Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (74 page)

Horrifyingly, this makes a certain amount of sense. The rebels have dared to mount an armed resistance to British rule, and the punishment for that offence is clear. Perhaps if such a place as Norfolk Island was not being wound down they could retain hope of a death sentence being commuted to serve out their life sentences in such a place, but in recent times all such reminders of the colonies’ convict past, bar Western Australia, are in the process of being shut down on principle. These men are left with little doubt that if the British can make the charges against them stick – whatever they prove to be – then death will be their fate. After all, three months earlier, Hotham had infamously refused to show mercy to the father of starving children by locking the man up for two months because he could not afford to pay for his license – what chance he would show greater forgiveness this time?

Monday afternoon, 4 December 1854, courage in Father Smyth’s residence

Easy. Easy. Steady. Steady. Big breaths. For there at Bakery Hill, on Father Smyth’s table, lies Peter Lalor. Peering down above him is Dr Doyle, assisted by the American surgeon Dr Kinsworthy, as they prepare to amputate what is left of the rebel leader’s left arm, with none other than Anastasia Hayes acting as nurse. But the heavy breathing is not coming from Lalor alone – Dr Doyle is also feeling ill at all the gore and wondering if he is up to removing an arm in such circumstances. Peter Lalor’s upper arm and shoulder is now no more than a twisted mess of putrescent flesh and shattered bone, with the humerus completely torn asunder, as is the artery beside it. One of the musket balls that hit him has carried pieces of Lalor’s shirt into the jagged wound from which shards of bone are visible, and the whole thing emits a stench that is truly nauseating.

Legend would have it that, sensing this, Lalor opens his eyes, looks at Dr Doyle and says rather impatiently, ‘Courage, courage, take it off.’

They take it off, using just as much chloroform as they dare, since a heavy dose would be too dangerous for a man in his condition. Pulling his arm right out of the shoulder joint, they also manage to remove two of the three bullets that hit him. They then tie off the largest spurting blood vessels with thread before using a hot iron to seal the smaller ones. Rightly or wrongly – it could never be proven – the story circulates afterwards that Anastasia Hayes disposed of the severed limb down a deep, abandoned mine shaft.

Monday afternoon, 4 December 1854, the panic grows in Melbourne

In small graveyard groups all over Melbourne, they huddle together, reading this first of scattered reports from Ballarat in a special edition of
The Argus.

BY EXPRESS

FATAL COLLISION AT BALLAARAT

At four a.m. this morning (Sunday) the troopers advanced on the right of the Warraneep Gulley, and another division on the left of the Eureka line, encompassing the camp of the diggers. A shout was raised, and after a sharp firing of about twenty minutes the troopers called to the soldiers, who were advancing, that it was all over . . .

The London Hotel is the chief repository for the dead and wounded. The troopers swept the diggings, and are making several captures now at the moment of writing.

The most harrowing and heartrending scenes amongst the women and children I have witnessed through this dreadful morning. Many innocent persons have suffered . . .

It is a report that gives credence to the rumours that have been circulating throughout the day, fuelling the worst rumour of all: the vengeful diggers now really
are
marching on Melbourne! No more mere red ribbons in their hats, they now have red sashes across their chest and pistols in both hands! And they’re not just coming from Ballarat, but from all over the diggings. They will sack the city. Whole sections of the road between here and Ballarat have been taken over by guerrilla parties, ready to fall upon any isolated group of troops or police! The horror! Oh, the
horror.
A dark mood begins to fall on Melbourne, as all wonder what will happen next.

Monday evening, 4 December 1854, more shots on Ballarat

Tension is the father of aggression, and all too frequently the bastard brother of catastrophic error. On this dark, cloudy evening the soldiers in the Camp have no sooner seen a flitting figure ‘running out of the Camp and down the hill’, keeping close to the picket fence, than in a split second a dozen muskets are brought to shoulders as they draw a bead.

Yet, right at the moment they are about to fire, a single ray of moonlight breaks through the clouds and illuminates the figure. It is a woman! Anastasia Hayes – who has been visiting her husband and, for reasons unknown, is now running away – will never know how close she has come to losing her life in a hail of bullets and musket balls. Upon investigation, it appears that via one of the guards, she has been in secret communication with her husband.

Catastrophe still stalks close, however. The two armed and glowering camps of a couple of days before have now turned into one destroyed camp with its furious survivors scattered and the other camp victorious but still angrily grieving for the good men it has lost. Trigger fingers on both sides have never been itchier. As Samuel Lazarus records in his diary at eight o’clock that night, A shot had been fired into the [Government] camp & for this solitary misdemeanour 50 or 60 musket shots had been fired indiscriminately among the tents.’ Among those who are in the way of the bullets is a mother with a babe in arms. ‘The same ball which murdered the Mother (for that is the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms.’ And there is yet more devastation to come as the barrage of bullets is heavy.

‘A gentleman on horseback was wounded in the leg,’ the
Geelong Advertiser
would report. ‘Another gentleman informs us that three children were killed by the discharge.’

The fury of the diggers is overwhelming.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Lazarus says, ‘will show the result of this wanton & tyrannical use of power. I hear many disastrous reports tonight but hope there is the foundation for them. After the blood stained lesson which was offered on Sunday morning (not a very fit day for such teaching,) the people will bear a great deal before they will risk a repetition but there are some deeds which will grace men beyond the power of endurance and this seems very like one of them.’

The fury of the diggers is manifested by many shots being fired into the diggers’ camp that night, all of it without retribution, and those inside, rightly, feel themselves to be under siege.

Tuesday, 5 December 1854, Melbourne, the outrage rises

And with those first reports the previous day come many more detailed, harrowing accounts. Most poignant is the correspondent of
The Melbourne Herald
: ‘I was attracted by the smoke of the tents burnt by the soldiers, and there a most appalling sight presented itself. Many more are said to have been killed and wounded, but I myself saw eleven dead bodies of diggers lying within a very small space of ground, and the earth was besprinkled with blood, and covered with the smoking mass of tents recently occupied. Could the government but have seen the awful sight presented at Ballarat on this Sabbath morning – the women in tears, mourning over their dead relations, and the blood-bespattered countenances of many men in the diggers’ camp.’

It is through the reading of this, and many such accounts, that the popular mood of the people of Melbourne starts rapidly to swing from fear of the diggers to outright anger at what the government has done to those diggers.

For already,
The Age
has done its sums and now sums up neatly: ‘Let the Government be undeceived. There are not a dozen respectable citizens in Melbourne who do not entertain an indignant feeling against it for its weakness, its folly and its last crowning error . . . They do not sympathize with injustice and coercion.’

The public mood towards the government is dark and only getting darker.

In answer to the request of eight members of the Legislative Council and self-interested Melbourne businessmen keen to see law and order restored, Mayor Smith calls a public meeting at one o’clock that afternoon in the Mechanics’ Institute Hall on Collins Street. However, so many unexpectedly attend – around 5000, as estimated by
The Age
–
that it requires a full contingent of police and troopers to keep order, even after the meeting moves to the front of the City Court House in Swanston Street. And they are not long in dividing up between those who seek a return to law and order and those seeking justice for the diggers . . .

After the Mayor, as Chair, exhorts the boisterous outdoor gathering to remain controlled, it is a barely audible John Pascoe Fawkner MLC who, just above the din, proposes the first resolution: ‘That this meeting deeply deplore that any sense of wrong doing should have induced a portion of our fellow colonists at Ballaarat to resort to the use of arms in resistance to lawful authority.’ Fawkner also argues, however, that the government should pardon the diggers – ‘let bygones be bygones’ – and ‘give the diggers what they demand’.
(Cheers)
Fawkner goes on to exhort the diggers to show patience in temporarily paying the license fee and obeying the law until the forthcoming Inquiry (in which he will take part) can try to get to the bottom of their grievances and propose solutions.

‘It was not the Governor’s fault,’ he continues. ‘He wished to act honestly by them. It was the fault of the Colonial Secretary Foster.
(Groans)
Let the reasonable demands of the diggers be conceded, but let them no longer continue their present unlawful opposition.’
(Cheers)

When the seconder of Fawkner’s resolution, however, returns to the issue of law and order and asks the crowd to support the government, the pro-digger lobby erupts: ‘They are wholesale butchers!’
(Repeated groans)
‘The diggers were driven to it.’ ‘It was in self defence.’

Rather than address the actual plight of the digger, the next three speakers prattle on about maintaining law and order (the original purpose of the meeting) and the need to act like Englishmen in order that business as usual may continue. After Henry Miller MLC asks the crowd to make a choice between ‘the flag of England’ and ‘the new flag of the Southern Cross’, more chaotic calls break out – and so much groaning it drowns out all else. It is obvious that he is not getting the response he wants. Outraged at the current tenor of the meeting, a digger in the crowd shouts out a motion from the crowd, ‘The only way to restore order . . . is to get rid of those who caused the disorder.’ The government.

Despite the protestations of the Chair, who has by now lost control of the meeting, the next speaker, a Mr Hibberd, starts to call once again for the immediate head of Foster, and asserts that Foster’s ‘memory would be execrated by the widows and orphans of the poor men who had fallen at Ballarat’.

As the crowd continues to cheer a series of speakers who support the diggers and denounce the actions of the Executive Council (though somehow Hotham escapes the worst of it), the harried Chair hurriedly declares the meeting closed. But no, the people do not want it closed, and cry out in protest.

Dr Embling replaces the Mayor as Chair and now another digger, with a moustache so curly the tips nearly come back to meet his nose, steps forward. Henry Frencham is well known for being one of the earliest after Esmond to have found payable gold in Victoria – in his case, around Bendigo – and he now roars to the appreciative crowd that the people ‘must go forth with their brother diggers to conquer or die!’

Previously interrupted, Mr Hibbard now completes his resolution calling for the immediate dismissal of the Colonial Secretary, and it is carried ‘amidst the most tumultuous cheering, every hand being uplifted in its favour’. Three deep groans are then given for Mr Foster, followed by three cheers for the replacement chairman, and with some loud cheers for the diggers in general, the gathering disperses.

Now, as the meeting’s proceedings have been duly noted by both the journalists and Sir Charles’s men, the anxious Lieutenant-Governor and Colonial Secretary Foster are shortly afterwards presented with a full report occasioning ever more anxiety, particularly from Foster, at the way things are turning.

However, out on those same streets an extraordinary edition of
The Government Gazette
is issued, calling on ‘all true subjects of the Queen, and all strangers who have received hospitality and protection under Her flag . . . to enrol themselves [as special constables]’.

Three o’clock, Tuesday afternoon, 5 December 1854, on Ballarat, the Camp is saved

Men on horseback.
Many
men on horseback. After a journey lasting four gruelling days, on this hot afternoon Major-General Sir Robert Nickle and his force of 800 armed men with squadrons of cavalry sent out in support arrive at last at the head of a seemingly endless train of supply wagons, which also boasts two 600-pounder field guns and two 12-pounder howitzers. Those at the diggings watch them with enormous trepidation and outright fear, for, just as rumours have swirled through Melbourne that an army of diggers was on the march, ready to kill them all, so too has Ballarat been beset by rumours that they are soon to be slaughtered by a vengeful army of Redcoats. And now here they are.

It is for this reason that one of the first things Sir Robert and his men see as they reach Ballarat is diggers and their families running for the hills. It takes some time before those who have departed with such haste feel confident enough to make their way back.

By contrast, for those in the Government Camp, the vision of Sir Robert and his men is greeted with unbridled joy. ‘We now felt like Red Indians after a siege,’ Samuel Huyghue would recall, ‘who, discarding weapons and war paint, smoke the [peace pipe] with a pleasing assurance of the preservation of their scalps, preparatory to the luxury of a big sleep.’