Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

Monday afternoon, 4 December 1854, courage in Father Smyth’s residence

  Easy. Easy. Steady. Steady. Big breaths. For there at Bakery Hill, on Father Smyth’s table, lies Peter Lalor. Peering down above him is Dr Doyle, assisted by the American surgeon Dr Kinsworthy, as they prepare to amputate what is left of the rebel leader’s left arm, with none other than Anastasia Hayes acting as nurse. But the heavy breathing is not coming from Lalor alone - Dr Doyle is also feeling ill at all the gore and wondering if he is up to removing an arm in such circumstances. Peter Lalor’s upper arm and shoulder is now no more than a twisted mess of putrescent flesh and shattered bone, with the humerus completely torn asunder, as is the artery beside it. One of the musket balls that hit him has carried pieces of Lalor’s shirt into the jagged wound from which shards of bone are visible, and the whole thing emits a stench that is truly nauseating.39

  Legend would have it that, sensing this, Lalor opens his eyes, looks at Dr Doyle and says rather impatiently, ‘Courage, courage, take it off.’40

  They take it off, using just as much chloroform as they dare, since a heavy dose would be too dangerous for a man in his condition. Pulling his arm right out of the shoulder joint,41 they also manage to remove two of the three bullets that hit him. They then tie off the largest spurting blood vessels with thread before using a hot iron to seal the smaller ones.42 Rightly or wrongly - it could never be proven - the story circulates afterwards that Anastasia Hayes disposed of the severed limb down a deep, abandoned mine shaft.

  Monday afternoon, 4 December 1854, the panic grows in Melbourne

  In small graveyard groups all over Melbourne, they huddle together, reading this first of scattered reports from Ballarat in a special edition of The Argus.

  BY EXPRESS

  FATAL COLLISION AT BALLAARAT

  At four a.m. this morning (Sunday) the troopers advanced on the right of the Warraneep Gulley, and another division on the left of the Eureka line, encompassing the camp of the diggers. A shout was raised, and after a sharp firing of about twenty minutes the troopers called to the soldiers, who were advancing, that it was all over …

  The London Hotel is the chief repository for the dead and wounded. The troopers swept the diggings, and are making several captures now at the moment of writing.

  The most harrowing and heartrending scenes amongst the women and children I have witnessed through this dreadful morning. Many innocent persons have suffered … 43

  It is a report that gives credence to the rumours that have been circulating throughout the day, fuelling the worst rumour of all: the vengeful diggers now really are marching on Melbourne! No more mere red ribbons in their hats, they now have red sashes across their chest and pistols in both hands! And they’re not just coming from Ballarat, but from all over the diggings. They will sack the city. Whole sections of the road between here and Ballarat have been taken over by guerrilla parties, ready to fall upon any isolated group of troops or police! The horror! Oh, the horror. A dark mood begins to fall on Melbourne, as all wonder what will happen next.

  Monday evening, 4 December 1854, more shots on Ballarat

  Tension is the father of aggression, and all too frequently the bastard brother of catastrophic error. On this dark, cloudy evening the soldiers in the Camp have no sooner seen a flitting figure ‘running out of the Camp and down the hill’,44 keeping close to the picket fence, than in a split second a dozen muskets are brought to shoulders as they draw a bead.

  Yet, right at the moment they are about to fire, a single ray of moonlight breaks through the clouds and illuminates the figure. It is a woman! Anastasia Hayes - who has been visiting her husband and, for reasons unknown, is now running away - will never know how close she has come to losing her life in a hail of bullets and musket balls. Upon investigation, it appears that via one of the guards, she has been in secret communication with her husband.

  Catastrophe still stalks close, however. The two armed and glowering camps of a couple of days before have now turned into one destroyed camp with its furious survivors scattered and the other camp victorious but still angrily grieving for the good men it has lost. Trigger fingers on both sides have never been itchier. As Samuel Lazarus records in his diary at eight o’clock that night, ‘A shot had been fired into the [Government] camp & for this solitary misdemeanour 50 or 60 musket shots had been fired indiscriminately among the tents.’ 45 Among those who are in the way of the bullets is a mother with a babe in arms. ‘The same ball which murdered the Mother (for that is the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms.’46 And there is yet more devastation to come as the barrage of bullets is heavy.

  ‘A gentleman on horseback was wounded in the leg,’ the Geelong Advertiser would report. ‘Another gentleman informs us that three children were killed by the discharge.’47

  The fury of the diggers is overwhelming.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ Lazarus says, ‘will show the result of this wanton & tyrannical use of power. I hear many disastrous reports tonight but hope there is the foundation for them. After the blood stained lesson which was offered on Sunday morning (not a very fit day for such teaching,) the people will bear a great deal before they will risk a repetition but there are some deeds which will grace men beyond the power of endurance and this seems very like one of them.’48

  The fury of the diggers is manifested by many shots being fired into the diggers’ camp that night, all of it without retribution, and those inside, rightly, feel themselves to be under siege.

  Tuesday, 5 December 1854, Melbourne, the outrage rises

  And with those first reports the previous day come many more detailed, harrowing accounts. Most poignant is the correspondent of The Melbourne Herald: ‘I was attracted by the smoke of the tents burnt by the soldiers, and there a most appalling sight presented itself. Many more are said to have been killed and wounded, but I myself saw eleven dead bodies of diggers lying within a very small space of ground, and the earth was besprinkled with blood, and covered with the smoking mass of tents recently occupied. Could the government but have seen the awful sight presented at Ballarat on this Sabbath morning - the women in tears, mourning over their dead relations, and the blood-bespattered countenances of many men in the diggers’ camp.’ 49

  It is through the reading of this, and many such accounts, that the popular mood of the people of Melbourne starts rapidly to swing from fear of the diggers to outright anger at what the government has done to those diggers.

  For already, The Age has done its sums and now sums up neatly: ‘Let the Government be undeceived. There are not a dozen respectable citizens in Melbourne who do not entertain an indignant feeling against it for its weakness, its folly and its last crowning error … They do not sympathize with injustice and coercion.’50

  The public mood towards the government is dark and only getting darker.

  In answer to the request of eight members of the Legislative Council and self-interested Melbourne businessmen keen to see law and order restored, Mayor Smith calls a public meeting at one o’clock that afternoon in the Mechanics’ Institute Hall on Collins Street. However, so many unexpectedly attend - around 5000, as estimated by The Age - that it requires a full contingent of police and troopers to keep order, even after the meeting moves to the front of the City Court House in Swanston Street. And they are not long in dividing up between those who seek a return to law and order and those seeking justice for the diggers …

  After the Mayor, as Chair, exhorts the boisterous outdoor gathering to remain controlled, it is a barely audible John Pascoe Fawkner MLC who, just above the din, proposes the first resolution: ‘That this meeting deeply deplore that any sense of wrong doing should have induced a portion of our fellow colonists at Ballaarat to resort to the use of arms in resistance to lawful authority.’51 Fawkner also argues, however, that the government should pardon the diggers - ‘let bygones be bygones’52 - and ‘give the diggers what they demand’. (Cheers) Fawkner goes on to exhort the diggers to s
how patience in temporarily paying the license fee and obeying the law until the forthcoming Inquiry (in which he will take part) can try to get to the bottom of their grievances and propose solutions.

  ‘It was not the Governor’s fault,’ he continues. ‘He wished to act honestly by them. It was the fault of the Colonial Secretary Foster. (Groans) Let the reasonable demands of the diggers be conceded, but let them no longer continue their present unlawful opposition.’ (Cheers) 53

  When the seconder of Fawkner’s resolution, however, returns to the issue of law and order and asks the crowd to support the government, the pro-digger lobby erupts: ‘They are wholesale butchers!’ (Repeated groans) ‘The diggers were driven to it.’ ‘It was in self defence.’54

  Rather than address the actual plight of the digger, the next three speakers prattle on about maintaining law and order (the original purpose of the meeting) and the need to act like Englishmen in order that business as usual may continue. After Henry Miller MLC asks the crowd to make a choice between ‘the flag of England’ and ‘the new flag of the Southern Cross’, more chaotic calls break out - and so much groaning it drowns out all else. It is obvious that he is not getting the response he wants. Outraged at the current tenor of the meeting, a digger in the crowd shouts out a motion from the crowd, ‘The only way to restore order … is to get rid of those who caused the disorder.’ The government.55

  Despite the protestations of the Chair, who has by now lost control of the meeting, the next speaker, a Mr Hibberd, starts to call once again for the immediate head of Foster, and asserts that Foster’s ‘memory would be execrated by the widows and orphans of the poor men who had fallen at Ballarat’.56

  As the crowd continues to cheer a series of speakers who support the diggers and denounce the actions of the Executive Council (though somehow Hotham escapes the worst of it), the harried Chair hurriedly declares the meeting closed. But no, the people do not want it closed, and cry out in protest.

  Dr Embling replaces the Mayor as Chair and now another digger, with a moustache so curly the tips nearly come back to meet his nose, steps forward. Henry Frencham is well known for being one of the earliest after Esmond to have found payable gold in Victoria - in his case, around Bendigo - and he now roars to the appreciative crowd that the people ‘must go forth with their brother diggers to conquer or die!’57

  Previously interrupted, Mr Hibbard now completes his resolution calling for the immediate dismissal of the Colonial Secretary, and it is carried ‘amidst the most tumultuous cheering, every hand being uplifted in its favour’.58 Three deep groans are then given for Mr Foster, followed by three cheers for the replacement chairman, and with some loud cheers for the diggers in general, the gathering disperses.

  Now, as the meeting’s proceedings have been duly noted by both the journalists and Sir Charles’s men, the anxious Lieutenant-Governor and Colonial Secretary Foster are shortly afterwards presented with a full report occasioning ever more anxiety, particularly from Foster, at the way things are turning.

  However, out on those same streets an extraordinary edition of The Government Gazette is issued, calling on ‘all true subjects of the Queen, and all strangers who have received hospitality and protection under Her flag … to enrol themselves [as special constables]’. 59

  Three o’clock, Tuesday afternoon, 5 December 1854, on Ballarat, the Camp is saved

  Men on horseback. Many men on horseback. After a journey lasting four gruelling days, on this hot afternoon Major-General Sir Robert Nickle and his force of 800 armed men with squadrons of cavalry sent out in support arrive at last at the head of a seemingly endless train of supply wagons, which also boasts two 600-pounder field guns and two 12-pounder howitzers. Those at the diggings watch them with enormous trepidation and outright fear, for, just as rumours have swirled through Melbourne that an army of diggers was on the march, ready to kill them all, so too has Ballarat been beset by rumours that they are soon to be slaughtered by a vengeful army of Redcoats. And now here they are.

  It is for this reason that one of the first things Sir Robert and his men see as they reach Ballarat is diggers and their families running for the hills. It takes some time before those who have departed with such haste feel confident enough to make their way back.

  By contrast, for those in the Government Camp, the vision of Sir Robert and his men is greeted with unbridled joy. ‘We now felt like Red Indians after a siege,’ Samuel Huyghue would recall, ‘who, discarding weapons and war paint, smoke the [peace pipe] with a pleasing assurance of the preservation of their scalps, preparatory to the luxury of a big sleep.’60

  From the first, Sir Robert is a different sort of man. Instead of staying in the heavily defended Government Camp or being aggressive, the day after arriving he heads out on foot, without even a mounted escort, something that greatly impresses the diggers under the circumstances. He asks questions as he proceeds and even - and this is the most astonishing thing - listens to the diggers and their plaints. When something of a crowd gathers round him, however, Sir Robert is equally quick to make his own remarks. He is not talking down to them, however, but to them, man to men.

  To begin with, do they not realise that these laws they are fighting against are works in progress, experimental only? Do they really want to give their lives against something that would likely not last long anyway?

  And you English and Scots, he says, you are from the land where they respect law and order the most. How can you be lining up on the side of the foreign anarchists? It is they who have caused this terrible loss of life and we British who must restore order. All of us British. Yes, those foreign anarchists who have abused the hospitality this country has extended them might choose to go on with their fight, but Sir Robert is here to tell them that if they do, he will round them up and have them deported to some uninhabited South Sea island.

  But now to the Irish. What to say to the men who had clearly been at the forefront of the fight? He chooses his words carefully. Do they not realise that it is because they are such fine fighting men that the foreign agitators want to stir them up? They must know that if those agitators are ‘not kept under vigilant control, they would ultimately not only have the principal voice in the government of the colony, but would draw thither hordes of aliens, who would take complete possession of their rich goldfields’.61

  At this point, a cry of ‘Hear! Hear!’ from somewhere deep within the throng clearly encourages Sir Robert, for he concludes his remarks with a little oratory that is as inspired in choice as it is inspiring to his audience. Referring to the current war Great Britain is having with Russia, he finishes, ‘I wish, that instead of you fellows making targets of yourselves for the bullets of your countrymen, I had you enrolled and trained as a troop of the Connaught Rangers, and that I was leading you in a tussle with the Russians at Sebastopol.’62

  Beyond mere oratory, however, Sir Robert is not long in restoring a sense of stability to the goldfields by sheer force of arms. With so many men and supplies, there can be no further doubt as to who is in control, a point underlined by the fact that Sir Robert immediately enforces Lieutenant-Governor Hotham’s declaration of martial law, meaning that the entire administration of the law moves from civil to military jurisdiction. Major-General Nickle immediately supersedes Commissioner Rede as the most important authority on the diggings.

  Sir Robert’s first command under this new regime is that all those who possess firearms must bring them to the Camp and turn them in or face the consequences. But there is more - much more. No firearms or munitions are to be brought into the area, and anyone found with the same on their premises or engaging in violence or insult to a soldier or policeman ‘would be subject to a General Court Martial’.63 And be told, you diggers - if a shot is fired at the Camp, then any tent in the ‘neighbourhood’ of the shot will be burned down unless the owners can prove they were not involved. There is to be a continuation of the policy of ‘no lights within gunshot of the camp after 8 pm’, which had bee
n initiated prior to the Stockade - effectively a curfew in that limited area.

  This last measure troubles most particularly the diggers doing deep-shaft mining, as the only way they can operate is around the clock, pulling out the water at the bottom of the shaft that continues to flow in. When the plaint is put to Sir Robert, however, he immediately softens that part of martial law, and allows them to use lanterns so long as they are well sheltered.

  Though it is clear that Sir Robert is in firm control, it is not as if the diggers themselves are eager to throw in their lot with the authorities. When, for example, the Major-General puts out a call for interested diggers to present themselves at the tent on the lawn just to the south of the Camp to be sworn in as special constables, seconded to keep the peace, not a single volunteer actually signs up. Rather, the small crowd listens to his patriotic speech politely then moves off quietly.

  Nevertheless, bit by bit, tension dissipates as the reign of Sir Robert on the goldfields continues. He has obviously given instructions to his men to be restrained in their actions. There are no more license-hunts, and suddenly the soldiers and police are even polite.

  The Melbourne Morning Herald‘s correspondent, for one, is impressed: ‘Had Sir Robert Nickle arrived here a few days before, the bloodshed of last Sunday would have been avoided.’64

  Not that all dissent has been extinguished, for all that. One such dissenter is Commissioner Amos, a decent man who has always had the respect of the diggers. He was so shocked by what occurred on Sunday morning, that ‘owing to some expressions which had lately fallen from him’65 he was placed under arrest. While he is released within days, he quickly resigns and heads to Melbourne, and his departure is just one more sign that the previously united facade of the government and its minions is crumbling.

  Another man instantly placed under arrest shortly after appearing at a public meeting is John Basson Humffray. His time of incarceration is even shorter, as he is released within minutes of pointing out that he resigned from the Ballarat Reform League the previous Wednesday and played no part in the Stockade. (In fact, at that public meeting he had been outspoken once more as ‘the strenuous advocate of constitutional agitation, as opposed to armed resistance’,66 which sentiment had been cheered to the echo.)