Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Those who suffered the most were the score of pikemen who stood their ground from the time the whole division had been posted at the top, facing the Melbourne road from Ballarat, in double file under the slabs, to stick the cavalry with their pikes. As Carboni wrote:

  The old command, ‘Charge!’ was distinctly heard, and the red-coats rushed with fixed bayonets to storm the stockade. A few cuts, kicks and pulling down, and the job was done too quickly for their wonted ardour, for they actually thrust their bayonets in the body of the dead and wounded strewed about on the ground. A wild ‘Hurrah!’ burst out and ‘the Southern Cross’ was torn down, I should say, among their laughter, such as if it had been a prize from a May-pole.15

  The ‘battle’ was over in fifteen to twenty minutes, but the troopers kept bayoneting and shooting wounded diggers, burning tents and slashing at people with their swords. Five troopers and twenty-two diggers were killed or later died of their wounds. Over a hundred diggers were taken prisoner and marched down the hill. At last Captain Pasley, the second-in-command of the British forces, threatened to shoot any police or soldiers who continued the slaughter.

  Although officially only twenty-seven died, no one knows how many miners and members of their families were bayoneted after the battle or burnt alive in their tents by the troopers. A count was made at the stockade, but not in the miles of tent cities ripped apart as soldiers burnt and raped and killed. Even the innocent who had been caught up in the savagery had every reason to keep well away from official notice.16

  Lalor escaped, hiding under the skirt of one of the women in the stockade. His arm was later amputated, on the night of 4 December. Anastasia Hayes, who had helped sew the Eureka flag, took Lalor’s amputated arm and threw it down a mine shaft so the troopers wouldn’t find it.

  The soldiers spread throughout the surrounding camp, burning and slashing at the tents. Again, in Carboni’s words, the soldiers:

  deliberately set in a blaze all the tents round about. I did see with both eyes one of those devils, a tall, thick-shouldered, long-legged, fast Vandemonian-looking trooper, purposely striking a bundle of matches, and setting fire at the corner end, north of the very store of Diamond, where we had kept the council for the defence. The howling and yelling was horrible. The wounded are now burnt to death; those who had laid down their arms, and taken refuge within the tents, were kicked like brutes, and made prisoners. The troopers, enjoying the fun within the stockade, now spread it without.17

  Frank Arthur Hasleham, an ex-soldier and newspaper correspondent, far from a rebel, was shot because he refused to join the troopers.

  After he had lured me within safe distance, namely about four paces, he levelled his holster pistol at my breast and shot me. Previous to this, and while advancing towards each other, he asked me if I wished to join his force; I told him I was unarmed and in a weak state of health, which must have been plain to him at the time, but added that I hoped this madness on the part of the diggers would soon be over; upon that he fired.18

  Henry Powell was twenty-three and had walked over to the stockade to visit a mate. The police shot him, thinking he was one of the rebels. They then ran their horses back and forth over him and slashed at him with their swords while he screamed for help. Powell died three days later. He identified his killer but the man was let off because Powell hadn’t sworn a legal oath before he died.

  Several children, like six-year-old Catherine Donnelly, whose father had a store inside the stockade, were separated from their parents and terrified by the violence. Some ran to the distant bush where they were sheltered by the Indigenous people till it was all over.

  Freed by a sympathetic official, Carboni ran back to help the wounded at the stockade.

  Old acquaintances crippled with shots, the gore protruding from the bayonet wounds, their clothes and flesh burning all the while. Poor Thonen had his mouth literally choked with bullets; my neighbour and mate Teddy More, stretched on the ground, both his thighs shot, asked me for a drop of water. Peter Lalor, who had been concealed under a heap of slabs, was in the agony of death, a stream of blood from under the slabs, heavily forcing its way down hill.

  The tears choke my eyes, I cannot write any further.19

  It was now between eight and nine in the morning. A patrol of troopers and traps stopped before the London Hotel, as Carboni recalled it:

  Spy Goodenough, entered panting, a cocked pistol in his hand, looking as wild as a raven. He instantly pounced on me as his prey, and poking the pistol at my face, said in his rage, ‘I want you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘None of your d____d nonsense, or I shoot you down like a rat.’

  ‘My good fellow don’t you see? I am assisting Dr. Carr to dress the wounds of my friends!’ – I was actually helping to bandage the thigh of an American digger, whose name, if I recollected it, I should now write down with pleasure, because he was a brave fellow. He had on his body at least half-a-dozen shots, all in front, an evident proof, he had stood his ground like a man …

  I was instantly dragged out, and hobbled to a dozen more of prisoners outside, and we were marched to the Camp. The main road was clear, and the diggers crawled among the holes at the simple bidding of any of the troopers who rode at our side.20

  Atrocities turn defeat into victory

  Rede pronounced martial law – the rebellion at Eureka was over. Hotham had won, and the slaughter and severing of the rebel leaders was enough to immediately quieten the diggings. The informants like ‘Spy Goodenough’ helped round up any remaining ringleaders.

  If Hotham had hesitated even a few more days, the rebels would have won. If they had won, other diggings and colonies may well have joined the rebellion. Eureka has been misinterpreted by historians who have never lived in a land of true darkness, couldn’t envisage how lost you might be, stumbling without light or torches even half a kilometre from camp.

  The darkness won Eureka that night, but it also won the miners’ cause. For as the soldiers plunged out into the dawn of the camp they took the flaming torches they had needed with them, setting alight to the tents of innocent and guilty alike.

  There was terror in Melbourne when the news of the Eureka rebellion first reached town. Was an army of desperate miners marching under a new flag about to invade Melbourne? But as news of the rampage was published, public opinion swung to support the miners. Public meetings condemning the government were held in Melbourne, Geelong and Bendigo, and Governor Hotham had to post troops to keep order. Hotham and his secretary, Foster, were blamed for the disaster. Foster resigned.

  Troopers stopped checking licences. The Victorian jury let off all but one of the miners who had been arrested. Only the editor of the Ballarat Times, Henry Seekamp, was convicted and sentenced to six months for seditious libel for publishing an issue of the paper after the rebellion, saying it had been a foul and bloody murder. Luckily friends burnt all but one issue or he might have been hanged for treason instead of spending three months in prison.

  A Gold Fields Royal Commission was held and gave the miners almost everything they had asked for – except for independence from Great Britain. The gold licence was abolished and replaced by a miner’s right costing only one pound per year, and giving the digger a right to mine for gold and vote in government elections. In 1855 Lalor and Humffray were elected unopposed to the Legislative Council, and Lalor became speaker of the Legislative Assembly in 1880. On Friday, 24 November 1857, a bill granting universal manhood suffrage was passed in the Victorian Parliament, the first in Australia (ironically, Peter Lalor voted against it).21

  The Eureka Stockade became a rallying point for freedom of speech and the right of every (white) man (not woman) to have a vote and the right to a fair trial. New South Wales got an elected government in 1855, though Britain could still override any decisions. South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania all got parliaments between 1856 and 1857. The Moreton Bay district separated from New South Wales in 1859 and was renamed Queensland, with
its own government, too.

  The only rebel aim that had not been achieved was to create a republic for the land beneath the Southern Cross. When the colonies federated to become a single nation, the Commonwealth of Australia, in 1901, the Union Jack still stood on our flag poles, not the blue and white one of Eureka.

  And of course, it is still part of our flag today.

  The legacy of Eureka

  Eureka gave us rudimentary democracy, voters who didn’t have to be rich. It is and has been a symbol of many ‘fight for justice’ campaigns. The United States has Martin Luther King’s speech to quote to rally a cause; we have Eureka. The continued importance of Eureka in our national consciousness can be seen in the many attempts to belittle it as an unwinnable, ten-minute scuffle.

  The 1850s gold boom also created a national myth that pervades decision-making even today: gold brings wealth. Gold made Melbourne a temporary boom town and contributed to the obsession with mining booms that pervades Australian economic policy. Gold is valuable but mining it is rarely profitable, except in places like Witwatersrand in South Africa, where about twenty-five per cent of the world’s gold reserves can still be relatively easily produced. Fortunes were made in the gold rush, but rarely by those who mined or fossicked the gold. Even as I write this in 2013 at a time when gold prices are high, goldmining in Australia is a chancy investment. Australia’s great mining fortunes are based on iron ore, aluminium and coal – resources required in large amounts where the demand is relatively steady for a product with major industrial uses.

  Goldmining also came at a cost. The gold booms of the 1850s and 1860s depended on an unacknowledged and undervalued corollary: the 1850s rain. Without that rain there would have been no mining boom – a mining puff, perhaps, as miners sought gold in well-watered areas.

  Miners need to eat, and food needs rain. Goldmining also requires large amounts of water, both then and now. If the drought hadn’t broken – if it had instead bitten deeper – there’d have been no food to feed miners, nor water to work the claims with. Mining was a risky enough financial venture in the 1850s, and Australia was just too far away for cheap food to be imported to feed the far larger population that the gold rushes brought.

  But it did rain. And because it rained the mining boom lasted for almost thirty years, destroying the land around the diggings. Newspapers of the time record floods, washing away men and diggings. Even in the 1990s much of the historic gold workings in Australia still bore the scars of mining a hundred years before: denuded topsoil, blackberry-covered mullock heaps, mines that seeped water high in heavy metals when it rained. (Gold is often found in association with metals like cadmium, lead and zinc, all toxic to humans, fish, amphibians and animals and – at higher rates – plant life too.)

  Gold brought people, money and economic diversity to Australia, to provide for the new population. But the ‘infinite land’ myth was in force with the gold boom, too. It still is now.

  South Coast of New South Wales, January 2013

  The Dargues gold mine opened in March 2013, four kilometres upstream of my home. Within the first two weeks its sediment trap overflowed twice, bringing gushes of mud through the Majors Creek State Conservation Area next to our property, and polluting our own water system. As I write this, on 27 June 2013, I am looking down on a fourth major spill, with up to half a metre of sand and silt covering what a week ago was a pristine rocky creek bed.

  The mine will be five hundred metres deep, with two kilometres of tunnels. It will take a minimum of 66.2 megalitres of water from the Majors Creek–Araluen River catchment every year. Three 25-metre-high tailings dams covering nine hectares will hold a suspension of mining sludge containing the toxic chemical xanthate. If the dam walls give way, everything in the gorge country that I have walked and studied and loved for forty years will die. So, probably, would I.

  Actually, despite the inauspicious beginning, I hope that the new conditions that environmental groups fought for and won in the NSW Land and Environment Court, combined with the Environmental Protection Authority’s vigilance now that existing and potential problems have been brought to their attention, and the new mine management team, will mean that Dargues may operate with minimal detrimental impact, and some very real good ones: employment and export income for Australia.

  But the bush and the peach orchard industry of the Araluen Valley are already balanced on a knife’s edge. They are stressed by climate change – less rainfall and progressively higher temperatures since 1973 – but also from increased human pressure as ‘tree changers’ move to the area and pump out water for houses and gardens. One extra-large water consumer like the mine might create a desert, but only ‘might’ – we simply do not know.

  To say that I love this land is inaccurate: I am part of it. The land is the foundation on which all of my books have been written. Without it, the person I am now, and hope to remain, will cease to exist.

  There are scientific reasons to protect this area. It is home to an extraordinary number of critically endangered, threatened and vulnerable species, including the green and golden bell frog. (The fish, frogs and tadpoles in the creek died in the second pollution event. Only one frog species, not endangered, has returned. Hopefully, come spring, the other species will have survived in sufficient numbers to breed up again.) None of these endangered species may be intrinsically significant in themselves, but their presence is an indication of the area’s value. The most important reason to preserve the Majors Creek gorge country is because of its contribution to regional environmental resilience. It is deep, almost sunless in winter, but warmth floats up from the wider Araluen Valley, creating a haven in times of cold.

  Bushfire jumps across the gorge, or has, up till now. Even in the worst droughts, water seeps from the rock into the deep pools, the only safe water source for at least fifty kilometres around. It is a migration route for at least four species of birds, and a wildlife corridor between the Monga and Deua national parks so that the species there can interbreed. It is so steep that the ecosystems change within metres, providing habitat for an extraordinary profusion of species from dry temperate rainforest through wet to dry sclerophyll forests, including forest types and plant associations not seen elsewhere. Best of all, most of it is so steep and inaccessible it is relatively untouched directly by humans.

  It is valuable because species have survived there. It is irreplaceable because species can survive there: if bushfire or human development or climate change wipes out surrounding land, the gorge is one of those places from where species can spread.

  But if the groundwater drops even one or two metres because of the mine, the species of the gorge will die. If mining reduces the water that seeps into the rock pools along the Majors Creek fault line (gold seams are usually associated with large or small fault lines), the species that migrate here will still come but find no water to drink, perhaps only the sand that’s already washed down the creek. The impacts will be far wider than just on the gorge itself.

  But there has been no on-site assessment of the species downstream of the mine, nor was there any cost–benefit analysis that looked at possible impacts on the existing income production in the area. The mine may make between $4 million and $8 million a year; the estimate varies in the press releases. But the industries in the few kilometres downstream already make more than this for the Australian economy. If the peach orchards alone are made unviable by a flood containing heavy metals left from ore processing – and floodwater has covered the valley floor at least three times in the past century – our economy will lose far more than we gain from the mine. Hopefully the mine will be both economically successful and have minimal impact. But there was no requirement for the developers to produce a cost–benefit analysis surveying existing industries or the vulnerability of the land downstream before it was approved.

  Australia is still in the grip of the delusions that brought nation after nation to the oceans near our shores to find that mythical land of gold. Our
planners and politicians still see the benefits of goldmining, but – perhaps subconsciously afraid of what an analysis might show – do not require a cost–benefit analysis to see if a project will cost the economy more than it will bring in.

  As for the consequences for the land, the requirements to show environmental impact are there, as is the duty not to pollute. The New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority acted swiftly and superbly when members of our local community informed them of gold mine pollution. But even as I write this, the devastating pollution in Gladstone Harbour and its effect on fishing and the Great Barrier Reef is being overlooked because of the value of the minerals exported from the port. This may, in fact, be justified, and the environmental and tourism costs worth it. But the cost–benefit analysis has not been done there, nor is it required elsewhere in Australia.

  Humans change the land. Australia was recreated by the first settlers of 60,000 years ago, but the ‘consensus’ decision-making practices that they used was a form of cost-benefit analysis: if we do this, will the land be more or less likely to feed us, and our descendants?

  If our land is to remain productive we need to look closely at the land, either by living with it and noting its seasons and changes and vulnerabilities, or using the multitude of scientific tools we have today. We need independent baseline data, both economic and environmental, before decisions are made. Every development comes at a cost. We need those cost–benefit analyses to be able to answer the question: is the development worth it?

  Instead, the myth of a fortune, somewhere just beyond the horizon, still makes many deliberately blind to what is actually there.