by Clare Wright
The magistrates retired to an adjoining room for half an hour to make their decision. Before a hushed crowed, John D’Ewes declared that after assessing all the evidence, not a shadow of an imputation remained on Mr Bentley’s character. Robert Rede followed suit. James Johnston dissented, unpredictable as ever. The prisoners were free to go.
Thomas Pierson made a tally of the grievances under which Ballarat was now groaning. The governor’s actions didn’t match his promises. Hotham’s hypocrisy had created quite a dislike for him. There was no representation of the miners in the legislature. Digger hunts had increased to five days per week. Sixteen bullies on horseback, their muskets loaded and swords drawn, would descend on the diggings. Fifty foot soldiers with clubs would vomit themselves forth from the Camp. The diggers felt under siege, with no benevolent governor to shield them and no elected leader to represent them. Constitutionally, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
The residents of Ballarat were not the only ones to sense danger in the air that October of 1854. Back in March, Britain had declared war on Russia. The Crimean War, fought by an alliance of the British Empire, France and the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Empire, played like a backbeat against the local pulse of dissonance and discord in Victoria over the winter and spring of that watershed year. The war (so far as any military conflict can be reduced to a sentence) was fought over Russian imperialist expansion into territories in Turkey, the Baltic and the Middle East. There was also a minor naval skirmish in the Far East in September 1854. News from the various fronts, culled from the British press months after the reports were written, flooded the Victorian newspapers. Victoria followed Britain’s lead in observing a day of fasting on 4 August, to commemorate lives lost in the war. Subscriptions were collected to send to the Widows’ Fund in Britain.
Then, in a bizarre twist of reason, the inhabitants of Melbourne managed to convince themselves that their humble port town was under threat from Russian invasion. There was no strategic logic in the panic, only wartime paranoia and, perhaps, projected fear of mutiny from the unruly goldfields. In Geelong, a rifle corps was organised and a weekly half-holiday proclaimed to give citizens time to practise rifle shooting, lest their town come under attack. The holiday was quickly abandoned and the corps reduced to a few gung-ho Germans, but the sense of lingering peril remained.21
Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the French consul to Victoria, Lionel de Chabrillan, was in Melbourne in October 1854 when anxiety about an imminent attack came to a head. Her diary entry:
Cannon fire has again just signalled the arrival of a ship. Tomorrow we shall have news from France. The cannon rumbled all night. All the inhabitants stayed on their feet, either in the streets or at their windows. Since the Crimean War, which is always on their minds, and because there is not a single warship in the Melbourne harbour, they are always imagining that the Russians are going to attempt an invasion to pillage the gold of the whole of Australia. They walk about in large groups, prepared for battle. The governor has been informed and he arrives from Toorack [sic], situated six leagues from Melbourne. They follow him; they run towards the harbour. Lionel does likewise. The sky is red and all the ships in port seem to be on fire. They think they hear cries of distress.
Mrs Massey was at a ball when reports of the invasion struck. Pandemonium! Scottish-born Robert Anderson joined the thousands of people flocking to the harbour in a state of great excitement. Shots were thundering away, rockets, shells and everything else to make the colonials believe the Russians had arrived, Anderson recalled in his memoir. The whole town was roused up, all was uproar, the soldiers called out and armed, all the policemen we could muster.
It was not until daylight that the hoax was revealed. The Battle of Melbourne, as it became known, was an elaborate practical joke played by the captain of the Great Britain, as revenge for having his ship put in quarantine. Hotham, who longed to command a naval battalion in the real war, was not amused. PUNCH had a field day. A farcical play called The Battle of Melbourne was quickly written and performed. The scaremongers and alarmists, as Céleste de Chabrillan called them, were forced to lick their wounded pride. One commentator later noted that Melburnians were prone to lurch from panic to panic.22
The Russians were not coming, but the communal adrenaline had barely subsided when news of a genuine breach of the peace hit the presses.
What is a land of opportunity if not an invitation to opportunism? On 16 October, at 2pm, four felons seized the day. Wearing black crepe veils tied around their faces, cord trousers, blue shirts and sou’westers, the thieves marched into the Ballarat branch of the Bank of Victoria and marched straight back out again bearing £15,000 in gold and cash. It was a clever robbery and well carried out, remembered Charles Ferguson, and had it not been for the extravagant and dashing Madam Quin, it probably would not have been exposed.
Mrs Ann Quin was the wife of one of the thieves, and the Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne newspapers followed her and the other scoundrels’ movements with tremulous interest (not least because of the £500 reward offered for information leading to an arrest). The robbery, reported in the Tasmanian press as a daring escapade, emblematic of the anarchic, ungovernable diggings, was a cause célèbre: a brazen theft of the golden goose and her eggs, carried out virtually under the nose of the sleeping giants at the Camp.
For weeks the robbery was a complete mystery to the police. Police Inspector Gordon Evans reported to his Melbourne superiors that four men had forcibly entered the bank, bound and gagged the manager and clerk and then emptied the safe, leaving behind them their hats, veils and shirts. The criminals had simply melted back into the landscape of uniform canvas tents and rabbit holes as slickly as they had emerged. No identification could be made and there was no clue to the road taken. For two weeks, it looked like the perfect crime. Since the robbery, the police are all alive, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER; the handsome reward had made the force suddenly alert to the slightest innuendo.23
But in Victoria, money didn’t whisper, it roared, and such prodigious booty could not long be muffled. Quin—of the Ballarat grocery firm of Garret, Marriet and Quin—was captured on 18 November at the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel in Flinders Street in the company of Mrs Quin and their three children. Ann Quin had been sighted in Geelong where she was cutting a rather wide swath and spending money left and right. Quin had been caught out buying a £50 diamond ring with the stolen Bank of Victoria notes.
Mrs Quin entered the dock with a babe in arms. The ARGUS reported:
she is a plump, rosy-cheeked, country-looking, young woman, about twenty-two years of age, and certainly does not seem very largely endowed with either intelligence, cunning or daring to mark her as the helpmeet for a first class burglar.24
Ann Quin was refused bail. Marriet was caught the next day in bed with a prostitute in a Spring Street house of ill-fame. Garret, alias Bolton, was spied on his way to Adelaide and headed off at the pass. His fancy woman had already left for England on the Calcutta. The Quin family had also booked a passage on the ship prior to their arrest. Mr Quin later turned state approver and peached on his former business associates. He confessed that the robbery had been planned a week prior to its execution, that their guns were loaded with paper, not powder or shot, and that they had made a prior agreement that no violence was to be done.
But what of the fourth man? It was three more weeks before ‘he’ was brought in, and over 150 years before it became readily apparent that the fourth felon was in all likelihood a woman. At the front of the relevant files in the Public Record Office of Victoria, the name Elijah Smith is listed with the others. Yet inside, in the court testimonies themselves, the name Eliza Smith appears repeatedly.25 The fourth robber, Elijah, was in fact Eliza, disguised beneath a veil drawn by gender-blind bureaucrats.
Eliza Smith was arrested at the Turf Hotel on the Eureka Lead. Like Mrs Quin, she was spending freely in local stores and showing off her ample cleavage to every miner who
took an interest. Tucked in her bodice was a roll of £10 notes, fresh from the Bank of Victoria. She was also eager to flash another roll of notes secreted in her stockings. Robert Tait, the landlord of the hotel, was witness to one of Eliza’s displays (she called me on one side and pulled a number of notes from her bosom…she stooped down and produced a parcel of notes from her stockings) and called the police. When the traps came to arrest her, along with a man who was also passing stolen notes, Eliza fought like fury. I had great difficulty taking them, said the arresting officer in court,
I had great difficulty with the woman, I asked her what money she had on her person, she produced twenty two pound notes six shillings…she then handed me a roll of notes, which she took from one of her stockings, saying take that you ‘Bugger’.
After she’d unburdened her smalls of their booty, Eliza Smith was found to have been carrying £262 on her person.
Eliza was brought to Melbourne to be tried, and was convicted of receiving: a lesser crime than that for which her companions were sentenced to seven years. It was Eliza who persuaded Quin to turn Queen’s witness, urging him to do so for the sake of [his] wife and children. But not even Eliza’s defence counsel, Adam Loftus Lynn, thought her a saint. He described her to the jury as not being constant as Penelope to her dear lord, of whom she took French leave. The implication was that Eliza was in need of fast money to fund an escape from her husband, a mitigating rationale for her crime.
The BALLARAT TIMES was utterly uninterested in the morals or motives of the offenders. There was only one victim in this crime, and that was the careworn community of Ballarat. In a stinging editorial on 4 November, Henry Seekamp accused the town fathers of sowing the seeds of disaster with their own ineptitude.
Had it been originally the intention of the managers in town to have their property stolen, they could not have selected a site more favourable to the exercise of the distinguished art, or science, of ‘sticking up’.
Seekamp was not the only one to point out that the Bank’s position behind the township, practically in the bush, was not conducive to public faith in the building as a financial institution. Of the bank’s site, the ARGUS said it really almost speaks out, and says, come and rob me, as much as a big nugget lying on the road-side would invite a traveller.26 To add insult, the building was a flimsy box, resembling as much as possible the zinc lining of some packing-case, with a hole knocked through the bottom to serve as a door. It was the people, as usual, who had lost their savings due to the dim-witted authorities.
The Bank of Victoria robbery had demonstrated that gold was not safe as houses, or at least not safe in houses. But nor, it seemed, was it secure in men’s hands. On 3 October, George Dunmore Lang, son of Reverend John Dunmore Lang of Sydney, resigned his position as the manager of the Ballarat branch of the Bank of New South Wales. He was given a farewell dinner by Ballarat’s leading merchants and storekeepers, who presented him with a gold cup and their best wishes. In August, George had written a letter to his mother in Sydney. He proudly reported that the bank was in a most flourishing state. He then confided that he was arranging to start a private bank with five others. The Bank of New South Wales may have been bursting with deposits, but it did not amply reward its employees. But George could dream of opening his own bank only because he had in fact been amply rewarding himself; two months after his resignation George was convicted of embezzling more than £10,000. The press left Lang alone, perhaps out of courtesy for his well-respected father, or perhaps there wasn’t much column space to spare in October.
But it soon became known that under Lang the Bank of New South Wales had allowed James Bentley to overdraw his account by £2000. The bank did not generally trade in loans—only deposits and gold purchases—but made an exception for Bentley because of his flourishing circumstances and superior collateral.27 It was also discovered that Lang had recently purchased a gold-broking business from one James Burchall, who had suddenly fled after his name was raised in relation to the Bank of Victoria robbery. Burchall had also tried to cash promissory notes in favour of John D’Ewes, signed by a local hotel landlord, presumably Bentley. As Eureka historian Ian MacFarlane has written, ‘like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, the murky financial dealing of the Ballarat officials seemed to extend everywhere’.28
Commissioner Rede read the verdict into the Scobie enquiry on Saturday 14 October. The court and its verandah were filled to overflowing. Hot winds from the arid north whipped up clouds of dust. People choked on their own breath, just as they gagged over the greatest miscarriage of justice yet witnessed in a town that thought matters could get no worse. A wealthy and influential man, allowed to walk away scot-free from a crime that he had patently committed. Herculean though the task may appear, roared the TIMES in its edition that evening, we intend to cleanse the Augean Stable of the Ballarat Camp, and purify its fetid atmosphere of those putrescent particles which offend the senses, by a rigid but wholesome exposure before the bar of public opinion. Thomas Pierson feared for the publican’s safety. Such was the hostility towards not only the magistrates and commissioners but Bentley himself that I should not wonder if his whole house was razed to the ground, Pierson wrote in his diary that night.
Bentley’s exoneration was a scandal. A public demonstration was called for the following Tuesday, 17 October. Notices were posted. The grapevine sent out its tendrils of insinuation. The meeting would be held within spitting distance of the Eureka Hotel, on the site of Scobie’s murder. Thomas Pierson was there, and twenty-seven-year-old Catholic woman Elizabeth Rowlands, cradling her six-month-old baby Mary Ann. They were joined by thousands of others.29 Pierson says 10,000 in his diary; a subsequent parliamentary enquiry reckoned 5000.30 A few mounted troopers hung back warily. Speakers came before the crowd to decry the outrage of Bentley’s acquittal and the incompetence—nay, impudence—of the Camp.
The decision was a perversion of justice resulting from entrenched venality. The Eureka Hotel was a safe house for murderers and thieves, connived at by the authorities. Bentley kept his clientele drunk, all the better for pickpockets to rob them. D’Ewes interfered with all aspects of the goldfields management, from licensing to land sales. Johnston had a share in Brandt’s Victoria Hotel. Most of the Camp’s higher officials were nothing more than land speculators. Rede was a puppet, a fool. The bench had no impartiality, no transparency. The Camp was a kind of legal store, where justice was bought and sold. Where was British liberty? Were the diggers slaves or serfs? Why, the Russians treated their people better than the diggers of Ballarat. On the accusations went, constricting the emotional helix of a blustery spring morning.31
At 10am, Police Inspector Gordon Evans sent a garrison of his men to the Eureka Hotel. Led by Maurice Ximines, the men snuck into the hotel, unseen by the crowd. Bentley had asked the police to watch over his property. He had received threats that the people intended to hang him by the lamp post. Bentley also had a pregnant young wife, a toddler and a hotel full of employees and guests, not to mention a mountain of private property, to protect. By this stage, the crowd had begun to bay for his blood. The cries of the mob were for Bentley, Ximines later testified.
At some point, the mood of the crowd changed. The sun was beating down. The wind was gusting strong. A peaceful public assembly began to turn ugly. Symptoms of riot began to show themselves, wrote Thomas Pierson back in his tent that night. He left, and watched the rest of the calamitous proceedings from a safe vantage point at a distance from the crowd. The multitude became a mob, moving with a vicious urgency towards the hotel.
James Bentley, convinced he was going to be lynched, fled on horseback to the Camp. On the way, he passed Charles Evans. I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man’s face, Evans wrote in his diary. Ellen Young saw him too, without hat or coat his white shirt sleeves tucked up, a trooper closely following. Ellen thought it was a race in fun. She turned to her next-door neighbour and said white shirt will win. But this was no game. Was Bentle
y on a mission to call for more protection? Was he saving his own neck? Or trying to create a diversion, thinking that the mob might change course and follow him, like a swarm of angry bees?
But it was not only the publican’s scalp the crowd wanted: a miner name John Westoby stepped in front of the hotel. I propose that this house belong to the diggers, he proclaimed, to wild cheering.
It’s a telling line. Here was the first instance during this watershed spring when Ballarat’s digging community overtly defined itself as a collective. Now it took Ellen Young’s literary lead: we (the people) demand…The time had come for the body politic of Ballarat to take matters of justice into its own hands.
‘Public punishment’, writes British historian Bernard Capp (in his study of the way that aggrieved communities in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century wielded shaming rituals against perceived enemies), ‘symbolised the community’s collective repudiation of the offence and its reassertion of traditional values’. Jeering, hooting, burning effigies and smashing windows were all activities that could be ritually performed by the whole community, including women and children, as a way to maintain a moral order. This is sometimes called charivari or ‘rough music’: a terrifying dirge tuned to righteous mob indignation, intended to punish transgression. It was all about loss of face in a society predicated on face-to-face contact.
The rough music accompanying James Bentley in his flight to the Camp from his overrun hotel underscores a central paradox in Ballarat’s looming political crisis. Those who immigrated in their thousands to the Victorian goldfields aspired to something different from what they knew, and particularly from the hierarchies of Home. Yet they also expected that the substructure—the traditional values and social assurance of law, order and justice—would stay the same.
