Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (86 page)

Nevertheless, in 1860 Barry was knighted and was even more highly honoured with a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George in 1877, awarded to those regarded as having rendered extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country. His most famous trial involved the sentencing of Australia’s most notorious bushranger, Ned Kelly, to death for the murder of three Victorian police constables, uttering the traditional words on such occasions, ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’

Kelly calmly replied, ‘I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.’

As it happened, just twelve days after Kelly was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880, Sir Redmond Barry, at the age of 67, suddenly died, reportedly from congestion of the lungs. He was buried in Melbourne General Cemetery, where the chief mourner was the mother of his children, Mrs Louisa Barrow, the woman he never married but who was nevertheless buried beside him when she died in 1888.

A small example of the internecine relationships that bound many of the key protagonists of the events of the Eureka Stockade for decades afterwards was the fact that just as none other than Arthur Akehurst – the one-time Clerk of the Peace accused but not convicted of killing Henry Powell – had been the magistrate who had first fined Ned Kelly’s mother, Ellen, with affray, so too was the foreman of the jury that convicted Ned Kelly the former auctioneer on the Eureka, Samuel Lazarus. The Melbourne Sheriff who presided over the hanging of the bushranger was Robert Rede himself.

After the Royal Commission into the Eureka massacre barely criticised Rede at all, his life in the public service continued. Recalled from Ballarat early in 1855, he had a year off on full pay before Lieutenant-Governor Hotham arranged for him to become Deputy Sheriff of Geelong and Commandant of the Volunteer Rifles. By 1857 he had become Geelong’s sheriff, a post he retained for the next decade before returning to Ballarat, where he occupied the same post – becoming one of the foundation members of that worthy retreat for the distinguished gentlemen of the town, the Ballarat Club – and then had another decade as Sheriff of Melbourne, starting in 1877.

Rede finally retired from all positions in 1889, and when he died of pneumonia at the age of 87 in Melbourne on 13 July 1904 and was buried in St Kilda Cemetery, it was as a highly respected member of the community.

Though William Stawell had no involvement in the Kelly case, he did remain as Chief Justice of Victoria until 1886 and was equally a highly esteemed figure in both the legal and wider community. After having been knighted in 1857, he was even more highly honoured upon retirement from the law in 1886 – at which point he became Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria – when Queen Victoria also recognised his service with a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George. Stawell died aged 73 in Naples, in the land of Raffaello Carboni, on 12 March 1889. He was survived by his wife, Mary, and their only offspring, Dr Richard Stawell.

After resigning his post as Gold Commissioner at Eureka, Gilbert Amos first moved to Van Diemens Land, where he married Isabella MacLachlan, before coming back to Victoria to become the Warden of Creswick in 1858. Alas, after the couple returned to England in 1862, they were both subsequently drowned in 1866, along with 218 others, when the steamship
London
was shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay on its way from Gravesend to Melbourne.

John Pascoe Fawkner stayed in parliament as member for Central Province LC, until his death as the grand old man of the colony on 4 September 1869, aged 77. No fewer than 15,000 people paid their respects at his funeral, and his cortege boasted over 200 carriages. He, too, is buried at Melbourne General Cemetery.

While Charles La Trobe continued to grieve for the loss of his wife, Sophie, some balm was provided by the fact that just a couple of years later he proposed to her sister, Rose Isabelle de Meuron. As it was illegal under civil law and forbidden by the church to marry your deceased wife’s sister in England, they were married in Switzerland on 3 October 1855 and were delighted to have two daughters of their own in quick succession. The two lived out the rest of their days in Switzerland, as La Trobe would never work for the British Government again, after what the authorities judged as his less-than-satisfactory performance in Victoria. No matter, he is unlikely to have missed it. Charles La Trobe died in 1875, aged 74. There are many institutions in Victoria that bear his name, most particularly the prestigious La Trobe University.

The second-last man left standing is the young lad, Barnard Welch, who gave such devastating testimony against Bentley and his associates. He lived until the ripe old age of 90, and a newspaper cutting from 1933 reveals that at the time he was living happily in Western Australia in a ‘little, old-fashioned weatherboard cottage, opposite West Subiaco Railway Station’. He died 8 May 1934.

Just six days later, and only a short distance away, William Edward Atherden of Western Australia – likely the youngest of those arrested in the Stockade – died, at the age of 96. He had returned to goldmining and enjoyed great success a short time later, taking a small fortune to England in 1856 before returning to Perth shortly afterwards. He is buried in Karrakatta Cemetery.

The Eureka flag that was dragged down from the flagpole on that terrible December morn of 1854 had an interesting fate. For many years it remained in the possession of the family of the trooper who first claimed it, John King, until after his death, when his wife presented it to the Ballarat Art Gallery on permanent loan. There it remained, still on loan, right up until 2002 when the King descendants very kindly ceded ownership to the gallery. When I first gazed upon it, encased at that gallery, I was stunned, firstly, by its size. Secondly, though, I was gnawed by the sense that, instead of looking at it alone while sipping on a cup of tea, I should have been being jostled by a crowd of dozens of my fellow Australians, with two security guards staring at me sternly for bringing tea within 100 metres of it, even if it is behind glass.

The Aboriginal people of Victoria, of course, never recovered their traditional ownership of the land.

In Tim Flannery’s book
The Birth of Melbourne,
their haunting fate is recorded by one of the Aboriginal men, Derrimut – the one-time headman of the Boonwurrung people – who had saved the infant settlement from massacre in October 1835 by warning of ‘up-country tribes’:

‘You see, Mr Hull,
’
he told a magistrate he met on the street some years later, ‘Bank of Victoria, all this mine, all along here Derrimut’s once; no matter now, me tumble down soon.’

Hull asked if Derrimut had any children, at which the enraged Aborigine replied, ‘Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children, no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.’ A fragment of Derrimut’s vast tribal estate was at last regained by him when, in 1864, he was buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. The generosity of the settlers even extended to a headstone.

There was, however, one small bit of justice well over a century later that bears recounting. The first recognition of Aboriginal land rights came in 1975, when the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, flew to Daguragu (Wattle Creek) in the Northern Territory to meet the Aboriginal elder of the Gurindji people, Vincent Lingiari. On the way there, Mr Whitlam told me in 1993 when I was conducting an interview for
The Sydney Morning Herald
, he was told by Cabinet Minister ‘Nugget’ Coombs the story of John Batman having the Aboriginal elders place the soil in his hands to indicate that the land now belonga’d a’him.

Inspiration struck, as it so often did with Gough Whitlam. Upon formally advising Vincent Lingiari that the government recognised his land claim, the two kneeled down on the red dirt and, as the cameras rolled and clicked, the Prime Minister picked up some handfuls of soil and placed it in Vincent Lingiari’s hands.

Now the government recognised that the land had belonged to him and his people all along.

———

How would Eureka be remembered in the short to medium term? Well, we have it on the authority of E. B. Withers that on the second anniversary of the battle, a small procession made its way through Ballarat to the site where the Stockade once stood, with a total of 200 people gathering.

Here, one of Lalor’s captains, John Lynch, stood on a tree stump and made a speech, beginning, ‘Sensible of the debt of gratitude we owe to the memories of the brave men who fell victims on the fatal 3rd December, 1854, in their efforts to resist the oppression and tyranny of the then existing Government, we meet here to-day, the second anniversary of that disastrous day, in solemn procession, to pay to their names the only tribute in our power, the celebrating with due solemnity the sad commemoration of their martyrdom.’

At the conclusion of the speech, a march of 300 people was made to the cemetery, led by James Esmond, with Henry Seekamp in tight behind.

Reported
The Ballarat Star,
as recorded in the pages of Withers, ‘Arrived at the cemetery, the procession walked round the spot where the bodies of the men who fell on the fatal Sunday morning are interred, and, returning to the monument erected to their memory, the apex of the monument was crowned with the garlands borne in procession.’

On the 50th anniversary of the attack, in 1904, a much larger crowd assembled in the rough area where the Stockade had stood – the precise area had been lost to the passage of the buffeting years – and there, again, was John Lynch, this time a far more withered form, though still proud, as he leaned upon the arm of his son, the even prouder Captain Lynch of the 3rd Battalion, Victoria Rifles. As he does so, ‘The crowd stood back to allow him to pass and many of the older men doffed their hats.’

That 50th anniversary saw the last great gathering of those who had fought from inside the Stockade, and the photo of the 60 or so men and women who came is an Australian classic. Old now, but almost to a man they have huge beards, bushy hair, and very, very, proud looks. They had been
there,
they had
fought,
they had stood against the Redcoats and never flinched!

———

As to the overall significance of the battle, beyond the effect on the lives of those who were actually intimately involved, that is, of course, much more problematic – and the subject of endless debate.

The first and most obvious phenomenon is that many of the specific reforms sought by the Ballarat Reform League were ushered in around Australia over the next few years. Eureka happened too late in the piece to directly affect the different constitutions of the colonies but, against that, as eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey has noted, ‘the first Parliament that met under Victoria’s new Constitution was alert to the democratic spirit of the goldfields, and passed laws enabling each adult man in Victoria to vote at elections, to vote by secret ballot and to stand for the Legislative Assembly’.

By 1857, in Victoria, a universal male franchise was in place, whereby all British, male citizens of sound mind and record, 21 years of age or over, could vote for the Legislative Assembly, regardless of their income or property, so long as they could read and write. And they could do so by secret ballot! (For the moment, the Legislative Council kept its severely restricted franchise, requiring that Council members have property worth £5000, while the property qualification for its electors was £1000.)

And, yes, those who seek to downplay the significance of Eureka do note that South Australia preceded these reforms in Victoria by a year, though as South Australia never had convicts and has always been a haven for liberal, social and political ideals, theirs was a far smaller step to take and a far less influential example to set.

It remained the reforms in the far more populous, powerful and turbulent Victoria that stood as the benchmark, demonstrating how democracy could soothe the savage breast of even the most passionate insurgent. New South Wales, acknowledging the mass democratic tides, followed suit in 1858 with its own reforms, with the other states also falling into line over the course of the next four decades.

The bottom line was that after all the struggles throughout Europe for the democratisation of the political process had been quashed in the two decades leading up to 1848, in Australia, in the three years after the Eureka Stockade, the better part of those struggles were won in Victoria at least. As a result of the political reforms ushered in by Eureka, Australia became nothing less than one of the key ‘lights on the hill’ for democratic movements around the world, most particularly when it came to secret ballots, known as the Australian ballot’, with Tasmania, followed by Victoria and South Australia, introducing the world’s first such ballot for an election in 1856. The country would remain at the forefront of those reforms for decades to come. By 1859, a law was passed in Victoria requiring there to be elections every three years, and in 1870 the last of the major Chartist demands was realised in Victoria with the
Payment of Members Act,
which saw a salary for members of both Houses for the first time, allowing poor men to be in positions of power, at least in the Legislative Assembly. Allowing women to both vote and sit in parliament would take another three decades, but, again, Australia was near the front of the movement, along with New Zealand.

Staggeringly, it would not be until 1918 that Great Britain would grant even the male suffrage that the two principal Australian colonies had been enjoying for the last six decades.

And yet, equal to the landmark political reforms won at Eureka was the emotional effect of the conflict on the people at large. That really did change Australia forever. Noted Eureka author John Molony, in his paper for the Federal Parliament on the occasion of Eureka’s 150th anniversary in 2004, put it singularly well.