The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Paranoia had gripped the Camp by now. For good measure, the prisoners were transferred from the ‘logs’ to the zinc-lined commissariat store. This means the women who had stayed at the Camp during the previous terrifying days, including Ellen Neill and baby Fanny, must have been moved out. Maggie Johnston recorded the week’s bizarre arrangements in her diary.

  December 3 Sunday

  The awful day of the attack made at the Eureka at 5 in the morning.

  December 4 Monday

  All day long funerals passing.

  December 5 Tuesday

  Somewhat similar.

  December 6 Wednesday

  Mrs Lane staying with me for a week.

  By the end of that train wreck of a month, the bulk of the funerals were over, the shops were once again open, mining operations were in full steam and the rattle of the windlass chimed in syncopated rhythm with squeezeboxes, street bands, shrieking children and barking dogs.

  Peter Lalor, with the connivance of Stephen and Jane Cuming, was in hiding in Geelong, under the care of Alicia Dunne. Along with Lalor, Frederick Vern, George Black and James McGill had a £500 price tag on their heads. Thirteen men—including Timothy Hayes, Raffaello Carboni and the nigger rebel, African-American John Joseph—were on their way to Melbourne to be tried for treason. Henry Seekamp had been arrested in his home, with Clara and her children looking on, and would contest a charge of sedition.

  The rest of the prisoners were released to the ruins of their burnt-out tents, grief-stricken kin and uncertain futures. Robert Rede’s report for the last week of December noted a population increase of 855 women and 1955 children, and a decrease of 4130 men. A better state of order is returning, he wrote, and the miners are resuming work…little gold has been raised.36

  Eureka Wright, whose parents Thomas and Mary Wright were in their tent inside the stockade when it was stormed, celebrated her first birthday.

  Dear Jamie and I spent a quiet day all alone, wrote Maggie Johnston. Our first Christmas after our marriage. Her baby quickened.

  A year earlier, Thomas Pierson had wondered what fate would befall him, Frances and Mason by the next Christmas. Now, he joined with thousands of other drunk and sunburnt people thronging the long Main Road that ran through the Flat to rejoice at the birth of Christ and other small miracles. It was a hundred degrees; the flies were as thick as Connecticut snow, and Thomas reckoned he would never grow accustomed to this strange country. Yuletide tells a story of birth, hope and promise in a spiritual sanctum, but for Thomas and Frances, after all they had seen, the exiles dream of home is past.

  Note written by Catherine Bentley on the back of a copy of the petition to free her husband. Dated 10 April 1892, the anniversary of James Bentley’s suicide. Transcription p. 479.

  The Bentleys’ dreams go up in smoke, as witnessed by Charles Doudiet, 1854.

  Anastasia Hayes.

  ‘The Australian Flag’ gets its first airing. Charles Doudiet, 1854.

  Original meeting placard, rallying ‘the inhabitants of Ballarat generally’ to Bakery Hill on 29 November 1854.

  St Alipius Catholic Church with mass flag flying, as depicted by von Guérard in January 1854.

  Eliza Howard née Darcy, seated between Patrick Howard and Ella Hancock’s mother. Date unknown but probably 1890s.

  Eureka veterans at the 1904 anniversary, Jane Cuming front row, third from right. Kind permission Ballarat Heritage Services.

  CONCLUSION

  A DAY AT THE RACES

  There was little work done in those last weeks of 1854. The aftermath of what soon became known as the Eureka Stockade—the AGE newspaper gave the bloody event this name on 20 December—took its toll on the usual bustling hive of end-of-year industry. First there were the funerals; then came the removal of incinerated tents, the stocktake of decimated business and the shelter of homeless families. There were preparations for Christmas too. And all under the blazing sun of a summer hot spell.

  But there was another matter more pressing than the body count, the burnt-out ground of the Eureka or the baking of mince tarts. There was the matter of the races.

  The races are the absorbing topic, noted the Ballarat correspondent of the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 27 December. The inaugural Ballarat Race Meeting had been planned for months. The event was intended to rival the oldest and best regulated courses in this colony and put the fledgling goldfields town on the sporting calendar. A weighing machine had been purchased at great expense, a track cleared some seven miles from the Camp, near Bald Hills, beyond Waldock’s Station, and stewards appointed for the five-day meet, which was slated to commence on 12 December. Prize money had been collected for the Hack Race, the Maiden Plate, the Camp Purse, the Ballarat Town Plate, the Publicans Purse, the Gold Diggings Plate, the Consolation Stakes and the Ladies Purse: a rollcall of Ballarat’s social taxonomy as clear as the blue sky itself.

  But, according to the BALLARAT TIMES, the recent disturbances were ill calculated to promote sporting affairs. There was also the considerable complication that two of the stewards—Messrs Rede and Johnston—were more likely to be lynched than listened to should they appear before a drunk and festive public. Johnston, noted the BALLARAT TIMES, always sounded as if he was insulting you, adding generously that perhaps he could not help it. Rede, the paper conceded, was an accomplished scholar and generous donor to charitable causes, but his manner set everyone at odds. For their own safety, both Rede and Johnston had left Ballarat shortly after the Stockade clash.

  So the first race day was rescheduled for Boxing Day and new stewards were appointed, neutral men unlikely to incite another riot. But still the fates were cruel to the sport of kings. Four thousand post-Christmas revellers walked the seven miles in scorching heat to the racecourse only to discover that the weighing apparatus had been accidentally damaged and the first race postponed indefinitely. It is too much to expect large assemblages of people to remain patient under a scorching sun, noted the TIMES. Liquids of all kinds were eagerly sought for. Ice sellers did a roaring trade, while pickpocket gangs swarmed from one hard drinking circle to the next. Sarah Hanmer was in attendance but got herself into a difficulty that soon gave rise to a good deal of yabber…too private and intricate to publish. By the time new scales had arrived and Mr Keating’s bay horse had it all his own way in the Hack Race later that evening, the crowd was legless.

  On day two, clouds of dust billowed in the arc of a northerly gale. The faces of punters looked as if at a masquerade ball, so besmeared with topsoil and sweat that you couldn’t recognize your most intimate friend. Then the seven-mile stagger back to the diggings, only to repeat the trek the following day. One party, who had hired a horse-drawn conveyance to relieve the slog, had cause to regret their indolence when the buggy overturned, resulting in serious injury to several passengers.

  Next the temperature plummeted and a perfect deluge flooded the track. A sudden change of the weather, noted the TIMES, rendered a visit to the course more an act of martyrdom than pleasure. By the end of the stormy third day, when the Ladies Purse (presented by the Ladies of Ballarat and Creswick of not less than 100 sovereigns…1 mile and a half, 11 stone; gentleman riders) was taken out by Mr Waldock’s St Patrick, the people of Ballarat must have wondered whether they were being punished for something.

  But their suffering was rewarded. With Old Father Christmas, concluded the TIMES, five days’ good racing, and a race dinner and ball crowded into one week, we ought to have enjoyed ourselves. William Westgarth, who was in Ballarat as a member of the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry established by Governor Hotham to investigate the root cause of miners’ grievances, thought the races a most absorbing spectacle.1

  A week-long holiday had scuttled the gold escort (the armed guard transporting gold to Melbourne) but done wonders for the morale of a community beset with trauma, sickened by hope deferred.

  New Year’s Day 1855 was ushered in by an even more absorbing sight than thousands of well-oiled race-goers.
To our readers, beckoned the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES, A happy new year to you all. Clara Seekamp continued her leader:

  That you may have better health, more wealth, and much more justice this year than during the one just past, is the earnest prayer of your fellow labourer—the Editor.

  With her husband awaiting trial on charges of sedition, Clara Seekamp took the reins of their family enterprise. She published the list of subscribers to the proposed Miners Hospital: topping the list was Sarah Hanmer with a generous £53 donation. (The second-largest contribution was from Robert Rede.) She published a letter from Jewish auctioneer Henry Harris, beseeching the Ballarat community to come to the financial aid of those unfortunates who have innocently suffered from the late fearful entente on the Eureka [when] women became widows, children fatherless. There is also a letter from ‘Quartz’, encouraging people to write to the enquiry into the late massacre and make suggestions to the Commission on political questions.

  There are many remarkable features of the New Year’s Day paper, but the most outstanding is by far the least prominent. Edition 45 of the BALLARAT TIMES, Monday, January 1, 1855, bears a small imprint in the bottom corner of the last column of its final page:

  Printed and published by Mrs Seekamp, Ballarat.

  These seven little words encapsulate the other insurrection that had occurred in the watershed year of 1854.

  When a few hundred polyglot gold miners hastily constructed a rough palisade around fifteen tents on the Eureka Lead, they intended to provide a place of armed refuge for unlicensed diggers against the legally sanctioned licence hunts designed to oppress, entrap and emasculate them. They raised a flag that would fly beside the French, German, American, British, Canadian and other standards that were customarily flown at public meetings. They called it the Australian Flag. Standing below that flag’s simple, geopolitically specific design, they swore an oath to stand by each other to defend their rights and liberties. Those rights, they considered, were nothing more or less than their entitlement as free-born Britons to be treated like men. Not animals, serfs or slaves: men.

  The miners were not disloyal to their sovereign, but rather had lost any shred of respect for the minions who served her. They did not want to change the system of government; they wanted to be included in it. At no time did they riot against or launch an assault on authorities. They were not insurgents. They were not revolutionaries. For the most part, they were British subjects denied the basic civilities of British justice. They were ethnic insiders being treated like outsiders. They rebelled against an unpopular and viciously policed poll tax when all peaceful means of protest had been rebuffed. They fought back when attacked by the military in a pre-emptive strike that was intended to restore the authority of a government that taxed but would not listen, a goldfields regime that postulated but would not protect, and an imperialist agenda that had promised so much but delivered precious little.

  They sewed a flag and built a fence.

  Flailing desperately to conjure a worthy enemy following bloody Sunday, Governor Hotham quickly determined that only foreigners could be responsible for such outrageous acts of perfidy. No one was fooled, least of all when Hotham declared an amnesty for any Americans involved in the affray. The Americans had been the only ones who, perhaps, truly did foresee a republican future and for whom insurrection against redcoats had already proved a successful political strategy. Clara Seekamp certainly was not duped by Hotham’s scapegoating tactic. In her leader on New Year’s Day 1855, she called Hotham to account:

  Who are the foreigners? Where are the foreigners? What is it that constitutes a foreigner?…Poor Governor Hotham! Could you not have found some other more truthful excuse for all the illegal and even murderous excesses committed by your soldiery and butchers?…Why did you disregard our memorials and entreaties, our prayers and our cries for justice and protection against your unjust stewards here, until the people, sickened by hope deferred, and maddened by continued and increased acts of oppression, were driven to take up arms in self defence?

  That Clara’s action—offering a political analysis of the Eureka Stockade—was genuinely revolutionary is evident in the general response. William Westgarth, opening his copy of the BALLARAT TIMES on New Year’s Day, did not fail to notice the breathtaking hubris of its emancipated editor. The TIMES was at war with the authorities local and general, he surmised before adding smugly, we amused ourselves with the violent style of the ‘leaders’. Tickled by his own sparkling wit, Westgarth made a pun of a woman aspiring to editorial governance. He forgot, perhaps, that with no representation in the legislature, the diggers could only make their voice heard through the press. In Ballarat, the only press was the BALLARAT TIMES, whose usual leader-writer was presently in prison on charges of sedition, with his wife stepping to the breach.

  There is no extant copy of edition 46, but Clara was evidently still chafing at the bit. The BALLARAT TIMES contains…a manifesto from Mrs Seekamp, wrote a journalist at the GEELONG ADVERTISER (soon syndicated throughout the country), as startling in its tone, and as energetic in its language, italics, and capitals, and the free use of the words ‘sedition’, ‘liberty’, ‘oppression’ etc as a Russian ukase would be. The reporter had a novel solution to this remarkable situation:

  I only hope that Sir William a’Beckett will at once perceive that a lenient sentence upon Mr Seekamp and a quick return to his editorial duties, will relieve, at all events, the gold field of Ballarat from the dangerous influence of a free press petticoat government.

  The Ballarat troubles had been caused, in part, by lack of judicial transparency and unchecked miscarriages of justice, yet the (pro-democracy) ADVERTISER’s reporter was prepared to suggest that Attorney General William a’Beckett exercise his discretion to restore the status of the press as a bastion of masculine authority. He was not alone. Charles Thatcher, the famous goldfields balladeer, also had something to say about Clara’s editorial style. In his popular ditty ‘Ballarat Comic Alphabet’, penned in 1855, Thatcher devoted ‘S’ to the imprisoned Seekamp:

  S is for Seekamp who I trust will be

  Released upon my life

  It will but save us from the trash

  Inserted by his wife2

  The anomaly of Clara’s pre-eminence at the masthead of the TIMES only served to affirm the general state of affairs that Thatcher lamented in other of his verses. The gals that come out to Australia to roam/Have much higher notions than when they’re at home, he sang in ‘London and the Diggings’.3 Having women call the political race was clearly too big a hurdle for most people.

  Nonetheless, Clara Seekamp and Ellen Young were not the only women to use the press as a route to the political influence otherwise denied them. On 7 December, Caroline Chisholm wrote a letter to the editor of the ARGUS. Vitriol was not her style. Any thoughtful person who calmly views our present condition, either commercially or politically, she wrote, would see the problem was underutilisation of the rich and beautiful land God has given us. With remarkable prescience, Chisholm concluded that we are a nation of consumers instead of producers. Pre-figuring the mining magnates of over a century later, she counselled Governor Hotham to stop taxing and start ploughing, a plea that echoed one of the miners’ key grievances: unlock the lands!

  In the weeks directly following the Stockade clash, miners formed yet another quixotic expectation: that justice would be done. By 15 December, there were calls for the exhumation of the bodies that had been swiftly buried in makeshift graves. The date is important. On 9 December, Henry Powell—the unarmed miner outside the Stockade who had been dreadfully mangled by a policeman despite the protests of Eliza Cox—died of his wounds. The following day, an inquest was held. The finding of the inquest, published on the 13th, was that the mounted police were culpable of firing at and cutting down the unarmed and innocent persons of both sexes. Powell’s was the only coronial investigation of any death that occurred during or after the Eureka clash. Subsequent to his burial, the
Ballarat correspondent for the GEELONG ADVERTISER predicted that all the bodies lately buried would be exhumed and inquests held. It is said by those who are learned in law, the ADVERTISER suggested, that all those killed on the 3rd and who had died subsequently of their wounds should have been subject to Coroner’s inquests. Digging up the bodies would require political courage. It would also need a community determined to maintain its rage.

  Charles Evans, for one, could not believe that the government would get off lightly. Surely the men who had perpetrated atrocities on blameless victims would be held to account by virtue of both natural and British justice. His diary entries keenly demonstrate his horror and disbelief at how far the British officials had strayed from their national and racial superiority as agents of civility and progress.

  There were others eager to bear witness to the moral and jurisprudential implications of the slaughter, afraid that time would veil the unsightly wounds. On 15 December, an anonymous poem was published in the GEELONG ADVERTISER. ‘The Mounted Butchers’ aimed for documentary relevance.

  There go the ‘Troopers’ that slaughtered our men,

  When all fight and resistance was o’er:…

  By firing the tents, and cutting men down:

  And mangling and maiming the dead

  They barely upheld the old British Crown,

  That our fathers had fought for and bled.

  Women and children escaped not their fire…

  Like demons they rode and vented their ire,

  When the ‘Red Coats’ the skirmish had won.

  The anonymous poet confirmed publicly what Charles Evans had scribbled privately in his diary: The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men.