The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Between the women who probably came together under cover of darkness to sew the rebel flag, there were at least nine children and two pregnancies. There is no faulting their dedication. Or maybe, if you are going to be up half the night with sleepless infants, you might as well do something that will be recorded in the pages of history.

  On the evening of 29 November, Captain Pasley, one of the military commanders now stationed at Ballarat, wrote to Hotham. The meeting at Bakery Hill had passed off very quietly, he reported, with speeches less inflammatory than previous public demonstrations. It is therefore, I think, clearly necessary, Pasley wrote,

  that some steps should be taken to bring the matter to a crisis, and to teach those persons (forming, no doubt, the great majority of the mining population) who are not seditiously disposed, that it is in their interest to give practical proofs of their allegiance.43

  Such persons, he hoped, would not only discourage the rebellious portion of the community but also actively interfere to prevent their further activities. With the appearance of the Australian Flag, community unrest had suddenly been branded seditious.

  It was somewhat disingenuous for Pasley to suggest that the rebels were in the minority. Up to fifteen thousand people had assembled at Bakery Hill that day. By the end of November there were 32,000 people at Ballarat: 23,000 men, 4200 women and 4300 children. Almost half of the total population was prepared to walk off the job and attend a protest meeting. Just imagine if that sort of percentage of citizens—say half of Melbourne’s current population of five million—turned up to any public meeting on climate change, maternity leave, nuclear disarmament, Aboriginal land rights, bank fees, the trains not running on time—anything. It would be political chaos.

  Faced with this sort of numerical opposition, the authorities of Ballarat were now itching for the simplicity of a violent collision in order to assert their supremacy. Their power and legitimacy were being questioned daily by everyone from Ellen Young, the BALLARAT TIMES and the conscientiously objecting unlicensed diggers on the outside, to Catherine McLister and the grumbling foot police on the inside. A rebellion would sort the loyal wheat from the mutinous chaff, and the Camp would be the omnipotent threshing machine. The line would be nothing more or less than the law. Which side are you on?

  Each man felt something would happen before the day was over. So wrote Alexander Dick on the morning of Thursday 30 November, as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gravel Pits. The heat was intense; the day overcast, windy, foul. The young Scotsman looked down on the usual comings and goings of a busy working goldfield. The noise and clamour. The shouts from holes and the creak of turning windlasses. Tents and flags flapping, children darting about. Shops trading. The workplace and the home fused in a perfect pre-industrial spectacle of manual labour.

  And then, a torrent of foot and mounted police suddenly descended from the Camp to the Gravel Pits. A massive licence hunt began, led by James Johnston, on the very morning after so many diggers had burned their licences in the flames of communal resistance. It was a test of the rebellious miners’ pledge to defend the unlicensed among them. It was a demonstration of strength from the Camp to put to rights the power inversion that had followed the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. It was an arm-wrestle to see who, when push came to shove, would gain the upper hand; a mighty rout of deliberately unlicensed diggers by an unprecedented show of force.

  There was a tremendous uproar. All the inhabitants of the Gravel Pits scattered among the mounds of earth and tents. Joe! Joe! Joe! The cry went down the line. It was mayhem, as the mounted police began to gallop among the tents. The soldiers made a sweep of the flat, with cavalry on both flanks and in the centre, clearing off all the occupants of claims to the high road beyond the lead, below Bakery Hill. Police fired shots into a crowded area, among tents where women and children were congregated in large numbers.44

  The confused crowd scattered like tumbleweeds in the hot wind, seeking shelter in the lee of neighbouring tents. Troopers were dragged down from their horses like mere stuffed effigies of men. Police were pelted with mud, stones and broken bottles. Robert Rede stampeded in and hurriedly mouthed the Riot Act. He had been criticised for not taking such action at the Eureka Hotel riot. Now he read the Act so quickly—with telegraphic speed—that in one journalist’s opinion the consequent proceedings were illegal.45

  Elizabeth Rowlands looked on. I was present, she later wrote, when the proclamation was read when the soldiers dropped on their knee and presented guns at us and told the crowd to disperse and my word they did disperse.46 Miners jumped down holes. Women and children melted into tents. A bugle sounded. The military marched down the hill, forming a line on the grass under the southward plateau of the Camp. A very picturesque array, thought Samuel Huyghue, the line of cavalry in their bright red uniforms, their brass buttons flashing in the sunlight, set against the verdure of the grass which had not yet lost its winter hue. Eight men were arrested for riotous behaviour but there were no serious injuries. First honours to the Camp.

  No one at the Gravel Pits went back to work that day. As news of the chaos and random firing on the crowd, including turning weapons on women and children, spread to other parts of the field, sympathetic diggers downed tools to seek information and digest rumours. Work is knocked off, wrote one official to Hotham,

  and the whole population is talking over events of the morning…The opinions of most disinterested persons here is [the actions of the Camp] are alike unwise and indicative of a wish on the part of the authorities here to hurry on a collision.47

  Even upright Martha Clendinning, a self-appointed member of the peace portion of the residents, thought that ordering licence hunts after the Bakery Hill meeting was an incredible act of folly. If James Johnston was going to step up digger hunts, which had already become an almost daily humiliation, and diggers were continuing to burn their licences in solidarity with the cause of freedom from the oppressive goldfields regime, then what were the interested persons to do?

  From all directions on the diggings, people started in the direction of Bakery Hill. The Australian Flag was once again flying there. The people turned their eyes to the five shimmering stars, guiding their footsteps towards a just course. This would be an unplacarded meeting—no notice, no agenda, no stage, no prepared speeches. Whatever grievances had caused those assembled to lose faith in the government—hunger, grief, shame, disappointment, harassment, indignity, humiliation, powerlessness—the object now was self-defence. The leaders of Ballarat had shown they would fire upon a civilian crowd. If the people’s call was sticks and stones, the Camp’s response would be lead and steel. This was not a tune to which Australia’s home-grown sons and daughters, or its ambitious immigrants, had ever expected to dance. This was the way masters treated servants, dogs and blacks—not free-born Britons and self-governing Yankees.

  Gathered now at Bakery Hill, under the starry banner, the people looked for direction. Who would guide this exodus, deliver them from tyranny, lead them out of slavery? From the crowd stepped a twenty-seven-year-old Irishman. Peter Lalor was raised in a political family. His eldest brother had fought in the Young Irish movement in that fiery year of 1848. The Lalors had known the oppression and hypocrisy of the Union Jack. They believed in home rule. As landed gentry, the family had used its political nous to stand up for the rights of Irish peasants. Patrick Lalor, Peter’s father, was an MP representing Queens County. Trained as a civil engineer and excited by the prospect of a golden frontier, Peter Lalor came to Victoria with his brother Richard and sisters Margaret and Maria in 1852. At Ballarat, he became Timothy Hayes’ mining partner. With his fiancée Alicia Dunne working as a teacher in Geelong, Lalor looked to Anastasia Hayes and her brood of children for his de facto domestic life.

  On 30 November this tall, charismatic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man stepped out of the crowd and said one word. He said it with feeling. Liberty! Mrs Ann Shann, twenty-four-year-old wife of digger John Shann, was there. She later v
ividly remembered the moment when Lalor was chosen leader of the diggers, and it was decided to drill and oppose the police and military by force.48 Mrs Shann joined with other diggers, their wives and children as the assembled group of a thousand marched en masse from Bakery Hill to Eureka. The Eureka was further from the Camp, and, as a flat, not a rise, more protected. They took the flag with them.

  At Eureka, the self-appointed leadership of the young solidarity movement met in the home-cum-store of Anne and Martin Diamond. A veritable United Nations of malcontents: Lalor, Carboni (who was needed to translate orders to the non-English-speaking rebels), Irishmen Patrick Curtain, John Manning, Patrick Howard and Timothy Hayes, Englishman George Black, Scotsman Thomas Kennedy, Frederick Vern the Hanoverian, Canadian Henry Ross, American James McGill, who was a close friend of Sarah Hanmer, and Edward Thonen, a thirty-year-old Jewish ‘lemonade seller’ from Prussia. John Basson Humffray abstained from the group, citing his infinite preference for moral force over physical force, and watched his former shipmates, Anne and Martin, give shelter to the rebels. Charles Evans sided with Humffray, the man with whom he’d walked to Ballarat, over Hayes, the man with whom he’d sailed to Victoria. By temperament, Evans was a cautious observer. Kennedy, by contrast, had told a cheering crowd at Bakery Hill monster meeting that mere persuasion is all a humbug; nothing succeeds like a lick in the lug.49

  The new group who met at the Diamonds’ store constituted themselves as a ‘council of war for the defence’, though there was, at present, no territory to defend. Lalor was elected ‘commander-in-chief ’ and began to organise drilling squads to protect the unlicensed diggers. For here was the root of the problem: the thousands of miners who had burned their licences in the fires of protest were now, technically, unauthorised to be on the diggings and could be fined or arrested for breach of the law. The Gravel Pits incident that morning had shown that the government would pursue its prerogative without mercy. Lalor concluded that the miners must resist force by force. But how to symbolise that resistance? A flag was one thing. It could stir hearts, but it could not shelter bodies.

  When French revolutionaries proclaimed their democratic rights, they blockaded the streets of Paris. They set up rough barriers, cordoned off territory: drew a line. Men and women stationed themselves behind those barricades in a show of communal militancy. ‘The barricade’, writes historian David Barry, ‘emerged on a large scale as a weapon of rebellion…in July 1830, creating a new mode of defensive neighbourhood action in which women, with their strong involvement in community networks, could profitably participate.’

  French revolutionaries carried pikes, waved banners and shouted slogans. Their activities were confrontational and highly visible, like a frilled-neck lizard throwing out a collar of spines to shock enemies with its potency: an animal act of defensiveness. But it was a primal knee-jerk with a very human twist. As Barry tells us, men of Paris welcomed women behind the barricades because ‘their presence was seen as a means of deterring the authorities from reacting with force’. There might not be safety in numbers, the freedom fighters reasoned, but there was surely safety in the company of women. No civilised government would deliberately fire on civilian women and children.

  In the Diamonds’ store that afternoon, the war chiefs decided to throw up a hasty barricade. There needed to be a neighbourhood refuge, an unassailable place of shelter, to defend and protect from arrest those diggers who had burned their licences—but how to cordon off such a zone? There were no European-style streets to speak of on the diggings, only rough transport thoroughfares lined by tent dwellings, stores and shanties. The streets were porous. A crowd (or an army) could leak out into the gaps between the canvas shelters. There was no physical structure to contain them, no wall of buildings. This being Australia, and the frontier, there was simply too much space. So the barricade would have to be self-contained, would have to close in on itself. The line would have to be a circle.

  Thus an area around the Diamonds’ store was immediately barricaded. It was all hands on deck, with any form of timber serving to construct a crude fortification: overturned carts, empty barrels and crates, felled trees, the thick slabs used to line shafts. Made in haste and with scavenged resources, the barrier was brutally uneven, only waist high in some sections, over six feet in others. Some sections were held together with ropes, some fixed into the ground; some slabs were given picket-like points, other links in the chain were the mounds of earth disgorged from a deep sinking.

  The territory it marked was at the southern end of the Eureka line, on a gentle slope running up to the Melbourne Road, only a few hundred yards from the charred remains of Bentley’s Hotel. The ground in this area was studded with tents and sinking holes. In all, about an acre of ground was enclosed. The barricade surrounded at least ten tents, the Diamonds’ immediate neighbours. These tents were the homes and businesses of diggers and their families; men and women randomly, fatally, thrust centre stage. As Anne Diamond would later testify, her tent was half in and half out of the ramshackle cordon.50 The ring was not even closed. It was a broken circle from the start, more of a wobbly parallelogram really, with its rear wall comprising the scrub of Brown Hill. At the heart of the enclosed turf, a flagpole was erected and the Australian Flag hoisted to stake the claim. The Eureka Stockade, as it would come to be known, made a mighty fine amphitheatre but a lousy bulwark.51 The cornered lizard bared its frills.

  With teams of diggers drilling on the flat ground beside their new stringybark citadel, Lalor led his war council back up to Bakery Hill. The Southern Cross was once more unfurled. Though the new stronghold at Eureka could be glimpsed from the Camp, this rise was more prominent. It would attract the attention of potential recruits as well as the wide-eyed glare of the Camp. A division of Americans, calling themselves the Independent Californian Rangers, fell in behind Captain Ross. Vern rallied a troop of continental freedom fighters. There is no evidence of any Chinese being recruited into the stoush, but it is not impossible that someone like John Aloo, who ran a popular restaurant on the diggings, acted as an interpreter, just as Carboni did for the Italians, French and Prussians. Local Indigenous inhabitants were present at the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion, public meetings; they may have been at Bakery Hill too.

  This was the pointy end of a momentous day, and those still standing beneath the flag that was flapping wildly in the hot late afternoon wind were here to pledge allegiance to a cause that had turned abruptly. What had started as a lawful outpouring of communal grievance was now a calculated show of armed resistance. The stage was set, a director appointed, the actors assembled, and now the players must speak. Lalor kneeled. He removed his hat and raised his hand towards the flag: We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.52 A chorus of five hundred true believers chanted Amen.

  The curtain now falls on Bakery Hill, and the players move back down to Eureka. They bring the flag with them. This time, it will not return.

  As the storm clouds built on that afternoon of Thursday 30 November, Police Constable Henry Goodenough, a government spy, relayed a rumour that the Camp would be attacked at 4am. Henry’s twenty-six-year-old wife Elizabeth and their six-month-old baby Mary Anne had no doubt been sent away from the Camp with Maggie Johnston and the other government wives as part of Captain Thomas’s defence plan. Goodenough prowled the diggers’ meetings dressed in miners garb, shouting oaths and pretending to be drunk. Either he was a bad actor or he really was intoxicated. At one gathering Raffaello Carboni gave the blathering oaf a sturdy kick in the privates to silence him. When Judas Iscariot Goodenough, as Carboni later called him, planted the story of the Camp’s imminent attack, there was every reason to storm the citadel. The eight men arrested at the Gravel Pits that morning were considered political prisoners, just as Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby had been. We shall be ready to receive them, wrote Captain Pasley. I am more convinced than ever that…sedition must be put down by force…befor
e many days have passed, it will be necessary for us to sweep the whole goldfield.53 Had somebody instructed Goodenough to orchestrate a crisis, if none truly existed?

  That evening the barometric pressure finally plummeted. A violent thunderstorm shook the night sky. It rained for three hours solid, great lashings of fat summer rain. During the whole night, the police troopers were exposed to the downpour, waiting beside their horses, saddled and ready for action. Fortifications had been made to the mess house, Dr David Williams’ house, the Camp hospital, Rede and Johnston’s quarters (a particularly exposed locality) and the military barracks. It was the job of the police to guard these vulnerable targets. So the exhausted and no doubt frightened young men lay wrapped in their cloaks on the saturated ground or crouching under their horses for shelter. To kill time, recounted Samuel Huyghue, the lads sat spinning yarns of former service in the field. For some, there would have been an element of truth to their tales. For most, the one-upmanship was pure bravado.