by Clare Wright
Chief Commissioner McMahon wrote to Robert Rede on 3 October, enclosing a copy of the petition and requesting immediate clarification from the magistrates as to whether any grounds existed for His Excellency’s clemency. This was definitely not standard operating procedure. Matters became still more peculiar when the American consul in Melbourne, James Tarleton, made representations to Governor Hotham on behalf of the Ballarat boarding-house keeper Carey. He vouched that the Americans at Ballarat were law loving and law abiding citizens.8 On 29 October, Frank Carey’s sentence was remitted. Mrs Hanmer’s players: take a bow. Your encore is yet to come.
Governor Hotham made two deft moves in response to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. With the right hand, he empowered a select committee to investigate the matter, taking evidence from any person who wished to speak up. E. P. S. Sturt was to head it up, fresh from presiding over Catherine McLister’s sexual harassment hearing. With the left hand, Hotham ordered the extra companies of the 12th and 40th regiments to fill the Camp with redcoats. It seemed an ingenious plan. Give the people the chance to vent their collective spleen while making it obvious that Ballarat was now awash with a military presence. Not everyone was convinced, however, that Hotham had Ballarat’s best interests at heart. We ask for bread and we get a stone, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER. We demand some attention be paid to our miserable conditions and get sent an army.9
The committee took evidence at Bath’s Hotel from 2 November to 10 November. The weather was oppressively hot during this week, and hundreds of diggers availed themselves of the opportunity to sit for a while in the lounge bar and tell the commissioners about what ailed them. Women gave evidence too, including Mrs Joanna Bath, though their testimony didn’t make it into the published report that was tabled in parliament on 21 November. The commissioners’ job was to establish whether there were any grounds for supposing that improper motives influenced the magistrates in their exoneration of James Bentley for Scobie’s murder, and also whether the conduct of the officers of the Camp generally had been such as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population. When the enquiry was completed, the answers were no and yes. This would not be popular news.
But there was a concession. Both James and Catherine Bentley, along with their servants Hance and Farrell, had been rearrested in the middle of October and sent to Melbourne for trial. And now, as another sop to the offended diggers, John D’Ewes and Robert Milne were relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of Ballarat. Many believed the wrong men had copped it. This affair will make Ballarat too hot for Mr Johnstone in a short time, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER; the sooner he is shifted the better.10 James Johnston continued to receive threats to his life and liberty after the commission cleared him. (Maggie’s diary reveals nothing of the pressure-cooker tensions of November.) Robert Rede and Gordon Evans were also absolved of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, John D’Ewes refused to go quietly. He protested his honesty and integrity until the last, all the while claiming that every other senior official in the Camp was nothing more than a money-grubbing land speculator tricked out in brass buttons and government-issue bayonets.
At least D’Ewes no longer had to fret about his accommodation. That was left to those remaining in Camp. The second half of Hotham’s plan was about as efficacious as the first. The arrival of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little fish into an already overpacked tin. Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses now poured in on us, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER, the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence. Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.11 The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas’s new plan of defence, meant that soldiers and police were on twenty-four-hour patrols. From the outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.
On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military. Without this skirmish, the BALLARAT TIMES reported facetiously, we should have little to talk about. The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the affair had been quickly hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES. He complained of the conditions endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. (This means the letter’s author arrived with either the 40th Regiment on 24 October or the 12th on 28 October.) His detachment was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily. They were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding as if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers. With the inadequate remuneration of only two shillings a day, the soldier is unjustly dealt with, complained the man.12 Who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers’ cause? The military leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might extend some brotherly love? His fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion of their own?
While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised. A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together, noted the GEELONG ADVERTISER of the particular mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat. On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would be the attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers. Around the speakers platform were placed English, Scots, Irish, French and United States national flags. A German band played. Henry Holyoake, Thomas Kennedy and George Black spoke for over four hours. The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn. American consul James Tarleton was in town, at the behest of Ballarat’s American community, who put on an American dinner in his honour at the Adelphi. Tarleton asked to address the meeting about the Carey affair. This odd gesture was, perhaps, a pre-emptive move to ward off a growing insinuation of favouritism towards the Americans, especially after charges of arson were dropped against young Yankee digger Albert Hurd, who had also been arrested after the Eureka Hotel fire. It was rumoured that Hurd’s release was influenced by back-room deals that were half American, half Masonic.13
The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for the events that would now tumble like dominoes towards their catastrophic resolution.
On 11 November 1854, a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier Alpheus Boynton was there and noted in his diary the talented men who put down picks and pans and took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men. The Ballarat Reform League united the proto-societies that had been popping up over the previous weeks, an Irish union here, a German bund there.
The reform league elected its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of the Catholic teacher Anastasia, was appointed as chairman. Humffray, Kennedy and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting. They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that committed to ink the chief grievances and goals of the league. A manifesto of democratic principles, its primary tenets were: free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of parliament; and fixed parliamentary terms. Thus the aim of moral rights for the disenfranchised goldfields population (dignity, equity, justice) was codified into a standard template of Chartist-inspired political rights.
The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely touted as the first formal step on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter’ was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant historical documents. Y
et oddly enough, the BALLARAT TIMES makes only brief—if bombastic—mention of this monster meeting. It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country, wrote Henry Seekamp, that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus of Australian Independence. A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.
The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the league that day were not, of course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat’s only newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:
However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the free subjects of a great nation.
Not ‘request’. Not ‘humbly pray’. Demand. And it is not Kennedy, not Black, not Holyoake, Humffray, nor Vern who committed their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous, but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity. Others had publicly spoken of cleaning out but none had gone so far as lopping off. The irony of the gender inversion was not lost on Ellen herself. Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist on the above demands? she provoked. And if refused, let us demand them of England.
Ellen’s indictment of masculine courage and foresight was printed on 18 November, the first edition of the TIMES to be published after the Bakery Hill monster meeting. It is likely that this edition was in fact edited and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her editorial influence to propel Ellen’s equally radical departure from feminine rectitude into the public eye. When Clara’s common-law husband was subsequently tried for sedition, the editions in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and 2 December. Henry Seekamp argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management of the paper at that time. Later scholars have speculated that John Manning, a teacher who worked at St Alipius with Anastasia Hayes, or George Dunmore Lang, the embezzling bank manager, may have been the true authors of the seditious articles. It is more probable that the highly literate and intelligent Clara had her finger on the pulse and the pen of the newspaper that was issued from her house. As we shall see, it was widely acknowledged that she took over editing the paper following Henry Seekamp’s arrest in early December.
Clara and Ellen may have had good reason to feel hostile towards their fellow freedom fighters. The Ballarat Reform League was constituted as a membership organisation, with a one-shilling entrance fee and a sixpence per week subscription. Significantly, the membership was to be gender exclusive. It’s not clear exactly who wrote the association’s rules, but the effect was to turn Ellen’s people into Boynton’s men. This is in line with the trajectory of British Chartism that saw the early goals of political equality sacrificed to a trade union model based on a male head of household supporting a dependent wife. It was a retrograde move that the unbiddable women of Ballarat strenuously resisted.
Raffaello Carboni alerts us to this drama playing out in the wings of Bakery Hill’s centre stage in one of his typically obtuse asides: Bakery reformers leagued together on its hill [No admission for the ladies at present]. Why would Carboni specifically, if parenthetically, note the omission of women from the Ballarat Reform League’s membership? In 1854, would we not assume that women were to be excluded from the formal body politic? And what to make of the qualifying phrase at present? So for now women cannot get a 2s ticket to the league, but, Carboni seems to imply, it is not out of the question that they will be eligible in the future.
Is this because certain women were requesting, maybe even demanding, inclusion? Was it only a matter of time before women would wear down the formalities of political convention and find themselves on an equal footing with their male co-conspirators? They were, after all, writing op-eds, topping subscription lists, starting businesses, buying property, financially supporting families, working beside their husbands on the fields, owning shares in mining ventures, speaking their minds freely, making ample use of the judicial system to assert their sovereign rights, throwing off the mantle of restrictive clothing, drinking, fornicating and otherwise behaving like perfect men.
It is the line of Latin that directly follows Carboni’s reference to ‘the ladies’ that gives the crucial clue: Durum sed levius fit patientia. The reference is from Horace, Odes 1.24. The entire line is: Durum: Sed levius fit patientia/Quicquid corrigere est nefas. ‘It is hard: but whatever is impossible to set right, becomes lighter by endurance.’14
Which ladies fought for, lost and were forced to ‘endure’ their struggle for political inclusion? Ellen Young? Anastasia Hayes, who later took on the Catholic Church over the issue of fair wages? Mrs Rowlands, who attended the monster meetings? Sarah Hanmer, who was contributing more coin to the Diggers Defence Fund than anyone else in Ballarat? Jane Cuming, who named her daughter Martineau after the renowned liberal philosopher and feminist? Thomas Kennedy’s wife? Christina McIntyre, whose wrongfully accused husband was up on charges of arson? Fanny Smith, who in 1856 would agitate for universal municipal representation on behalf of myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat?15 Dorette Welge and Ellen Flemming, who in 1855 would marry Adolph Wiesenhavern and William McCrae, proprietors of the Prince Albert and Star hotels, where members of the reform league held their meetings? The wives of other nonconformist British and European radicals who had, in partnership with their husbands, travelled to Victoria to seek political refuge from the sort of conservative atavism that that would see the French revolutionary universality of liberté, égalité, fraternité reduced to the chauvinist dogma of the Paris Commune?16
It is clear that something more than manhood suffrage was envisioned by at least a vocal minority of goldfields possum-stirrers. During the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion of August 1853, William Dexter took the stage to argue for women having votes as well as men. It was William’s wife, Caroline, who would bring her bloomer costume and lectures on women’s rights to Melbourne in January 1855. William Howitt, who witnessed William Dexter’s inflammatory speech, dismissed the French-educated man’s cosmopolitan doctrines as the peculiarly revolting cant of ultra-republicans, those maniacs of revolution.17 But Dexter was no raving lunatic. He would stand for the Victorian Parliament on a platform of universal suffrage in the elections of 1856, with his wife in campaign mode.
So too would a young man named Thomas Loader, who stood against John Basson Humffray in the 1856 elections for the seat of North Grant, covering East Ballarat and the Eureka Lead. Loader styled himself as a Liberal Australian Reformer and pledged, if elected, to introduce such reforms as are peculiarly requisite in Australia, arranged upon liberal and progressive principles. Loader’s policies included rights of women but he hedged his bets about suffrage.18 He was trounced anyway.
But such concerted public action by women, or on behalf of women by sympathetic men, constituted what the historian June Philipp has called ‘both a plea and a threat’. Raising the spectre of women’s political enfranchisement—their constitutional entitlement to civic rights, their elevation in status from moral compass to helmsman—cast doubt on the power and status of deeply entrenched norms of social and political behaviour. This was truly revolutionary, and the Australian people would have to wait another forty-eight years before the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902 made their nation the most democratic in the world. The internationally unprecedented legislation gave (white) women full political equality with men: the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament. America would not pass
the constitutional amendment that ensured these liberties until 1920 and British women would not enjoy such rights until 1928. Aboriginal women (and men) would not be fully enfranchised until the 1960s.
Catherine Bentley was one woman who was definitely not clamouring for membership of the Ballarat Reform League in mid-November. The only acceptance she needed was from a jury of her peers. On 19 October, Catherine had been arrested after her former employee, Thomas Mooney, turned Queen’s evidence and claimed the reward of £300 for information leading to a conviction in the Scobie murder. On 1 November Catherine was transported to Melbourne, where her husband had been apprehended.
Not everyone was thrilled by this development. There were those who, like Ellen Young, believed that the Bentleys were being unduly scapegoated for wider feelings of envy, hatred and malice towards the corrupt Camp officials and those they winked at. Certain merchants, storekeepers, diggers and residents of Ballarat and Melbourne got up petitions to proclaim James Bentley’s good character and innocence of any crime. One of the jurors at the original inquest signed a petition to the effect that there has been heaped on Bentley’s head a greater amount of odium than he at all deserves.19
But none of this could avert a show trial to demonstrate the Crown’s impartiality. Catherine would have to take her starring role in the cast. Even so, a journalist for the ARGUS reported with alarm that when Catherine was conveyed by steamer from Geelong Prison to Melbourne to stand her trial, she was handcuffed all the way. Her keeper, Detective Cummings, refused even to allow her to get dinner regardless of the fact that she was by now seven months pregnant with her second child. Mrs Bentley has been moving in a respectable line of life, chided the journalist. She is not convicted of any offence, and it is not likely that she will be. The only cause to justify such harsh treatment and cowardly brutality, argued the journalist, was the supposition that it was in accordance with the public feeling to heap insults on a defenceless woman. Cummings’ behaviour was an insult to the community, especially as the public sentiment aroused by the case evinced not so much a virulent hatred of the alleged offenders as a mark that the people of the colony will not stand for the abuse of power and privilege by judicial authorities.20 Others similarly came forward to declare that ‘the Bentley affair’ was simply the last straw in a long line of baleful examples of disregard for the rule of law by the Ballarat authorities.
