catherine’s subsequent murder trial, called the landlady a whore. William Hance, the watchman who had now joined the posse in the bar, said that was not language to use to any woman. James Bentley now entered the bar in his trousers and shirtsleeves, as did Farrell, and Duncan the barman. Scobie and Martin scampered away towards a cluster of nearby tents, about seventy metres from the hotel.

  What happened next has been told and retold in history books, literature, song and dance, an indissoluble amalgam of speculation, hearsay, sworn testimony and myth. The following version is synthesised from the primary sources only. Even then, there are multiple layers to the onion and trying to peel them apart is a fiddly exercise in perseverance, if not tears.

  After their property was damaged and Catherine insulted, the Bentleys, Hance and Farrell pursued Scobie. A violent altercation occurred once the party caught up to the drunken, staggering Scobie. Eleven-year-old Bernard Welch was asleep in his family’s tent when he was woken by voices outside. He peeped through a flap to see Mr and Mrs Bentley, and three or four men. One of them picked up a spade from the corner of the Welches’ tent. Bernard couldn’t say, when he was later required to give a sworn testimony, which of the party picked it up. Bernard’s mother Mary Ann also awoke and heard the voices. She thought they might belong to Mr and Mrs Bentley but could not be sure. The party moved on. Bernard heard a scuffle and a blow struck. Peter Martin later testified that he was struck down by a group of men and one woman, but he could not identify them. Scobie received a blow to the head. Martin ran to fetch help. He returned with the local butcher, Archibald Carmichael, and Dr Carr. Carr could detect no signs of life. Carr and Carmichael took the body to the Eureka Hotel. (The Victorian licensing law required that hotels also serve as morgues and sites of coronial enquiries.) According to William Duncan, no one from the hotel left the premises from the time the drunken men tottered off to the time Dr Carr arrived with Scobie’s dead body.

  According to Catherine Bentley, in the note she scrawled almost forty years later, the dead body dragged into her hotel that night did not belong to Scobie at all, but another young miner. Scobie, she argued, was transported surreptitiously to Melbourne by another Irish miner, Peter Lalor, and secreted in the Abbotsford Convent. Catherine believed that James Scobie had gone on to marry and live a fruitful life in Dowling Forest. Remarkably, there is no death certificate for James Scobie to prove her wrong.14

  It was now past 2am. At the Eureka Hotel, Dr Alfred Carr conducted a post-mortem on the deceased. The stomach, he found, was filled with a large quantity of partially digested food and when opened the odour of spirits was very perceptible. Carr believed the cause of death to be the rupture of one or more vessels within the substance of the brain caused in all probability by a blow. He determined that the state of the stomach from food and spirituous liquor would render a blow more dangerous and more likely to cause a rupture of the blood vessels. His final conclusion was crucial: I think the injury was inflicted by a kick and not by the spade now produced.15

  All these details came to the fore a
t the coronial inquest held the following day, Saturday 7 October. Many more particulars—potential fact and scurrilous fiction—emerged at the subsequent Ballarat and Melbourne trials of the Bentleys and two of their employees.16 That James Bentley was still in his slippers when he left the hotel. That Catherine and James were not really married. That James Bentley boasted he had taken over £200 on the day of the inquest. That Mary Ann Welch heard Mrs Bentley say how dare you break my windows before the fatal blow was struck. That Mrs Bentley was heard laughing in the dining room shortly before Scobie’s body was dragged to her front door. When the waiter asked why the landlady was laughing, the barman said Oh, that fellow has got a clip what was at the door. One witness said Scobie did not call out you whore or use any bad language. Another said he heard Mrs Bentley say that is the sweeps what broke my windows. Yet another witness said he heard a woman say that serves you right after the blow was struck but swore that woman was not Mrs Bentley. The watchman, Thomas Mooney, who turned Crown witness against his former boss, said there was no foul language used by Scobie—but also conceded [I] cannot swear I am in my right mind.

  At the coronial inquest on the morning of 7 October, no one mentioned the alleged slur to Mrs Bentley’s good name that became the centrepiece of the subsequent murder trial in Melbourne. Carr’s autopsy conclusion ruled the day: that the death was occasioned by a blow to the head from a scuffle, most likely from a fist or kick, not a spade. But that day was short lived.

  Word soon spread that a poor, young Irish miner had been murdered by a rich, well-connected English publican. And not just any publican but the most successful liquor distributor on the diggings. Magistrate John D’Ewes himself later said that Bentley had made the enmity of a large class in the diggings, the sly grog sellers, whose trade had been ruined by the licensed houses, of which Bentley’s was the largest. The fact that Bentley was the president of the Licensed Victuallers Association only added venom to their gall.17 On the 8th, a deputation of miners visited the Camp. On the 9th, Bentley, Farrell and Hance were arrested and bailed (at £200 each), and the case was remanded for three days. During this time, the accused and their supporters, including the numerous residents at the hotel, were able to get their stories straight, a fact that was not lost on the grieving relatives and aggrieved countrymen of Scobie, particularly his older brother George. Bentley was also spotted at the Camp, where it was assumed he was communicating with Police Magistrate John D’Ewes. There had long been a rumour that D’Ewes was financially indebted to Bentley. On Thursday 12 October, an enquiry into Scobie’s murder was held before D’Ewes, Robert Rede and James Johnston.

  The decision of the bench that day saw a family’s dreams go up in smoke.

  Summer set in in ernest, recorded Thomas Pierson, though it was only early October. North winds. Dust. Oppressive heat. In the three days between Bentley’s arrest and his appearance before the bench, another inflammatory incident occurred. It had nothing to do with James, or Catherine, or the hotel, or even alcohol, but it would start a devastating domino effect on the Bentleys’ future.

  On Tuesday 10 October, a crippled Armenian servant named Johannes Gregorius was visiting a sick man in his tent on the Gravel Pits. Gregorius had limped from his residence, a flimsy vestibule attached to the cavernous tent that served as the Catholic church. Gregorius was the servant of Father Patrick Smyth, the young Irish priest who had recently been transferred to minister to Ballarat’s nine thousand (predominantly Irish) Catholics. Gregorius had no reason to fear being spotted at large among the diggers; ministers of religion and their live-in servants were not required to hold a licence. On this day, however, a callow mounted policeman stopped Gregorius and demanded to see his licence. In faltering English, Gregorius attempted to explain his exemption. But the trooper was in no mood to listen. Damn you and your priest, the trooper spat,18 and dismounted to assault the lame man. Horrified onlookers watched as the horse, unrestrained by his master, proceeded to trample Gregorius.

  As luck would have it, James Johnston was in the vicinity. The crowd expected their assistant commissioner would discipline the policeman, who was so clearly overstepping the line. Johnston, however, drew his own arbitrary limits: regardless of any alleged assault, there was the assumed issue of the outstanding licence to deal with. Gregorius would have to attend court the following day. Father Smyth arrived on the scene and offered Johnston £5 bail to take his injured servant home.

  What began as a tragedy ended as a farce. In court the next day, in front of John D’Ewes with James Johnston as witness, the battered Armenian was fined £5 for being unlicensed, despite his legal exemption. As Smyth had already paid that sum, the slate should have been cleared—however unjustly the offense was accrued. But Johnston decided to up the ante. He charged that it was the cripple Gregorius who had in fact assaulted the mounted policeman. D’Ewes found this new indictment proved and fined Gregorius another £5.

  The Catholics of Ballarat were ropable. Autocratic and illogical miscarriages of justice had become commonplace in Ballarat that winter, but the Catholic community took this one as a direct insult to its priest. A petition was raised on behalf of the aggregate Catholic body at Ballarat. The petition, nominally headed up by Timothy Hayes, was undoubtedly the project of his wife Anastasia, who was working as a teacher at the Catholic school. Anastasia, as later events would prove, was a born litigant: quick to assert her rights and defend the rights of those she cared for. In 1854 (though not later) Anastasia Hayes cared most about the Catholics of Ballarat.

  The petition wanted the feelings of an offended people recognised, and these people held James Johnston personally responsible for the slight. Johnston had never been popular, but now he was in complete disgrace. The petition called for the immediate removal of Johnston from Ballarat and an enquiry into his ungentlemanly and overbearing character. (Frederick Vern later called Johnston the most insolent and unscrupulous of all the government officers.) As if pre-empting an accusation that the victimised petitioners were but a bunch of Irish ratbags, the petition stated: The Catholics of Ballarat are a large and influential body comprising inhabitants of every recognised country under heaven. This corpus begged leave to observe that the constitutional means taken to obtain a redress of the wrong here complained of evinces our respect for the law.19 Not just Irish. Not a mob either. Constitutional. Lawful. Legitimate.

  Governor Hotham, alerted to the sectarian crisis brewing at his most populous goldfield, momentarily considered transferring Johnston to another district, but decided it would be impolitic to do so. Robert Rede made clear his intention to stand by his right-hand man. It would not be in the best interests of the Camp for its leader to undermine his deputy. Johnston stayed. Margaret Brown Howden Johnston bought a cradle for her gestating baby, noting the purchase in her diary. The Irish of Ballarat considered sewing a large flag to make their point; a Monster national banner, reported the ARGUS, to fly over the disputed ground of the Eureka.20

  Another turn of the screw. The coil tightens.

  The court was crammed to suffocation on the morning of the judicial enquiry into the murder of James Scobie. It was 12 October. James and Catherine Bentley and their servants, Farrell and Hance, were in the dock. D’Ewes, Rede and Johnston presided over an agitated crowd. There was no jury. The BALLARAT TIMES had been fulminating about the case for days. James Bentley was characterised as exhibiting all the wiles and blandishments of a wealthy publican. Scobie’s death was described as melancholy. The newspaper detailed inconsistencies and irregularities of the coronial inquest, and proffered ‘facts’ counter to the ones given at the inquest.

  Yet a letter to the BALLARAT TIMES published on 14 October shows that the Bentleys did have the support of certain sections of Ballarat society. The letter was addressed to James and signed by more than a hundred of Ballarat’s storekeepers, diggers and inhabitants. It stated that the signatories

  duly appreciating the conduct and manner you have evinced in carrying on the Eurek
a Hotel, and feeling that you could not either directly or indirectly, in the late lamentable occurrence, have been in any way accessary [sic]…are assured that your urbanity and manly behaviour will still continue to guarantee to so well a conducted house, its full share of public patronage.

  A portion of the Ballarat population was confident of the Bentleys’ innocence.

  Over two nail-biting days, the witnesses took the stand. All the residents of the hotel testified that Mr and Mrs Bentley had not left that evening, that they remained in their bedroom together until Dr Carr arrived. Mary Gadd, Catherine’s sister, swore that she could hear every thing that passes in [their] room. A butcher residing opposite the hotel swore that Bentley was not one of the men he saw fighting. It was moonlight so he could see clearly and [I] would know him by his general appearance and being lame. Mary Ann Welch and her son Bernard were called last. It was now that Mary Ann testified that she heard Catherine Bentley say ‘How dare you break my window’. The voice, to the best of my belief, was Mrs Bentley’s, said Mary Ann. I live within a few yards at the back of the hotel, and often heard Mrs Bentley’s voice before. Bernard Welch told again what he’d seen through his peephole. The TIMES thought him a very intelligent boy.