We Are the Rebels

by Clare Wright

  Another man woke on hearing the shots. He went out of his tent in his shirt and long underwear. Seeing what was happening he shouted at a trooper, For God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children, and was shot dead on his own threshold.

  Could there be a more humiliating way to surrender? A dawn raid. On a Sunday. The miners caught with their pants down on their own doorsteps. Who would be swaggering now?

  WHERE CAN I HIDE?

  If the soldiers and police were troubled by the presence of families in their frenzied midst, most did not show it. A poor woman and her children, reported a stunned Geelong Advertiser correspondent,

  were standing outside a tent. She said that the troopers had surrounded the tent, and pierced it with their swords. She, her husband, and her children were ordered out by the troopers, and were inspected in their night clothes outside, while the troopers searched the tent.

  Some troopers demonstrated more restraint. Charles Ferguson, one of McGill’s California Rangers, saw a woman come running out of her tent in her nightdress. She ran over to some soldiers who had captured her husband. She begged them to release him but she was only pushed around roughly by the soldiers, when at last the commanding officer rode up and ordered them to deliver to the woman her husband. Ferguson had the highest praise for this chivalrous fellow: a manly officer.

  Rebecca Noonan, who ran a store a hundred metres from the Stockade, was not so fortunate. She and her husband Michael and their five children were attempting to escape from their besieged tent when Michael was stopped by police and arrested. He pleaded that he was a peaceable and loyal subject of Her Majesty and [his] Excellency’s Government, but was taken into custody regardless. Rebecca protested, and was then brutally assaulted by the foot police and her life threatened. She was four months pregnant.

  When the soldiers burst into Mary Faulds’ tent she was in labour: lying on the ground, wedged between two cots with a blanket covering her. The soldiers turned around and left her to her fear and anguish. Her baby Adeliza was born later that day.

  Other women risked their own safety to aid the wounded and dying. Elizabeth Wilson stayed put when her husband fled. When a miner raced up to her and said, Look Ma’am, where can I hide? she replied, Right where you stand. And with that she lifted her dress, pushed the man to the floor, stepped over him and swathed him in her hoop skirts.

  (Women’s clothing was in high demand. Frederick Vern, who had not been in the Stockade at the time of the attack, escaped Ballarat disguised as a woman. Captain James McGill fled into the bush, where he was later met by Sarah Hanmer, who provided him with dress, shawl and bonnet—either her own or costumes from the theatre—and food for his journey into hiding.)

  A defenceless man was cut and slashed on his body and head near the tent of Dr Leman, close to the Stockade. Mrs Leman heard the man’s cries and left the cover of her tent to assist him. The cruel sight drew an expression of horror from her, reported an onlooker which reaching the ears of one of the butchers he turned around and deliberately fired at her. The shot missed and the soldier fired again as Emma Leman fled back into her tent, playing hide-and-seek with oblivion.

  THE FINAL INDIGNITY

  Raffaello Carboni had been asleep in his tent at the time of the attack. He was arrested along with 113 others: dragged out, and hobbled to a dozen more prisoners outside, and we were marched to the Camp.

  Timothy Hayes, also at home with his family when the Stockade was taken, was on his way there to assist the wounded when he was arrested. Anastasia saw the mounted troops leading her husband back to the Camp in handcuffs, and rushed headlong between the horses to bawl them out. If I had been a man, she spat, I wouldn’t have been taken by so few as these. The insult covered pretty much everyone in the vicinity, including her husband.

  The shameful fact was that the Stockade was a shambles.

  The weapons were deadly and the stakes were high: no less than manly honour and duty were on the line. Peter Lalor himself had admitted that he would be unworthy of being called a man…were I base enough to desert my companions in danger. But when push came to shove, the very men who had been goaded into resistance—

  rendered impotent by a legal system that denied them rights, and a taxation system that made them paupers,

  disappointed by a land that promised reward for honest toil but delivered instead disease, death and poverty,

  hacking futilely at solid rock while their womenfolk made good money with their skills and labour

  —these men could not even defend their wives and families from danger, let alone their companions.

  It was the final indignity.

  The Ballarat miners had come to Victoria to be free men, independent, upright and proud. Most had failed to feed, clothe or adequately house the families they brought with them, or those they quickly started.

  And, really, there was nothing heroic about watching your women being assaulted while you stood in the dawn light in your underwear.

  BURN BABY BURN

  From the Camp, Samuel Huyghue listened to the deep reverberations of musketry telling us that there was a real collision at last, followed by a ghostly silence. Then he could see only sheets of smoke and flame.

  After the bayonets, Captain Carter had ordered all of the tents in and around the Stockade to be burnt to the ground—firstly to root out any insurgent hiding there. Secondly, because nothing instils terror like fire.

  Using a pot of burning tar, the troopers and soldiers set about torching every tent on the ground. There was no system to regulate our search, one police officer later testified. Another admitted that the police had no idea whether the occupants were in the tents before they set fire to them.

  In the Stockade, some of the blazing tents contained the bodies of the wounded or dead. Two men who burned to death in their tent had either passed out or were still asleep. The sight of their charred remains was so sickening that even the soldiers had to turn away.

  Patrick Curtain had managed to escape the Stockade without injury. He went to find his wife and daughter and delivered them to friends. On my return after leaving my family in safety at a distance, he later wrote in an unsuccessful claim for compensation, I found my store all in flames without a chance of saving anything.

  There was a knock at Bridget Shanahan’s door. Timothy had not returned. He may still have been hiding in the dunny. A trooper and a foot soldier barged in. Shoot that woman, ordered the trooper. The soldier begged, Spare the woman. The trooper hesitated. Well, get out of this place, he finally said, the place is going to be burnt woman. The men set fire to the tent, but Bridget managed to put it out before much was destroyed.

  The ring of fire extended out in terrifying ripples. Most of the surrounding tents were diggers’ homes, stores and small grog shops. Some of these, marvelled Huyghue, were actually defended by their occupants while burning, and several contained women and children who were with difficulty rescued from the flames.

  The Curtains and Shanahans were inside the Stockade; they might have expected some reprisal. But John Sheehan’s tent was outside the barricade and, being strictly honest sober and industrious and having no part directly or indirectly in the uprising, he did not anticipate the troops’ vengeance. Sheehan’s wife a
nd children were huddled inside their tent when it was set alight.

  On the other side of the ledger: according to Samuel Huyghue, Lalor owed his escape to the fact that the soldier who saw him fall was fully engrossed…in rescuing an old Scotchwoman and her family of children from her burning tent, a task of considerable difficulty which evoked an expression of fervid gratitude from the relieved parent. The woman quickly snatched a piece of paper from the smouldering wreck of her home and asked her rescuer to write his name so she could remember to whom she owed what doubtless seemed to her an act of remarkable generosity.

  As the night drew to an end, the reality of the situation became clear. It was not a bad dream. There was no silver lining. Stragglers from the neighborhood of the Stockade, wrote eyewitness John Fraser, some of them in a state of the greatest terror and excitement, came hurrying along close to the tents. An Irishman approached Fraser for a drink of water. He had his wife and three little children with him.

  The poor woman, crying bitterly, presented, to our mind, a picture of distress, as, nursing her infant in her arms, she bewailed in heartrending tones the loss of their little possessions—tent, clothes, everything—burnt and destroyed by the troopers.

  William Adams, who ran a store near the Stockade, was shot three times while trying to flee his burning tent with his wife and child. After he emerged from a week in the Camp hospital, he estimated the loss of his family’s worldly goods to be £937 and 10 shillings. He had £4-10s in his pocket when he was taken to the hospital. The loose change was missing from his blood-spattered pants when he was released.

  UNGOVERNABLE EXCITEMENT

  By the time the sun rose over Mount Warrenheip the troops and police were returning to Camp, where they were given more rum. When the soldiers were finally dismissed from duty, Huyghue tells us, they rushed cheering and capering like school boys to their tents. In his report to Governor Hotham the following day, Captain Thomas was pleased to advise that the behaviour of the troops and police, both officers and men, was very good.

  As for the Eureka flag, an anonymous eyewitness sent his account to the Geelong Advertiser:

  The diggers’ standard was carried by in triumph to the Camp, waved about in the air, then pitched from one another, thrown down and trampled upon.

  Those participating in the victory dance then proceeded to cut off little pieces of the flag and tuck them away as souvenirs. Small patches of Prussian Blue wool have been turning up in public collections ever since.

  Commanding officers turned a blind eye to the brutal, petty and wilful misdeeds of their soldiers. As far as Hotham was concerned, it was simply a case of boys being boys.

  There is ample evidence in reports from the Stockade of arson, murder and pillage (thieving). These are three of the traditional ‘spoils of war’. The fourth is rape, of which there are no direct reports. Was that because it didn’t happen?

  According to anthropologist Roland Littlewood, sexual violence in warfare has occurred from Hebrew times through to the twentieth-century atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia. But it is very rarely reported. Sexual assault by soldiers ‘reflects badly’ not only on the rapists but also on the victims, who feel degraded and humiliated. Indeed, that is its purpose: ‘An explicit justification frequently made by the soldiers who rape women,’ writes Littlewood, ‘is that it is to degrade and humiliate them.’

  Littlewood’s research shows that most military rapes occur in house-to-house searches and reprisal attacks. The assaults are rationalised on the grounds that the women were housing enemies of the state.

  What we do find in reports from Eureka are veiled references to ‘unmanly acts’ perpetrated amid the chaos and terror: acts that Victorian sensibilities preferred to leave to the reader’s imagination.

  Thomas Pierson referred to hundreds of other cruel deeds done by these fiends that would strike any civilised person with horror. The young American Dan Calwell wrote home to his parents and sister reporting on the Stockade clash. The victors, reported Dan, committed all the brutalities of the darker ages.

  The Goldfields Commission of Enquiry later found that—as currently rumoured—there had indeed been some of those disgraceful inhumanities that are the customary feature of a social outbreak. The commissioners acknowledged that the mounted police, in particular, had committed violence of the sort displayed in moments of ungovernable excitement, but decided not to elaborate this subject further.

  Just as the flag was symbolically trampled and souvenired, so Ballarat’s women may also have been taken as a trophy of battle. As we have seen, women in Ballarat played a prominent role in expressing the social and political grievances of their community.

  If they too suffered bodily harm for crossing the line, it was an act of revenge more terrible than anyone was prepared to disclose.

  THE MORNING AFTER (REPRISE)

  On that bloody Sunday morning, the people of Ballarat woke to the smell of burning canvas and the spine-chilling sounds of mourning. People descended on the Stockade in silent fascination and horror. Lifeless and disfigured bodies had been laid out in neat rows, their clothes saturated with blood from bayonet wounds. Military guards stood over them in case they should rise from the dead and scamper off.

  During the next few hours grieving relatives and friends retrieved the bodies, taking them home to be nursed or shrouded. Nearby hotels were turned into makeshift hospitals. Thomas Pierson thought the treatment of the prisoners and wounded was characteristic of English warfare. Most heathenish, bloodthirsty, disgraceful and cruel.

  Charles Evans, too, was filled with disgust when he walked down to the Stockade on Sunday afternoon. That night he bared his troubled soul to his diary. The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, he wrote, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men.

  The young man’s world had been turned upside down. I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such savage use and cowardly use of their power as unhappily proved to be the case, he scribbled, his hand trembling with fury and pity. Newly made widows…children screaming and crying round a dead father…cowardly and monstrous cruelties…It is a dark indelible stain on a British Government.

  Ballarat was in a state of shock. Instead of the noisy mirth which usually characterises Sunday here, Evans concluded his entry for 3 December, an uncomfortable stillness prevails and many seem to think it is the lull before the tempest.

  In fact, the storm had passed. Now there was the clean-up.

  All the unclaimed dead and wounded were brought to the Camp in carts that afternoon—three dray-loads full of maimed and lifeless bodies to be buried at the cemetery on Monday. Huyghue saw the mangled remains in the Camp hospital, the dead rebels’ faces ghastly and passionately distorted.

  Army and civilian surgeons attempted to patch up the shattered limbs and ragged gashes of the wounded.

  Four soldiers were dead: Privates William Webb (19 years) and Felix Boyle (32 years) of the 12th Regiment and Michael Roney (22 years) and Joseph Wall (20 years) of the 40th Regiment. At least nine more soldiers and police were wounded. Captain Henry Wise, a 25-year-old commissioned officer and the most popular soldier in the division, died of a gunshot wound to his leg on 21 December. Before he died, Wise gamely announced that
his dancing was spoiled.

  It is impossible to say exactly how many civilians died either at the Stockade, in the surrounding tents or in the bush and the mine shafts where the dazed and wounded fled. There were many body counts that circulated in the following days and weeks.

  Peter Lalor famously published a list of the Eureka martyrs, in which he named 22.

  In his diary entry for 6 December, Thomas Pierson noted 25 deaths, but some time later he scrawled in the margin, time has proved that near 60 have died of the diggers in all.

  General Thomas wrote in his official report that the casualties of the military action had been great but there was no means of ascertaining correctly. He estimated at least 30 killed on the spot, and many more died of their wounds subsequently.

  G. H. Mann simply recorded that an onerous number of funerals were frequently passing to the cemetery for many days.

  Of these funeral processions, Charles Evans describes only one—the one that began our story. This is the coffin trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowful group. This is the coffin containing a dead woman, whose body was claimed but not named. This is the woman mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. It was monstrous acts like these that Charles Evans denounced as polluting the soil with the innocent blood of men women and children.

  We don’t know whether the dead woman’s husband was spared—whether she took the bullet or the bayonet for him. We don’t know whether she left motherless children behind. We don’t know how many other women may have been among the number of dead that could not be ascertained correctly. This is the woman who was slipped quietly into the earth by her weeping friends and loved ones, then slipped just as silently out of history.