by Clare Wright
The magistrates retired to an adjoining room for half an hour to make their decision. Before a hushed crowed, John D’Ewes declared that after assessing all the evidence, not a shadow of an imputation remained on Mr Bentley’s character. Robert Rede concurred. James Johnston dissented, unpredictable as ever, but it made no difference. The prisoners were free to go.
Thomas Pierson made a tally of the grievances under which Ballarat was now groaning. The Governor’s actions didn’t match his promises. Hotham’s hypocrisy had created quite a dislike for him. There was no representation of the miners in the legislature. Digger hunts had increased to five days per week. Sixteen bullies on horseback, their muskets loaded and swords drawn, would descend on the diggings. Fifty foot-soldiers with clubs would vomit themselves forth from the Camp.
The diggers felt under siege, with no benevolent governor to shield them and no elected leader to represent them. Constitutionally, they had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
HOUSE OF THE RISING DIGGERS
Commissioner Rede read the verdict into the Scobie enquiry on Saturday 14 October. The court and its verandah were filled to overflowing. Hot winds from the arid north whipped up clouds of dust. People choked on their own breath, just as they gagged over what they now considered the greatest miscarriage of justice yet seen in a town that had thought, after the Gregorius incident, that matters could get no worse.
A wealthy and influential man was walking away unscathed from a crime that, to many people, he’d quite obviously committed. The Ballarat Times thundered about the stink of corruption—a fetid atmosphere of putrescent particles which offend the senses. Thomas Pierson feared for Bentley’s safety, such was the hostility. I should not wonder if his whole house was razed to the ground, Pierson wrote in his diary that night.
The Bentleys did have the support of certain sections of Ballarat society. A letter to the Ballarat Times (addressed to James and signed by more than a hundred of Ballarat’s storekeepers, diggers and inhabitants) was published on 14 October. It stated the signatories’ feeling that you could not either directly or indirectly, in the late lamentable occurrence, have been in any way accessary [sic]. So a portion of the Ballarat population was confident of the Bentleys’ innocence.
But to most, it was a scandal that Bentley had been cleared. A public demonstration was called for the following Tuesday, 17 October. It was to be held within spitting distance of the Eureka Hotel, on the site of Scobie’s murder.
Thousands attended. Pierson says ten thousand in his diary; a subsequent parliamentary enquiry reckoned five, and noted that women were among the crowd. A few mounted troopers hung back warily. Speakers got up before the crowd to decry the outrage of Bentley’s acquittal and rail against incompetence and corruption. Rede was a puppet, a fool, it was said; the Bench had no transparency and the Camp was a kind of legal store, where justice was bought and sold.
Where was British liberty? Were the diggers slaves or serfs? Why, the Russians treated their people better than the diggers of Ballarat were treated! The accusations went on, and the emotional temperature of the crowd soared.
At 10am, Police Inspector Gordon Evans sent a garrison of his men to the Eureka Hotel. Police officers snuck into the hotel, unseen by the crowd. Bentley had asked the police to watch over his property. He had received threats that the people intended to hang him by the lamp post. Bentley also had a pregnant young wife, a toddler and a hotel full of employees and guests, not to mention a mountain of private property, to protect. By this stage, the crowd had begun to bay for his blood. The cries of the mob were for Bentley, one officer later testified.
At some point, the mood of the crowd changed. The sun was beating down. The wind was gusting. A peaceful public assembly began to turn ugly. Symptoms of riot began to show themselves, wrote Thomas Pierson in his tent that night. He left, and watched from a safe place as the multitude became a mob, moving with a vicious urgency towards the hotel.
James Bentley, convinced he was going to be lynched, fled on horseback to the Camp. On the way, he passed Charles Evans. I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man’s face, Evans wrote in his diary. Ellen Young saw him too, without hat or coat his white shirt sleeves tucked up, a trooper closely following. Ellen thought it was a race in fun. She turned to her next-door neighbour and said white shirt will win. But this was no game.
Was Bentley on a mission to call for more protection? Was he saving his own neck? Or trying to create a diversion, thinking that the mob might change course and follow him, like a swarm of angry bees?
But the crowd wanted more from the publican than his scalp. A miner named John Westoby stepped in front of the hotel. I propose that this house belong to the diggers, he proclaimed, to wild cheering.
It was the first time during this eventful spring that Ballarat’s diggers defined themselves as a community. The time had come for the body politic of Ballarat to take matters of justice into its own hands. And how better to cut a man down to size than to invade his ‘castle’? Shame him in front of his wife and child. Show him to be no better than the rest of the dispossessed, disempowered crowd outside his painted door.
And so, in the words of public servant Samuel Huyghue, the match was applied to the train of long gathering discontent.
IT BURNED LIKE PAPER
Once the crowd had surrounded the Eureka Hotel and its half-acre of funhouses, stables and storage facilities, Robert Rede was called from the Camp. Rede attempted to quell the mob’s fury. He stood up on a window ledge. He called for order.
At this stage, as critics later pointed out, he might have taken control by ‘reading the Riot Act’. This refers to the proclamation which British law states must be read out to any unruly crowd before the authorities can unleash deadly force upon them. (The law was not significantly amended in Victoria until 2007.) If Rede had done this, his men would have had the power to disperse the crowd at the point of guns and bayonets.
Instead, he was hooted and jeered, pelted with bottles, bricks, stones and eggs while his men looked on. Someone threw a rock at a window. One report says a little girl cast the first stone; another says it was a teenage lad.
It doesn’t matter who it was. Once the glass shattered, so did the last of the crowd’s equilibrium.
That very morning, tradesmen had put the final touches to the hotel’s major construction works. Now, within minutes, the crowd set about disassembling all the Bentleys had taken months to build: ripping at boards, smashing windows, throwing stones at lamps. The edifice of the Bentleys’ success was demolished.
Imagine Catherine Bentley’s terror. As the hotel rocked with the force of the crowd’s fury, the police officers holed up inside the hotel scattered. Catherine and the other residents were left to fend for themselves.
Climbing through shattered windows and splintered doors, the rioters began to invade the building. Kegs of liquor were dragged out of storage rooms and eagerly tapped. Furniture was hurled from windows. Someone found Catherine’s bedroom and began throwing her jewellery to the people below, their arms reaching up like a pack of savage bridesmaids.
A cry of Fire! went up. Someone had set light to the canvas of the bowling alley. The wind had been blowing hot all day, recalled Raffaello Carboni, and at this fatal precise hour…[it was] blowing a hurricane.
And that was it. The fire in the bowling alley leapt to the main building. Flames consumed the hotel before the glistening, vengeful eyes of the crowd. It burnt like paper, said Robert Rede.
A few hours before, said D’Ewes, had stood by far the most extensive building in the diggings, painted and decked out in gay and gaudy colours, with a long row of stables and outhouses, erected at an expense of £30,000, and totally uninsured.
Minutes after the blaze was started, Charles Evans arrived. He saw only a black heap of smoking ashes.
Ellen Young could clearly see the rioters and the fire from her vantage point outside her tent at Golden Point. She saw clothes and linen being thrown from upstairs windows. She watched a bonfire made of the contents of the house of every description. As goods rained down from the hotel windows, people tossed them into the inferno. One person threw Catherine Bentley’s jewellery box on the bonfire, quickly fished it out again, studied it, then threw it with great force into the flames. Finally a handsome gig, the horse-drawn equivalent of a sports car, was backed onto the fire.
Status turned to cinders.
MOSH PIT
James Bentley, having fled to the Camp on horseback, spent the night in Captain Gordon Evans’ tent. But what happened to Catherine as her home burned around her?
Emily Eliza Boyce, twelve years old in October 1854, was present at the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. She saw Mrs Bentley and her child landed safely from one of the windows. Kenneth McLeod, a wine and spirit merchant, had rushed to the hotel when it was engulfed. He entered the building and found Catherine. With the assistance of a man named Robert McLaren, and at the risk of my own life, he tossed Catherine and little Thomas from the second storey, into the arms of the crowd. As in a chivalrous mosh pit, Catherine was caught and released.
Did she join James at the Camp? Ellen Young says the inmates fled in terror. It’s not clear whether Catherine was among them. But Catherine did find someone to take her in. One of her later petitions for financial compensation for the loss of her property states that she was dependent on the kindness of a few friends for her daily bread after being reduced from comparative affluence to absolute poverty.
Perhaps the Bentleys, Catherine and James alike, had been too cocky. Parading their success at a time when the mining community was becoming increasingly alienated and aggrieved. Martha Clendinning knew that ‘dressing down’ was the key to her business success. Lady Hotham knew better than to maintain aristocratic pretensions. Did Catherine Bentley give herself ‘airs’?
The evidence of witness Mary Ann Welch, who identified Mrs Bentley’s voice in the fight with Scobie, hints as much. She said Mrs Bentley was a stranger to her; had never spoken to her but had often heard her speak, even though the Welches’ tent was not ten yards from Bentley’s Hotel. Perhaps Mary Ann, a 39-year-old miner’s wife, was affronted that the 22-year-old publican’s wife had never made her acquaintance, despite one of her eight children being a similar age to Catherine’s Thomas. Perhaps she resented the bejewelled Irish mother with the small army of live-in servants.
Envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness. That’s how Ellen Young summed up the burning of Bentley’s Hotel in a letter to the editor of the Ballarat Times.
THE BLAME GAME
It was obvious to all that no attempt had been made to control the crowd or protect life and property on Bentley’s Hill. Commissioner Rede blamed Police Inspector Gordon Evans, who had authority over the police, for not clearing the crowd or defending the hotel despite the fact police officers had been in the hotel all morning. Other police testified that Evans had lacked determination to stop the rioting. Rede also claimed he had no power over the military, who were dispatched only after the fire began.
Evans defended himself against the charges of inaction. My hands were completely tied, he said, I must obey my orders. Only the Resident Commissioner, Evans argued, could read the Riot Act.
McLISTER: THE COMPLAINANT
Gordon Evans was not a popular man. He was a bully whose appointment had met with great dissatisfaction in Ballarat. He was also, it seems, a sexual harasser.
Mrs Catherine McLister, a 28-year-old daughter of Irish Protestant gentry, was the wife of one of Evans’ sergeants. On 27 October, eleven days after the Eureka Hotel riot, she served an explosive complaint to the Chief Commissioner of Police. Evans had grossly insulted me, she wrote, by indecently expressing his person.
At a board of enquiry held the next day, Gordon Evans came out swinging—denying Catherine’s claim and implying she had been making a play for him. But she was not to be intimidated, and gave this extraordinary testimony:
Mr Evans came behind me and put his arm round my waist. He was dressed, the front of his pantaloons were open and his person exposed…He said ‘look at this’ and then I saw his trousers were undone.
The board threw Catherine’s charge out because she had not told anyone at the time. They also found it improbable that such a gross insult—Evans flashing his privates—would not have made her cry for help. If Catherine had made a more ‘womanly’ scene—running away shrieking, perhaps—she might have been believed. In calmly instigating an official enquiry she found her claim dismissed as malicious.
Interestingly, the board’s decision was not quietly buried, but was sent to Governor Hotham. Catherine’s stand was viewed as yet more evidence of the mounting rebelliousness in Ballarat, about which His Excellency needed to be kept informed.
What a fiasco.
Evans blamed Rede, Rede blamed Evans, and nobody seemed to know who exactly was in charge of Ballarat. It was only after the Eureka Hotel riot that Rede was given a letter of absolute power. It was clear now that he headed a chain of command that included the police and the military.
But many believed the damage had been done. The people had carried the day. They had sensed their own power. And the government forces had been shown as ineffectual fools.
Samuel Huyghue assessed the mood of the police and government on the afternoon of the riot. A silent hush had settled over the Camp. Troopers and traps (cops) spoke in low mutters in their tents. There was angry humiliation that Rede had tried to calm things down rather than take swift action. There had been a loss of prestige. How could it be regained?
A huge downpour came in the night, temporarily settling the dust.
ELLEN vs JOE
The fine weather soon returned. Licence hunting stepped up with a new vigour now the winter mud was gone. Suddenly, large, armed military forces were sent out from the Camp to patrol the diggings. Foot police carried batons. Soldiers wielded carbines, swords and holster pistols. Some were mounted, parading frisky horses through the tents and holes in search of unlicensed miners.
A new chum, wrote ‘An Englishman’ to the Geelong Advertiser on 10 October, might think the show of force was to intimidate criminals against the dog poisoning, horse stealing and tent breaking that had become endemic this spring. But no, it was merely digger hunting, pursued with an unusual degree of severity. The Englishman attributed the new regime to Commissioner Rede proving his utility.
Others saw that, as it has been throughout the ages, it was about the economy. The new governor had pledged to balance the colony’s books and was going about it
energetically. The public service was being slashed to reduce expenditure.
On the income side of the ledger there were only taxes on alcohol and mining licences to lift the bottom line. The diggers were helping out with the liquor excise by drinking as much as ever. But they showed increasing reluctance to produce a valid licence.
The Governor ordered his minions to crack down and carry out more licence hunts. If once a week was not enough to demonstrate that this government meant business, then make it twice. Or every day except Sunday. Is it to be endured, wrote the Englishman, in a possession of the British Crown, that an armed police force may ‘bail up’ and require the production of your badge in all places at all times? Does this happen in London? He finished by calling for some more influential pen to take up the cause of the unrepresented diggers.
Ellen Young patriotically obliged.
On 4 November—following Scobie’s murder, the Eureka Hotel riot and the fire—Ellen captured the mood of her clan in a long letter to the Ballarat Times.
Alas for the poor diggers, over whose spoil the whole tribe are squabbling. Alas for the honest of each party that he should be sacrificed to the dishonest. Alas, alas for us all that we cannot get a snap of land to keep a pig live pretty, and grow cabbages on; and three times alas; let it three times be for us (the people) poor dupes…following in high hopes the jack o’ lantern dancing over the land, his false light blinding all.
It was Governor Hotham whose false light, Ellen believed, had led the foolish diggers down the garden path with empty promises. Hotham had betrayed Ellen’s early trust. She would now place her faith in the power of the press.
