Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  Now the young servant emerges, limping, for he is practically a cripple himself. Blinking because of the strong sunlight, or perhaps out of sheer astonishment at being so addressed - though his grasp of English is not the equivalent of the way the diggers hold on to a nugget, he certainly understands the outraged tone - the trooper roars at him, ‘Have you got a license?’93

  Stuttering, Johannes, a rather withered, kind of broken man, replies in equally broken English that, no, he does not have a license as he is not a digger; he is simply a lowly servant to the priest.

  ‘Damn you and the priest!’94 Trooper Lord roars back, before dismounting so he can arrest the unfortunate young man and take him to be charged. Now properly terrified, the servant replies with the truth that he is a cripple and can only walk a short distance with great difficulty, let alone traipse behind the trooper as he visits other camps looking for unlicensed miners. But, he says tremulously in his thickly accented English, he would be h-h-h-happy to go direct to the Government Camp if that w-w-w-would be alright with you, s-s-s-sir?

  Enraged at this damn impertinence, the trooper now smites the young man with a mighty blow, knocking him down before dragging the whimpering one about in such a fashion that his shirt is torn. Johannes is further hurt when, remounting, the trooper has the horse trample upon him.95

  It is appalling behaviour and the diggers who witness it are united in their call: ‘Shame! Shame!’ 96 To treat a humble servant of an esteemed servant of God in this fashion! To think that Johannes could possibly afford PS1 a month, simply for looking after the good Father. Why, it is an outrage, and all the more so because, as everyone but the trooper knows, the law actually excludes religious ministers and their servants from having to pay the license fee.

  The situation is ugly and in danger of getting out of hand - quick, run for Father Smyth! - and it is likely a mercy for the suddenly surrounded trooper that at this point Assistant-Commissioner James Johnstone97 gallops up and says sharply to the crowd that they must not interfere with the trooper doing his ‘dooty’.98 And then Father Smyth himself hurries up, a man of peace. The 35-year-old Irishman with the tousled hair, a native of Mayo, is horrified at this turn of events. He was only ordained two years before, and arrived on Ballarat a few weeks earlier, so he does not have an enormous reservoir of experience to call upon, but at least manages to calm things by giving Johnstone a PS5 note, by way of bail. He assures the Assistant-Commissioner that he will bring his servant in the next day to the office of the police.

  And, sure enough, as good as his word, the priest does indeed bring his servant before Magistrate John Dewes, where he is first charged with being without a license and then - when it is pointed out that the law says a servant of a minister of religion does not need a license - Assistant-Commissioner Johnstone again comes to the ‘rescue’: Johannes Gregorius, still bearing the wounds of yesterday’s trampling, is charged with striking the trooper instead! The trooper is called to give evidence and, under oath, confirms what Assistant-Commissioner Johnstone has said, that the day before he had only been trying to execute his ‘dooty’ and the servant had struck him.

  Monstrous lies! About a man of a man of God!

  No matter that an obviously respectable digger immediately takes the stand and swears under oath the truth of the matter, testifying to the trooper’s aggression. Magistrate Dewes - a curious combination of being both rough and officious in manner - is unmoved. He takes up his gavel and, with a dismissive wave of the easily bored, peremptorily beats out the tune of the times in Ballarat: ‘Fined PS5; take him away.’99 The unfortunate servant is indeed taken away to the lockup until such time as his fine is paid.

  It is yet one more story of injustice and the gross abuse of the diggers by the authorities, and it travels all over the diggings in nothing flat, heightening the tension still further. In this sense of outrage, Henry Seekamp’s Ballarat Times takes the lead, describing the trooper in question as ‘savage and cowardly’ and a ‘monster’.100 These prove to be merely his opening remarks.

  12 October 1853, at the Police Magistrates’ Court, Ballarat, justice is outraged

  It is a busy time of it these days for Police Magistrate John Dewes. No sooner is the Gregorius case satisfactorily resolved than the even more troublesome case of Bentley comes before him.

  Presiding with him on this case at the Ballarat Police Magistrates’ Court in this exercise of British rolled-gold justice is Gold Commissioner Robert Rede and Assistant-Commissioner James Johnstone, who has gone from sitting atop a horse in one legal case to sitting on the bench for this one.

  At Dewes’s appearance in this role, there is an immediate stirring in the large crowd assembled for the occasion. For the question is asked: how can Dewes, who is known to be very friendly with Bentley and who, it is rumoured, is a secret partner with him in the Eureka Hotel possibly be impartial?

  Word spreads among the gallery that during one adjournment Dewes had even been seen to allow Bentley in to chat with him in his private chambers for ten minutes. From the bench, however, he so relentlessly badgers all the hostile witnesses that the solicitor engaged by Scobie’s supporters, Adam Loftus Lynn, threatens to withdraw from proceedings. But nothing restrains the magistrate.

  Dewes ignores such clear depositions as those tendered by the likes of Peter Martin, who states, ‘[Scobie] went up to one of the windows and asked to get in and a blow was struck at the head of the Deceased through the window as if by a man’s hand. I was knocked down … before I could distinguish who struck me … my eyes were attracted towards [Bentley] because he was the only person I saw with a weapon in his hand.’101

  Here is the key witness to the terrible event, a man with no reason to lie, positively identifying Bentley as the man with the weapon in his hand!

  None of it seems to impress Magistrate Dewes. Sure enough, after hearing from other witnesses who swear that Bentley never left his premises, he very quickly brings down his gavel on his majority verdict, with only Johnstone dissenting, that Bentley, his wife and associates have no case to answer and are free to go. The stunned spectators respond with groans and hisses, not believing that Dewes can really be pretending that he is administering justice.

  But the Magistrate is not done and goes even further to publicly state, ‘Not the shadow of an imputation can remain on Mr Bentley’s character.’102 More groans and hisses. The only solace is the surprising integrity shown by Assistant-Commissioner Johnstone - he feels so strongly about Bentley’s guilt that he will soon write a formal letter to Attorney-General William Stawell on the subject, including with it a copy of the depositions. This gives hope …

  As reported by The Ballarat Times, ‘It is thought that the decision (which gave unmistakeable offence to all who heard it) will not be final.’103

  One appalled spectator through the whole proceedings is once again Peter Lalor. The outrage over the decision is so widespread, again led by Lalor, that the same committee that had pushed for this judicial hearing now calls for a public meeting to be held outside Bentley’s Eureka Hotel on the afternoon of 17 October, to discuss what further steps should be taken …

  Mid-October 1854, Ballarat, are diggers dogs, to be hunted so?

  The license-hunts go on. And the anger rises.

  What makes matters even worse for some of the diggers is that, as the goldfields at Ballarat have now become so large, there are now four Commissioners, nominally overseeing four sectors of the goldfields, but it is anyone’s guess as to where the precise boundaries between those sectors lie. This means that at the behest of different Commissioners, different groups of troopers frequently go on license hunts over the same ground, harassing the same diggers. It is intolerable.

  And the only consistent thing in this turvy-topsy, strange world is how in these pursuits everything is the reverse of the way it is in Europe. Over there, a similar situation of armed men pursuing law-breakers would see fine, upstanding men pursuing common criminals who have offended against
the moral standards of society. But not here.

  For who are these traps, anyway? Very few of them have been with the police for long.

  The truth of it is that most decent men with any ability have come to the goldfields to try their luck. It is only those without any ability, without any pluck, and perhaps without even the barest bones of capital necessary to buy such things as picks and shovels who have been left behind - and it is from this resentful bunch of lazy ne’er-do-wells, blackguards and braggarts that the police have had to be recruited. Lacking the energy to wield a pick or a shovel, these men only truly come to life when it comes to ruthlessly chasing down those who do and putting them in manacles.

  Frequently thus, the situation arises where men whose natural home is in the slums or gaols are hunting down well-educated gentlemen of good breeding, and - after heartily abusing them in a vicious manner - throwing them into the lockup. It is just not right, and the resentment builds daily.

  One digger, William Howitt, would leave a particularly eloquent account of his and his fellow diggers’ feelings on this matter: ‘The men employed by the police to hunt over licenses were too often excessively ignorant and vulgar persons, who, never having before enjoyed the slightest shadow of power, [now do so] with a coarse brutality which was intolerable to generous minds. Men who were found without licenses on their persons, but who had them in their tents, were dragged off to the Government Camp, and fined. [If] they remonstrated with the police, they would probably be instantly clamped into handcuffs.’104

  Soon, however, the situation is brought to the attention of the outside world. One Ballarat digger writes a considered though scathing letter to the Geelong Advertiser, where he is quick in coming to the point: ‘Since the visit of Sir Charles Hotham an unusual degree of severity has been exercised towards the more unfortunate of the mining population … We are ignorant and “wandering tribes”, not much acquainted with civilised life up here. Does a military police parade your public ways, and ask you if you have paid your taxes?’105

  It is true that not all the police behave badly towards the diggers, and some of them are decent. But all of them are in the invidious position of having to enforce a bitterly resented law upon a population that is beginning to rise against it. Far from the law providing the structure for the proper behaviour of all in society towards each other, in this case it is causing society to fracture.

  This sense of rising fury and frustration on the goldfields at the waves of license-hunts is confirmed by the Geelong Advertiser‘s Ballarat correspondent, when he informs his readers:

  There are breakers ahead. If Sir Charles manages to avoid the reefs by which he is surrounded, he will prove himself a pilot of no mean ability. For the last week or so the spirit of disaffection has been rapidly increasing and, unless a change for the better be speedily brought about, Ballarat, I fear me, may soon cease to be worthy of praise from the lips of the Governor in matters of loyalty.106

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FIRE’S BURNING, FIRE’S BURNING, DRAW NEARER

  It is not fines, imprisonment, taxation and bayonets that is required to keep a people tranquil and content. It is attention to their wants and their just rights alone that will make the miners content.1

  The Ballarat Times, 28 October 1854

  Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other goldfields are in dust.

  Raffaello Carboni2

  The European gold hunter [in Victoria] had no more voice than the naked aborigine he saw prowling about the bush. At the root of all the troubles that led to the Eureka Stockade, lay the old tyranny of taxation without representation. Before he could legally put pick or shovel into the ground, the digger had to pay a heavy monthly tax, levied upon him by a Government and Parliament in which he was not represented.

  W. B. Withers in History of Ballarat3

  Afternoon, 14 October 1854, outrage on the Eureka …

  Have you heard? Bentley and his missus, and that other bloke? They have got off! The case against them has been dismissed by Magistrate Dewes, the very bastard Bentley is in cahoots with!

  The news spreads around the diggings like a bushfire with a hot, howling westerly behind it - it is, after all, a scorching, blustery day, perfect for such fires - passing from pit to pit, tent to tent, man to man, burning ear to burning ear. Scobie had been as popular with the diggers as Bentley has been unpopular, though the notoriously corrupt Dewes, who had personally fined many of them, many times, certainly runs Bentley close. It is a communal anger that starts to boil and bubble with the sun. That evening, eyewitness Thomas Pierson writes in his diary:

  The jury’s verdict whitch I heard given was that there was not a particle of evidence against him - it gave general dissatisfaction and is supposed Bentley Bribed his servants & others …4

  The Ballarat Times is stronger in its promise to its readers: ‘We intend to cleanse the Augean stable of the Ballarat Camp and purify its fetid atmosphere of those putrescent particles which offend the senses, by a rigid but wholesome exposure before the bar of public opinion.’5

  Early afternoon, 16 October 1854, on Ballarat, the heat starts to rise

  The posters - organised by Peter Lalor and his cohorts - are now all over the goldfields, calling on those concerned with the lack of justice for Scobie to gather at noon on Sunday, 17 October, on the spot where he died, for a meeting.

  Again, the word spreads quickly. We’re gathering at the spot where Scobie got done in. Pass it on.

  A worried Bentley quickly dashes off a note to tell Dewes what is afoot:

  Sir,

  Inflammatory placards have been posted about the Diggings, to get up a meeting, on the ground were James Scobie was murdered, near to my House, to enquire into the best method of convicting the murderer of the said James Scobie, and to demonstrate public feeling as to the manner in which the case has hitherto been conducted.

  I have been informed that the meeting alluded to, is to be got up for the purpose of Riot and violence upon my person and House …

  I therefore request that a strong force of protection may be present at 12 o’clock Tomorrow to see that the Law is in no way violated.6

  Dewes, while a little alarmed, cannot be there himself as he already has a legal commitment in Buninyong to preside over - a case of armed robbery - but he is quick to consult with Commissioner Rede, showing him the letter.

  Rede moves promptly, giving orders to Police Inspector Gordon Evans to ensure his officers will be in attendance. Evans feels that five police should be sufficient.

  Rede himself, as he would explain afterwards, decides not to attend: ‘There was some irritation against me in consequence of having sat on the Bench when Bentley was dismissed.’7 Instead, he goes to the Eureka Station, the spot where Assistant-Commissioner Amos has his digs, from where he can observe the meeting while also sending a magistrate along ‘furnished … with the Riot Act to use in case of necessity’.8

  Meanwhile, as insurance, Dewes also talks to Lieutenant Broadhurst of the 40th Regiment to have some of his own men on stand-by. Satisfied that the matter is now covered, he prepares for his trip to Buninyong.

  Still, Bentley is not the only one sensing trouble on the morrow, as digger Thomas Pierson writes in his diary:

  [Bentley] is a ritch man and what they call here an old lag - he was sent out here some years ago for life for some crime committed in England - the Inhabitants of Ballarat call a General meeting tomorrow to consider the whole of the Circumstances and from symtoms whitch exhibit themselves I should not wonder if the whole house was raided to the ground tomorrow.9

  Noon, 17 October 1854, Ballarat boils

  And yet … perhaps five police might not be enough. So many diggers are streaming towards the meeting, such is the evident excitement on the diggings, that well before it begins Sub-Inspector Maurice Ximenes puts his police, armed with nothing but staves, inside the Eureka Hotel as insurance that it will be protected and to conceal any display of force that might aggrava
te the diggers.

  And still from everywhere the diggers come, even as an intolerable dust storm is blowing hard. There is menace in the air, with this swirling, dirty heat just made for trouble. When the sun is near its highest in the sky, there are at least 3000 diggers milling around the spot where Scobie was murdered - joined soon by so many that they spill to ‘far, far off, on every hill round about’.10 Though there is a broad mood of mayhem abroad, there is no specific plan, no particular malice aforethought and, like the police, the diggers carry no firearms - at least no obvious ones. All they know is that they are collectively angry and intent on expressing that anger in some manner. And they are also, come to think of it, thirsty in the pressing heat. Having taken the opportunity of a day off work, they drink heavily as the sly-grog sellers move freely among them.11

  But to the business at hand!

  The man who is to chair the gathering, Hugh Meikle, had been a juror at the coroner’s inquest and was horrified and bewildered in equal measure at the verdict given and how it was received by the onlookers with such great and appropriate hissing.

  William Cockhill who, like Peter Lalor and the other jurors and witnesses, had signed the letter to the editor that appeared in The Ballarat Times critical of the judicial inquest is not long in putting the first of four motions: ‘This meeting, not being satisfied with the manner in which the proceedings connected with the death of the late James Scobie have been conducted, either by the magistrates or by the coroner, pledges itself to use every lawful means to have the case brought before other and more competent authorities.’ The motion is quickly seconded by the man who had been the foreman of that jury, James Russell Thompson.12

  Having seen all the evidence firsthand, the jurors are united in their horror at the verdict as it stands and in their passion for seeing justice done. The motion is carried unanimously.