by Clare Wright
Yet ultimately, local indignation could not be sustained.
When the dust settled, Henry Powell’s would be the only inquest. The bodies remained in the ground. Only one man, Powell’s killer, would be brought before the courts. But before that, smelling danger, the red-coated rats abandoned Hotham’s ship in droves. Three soldiers deserted the 12th Regiment in November 1854. Nineteen more followed in December 1854 and January 1855. A further thirteen deserted in the early months of 1855. In total, thirty-five out of sixty-five soldiers of Ballarat’s 12th Regiment deserted. In 1855, 165 soldiers in Victoria threw back the Queen’s shilling, the highest recorded desertion rate in Victoria’s history.4
Diggers and Redcoats alike had fought well and fierce, recorded Corporal John Neill after the stockade fight.5 But some casualties were more equal than others. It was six months before death certificates were issued for miners who lost their lives at Eureka: a bulk lot issued by the Ballarat registrar on 20 June, identifying sixteen men who died of gunshot wound on 3 December 1854. Yet there was a paper trail of evidence and a mother lode of popular memory to inscribe the reality that at least a dozen more people, both women and men, had been the victims of government brutality on that fateful day.
Now fast forward one year to 3 December 1855. The trials of thirteen miners for treason had dissolved in farce, making a laughing stock of the government. No jury would convict their peers of a capital offence for which there was not a shred of evidence, save, perhaps, a mangled blue and white flag pilfered by one of the troopers in the ashes of the Stockade, and later returned to him by the Crown—more as souvenir than state secret.
Only one blow from the prosecution landed, and it was no more than an oblique backhander, intended to strike at the potency of the miners’ worrisome popularity among city dwellers. Timothy Hayes was the butt of the joke: Lieutenant T. Bailey Richards of the 40th Regiment swore on oath that he arrested the Ballarat Reform League leader walking unarmed outside the Stockade after the battle. He then regaled the court with the tale of Anastasia’s insult: His wife came up afterwards and said are you taken, he said yes, she then said to him ‘if I had been a man I would not have been taken by so few as these’.6 Laughter in the court at the Punch and Judy show, the spectacle of an untamed shrew more powerful than her mate.
By the time the courts ejected the last of the prisoners, the goldfields commission had also tabled its report. It ranked the miners’ grievances in this order: the licence fee (or more properly the unseemly violence often necessary for its due collection); the land grievance; and the want of political rights and recognised status rendering the mining population an entirely non-privileged body… without gradations of public rank. The editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER offered his own summary of events:
Denuded of the rights of citizenship, and tabooed, regarded as inferiors, and forced to submit to insolence, annoyance, direct insult and a long course of petty oppression, without means of address,
the miners had no option but to act. Their treatment had been repugnant to British experience and derogatory to the manly feeling of independence.7
The commission’s recommendations for alleviating these complaints were quickly adopted. The mining royalty was replaced with a miner’s right. For £1 per year, it entitled miners to fossick for minerals, gave them access to a plot of land on which they could make capital improvements, and enfranchised them to vote in and seek representation on both a new local mining court system and the Victorian legislature. Women could purchase a miner’s right, but were excluded from its political spoils. (Victorian women would not win the state franchise for another fifty-three years.)
The commission of enquiry, like the juries, came out on the side of the miners. But this did not get the victims of 3 December any closer to the compensation many had claimed from the government for property losses when the military set the Eureka ablaze. A board of enquiry found in mid-winter 1855 that the destruction of tents on the morning of 3 December was a necessary consequence of the resistance offered to the military. Your Board lament the losses sustained by individuals, read the report, but cannot forget that if the sufferers were not actively engaged in an overt act of Rebellion they displayed no disposition to support authority. Thus Anne Diamond, whose husband was shot inside their store before it was burned to the ground, found her claim for £600 rejected. In this the struggling miner’s wife was no different from Catherine Bentley, the formerly prosperous publican’s wife, whose claim of £30,000 for the loss of her hotel and the forced annexation of land held in her name, was brushed aside. It was a small taste for these new Australians of the bitter pill of dispossession suffered irretrievably by the old Australians.
By December 1855, Henry Seekamp was back at the helm of the TIMES, having served half of his six-month sentence for sedition. A massive petition raised by Clara, and reputed to bear thirty thousand names, had begged successfully for his release. Charles Evans had published and printed his own newspaper, the BALLARAT LEADER, with J. B. Humffray at the helm. It lasted seven editions, folding at the same time that Queen Victoria signed the bill that would give her eponymous Australian colony its first Legislative Assembly.8 When elections were held under the new Victorian Constitution in November 1855, J. B. Humffray and Peter Lalor were elected as Ballarat’s representatives.
By spring, Sarah Hanmer had sold the Adelphi and left Ballarat. After moving around various other goldfields, she and Julia were playing to packed houses at Coppin’s Olympic Theatre in Melbourne. (She appears to have uprooted out of choice rather than necessity; Sarah was re-issued with a Ballarat theatrical licence in January 1855, despite her direct competitor, Stephen Clarke, objecting that he had always been loyal to the Crown which cannot be said of the Adelphi Company under the direction of Mrs Hanmer.9) Sir Charles and Lady Hotham were regular theatregoers, perhaps to distract them from the shadow of incompetence that trailed the governor. They may have occupied a private box to see Sarah and Julia perform a Domestic Tragedy, a Burlesque and a Farce, before Mayor J. T. Smith, and American consul James Tarleton. The Hothams did not know, of course, that tragedy was soon to befall them.
And so by 3 December 1855, after a year in which life-changing events had surged forth with an urgent force of nature, it was time to stop and remember the dead. Raffaello Carboni had published copies of his memoir The Eureka Stockade: The Consequence of Some Pirates Wanting on Quarter Deck a Rebellion. (Its cover price of five shillings put it beyond the reach of many interested in the regrettable events.10) The eccentric Italian spent the day sitting at the Stockade site and reading from his book from sunrise to sunset. There was no formal commemoration of the day. In the morning a group of some hundred mourners walked to the cemetery to pay their respects. If there were eulogies spoken, tears shed, passions rekindled, the newspapers did not report them. For there was another conflagration to upstage the first anniversary of the Stockade and monopolise media attention. Fearful Fire at Ballarat. Great Loss of Life, screamed the headlines.
On 1 December, a fire ripped through the new wooden buildings that lined the street where a year ago tents flapped in the breeze. The locus of the Main Street inferno was the United States Hotel, radiating a glare of light…that has never before been witnessed on Ballarat. The blaze had spread to the Criterion Store, once owned by Charles and George Evans, the Adelphi Theatre, Moody’s Store and several other business and grog shops. Moses and Sons’ zinc-lined store stopped the flames spreading further in the Eureka direction. One male and one female body were pulled from the burning United States Hotel, owned by American Mr Nicholls, a former friend of Sarah Hanmer’s. The bodies were identified. One stump of charred human flesh was Nicholls himself; Dr Clendinning later held a coronial enquiry identifying the victim.
It was Henry Seekamp who ran down from the TIMES office at the first cry of fire. He was too late to save Nicholls but, entering the inferno, he saw a woman with her head lolling to one side. As Seekamp later told Clendinning,
; I endeavoured to envelop the head of the female with a silk handkerchief to enable me to lay hold of it, but the head was so burnt that it crumbled into cinder; and I was obliged to leave from the heat.11
(A subsequent post mortem later exposed two testicles complete, revealing the headless woman to be a man.) Mr McGill, who, a year to the day earlier, had brandished Sarah Hanmer’s heirloom rapier at the head of the Californian Rangers, now poured water on the smouldering remains. The capital damage was estimated at £50,000. Two more bodies were found.
Two weeks later, the worst floods on record inundated the town, leading the GEELONG ADVERTISER to conclude: December is a fatal month in Ballarat—last year the sword, this year fire and flood are the agents.
And then, on the last day of the year, Charles Hotham died after a brief but violent illness, with his lady by his side. They had been married just over two years. The only extant passages from Lady Hotham’s diary pertain to the final days of her husband’s life. She read to him, fed him, prayed with him. He asked me to miss him, she wrote,
he put his left arm around my neck, and kissed me many times as if he wished to say good bye, but he did not speak…for a moment before he died his eyes resumed their natural expression, he seemed to be looking at me with intense affection.12
Some said Hotham had caught a chill in the freakish summer weather; other claimed it was a fatal bout of diarrhoea. Those who did not fear speaking ill of the dead swore he was broken in health and spirit through his own foolhardiness, landing here with words of liberty upon his lips, but with the design of a despot. For Lady Jane Sarah Hotham, twice widowed at the age of thirty-eight, there was nothing but grief.
1856 marked a turning point in the sexual politics of Victoria. When Lady Hotham sailed back to England in February of that year, she left behind her a colony struggling to contain the transformative forces it had both encouraged and feared. For if Eureka was a real time and a real place, it also became a metaphor for a moment of sweeping change when old and new regimes, attitudes, structures and aspirations collided head on.
Women had both stirred up and been carried along by that torrent of history. As the technology of gold digging was itself making the transition—from the early days of independent, alluvial mining, where individuals worked for themselves, to syndicated (corporatised) quartz mining, employing waged workers—so the initial phase of relative autonomy and liberation for women began to solidify into familiar structures of dominance and subservience.
The growth of towns, which the miner’s right facilitated, led to the establishment of permanent hospitals, schools and churches: the longed-for feminisation of the frontier. An editorial in the BALLARAT TIMES from 12 June 1856, on the ‘Progress of Ballarat’, articulated the criteria for such improvement. A few years ago, it explained, Ballarat exhibited the universal disorganisation of society. Now, by contrast, [we are] a peaceful, orderly people [showing] the decencies and refinements of civilised life. Martha Clendinning affords a perfect barometer of the changes that such civility was supposed to entail.
By 1856 Martha had decided to shut the store that had given her such satisfaction. Her reason had nothing to do with economic imperative. She was a good businesswoman and did a profitable trade, despite increased competition and diminishing returns. I was satisfied with the result of my work, she declared. As Dr Clendinning had struggled to establish his own practice, she had worked to supplement his income.
After 1855, Ballarat had become a settled township in which men came ‘to stay’ and with their wives and families make their homes there. Once the feverish turmoil of the early diggings subsided, sex roles began to revert to their former ideological inertia. The time had gone by, wrote Martha, when, even on the gold fields, a woman unaccustomed to such work could carry on her business without invidious remarks. Fearful for her husband’s reputation (she worried he might be blamed from allowing me to continue at it) she chose to shut up shop. The good doctor was himself most anxious about how her business activities would be viewed and was greatly pleased when she retired.
Dr Clendinning at once began building her a wooden house on Red Hill. This put an end to all further remarks, Martha conceded, and allowed us to make our home fit for a lady and her doctor husband to occupy, and, in a little time, to add a small garden to their comforts. The picket fence of Martha’s newly constrained life was complete when she began the charity work that is the keystone of civilised life. Martha Clendinning, doctor’s wife, was on the first committee for the Ballarat Female Refuge and a member of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society of Melbourne. Like many former miners who later looked back on the roaring fifties with nostalgia, Martha remembered her years as an autonomous shopkeeper with affection and not a little regret.
Other trailblazers weren’t prepared to go so quietly.
When Lola Montez toured Melbourne and its glistening hinterland in early 1856, she raised eyebrows for her outlandish claims to political influence as much as her saucy spider dancing. As we have seen, her tour was dogged by controversy, none more infamous than when she horsewhipped Henry Seekamp for giving her a bad review in the BALLARAT TIMES. The coward who could beat a woman, ran from a woman, thundered Lola in her curtain speech after thrashing Seekamp. He says he will drive me off the diggings; but I will change the tables, and make Seekamp decamp!13 The stoush spilled from the theatre to the courts when Seekamp sued Lola for assault and Lola counter-sued for slander. PUNCH composed a twenty-seven-verse poem about the incident, facetiously titled ‘The Battle of Ballarat’, a direct allusion to the Eureka Stockade.
Come forth, come forth, thou vap’ring Erle
Thou scribe so rude and rash
And yield thee to the punishment
Of Lola Montes’ lash.14
Imperial anxieties about the state of social flux in the colonies in general, and about the presumptuous, defiant behaviour of women in particular, are summed up in the satirical analogy between women whipping men and the military whipping the miners.
Lola’s public incursions into the structures of power may ultimately have been viewed as a salacious sideshow, but in 1856 there was another struggle taking place between the forces of female aspiration and masculine privilege.
The organised movement for female suffrage in Australia didn’t mobilise until the 1880s, but it is clear that women’s political and legal rights, including suffrage, were part of the liberal democratic agenda of some gold rush visionaries, male and female. In 1856, this agenda butted up against the ‘civilising’ impulse to restore the status quo to Victoria’s sexual politics. A letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES in 1856 provides compelling evidence that there were women on the diggings who interpreted the rhetoric of political and social inclusiveness as an invitation to participate more fully in the decision-making processes that governed their lives.
On 8 September, Fanny Smith wrote this. It is an important enough document to be quoted in full:
My Dear Sir—Will you be good enough to inform me if ladies holding the ‘miner’s right’ are eligible to be elected as members of the Local Court? I have read the Gold Fields Act 18 Vic No 37, and find it silent as to sex. The point has been disputed, and I have thought of asking the opinion of Mr Chairman Daly, but I am told that he has stated he sees no objection to lady members, provided they possess the necessary qualification—are proposed, seconded and elected. Your opinion will be anxiously waited for by myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat.15
Fanny’s letter gives us many vital clues as to the political literacy and vigour of Ballarat’s women. She is versed in the relevant legislation and the critical processes, she is using Chairman Daly’s alleged support as a wedge, and she is letting it be known that she is not a lone voice, but simply the vocal tip of a looming iceberg of female ambition. Indeed, in February 1856, the ARGUS cautioned the leaders of the ‘women’s rights’ movement against their somewhat injudicious proceedings.16
The mine
r’s right had been the most tangible outcome of the Ballarat troubles. The newly constituted local mining courts, empowered to resolve mining and partnership disputes, were widely seen as a victory for self-rule. The miner’s right was the gateway to participation: the ‘necessary qualification’ for voting or standing for office. Geoffrey Blainey has characterised the miner’s right as ‘probably the high tide of Australian democracy’.17 And Fanny Smith was correct: there was nothing in the legislation to bar women from holding a miner’s right. Indeed many women elected to purchase one to stake a claim on the land or were obliged to purchase one if they mined independently of husbands or ran their own businesses on the diggings, which many did.18 But did the legislature anticipate that possession of the miner’s right would also constitute legal sanction for women’s participation in the other democratic functions promised by the municipal franchise?
Fanny Smith never got a straight answer on the issue of representation in the local courts. But her possum-stirring had an immediate effect. On 12 September 1856, another letter to the editor was published in the BALLARAT TIMES, by someone claiming to be putting herself up as a candidate in the imminent elections for state parliament for the seat of North Grant. Her platform? All the crazy ideas going around, including universal suffrage:
Women’s right: I am for their having the same rights as a man, and to allow them to go into the House and to the Bar; for I am sure there is many an old woman in both positions already.19
The later suffragists would, of course, become familiar with this form of mockery.
The same issue of the BALLARAT TIMES reported that twenty-six-year-old Thomas Loader would contest the seat of North Grant against sitting member J. B. Humffray in the 1856 Victorian Legislative Assembly election. There were clearly enough ambitious ladies in Ballarat to convince a young man to stake his political future on the improvement of their legal status. Although Loader did not expressly advocate the female franchise, his policy on law reform included rights of women and simplification of divorce law…questions I have strong opinions upon the necessity of immediately reforming. No other popular candidate in the 1856 election included such a radical policy as women’s rights in their platform. At the election, however, Humffray won by an overwhelming majority. Thomas Loader may have seen that there were special circumstances in gold rush Victoria that made certain social reforms, including women’s rights, ‘peculiarly requisite’. But even by 1856, he was swimming against the tide.
