Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  In Queensland there had not been much discussion of Federation in the press or politics or in the community, so that those in favour—men like Samuel Griffiths—had to work hard and cover great distances to explain it. They found that Federation was most popular along the southern border, where producers looked forward to free access to Victorian markets, amongst sugar growers for the same reason, and in the north and centre of the state, where there was a passion for seceding from Brisbane, which people thought would be easier to do under a Federation. But in Brisbane itself, and the south-east, opposition was strong; manufacturers were worried about open competition with Sydney, and so were many farmers. The result of the poll was 38 488 in favour to 30 996 against. In the end Rockhampton polled against the bill because Section 124, though it provided that there could be new states, declared it possible only with the consent of the parent state.

  Western Australia was yet to accept the bill. At the Premiers’ Conference of 1899, Sir John Forrest, who had had to spend the greatest amount of choppy time at sea going to and coming from conventions, showed unease about aspects of the bill. Though there was no referendum held in Western Australia in 1899, Clause 3 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act allowed the admission of Western Australia to the Federation, ‘On or after a day . . . not being later than one year after the passing of this Act . . . if Her Majesty is satisfied that the people of Western Australia have agreed thereto.’

  Unlike New South Wales, Western Australia had belonged to the Federal Council set up in 1883 and involving, as well as the Australian colonies, Fiji and New Zealand. But many Western Australians felt now that in Federation they would be too far away from the centre of political and financial power in the east. So the Western Australians—including Sir John Forrest, the Western Australian who had made a great contribution in the various conventions, who wanted the federal Parliament to have the power to legislate the building of a transcontinental railway—desired to be able to impose their own customs duties on the other colonies and on the world in general for the first five years of Federation, and an exemption for the same period from the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commission, the body which would police interstate free trade. The Western Australian Parliament wanted to give their electors a choice between the bill the other states had passed and the bill with the Western Australian amendments. This was opposed by eastern federalists, who were confident that though there were few members representing the goldfields in the state Parliament, there were plenty of goldfields people who would vote Yes. In the Legislative Council of Western Australia, the idea of presenting either bill, the one as amended by Western Australia or the one passed in a referenda in the east, was obstructed.

  On the goldfields the miners, damned elsewhere in Western Australia as ‘t’othersiders’ and ‘ancient colonists’, had by now been enraged by new mining regulations, and had driven Premier John Forrest back to his railway carriage when he visited Coolgardie. Now they held meetings to call for their separation from Western Australia and their inclusion in the Australian Federation. ‘Separation for Federation’ became the goldfields slogan, and preliminary meetings to send delegates to London to organise separation were held. Compared to pastoralist areas, the goldfields returned less than their share of members to the Parliament in Perth, and the miners bitterly resented it, as they did the prices they paid for freight on what they believed was the overpriced railway, and so for goods in the stores. The young journalist Frederick Vosper, who would found the Sunday Times in Perth, campaigned for miners’ rights and Federation and was a potent voice for goldfields secession if necessary. (Elected in the end to the first federal Parliament, where he would have made an interesting impact, he died of peritonitis before the Parliament met.) The Colonial Office did not seriously entertain the separation idea, but the intention of the miners did make other Western Australians think that it might be better to vote for Federation than face the loss of their gold lodes.

  Forrest tried to meet the mutiny against Perth by reducing customs on imported food, by introducing an industrial arbitration act, and by giving women of twenty-one years and older the vote. But the mining districts even looked askance on these reforms, since there were more women in the pastoral electorates than on the goldfields. And even Frederick Vosper now began to wonder aloud if social justice might not be better achieved by an independent Western Australia than within a federation.

  In January 1900 John Forrest went east to Sydney for the conference of premiers and abandoned three of the Western Australian amendments, but would not yield on the right of Western Australia to go on imposing customs for five years. To accept that would have been to make the people vote on Federation all over again, said some of the easterners, particularly New South Wales, but on legal advice an amendment to the bill was managed for the sake of getting Western Australia into the great federal tent.

  Since the convention of 1891, New Zealand had taken no part in the framing of the federal constitution. New Zealand was mentioned, however, in Clause 6 as a possible state. In July 1899 a Federation League had been formed in Auckland, and the idea was discussed by politicians, the press and the people. New Zealand’s distance of 1200 miles (1900 kilometres) by sea from eastern Australia dampened enthusiasm for Federation. Sir John Hall, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, who legislated to give New Zealand women the vote in 1893, had said at the 1890 Melbourne conference that the 1200 miles of the Tasman Sea were 1200 reasons why New Zealand should not join an Australian union. Federationists pointed out that this was a very poor argument since steamships connected eastern Australia to New Zealand faster than to Western Australia.

  New Zealand and Australia were, in the days of the Federation debate, united economically and socially by the large numbers of people who moved both ways across the Tasman, by the same banks and insurance companies, by trade unions, churches and professional organisations. The network of connections was stronger across the Tasman than it was across the Nullarbor. Yet the reason the Federation cause arose at all in New Zealand was fear of losing access to the Australian market, and Prime Minister Richard Seddon of New Zealand, who as a pockmarked youngster had mined in Victoria for gold, therefore appointed a Royal Commission on Federation. It found that there was no overriding sense that union was the New Zealand destiny. Seddon’s commissioners did not believe in the visionary idea that union would bring a higher form of existence to New Zealanders, and were more interested in the fact that New Zealand would always need its own individual defence force, and that with Federation there would be a loss of independence to create one. Seddon answered the imminent arrival of a Commonwealth by increasing efforts to acquire Samoa, Fiji and Tonga and so make New Zealand the head of an island dominion rather than merely part of an Australian one. He still watched closely the progress of the Australian Constitution when it was brought to London, and his representative there would give the Australians a great deal of trouble.

  Ultimately, on 17 May 1900, three days after the Commonwealth bill was introduced in the House of Commons in Westminster, the Western Australian Parliament passed an enabling act by which the constitution bill would be submitted to a referendum. On 23 May, Sir John Forrest moved the second reading and said he would vote for Federation, even though he was uncertain about the benefits it would bring to Western Australia in the near future. All adults—men and women—who had been twelve months in the colony would be entitled to vote. The referendum was fixed for 31 July, and Sir John Forrest argued hard for a Yes vote, since he knew that to join the Commonwealth was an inevitability for the Western Australians, and they were better off joining now and helping to form policy. Western Australia would, after all, have as many senators as the big states. The anti-Federalists argued that federal control of customs would wreck the finances of Western Australia, and that Section 95, allowing Western Australia to retain intercolonial duties on a reducing scale over five years, was a mere token. On the day of the v
ote, Yes won by a majority of 25 109. Though country electorates voted against the bill, Perth and Fremantle voted for it by a small margin. On the goldfields, however, 26 000 voted Yes against less than 2000 No. The goldfields would thus be forever praised or blamed for hauling Western Australia into the Federation.

  BOER WAR

  And, as the colonies contemplated Federation, they were at war, and if the war lasted long enough would pass it on to the new nation they were making. Famously, when Britain declared war on the Boers of South Africa on 3 October 1899, it was native-born Sir George Turner, Deakin’s friend, a little man in a shabby brown suit and soon to be first federal treasurer, who declared that ‘if ever the old country were really menaced, we would spend our last man and our last shilling in her cause’, a sentiment which would be echoed by Andrew Fisher at the beginning of World War I. In Perth, John Forrest turned on a member who asked questions about the justice of the British cause in South Africa, which seemed to be nakedly expansionist to many throughout the world, and declared, ‘We do not want to know.’ William Morris Hughes, Labor man, spoke for a sizeable Australian minority when he accused Great Britain of engaging in a cowardly undertaking to bully the Boers out of the gold and diamonds of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

  Australia sent an extraordinary patchwork of troops to the Boer War, and there were in fact five waves of the Australian contribution. The first were the contingents raised by the Australian colonies after the outbreak of war in 1899 from the militia in the various colonies. The second were the ‘bushmen’ contingents, paid for by public subscription or wealthy individuals. The third were the ‘imperial bushmen’ contingents paid for by the government in Britain. Then there were the ‘draft contingents’ raised by state governments after Federation on behalf of the new Commonwealth government. And towards the close of the war Australian Commonwealth Horse Contingents were recruited by the federal government itself. The 4th Tasmanian, 6th Queensland, South Australian and Western Australian contingents did not reach South Africa until March–April 1901, just over a year before the end of the war. The Commonwealth’s contingents did not embark until 1902 and most did not arrive in time for the war.

  The Boers had early success, but the first Australians, between four and six contingents from each of the colonies, arrived in South Africa between November 1899 and March 1900. These men were in place in the Orange Free State to fight in the British counter-offensive of 1900. During the campaign British professionals complained of the poor training of Australian officers, though the men themselves rode and shot well. The officers were generally squatters’ sons, and the troopers were generally shearers, station hands, farmers or a few as yet unelevated squatters.

  The first Australians arrived in Cape Town in December 1899 after the ‘black week’ of 10–17 December when the British lost three engagements with the Boers. By February, with Australian mounted regiments—the South Australians on the left, the Western Australians and the Tasmanians on the right—were defending a semi-circular position, connected by farmhouses and small hills, at Colesburg, hundreds of miles up the Central Railway in the Northern Cape. Two Australian newspaper correspondents, Alfred Smiler Hayes, former boxing promoter, writing for the London Daily News and Jack Lambie, weathered correspondent for the Age, were amongst the first shot dead, but the Australian troopers, fiercely attacked by confident Boers, just as adept in the saddle and with a rifle as the Australians, fell by the dozens. A regiment of the Wiltshires came up in support, the line was held, and an officer said of the confused action that he did not know whether the Australians had saved the Wiltshires or the Wiltshires the Australians.

  Meanwhile, in February 1900, 500 Queenslanders and New South Welshmen were riding and marching towards Kimberley in the Orange Free State in a great British column led by Lord Roberts. It was tough and thirsty going. ‘We killed our horses and almost killed ourselves to relieve the Diamond City,’ wrote Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Banjo Paterson. He saw many falling over with enteric fever, then the common name for typhoid. Medical facilities were scarce. Banjo wrote, ‘Passed some infantry that had been on the march for days and were pretty well exhausted. It was pitiful to see them, half delirious with heat and thirst, dropping out of the ranks and throwing themselves down in the sun, often too far gone to shelter their heads from the sun, but letting their helmets roll off and lie beside them’. The Scot’s Greys were next to the New South Wales contingent and were well mounted, ‘but their big English horses were not standing it as well as our leathery Walers’. When the column reached the Modder River, they cleared the Boers away from the crossing by a charge-cum-stampede initiated by the horses sniffing the water.

  The cock-sparrow, Banjo, was aware that the war was internationally unpopular. ‘The German emperor was sending messages of congratulation to Kruger [the Boer general] and the American Press were roasting the war for all they were worth.’ But, amongst all his reporting, he had the mental space to engage in an argument with Colonel Haig, the future field marshal, about whether the horses of the tin bellies, the Life Guards, were better than the Australian horses. Paterson had something of a last word in his less than distinguished but popular ‘To Kimberley with French’:

  And in the front the Lancers rode that New South Wales had sent,

  With easy stride across the plain their long lean walers went.

  General French’s column drove the Boers away from the outskirts of Kimberley, into which the troops rode to a ‘howling, shrieking, cheering crowd’. With the off-handed anti-Semitism of his day, Paterson mentioned that French was officially received by a Jewish gentleman ‘who probably owned a gold diamond mine’, and whose opening words were, ‘Veil, general, vy didn’t you come before?’ The Boers withdrew and the troopers sat down in the streets of the city to eat horse soup.

  Field Marshal Roberts’ advance on Bloemfontein and Pretoria from the west was fascinating in detail, especially as recounted by Banjo Paterson. He brought to the deeds of the Australians the same romantic view he had expressed in ‘The Man from Snowy River’. For example, he wrote of the cool-headed courage of a Sydney barrister, Captain Robert Lenehan, soon to command the famous Bushveldt Carabineers, of which Breaker Morant was a lieutenant. Genuinely remarkable was Trooper Lawrence Palmer of the Australian Horse, who was shot in the head and kept riding and fighting till he fell from his horse from loss of blood. The unworthy joke went around amongst the British that you couldn’t stop an Australian by shooting him where the brain was supposed to be.

  Men of the New South Wales Mounted Rifles had a part in what was to be their last major battle at Paardeberg in Cape Province in the same month. The Boer army became fragmented thereafter, forming commando units. Mounted troops were suitable for the pursuit of these groups. But enteric fever (typhoid) wiped out so many troopers that it—rather than determined Boer skirmishers fighting for their homes—became the major killer. During a period of rest in the newly captured town of Bloemfontein a further typhoid epidemic broke out because of corpses and human waste in the water supply. The Australians, given that so many of them had experience in the bush, were better than the British, often urban, soldier at boiling water and excreting at a safe distance from water sources. But at the hospitals in Bloemfontein, full of typhus cases (arising from lice bites), Australians were also amongst the dying, and amongst them was yet another correspondent, Horace Spooner, who wrote for two Sydney newspapers. The Anglican Reverend Frederick Wray, ‘the sporting chaplain’, accomplished Australian Rules footballer, spent all his days soothing the dying and burying the dead. Here as elsewhere a lack of wood meant that men were buried in sewn-up blankets. As ever, the military had an interest in the fighting soldiers but were skimping on the ‘in-effectives’, that is, the wounded and dead.

  On 28 July 1900 in the Caledon Valley in the West Cape, Banjo Paterson saw the Boers caught ‘like sheep without a shepherd. They had thousands of cattle and s
heep with them.’ Also in their retinue were ‘women, children and Kaffirs . . .’. Another time, travelling with surgeons under a truce to collect a wounded British soldier the Boers had captured, Paterson found his party right in the middle of a Boer commando. ‘We saw a lot of rough, dirty, bearded men, just like a crowd of shearers or farmhands.’ But these Boers were self-supplying. ‘Each man was his own ordnance, supply and remount department.’

  One of Paterson’s fellow campaigners was a young English journalist considered both brash and reckless, who would have a massive impact on Australia’s future without ever setting foot there. This was Winston Churchill, who had already reported on Kitchener’s revenge campaign in the Sudan. Paterson and the young Winston Churchill travelled together, though a lot of their time was spent hanging around headquarters. According to Paterson, writing at a time before Churchill had achieved any status as a great politician, the young Englishman said to him, ‘This correspondent job is nothing to me; but I mean to get into Parliament through it. They wouldn’t listen to me when I put up for Parliament, because they had never heard of me. Now I am going to plaster the Morning Post with cables about our correspondent, Mr Winston Churchill, driving an armoured train, or pointing out to Lord Roberts where the enemy is.’ The man was a curious combination of ability and swagger, said Paterson, and the army could neither understand nor like him.