The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  Small and scattered as they are, these nuggets of evidence that women’s political citizenship was being advocated in Australia as early as 1856 are significant. They place the genesis of women’s rights activism in that gold rush community of adventurers, risk-takers, speculators and freedom fighters who struggled for the more famous civic liberties often said to be at the heart of Australia’s democratic tradition.

  For Victoria’s women, the window of golden opportunity that opened during the social flux and political tumult of the mid- to late 1850s was firmly slammed shut by the Electoral Law Consolidation Act of 1865, which finally inserted the word ‘male’ before the word ‘person’ in the voting qualification, thus ensuring that manhood suffrage was just that. By the time ‘universal suffrage’ became a hot political topic in the late 1860s, it was taken for granted that it was the rights and entitlements of property, not gender, that were at stake.

  The baton of manhood suffrage—and its attendant values of independence, responsibility and human dignity—thus passed, in legend at least, from Eureka’s miners to the shearers to the union movement to the labour movement to today’s activists and idealists. The dynamic yet still disenfranchised proto-feminist women’s rights movement of the 1850s dropped unceremoniously from public view.

  To top it all off, by the time of the Ballarat Christmas Races of 1856, there was no longer a Ladies Purse.

  1856 was also a watershed year for Eureka remembrance. On the eve of the second anniversary of the battle/riots/uprising/massacre (for all these terms were by now used interchangeably), a crowd of three hundred miners gathered on the ground and passed a resolution:

  that Wednesday 3rd of December, being the anniversary of the massacre of the Ballarat Patriots, be observed as a general holiday, in commemoration of the men who so nobly sacrificed their lives in resisting injustice and tyranny.

  At 2pm the following day, a group of five hundred mourners met on the stockade site. Each wore a black gauze scarf tied around the left arm. Miner John Lynch read an oration, exhorting the crowd to: Be true men all you men, like those we celebrate. The mourners then formed a solemn procession to the cemetery. It was here that Dr Hambrook—who had not been anywhere near Ballarat two years prior—delivered his rousing graveside address, the eulogy that opened this book.

  Morning dawns upon the land for whose happiness and independence the patriots bled, Hambrook boomed.

  Combine together for the common weal—maintain the right—protect the weak—give your determined opposition to injustice in every shape, and let others in future ages have the opportunity of pointing to this colony, and saying—‘The men of Victoria were true to themselves’.

  And with that, Eureka drifted into something more like a disturbed dream than an actual historical reality.

  By 3 December 1857 there was no half-holiday. No crowds. No black armbands and but one reference in the BALLARAT TIMES to the events of three years hence: happily, those dark and dismal days are past forever.

  By 1858: the stockade, with all the strong feelings then called up, is forgotten, save by a few. Five Germans and two newspaper reporters were all who met to do honour to the memory of the men who fell four years ago. One reporter concluded, The thought of races or apathy triumph over sympathy.

  So, yes: Geoffrey Blainey was spot-on when he said that Eureka is like a great neon sign with messages that flick on and off, selling different lessons to different customers according to the fashion of the day. It has been that way since 1856, when the second anniversary was used to underscore the colony’s transformation from the wild and delirious nature of the ‘early days’ to the beginnings of a settled society. In the transition from rough to respectable, men’s transgressions were celebrated. Miners became patriots, while women were erased from the frontline of the frontier.

  But that’s only part of the story. By 1884, pioneer women had fought back with the declarations that opened this book: the Lady Who Was There and the Female of ’54 wanted that light to shine on them for one brief moment of historical remembrance. And then at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka in 1904, when the old survivors were gathered together in the flash of the photographer’s gaze, Jane Cuming took a front-row seat. The women of Eureka have always been there.

  In her firecracker leader of New Year’s Day 1855, Clara Seekamp took the temperature of her community and predicted a patriotic fever that would burn low but would not completely die.

  What is this country else but Australia? Is it any more England than it is Ireland or Scotland, France or America, Italy or Germany? Is the population, wealth, intelligence, enterprise and learning wholly and solely English? No, the population of Australia is not English, but Australian. Whoever works towards the development of its resources and its wealth is no longer a foreigner but an Australian, a title fully as good, if not better, than that of any inhabitants of any of the geographical dominions in the world. The latest immigrant is the youngest Australian.

  It is one of the mental traps of historical imagination to conjure all people in the past as old. But make no mistake: Eureka was a youth movement. The inhabitants of Ballarat, like the youth of a century later, believed that the times they were a’changing. And like today’s backpackers, the gold rush generation was transient, expansive, adventurous: in search of experience, questing for something more authentic, more precious than they could find at home, something that would transcend the familiar boundaries of custom and caste.

  But there is a difference too: where today’s backpackers might search for metaphysical transcendence, the 1850s gold seekers were fortune hunters. They took risks calculated to bring economic prosperity, not personal enrichment. Few had a return ticket or a line of credit. In this, they were more like refugees than tourists. And for them, independence was a political concept as much as a personal goal, quite distinct from the individualism that would drive later youth movements. Yet the conflict at Eureka was inter-generational as much as it was intra-imperial. New expectations for who people could be and what they were worth collided with old structures for measuring value. The currency was liberty and, as with any liberation narrative, those with the prerogative of privilege resisted the incursion of those with a claim to entitlement.

  Two months after Clara Seekamp issued her New Year’s missive, Karl Marx, writing in the German-language newspaper NEUE ODER-ZEITUNG, characterised the Eureka Stockade outbreak as being but the symptom of a general revolutionary movement in Victoria. If there was a revolution at Eureka, it was not a political but a sociological one. The mining community of Ballarat did not intend to overthrow the British Crown, any more than it wanted to create an equal distribution of wealth or a global map without colour lines. Any republican feelings were as nascent as the proto-feminist sentiments that were stirred up, but ultimately buried, in the topsy-turvy whirlwind of gold rush flux.

  More widespread was the desire to replace static power relations with a fluid, mobile social hierarchy based on merit rather than birth, breeding, rank, marriage or conventional sex roles. In this, the gold rush generation largely succeeded. A study of the life trajectories of gold rush immigrants reveals that most ultimately fulfilled their objective. They mightn’t have struck it rich, but they built businesses, farms, families, towns and, ultimately, a nation. But this was all to come.

  Karl Marx might more accurately have observed that the goldfields society was straining under the weight of its own internal contradictions. On the diggings, unsullied egalitarian urges vied with the tried and true reality of ethnic, racial and class schism. The land was vast and ‘empty’, but the places of habitation were cramped and squalid. The practical need for co-operation wrestled with the base drives of competition. Men could not move up and women would not stay down. Idealism and energy collided with brutality and death. And new beginnings ended abruptly in old sufferings. The certainty, as Clara Seekamp correctly foretold, was that these ambiguities and tensions would be Australia’s own story, to tentatively assert or flag
rantly deny.

  EPILOGUE

  Main characters

  Martha Clendinning remained a keystone of the Ballarat establishment during her husband’s long tenure as Ballarat’s district coroner. When their only child, Margaret, married Ballarat’s former resident commissioner, Robert Rede, in 1873, the wedding arrangements filled the social pages of the local papers. Dr George Clendinning, sixteen years his wife’s senior, died in 1876. Martha moved to Toorak, where she wrote her memoirs, and lived until 1908. She was eighty-six years old. She was buried in Ballarat, not far from the place where she ran her first store.

  Soon after Eureka, Robert Rede was transferred from his position as resident gold commissioner of Ballarat to sheriff of Geelong. In 1859, when Rede was forty-four years old, he married nineteen-year-old Isabella Strachan, the daughter of a member of the Legislative Council. They had a son, Robert, in 1861. The following year Isabella died of liver and kidney disease. In 1868, the widowed Rede returned to Ballarat as the town’s sheriff. Four years later he fell madly in love with Margaret Clendinning, thirty-three years his junior. He wrote passionate love letters to Margaret and sent her pressed flowers in tiny envelopes, revealing another side of a man who had become renowned for his cold-hearted treatment of the Ballarat miners. They were married in January 1873. Robert Rede died at his home in Toorak in 1904, one year shy of his ninetieth birthday. Fairlie Rede, the youngest of Robert and Margaret Rede’s six children, died in 1968. She has a hybrid tea rose named after her.

  After appointing herself the Ballarat poetess in 1854, Ellen Young retired from public life to support her husband Frederick’s career. Frederick gave up gold mining and returned to his profession as a chemist, becoming the first mayor for East Ballarat in 1862. Ellen appeared in print only one more time. In 1864 she wrote to the BALLARAT STAR to defend herself against insinuations made by Charles Dyte, who was also elected to the East Ballarat Council. Ten years after Eureka, Ellen reminded readers that she had pleaded the cause of the oppressed from lawless law and by doing so had won the general acknowledged esteem of this community. Frederick died in 1868, aged fifty-six, of apoplexy. Ellen died in 1872, aged sixty-two, of diarrhoea. They are buried in the Church of England section of the Ballarat Cemetery.

  Peter Lalor remained in hiding until a general amnesty towards all Eureka participants was declared following the unsuccessful state trials in May and June 1855. He married Alicia Dunne on 10 July 1855 at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Geelong. They had three children, the eldest of whom, Ann, was born in 1856. As an elected member of the Legislative Assembly, Lalor became known as a turncoat conservative and capitalist mine owner. Daughter Ann died of pulmonary phthisis in 1885 in the family’s East Melbourne mansion and Alicia died in 1887. Peter followed two years later.

  The marriage of Anastasia and Timothy Hayes did not survive the cauldron of the Eureka years. Perhaps his fiery wife’s jibe, used in evidence against Timothy in his treason trial, was the last straw. Timothy abandoned his family and travelled to South America and the United States. Anastasia, left alone to raise their six children, continued working at St Alipius School but fell out with the Catholic Church after agitating for fair pay and a living allowance. According to Anne Hall, Anastasia’s family was brought up to believe their father was a coward; subsequent generations inherited Anastasia’s bitterness at being deserted by her husband and exploited by her church. Sharp of mind and tongue to the last, Anastasia Hayes died in Ballarat in 1892, aged seventy-four.

  Brave Catherine McLister dared to expose the intimate underbelly of the Government Camp but she had a weak physical constitution and died in childbirth on 4 March 1858 at the age of thirty-two. The official cause of death was phthisis, more commonly known as consumption. Her baby son, James, lived for ten days, dying of debility in the Geelong home of his father, Robert McLister, whose profession was by then listed as gold digger.

  The man who shew too much, Police Inspector Gordon Evans, was transferred from Ballarat to Carlsruhe soon after Eureka. In May 1855, he married Lucy Ann Govett, a squatter’s daughter from Van Diemen’s Land, ten years his junior. They had eleven children. Evans died of a stroke in South Melbourne in 1885, aged fifty-nine. His death certificate lists his occupation as share-broker.

  Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke gave birth to her first child, John, on the road between Ballarat and Bendigo, ten days after the storming of the Eureka Stockade. She and her husband George had eleven more children, most born in Woodend, where the family settled into a life of farming and breeding. Anne died in 1914, aged seventy-six. Her husband died four years later. Their youngest child, Annie, lived until 1948, only six years shy of witnessing the centenary of the Eureka Stockade.

  James and Margaret Johnston left the Ballarat Government Camp on 4 March 1855. Their first child, Sophia, was born on 30 April, six weeks premature. On Sophia’s birth certificate, former Assistant Gold Commissioner James Johnston is listed as a farmer. The couple went on to have fourteen more children, the youngest twin boys. In the 1890s, their eldest son, James, murdered his wife and children and attempted to kill himself. He was tried and hanged for his crime. Margaret Brown Howden Johnston died on 13 July 1888 at Buninyong, aged fifty-five. The cause of death was exhaustion. The eldest of her children was thirty-three, the twins thirteen. An 1855 dictionary of medical terms defines exhaustion as loss of strength, occasioned by excessive evacuations, great fatigue, privation of food or by disease. Giving birth to fifteen children in twenty years may well count as the excessive evacuation of human bodies. Margaret was buried in the Ballarat Cemetery with Presbyterian rites.

  Frances and Thomas Pierson did not return to America. Nor did they have any more children in Victoria. Frances died in 1865, aged forty-five. The following year, her son Mason married Elizabeth Markham at Buninyong. They had four daughters: Frances Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Mary and Elizabeth. When Mason’s wife died, he married her sister Annie Markham, with whom he had another daughter, Frances May. Thomas Pierson died in 1881, aged sixty-eight, and Mason died in 1910, aged seventy-three.

  Lady Jane Sarah Hotham returned to England on 20 January 1856. From the Hood family’s home at Cricket St Thomas, she personally oversaw the design and construction of the memorial tomb to her husband, Sir Charles Hotham, which stands tall in the Melbourne General Cemetery. She spared no expense on the monument, using her own funds to supplement the controversial £1500 pledged by the Victorian Legislative Council to defray funeral and burial expenses. Jane wanted the sculptural decoration of the monument to closely resemble the native foliage of Australia, suggesting an affinity with the land that transcended the tragedy of her time in the colony. The monument was not fully installed until September 1858.

  On 30 August 1860, at the age of forty-three, Jane married William Armytage, a captain of the Royal Navy. Together they went on the Atlantic Telegraph Expedition in 1866, and travelled extensively abroad, including a time in Malta in 1871. Jane continued to be known as Lady Hotham after her marriage to Captain Armytage, and kept up her court appearances. She divided her time between London and Devon. Armytage died in 1881. Lady Jane Sarah Hood Holbech Hotham Armytage died on 28 April 1907, aged ninety. She outlived three husbands, her sovereign Queen Victoria and the colonial rule of Australia.

  Eliza Darcy married Patrick Howard at Ballarat’s St Alipius Church in August 1855. Their first child, Mary Ann, was born in 1856 and died six months later. Over the next twenty-four years, the couple had eleven more children. The Howard family remained closely aligned with the Darcy family, farming in the Birregurra area. Eliza Darcy died in Geelong in 1920, aged eighty-four. Leo Howard, who died in 2010 aged ninety-three, was the son of Eliza and Patrick’s second-youngest child, Daniel, born in 1880—and the father of famed Australian musicians Shane, Marcia and Damian Howard. Ella Hancock, Eliza and Patrick’s granddaughter from their youngest child Alicia, is the oldest living Eureka descendant, aged ninety-seven in 2013.

  Merchant and journalist George Francis Train,
who dubbed the Eureka Stockade Australia’s Bunker Hill, returned to the United States in November 1855. Here he was reunited with his wife, Willie Davis, and met their baby daughter. Willie had returned to New York in 1854 while pregnant, as George wanted his first child to be born in America so that he was eligible to become president. Train became a global transport magnate and himself ran for President of the United States as an independent candidate in 1872. He and Willie separated the same year. Train was the major financier of THE REVOLUTION, a newspaper published by women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He died, eccentric and alone, in New York City in 1904, aged seventy-five. Train is reputed to have been the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

  Stephen and Jane Cuming, who sheltered Peter Lalor after his escape from the stockade, remained in Ballarat for the rest of their lives. They built a house on the site of their original house on Pennyweight Hill, where they mined and later grew fruit and vegetables. Jane and Stephen’s daughter Martineau, who was six years old at Eureka, married Simon Andrew and later lived in Clunes at the time of the mining riots against the use of Chinese scab labour by the Lothair Mine, part-owned by Peter Lalor. Stephen Cuming died at the age of seventy-eight in 1898. Jane survived him by thirteen years, long enough to be present at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka. She died at the age of eighty-eight, telling her great-granddaughter that for all the difficulties of life on the goldfields, she felt freer than in Cornwall. Martineau died in the Pennyweight Hill house in 1930.