by Clare Wright
For months—in some cases years—shamefaced men had been struggling to put food in the mouths of their children. Now these same men had to worry about how to protect their loved ones from an army that would fire bullets among anonymous tents.
They had faced the deaths of people they loved at sea or in childbirth. There was nothing anyone could do about that. But, lord knew, a man could stand up to another man.
Peter Lalor wrote as much to his fiancée, Alicia Dunne, two days earlier. I would be unworthy of being called a man. I would be unworthy of myself, and, above all, I would be unworthy of you and your love, were I base enough to desert my companions in danger.
Some people had spent Friday night in the Stockade but most had slept in their own tents. The purpose of the Stockade, after all, was to prevent the arrest of unlicensed diggers. There had never been a licence hunt at night.
But throughout Saturday more diggers kept rolling up, many coming from other goldfields, eager to help the resistance. The numbers were swelled by women who brought food into the Stockade and at least one female sly-grog seller, who knew a captive market when she saw one and set up shop on the fringe of the palisade.
Alexander Dick had only been in Ballarat for two weeks but he could immediately see that the place was rife [his word] for an explosion. Peter Lalor, whose tent was inside the Stockade, could read the mood too. He needed to corral the energy or his ‘army’ would disintegrate into a violent mob, as had happened at Bentley’s Hotel.
Already there had been reports that looters were taking advantage of the situation, roaming the Flat demanding cash, firearms and provisions from frightened diggers and their wives. Martha Clendinning was alone in her store that day when a group of eight miners marched up in military fashion and demanded any firearms she possessed. She escaped harm, but fetched her brother to stay with her that night when Dr Clendinning was called away.
On Saturday afternoon, Lalor once again stepped forward to take command. Emerging from the committee room of Diamond’s store, he climbed onto an old log and delivered a simple message: We must make this a country we can live in.
So far, there had been no grand plan. No strategy for gaining the upper hand. Every action had been responsive—protective. The Stockade had been thrown up at random. The flames did not devour the Eureka Hotel, admitted Carboni, with the same impetuosity as we got up our stockade.
The majority of the miners and storekeepers on the diggings were not overtly rebellious, nor were they prepared to take up arms. We of the peace portion of the residents, is how Martha Clendinning identified herself, though she was sympathetic to the miners’ grievances. As Henry Mundy put it, All reasonable people were willing to wait til the Commission had finished its labours and report. Such people still had faith that Hotham would do the right thing by them.
And even the militants were divided. Some of the members of the Ballarat Reform League had sworn the oath of allegiance at Bakery Hill, but not all. J. B. Humffray refused to enter the Stockade, and others also clung to the hope of a constitutional resolution. Some were for a republic. Others, including Lalor, claimed that the diggers’ resistance was purely to defend themselves against the misrule of Ballarat’s officials. Frederick Vern, cranky at the new boy, Lalor, stepping straight into the leadership, was holding his own meetings down at the Star Hotel.
Tomorrow was Sunday, a day of rest on the goldfields. There would be no digger hunts. Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold fields? asked Mrs Massey, and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised places.
Sunday was a sacred day, the day to worship but also to wash. On Sundays, scores of men could be seen in front of their tents with tin dish or bucket washing their weekly shirt and flannel, recalled Henry Mundy. It was also a day consecrated to cookery. Families went on picnics in the bush.
People began to relax, and the majority of the 1500 who were in the Stockade to hear Lalor’s Saturday afternoon oration felt free to leave. One after another the diggers left the Stockade, H. R. Nicholls later wrote, to get a clean shirt or to prepare in some way for Sunday. A government spy dutifully reported the unexpected exodus from behind the barricades.
At the same time, headed into the Stockade were James McGill’s Americans, his Independent Californian Rangers, many of them veterans of the Mexican–American War. They had decided to defy Tarleton’s pleas, and came now to the Stockade, offering service. McGill himself carried a handsome sword—a precious heirloom, brought across the seas. It was a gift from Sarah Hanmer. In fact all of the Adelphi Theatre’s props—pistols, revolvers, sabres—had been distributed to the Californian Rangers. The actors themselves had swapped the stage for the Stockade.
By nightfall, about 150 people remained in the Stockade, mostly those diggers and storekeepers, like the Diamonds and the Shanahans, who lived in the captive tents; out-of-towners; and the sentries, chiefly Americans, posted to keep friends in and foes out.
NIGHT OF A FULL MOON
It was about two kilometres as the crow flies from the Camp to the Eureka. From that distance the Stockade site looked like a sea of white calico and canvas dots quivering in the breeze. A huge flag of blue and white rising from the ochre earth. Tiny figures darting in and out of tents.
The windlasses were still; the creeks and shafts abandoned. Mining operations, domestic work, entertainment and commerce had ceased a day early. There were none of the usual Saturday afternoon pastimes: music, card games, children playing quoits, women promenading in their finest clothes. Where was everybody?
Only one person had been to the Camp to purchase a licence today—and that was a woman. Elizabeth Rowlands marched up to the commissioner’s tent clutching her baby, Mary Ann, and bought herself a licence for £3. Then she took the licence back to her tent at Eureka and her husband burned it.
Was she a spy, checking the lie of the enemy’s land? Perhaps the miners thought a new mother would get past the Camp’s sentries; if so, they were right.
The Camp, as Elizabeth would have observed, was ready to fend off any assault. The territory was well and truly fortified. Sandbags, bales of hay, sacks of flour and wheat—all piled high around the most important buildings and along the front fence facing the diggings. Commissioner Rede had announced a curfew: no lights in neighbouring tents after 8pm, punishable by summary fire from the sentries.
And still the troops kept piling in. Today, a contingent from the Castlemaine camp. More backup—six hundred soldiers, plus munitions and cannon—were on their way from Melbourne.
Many of the soldiers at Ballarat had already been on 24-hour sentry duty for days. They had passed several nights without a wink of sleep. They hadn’t washed, or changed out of their rain-soaked clothes. Constant deliberate false alarms were given at night by Captain Thomas to keep the soldiers on their toes, as more than 540 edgy young men jostled for a place to sleep.
Most of the women—wives and female servants, who helped with provisioning—had been sent away. (Corporal John Neill’s wife Ellen and their baby Fanny were an exception; they stayed put despite the privations and fear of attack.) Rations were basic. All of the stores had been dumped outside the commissariat building so the space could be used to
shield any remaining women and children, or the sick and infirm. Now the food was covered in grit, spoiled by damp. Water was in short supply—the carrier who was supposed to bring it had not turned up that week. Tradesmen either feared antagonising the insurgents or were supporting them with an embargo on the Camp.
Samuel Huyghue was in the Camp on Saturday night. An ominous and oppressive silence brooded over the deserted workings, he later wrote. The full moon rose high in the cloudless sky.
At 2.30am, Captain Thomas called on his troops to fall in. This time it was no false alarm. One hundred mounted and 175 foot soldiers assembled at the rear of the Camp, joined by a contingent of officers, police and civil commissioners. The remaining 384 soldiers would stay to defend the Camp.
Police Inspector Gordon Evans handed around bottles of brandy to his men. They were told it was for the benefit of all. At 3am, those chosen to fight slipped silently down the hill.
Corporal Neill, like most of his regiment, had slept in his clothes. He quietly fell in behind his sergeant, leaving Ellen and baby Fanny behind in bed. Captain Thomas led the troops the back way, down Mair Street, across Black Hill, past the Melbourne Road to the Free Trade Hotel.
From here, detachments of the 12th and 40th regiments extended in skirmishing order. Part of the mounted force of military and police moved around the flank and rear of the slumbering Stockade. The idea was to get as close as possible without being seen.
It was 4am on Sunday. No one was watching.
3 DECEMBER—BLOODY SUNDAY
The question of who fired the first shot has been hotly contested for over 160 years. Both sides were eager to claim the moral high ground. The other lot started it, so it was self-defence.
Captain Thomas later reported to Hotham that when the troops were 150 metres from the barricade, he detected rather sharp and well-directed fire from the insurgents…then, and not until then, I ordered commence firing.
Peter Lalor wrote in a letter to the Age the following April that, without warning or provocation, almost immediately, the military poured in one or two volleys of musketry, which was a plain intimation that we must sell our lives as dearly as we could.
Gregory Blake is the historian who has made the closest investigation of the battle at the Stockade. He says: ‘There may have been several “first shots” within seconds of each other.’ But from extensive research and ballistic reconstruction, he is certain that the first shot came from inside the Stockade.
Does it matter? The scene tells its own story.
A rebel sentry realises the Stockade is suddenly surrounded. A shot rings out, followed by deafening volleys of gunfire. The sleeping residents of the Stockade jerk to attention at the sound. Men scamper to get dressed, stumbling, falling out of their tents with one leg in their pants. Women lie flat to the ground and fold their bodies around their children and babies.
Scotswoman Mary Faulds, 26 years old, is in labour with her first child. Her anguished cries cannot be distinguished from the frantic shouting around her.
Bridget Shanahan hears the firing before her husband Timothy, who has only just gone to bed. She pulls him out of his cot, thrusts his gun in his hand and tells him to go out. Timothy does leave the tent, but goes to hide in an outdoor dunny. Bridget stays in the tent with their three children.
Elizabeth Wilson, who keeps a store just outside the Stockade perimeter, loads rifles for her husband Richard. They have not bothered to change into their nightclothes and are ready for action.
Bridget Callinan distracts the soldiers while her wounded brothers, Michael, Patrick and Thomas, are helped away. (History does not tell us what she did to divert the redcoats’ attention. It’s tempting to think maybe she flashed a glimpse of thigh.)
The exchange of fire went on for no more than fifteen minutes before soldiers from the 40th Regiment managed to get over a low section of the barricade.
Now it was a hand-to-hand fight—between trained members of the British army and an under-strength team of gung-ho amateurs, their ardent wives and screaming children. The miners knew the game was up.
The entrenchment was then carried, reported Captain Thomas, and taken by the point of bayonet, the insurgents retreating. I ordered the firing to cease.
NIGHTMARE ON EUREKA STREET
It’s what happened after the surrender that really matters. It’s what happened after the firing ceased that caused people at the time to call the events of 3 December the Ballarat Massacre.
The barricade was breached. The adrenaline was surging. The lid was finally lifted off the steaming cauldron of military and police discipline.
What bubbled over was a lethal stew of hunger, discomfort, exhaustion, boredom, insult, exasperation, sexual depravity, bravado, spite, homesickness, terror and relief. Charles Schulze, who operated a bakery on Bakery Hill, was an eyewitness to the violent outpouring that followed the rebels’ surrender. He could see what the weeks of tension had produced. Jaded, tired, not allowed to return the insult, he wrote, you can imagine. That when the time came, they revenged themselves to the fullest extent.
It was the bayonets, not the bullets, that did the damage. Mayhem and carnage reigned as the crazed soldiers and police thrust their blades into dead, dying and wounded miners. Gold lust gave way to blood lust and the Eureka line became a killing field.
It was a trooper that did it, Anne Diamond later testified. I know that my husband got three hurts from a sword on the back; he fell on his face and he got three cuts of a sword and a stab of a bayonet. Anne and her husband were fleeing from the Stockade when Martin was shot. They treated the dead bodies very badly, Anne reported 22 days after Martin’s death. The woman that laid him out could prove that.
Some soldiers hacked at the bodies lying on the ground. Others surrounded tents and sliced and jabbed at the bullet-riddled canvas. Supposedly, they were on the hunt for prisoners, trying to ensure that no insurgent was allowed to escape. In effect, as the Geelong Advertiser thundered on 5 December, those perfectly innocent of rebellious notions were murdered, fired at and horribly mangled by the troopers. Outnumbered and trapped, many insurgents were literally butchered. One eyewitness later reported: the corpses of the slain had been hacked by the mounted troopers out of sheer brutality…It was a needless massacre. Not even at the siege of Sebastopol did British soldiers kill enemies who lay wounded and defenceless.
The residents of the Stockade could not believe their eyes.
Those who were able began to run towards Brown Hill, at the rear of the Stockade where the barricade did not quite join up. The scrub was thick and the broken ground held up the troopers’ horses; Brown Hill would shelter outlaws for weeks to come. There is some evidence that Wathaurung people looked after the children of fugitive miners.
Others jumped down flooded mine shafts, too terrified to worry about deep water. Their bloated bodies were fished out days later. Some fled into neighbouring tents, where they clambered up sod chimneys or squeezed under camp beds.
Some of the wounded within the Stockade found themselves shielded by the shuddering bodies of women, who pretended they were mourning their dead and prayed that the soldiers would pass without further investigation. Bridget Hynes threw herself over an injured man and cried, He is dead! He is dead! so that the troopers
would not bayonet him. Bridget was two months pregnant with her first child.
BRIDGET HYNES (NEE NOLAN)
* * *
BORN Monivae, Galway, 1831
DIED Leongatha, 1910
ARRIVED June 1852
AGE AT EUREKA 23
CHILDREN Pregnant at Eureka with the first of eleven children.
FAQ Irish Catholic from poor farming family. Immigrated as single woman with her brother. Thomas Hynes and Patrick Gittens were on her ship. Went to Ballarat. Married Thomas Hynes October 1854. John Hynes (cousin) and Paddy Gittens were killed at Eureka. Hid her husband’s pike and pants so he could not fight.
Peter Lalor had been shot in the shoulder; he was dragged under a ledge and safely concealed.
Henry Ross, fatally wounded, was not so lucky. At least he was spared the pain of seeing the beloved Southern Cross flag dragged down from its mast by Constable John King and paraded before his fellow policemen as a trophy of war.
The army officers remained silent as boy soldiers taunted and assaulted bystanders. The bodies of the dead were heaped together face up: mouths gaping, eyes fixed. Several of them were still heaving, reported an eyewitness to the Geelong Advertiser, and at every rise of their breasts, the blood spouted out of their wounds, or just bubbled out and trickled away.
They were not the only victims of the frantic attack. Standing by, tragically alive to the moment, were poor women crying for absent husbands and children frightened into quietness. Other women had bolted from their tents, leaving their husbands behind.
Mary Curtain rushed out of her store in her nightgown with fifteen-month-old Mary Agnes in tow. Mary was eight months pregnant. Such was the terror and hurry with which my family fled, her husband Patrick Curtain later claimed, that they left behind them even their every day dress.
