by Clare Wright
WE ARE THE REBELS
THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO MADE EUREKA
Winner of the 2014 Stella Prize, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is the most talked-about work of Australian history in recent years.
We Are the Rebels is a new, concise edition of Clare Wright’s groundbreaking study of the women who made the rebellion.
Teaching notes are available at textpublishing.com.au/education.
‘Exhilarating.’ Brenda Niall
‘Full of colour.’ Books+Publishing
‘Immediately entrancing.’ Guardian Australia
‘Fascinating.’ Irish Echo
‘A great story.’ Courier-Mail
‘Beautifully told.’ Peter FitzSimons
‘Wonderful.’ Chris Masters
‘Something for everyone.’ NZ Listener
‘Fills an enormous gap.’ Australian
‘Fast-paced, racy.’ Otago Daily Times
‘Refreshing.’ Age
‘Engrossing.’ The Hoopla
ALSO BY CLARE WRIGHT
Beyond the Ladies Lounge
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
Clare Wright is a historian who has worked as an academic and broadcaster. She is a writer and presenter for television, with the ABC TV documentary series Utopia Girls and The War That Changed Us among her credits. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, three children and too many pets.
clarewright.com.au
@clareawright
The Text Publishing Company
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Copyright © 2015 by Clare Wright
The moral right of Clare Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 2015 by The Text Publishing Company
Page design and typesetting by Jessica Horrocks
Maps by Guy Holt
Index by Karen Gillen
Cover design by WH Chong
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Wright, Clare Alice, author.
Title: We are the rebels : the women and men who made Eureka / by Clare Wright.
ISBN: 9781922182784 (paperback)
9781925095708 (ebook)
Target Audience: For secondary school age.
Subjects: Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, Vic., 1854.
Women—Australia—History—19th century.
Gold miners—Victoria—Ballarat—History.
Riots—Victoria—Ballarat—History.
Ballarat (Vic.)—History—1851–1901.
Dewey Number: 994.57031
TO ESTHER
my own little rebel
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
INTRODUCTION
The Morning After
Why Weren’t We Told?
A Coffin Trimmed with White
GETTING THERE
Eureka!
Getting Ahead
Great Expectations
The Long Goodbye
The Wild World of Water
Our Floating World
A Dirty Disagreeable Lot
Crossing the Line
Southern Stars
The Deep
(Not So Marvellous) Melbourne
Settling for Collingwood
Canvas Town
Law and Order
All the Single Ladies
The Road
This Feminine Exodus
My Gypsy Life
GETTING AHEAD
Ballarat
The Camp
Diggeresses
Lady Luck
A Tax by Any Other Name
Pop-Up Shopping
Everything That Could Be Wanted
Mates
The Servant Problem
The Marriage Game
Girls on the Grog
The Chinese Puzzle
GETTING STUCK
Winners and Losers
Raw Cold and Unfathomable Mud
Poverty Point
Getting Spliced, Getting Licked
Land Locked
British Justice
Licence Hunters
Enter Ellen Young
Here Come the Hothams
Put Away
A Shameful Spectacle
A Licence to Swill
The Eureka Hotel
Liquid Gold
The Adelphi Theatre
GETTING EVEN
Spring
Murder Most Foul
A Busy Week
Famous Last Words
An Offended People
Scot Free
House of the Rising Diggers
It Burned Like Paper
Mosh Pit
The Blame Game
Ellen vs Joe
Tongues Wag
Lying in a State of Stupidity
The Stranger
Yankee HQ
A Cunning Plan?
We, the People
No Admission
Courtroom 1
Courtroom 2
The Diggers ‘Demand’ and Hotham Cracks It
GETTING TOGETHER
Thanksgiving
A Flag of One’s Own
Bringing the Matter to a Crisis
The First Shots
The Diggers Rally
A Council of War for Defence
Drawing the Line
Swearing an Oath
A Spy and Some Wet Soldiers
A Late-Night Deputation
1 Decembe
r—Friday
2 December—Saturday
Night of a Full Moon
3 December—Bloody Sunday
Nightmare on Eureka Street
Where Can I Hide?
The Final Indignity
Burn Baby Burn
Ungovernable Excitement
The Morning After (Reprise)
CONCLUSION
Business as Usual
Hope
The Miner’s Right
The Youngest Australian
Acknowledgments
Other Reading
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Where you see italics in the text, you are reading a direct quote from a primary source. This includes letters, diaries, newspapers, poetry, songs, official reports and other documents written at the time by the people who were there.
Primary sources, also known as ‘archives’ or ‘historical records’, are kept in public places like libraries, museums and government records offices. Sometimes they are also found in private hands: for example, family collections.
This book is based on my book The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, first published in 2013. Forgotten Rebels includes an extensive bibliography and endnotes, for much more detail on quotes and sources. You can also go back to that book if you want further information about a particular character, or deeper historical context for events depicted in We Are the Rebels.
THE MORNING AFTER
It’s Monday morning, 4 December 1854. The tent city of Ballarat has woken to a strange dawn.
A Monday morning on the richest goldfield in the world would usually be humming: a busy start to an energetic week. There are 32,000 people on the Ballarat diggings, and normally they would be hard at it.
Miners from every continent on the globe working their claims. Cartloads of goods arriving from Melbourne and Geelong to fill the stores with food and merchandise. To be sure, in 1854 most of the businesses are still not buildings at all, just simple canvas structures of every size imaginable. But they serve their purpose. Restaurants are dishing up food, grog shops are selling illicit booze; there are even theatres getting ready for the evening’s performance.
Normally, there would be newcomers putting up their tents and unloading their drays in wide-eyed fascination. There’d be children dodging and weaving through the tents, campfires and washing lines. Everywhere the sights and sounds of a colonial frontier society going about its daily business. And the noise would be ferocious.
But this Monday morning is silent.
An inferno has just torn through the dark hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning, shattering the rhythms of work and home.
It was a true Australian night, one miner later recalled, not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the stringy-bark trees…the whole air was full of that fine haze…which slightly veils but does not conceal, lending a ghostly yet beautiful appearance to all around.
What happened next has been taught to Australian schoolchildren for generations. At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and Victorian police stormed the rough barricades that had just been erected by a mob of armed miners.
A few days earlier, the diggers had burnt their mining licences as a form of protest against the way local authorities bullied and harassed them. They were sick of being pushed around. And they were sick of the government charging them a licence fee but never listening to their complaints. The diggers pledged, in the words of their brand new leader Peter Lalor, to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
PETER LALOR
THE ONE-ARMED BANDIT
* * *
STUCK HIS NECK OUT AND HAD HIS ARM BLOWN OFF
BORN Tenakill, Ireland, 1827
DIED Melbourne, 1889
ARRIVED October 1852
AGE AT EUREKA 27
CHILDREN Unmarried at Eureka; later, father of two children.
FAQ Son of an Irish Catholic landowner and politician. Youngest of eleven sons. Engaged to schoolteacher Alicia Dunne at time of Eureka. Elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in November 1855.
Then they hurriedly built the Stockade, which was really just a pile of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts. It was intended as a bolt hole: a hiding place for any newly unlicensed miner threatened with arrest.
When the military attacked in the early hours of Sunday, the armed conflict lasted no more than 20 minutes. At least four soldiers and 27 civilians were killed. The rebel stronghold was taken, and the rebel flag of blue and white—bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross—was hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle, authorities continued to hound people close to the barricades, in case more renegades were hiding in the surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down with swords, and hundreds were arrested. It was called the Ballarat massacre.
This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.
WHY WEREN’T WE TOLD?
This is the way I learned about the Eureka Stockade when I was in high school: a bunch of soldiers in red coats with gold buttons fought against a bunch of miners in blue shirts with cabbage-tree hats. The diggers staged an uprising because they didn’t want to pay the unfair licence tax. The British army needed to restore order to save face. Blood stained the wattle, men got the vote and out of all this—the so-called ‘first’ instance of civilian armed conflict on Australian soil—democracy was born. All the participants were men, of course. That went without saying.
It was a Ballarat historian called William Withers who started the myth of the Australian goldfields as an exclusively masculine place. In his popular History of Ballarat, first published in 1870, Withers stated that the diggers were young and wifeless for the most part; that to see a woman was an absolute phenomenon; that the diggings were womanless fields.
But Withers’ bold descriptions referred to the earliest days of the gold rush: late 1851 and early 1852. This was conveniently overlooked by later historians, eager to romanticise the digging life as one of masculine freedom and independence.
These later writers, including famous poets such as Henry Lawson, were trying to contrast their dull city lives with the bravery, adventurousness and risk-taking of the pioneers. They liked the idea of the diggers as free spirits: both classless—irreverent about authority—and womanless.
Then, when the second wave of ‘diggers’ appeared—the ANZACs of World War I—they extended the myth. Classless, womanless. Eureka was the birthplace of democracy and Gallipoli was the birthplace of the nation.
When I was at school, even though I went to an all-girls school and was taught by a female history teacher, I never questioned these assumptions. We were encouraged to identify with the diggers of the goldfields who had stood up against injustice to fight for their rights. It never occurred to me to ask, on behalf of my sisters and my fellow students: where are we in this story?
It was only many years later, after I had become a historian myself, that I began to wonder if there were women in and around the Eureka Stockade
on that brutal Sunday morning. What if the hot-tempered, free-wheeling gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons?
My first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge, was a history of women who ran pubs in Australia. When I was researching it I discovered an interesting fact: a woman called Mrs Bentley ran the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat in 1854. I also read that, according to legend, it was women who made the famous Eureka Flag, the emblem of the rebellious miners.
I put fact and folklore together and came up with a question: if Mrs Bentley and the flag-sewers were in Ballarat in 1854, how many other women might also have been there?
That simple enquiry set off a domino effect in which each question tripped off another. If there were women there, what were they doing? What drove them to leave their homelands in search of a new life? Did they come for the same opportunities as men: for wealth, freedom and independence? If so, did they fight side by side with the men when those freedoms were denied?
Eventually the only thing left to do was put aside the history books written over the past 160 years and go back to the archives: to the original documents written by the people who were actually living in Ballarat in 1854.
It took me ten years to do this historical detective work. But that wasn’t because searching for women on the goldfields was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Quite the opposite. I found the evidence of women’s lives everywhere: clinging to dusty files at the Public Record Office, trapped in the yellowing pages of newspapers, caught in the creases of letters and the spines of diaries, transmitted down through generations of descendants.
Ten years on, this is what I know. Ballarat in 1854 was far from being a wild-west outpost of bachelors out to make a quick buck. It was a surprisingly domestic community of men and women, many with small children, intent on building a new life and a better future for themselves.
What went so horribly wrong?
