Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (70 page)

‘Stand up in the Queen’s name, you bastard,’ he says.

‘Very good, sir,’ the frightened Powell replies, now with as many as 30 troopers surrounding him. ‘Very well, gentlemen, don’t be alarmed, there are plenty of you.’

There is no fight in him at all – just fear and the earnest hope that he will not be hurt. Alas, with nary another word, Akehurst takes his three-and-a-half-foot sword and strikes him a fearful blow on the head.

Powell first falls down, then gets up, bleeding, only to have one of the troopers now fire into him and shout, ‘There, you bugger, that shows you!’

Even as the young man screams for help, the other troopers take their horses back and forth over him, their hooves inflicting cruel damage. When he again tries to rise, they first fire pistols and then slash viciously at him with their swords, and again he falls. Thomas Pierson would write of such acts in his diary, ‘It was a most cowardly disgraceful Butchery, worthy only off sutch scamps as those who instigated it.’

In their own tent inside the Stockade, Matthew Faulds and his heavily pregnant wife, Mary, cower in terror. Mary is due to give birth at any moment, fleeing is out of the question, and all Matthew can do is have her lie on her back, roll two logs either side of her for protection and put a blanket over her as they pray for a miracle. A mounted trooper suddenly slashes open the tent, the flooding light revealing the situation. He turns and leaves them be. Their daughter, Adeliza, is born not long afterwards.

Ah, but there are many more atrocities to come, as recorded by Samuel Lazarus: ‘Another man, a considerable distance from the Stockade . . . went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers and seeing the savage butchery going on cried out in terror to a trooper galloping by, “For God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children,” his prayer may as well have been addressed to a devil. He was shot dead on his own threshold.’ Not far away and only shortly afterwards, former
Ballarat Times
and
Melbourne Morning Herald
correspondent Frank Hasleham turned digger and part-time reporter (he provides information to the current
Geelong Advertiser
correspondent) is trying to find a safe place away from the danger of the Stockade. He happens upon a quiet gully when he looks up to see three horsemen heading his way.

‘One of them,’ he would later recount, ‘who rode considerably ahead of the other two arrived within hailing distance, [and] he hailed me as a friend.’

The trooper now addresses him, asking pleasantly, ‘Do you wish to join our force?’

‘No,’ Hasleham replies a little uncertainly, surprised by the question. ‘I am unarmed, and in a weak state of health. I hope this madness with the diggers will soon be over.’

Ah, but there is some madness yet to go: at a distance of just four paces, the trooper raises his pistol, points at Hasleham’s breast and shoots.

Hasleham falls hard, bleeding heavily. The trooper isn’t done, however. Dismounting, he handcuffs the innocent man, who lies there for the next ‘two hours, bleeding from a wound in his breast, until his friends send for a blacksmith who forces off the handcuffs with a hammer and cold chisel’.

———

In their humble abode some two miles from Eureka, Henry Seekamp and his wife, Clara, are woken by a furious pounding on the door and before they can even open it, a friend by the name of Underwood bursts in.

‘I’m as glad as if I’d got a thousand pounds to find you in bed,’ says he. ‘The military have gone down and fired upon the diggers.’

No sooner have the Seekamps tried to absorb this appalling news than a young boy comes and says to their servant girl, ‘Your brother’s been shot dead.’ The distressed young girl falls away into a dead faint.

———

Meanwhile outside the Stockade, Raffaello Carboni, seeing that the tent next to his own is in flames and that his own is likely next, rushes to retrieve some important papers. Once they are secured, he has just emerged again when he comes face to face with the commander of the foot police, Sub-Inspector Carter, pointing his pistol and giving him the sharp order to fall in with the other prisoners.

With no other choice, Carboni obeys. Then, in the middle of the gully, he spies Captain Thomas, whom he knows a little. Thomas asks the Italian whether he had indeed been made a prisoner within the Stockade.

‘No, sir,’ Carboni replies frankly, before adding a brief explanation of where he had been. There is something in the way the Italian speaks, in the way he is happy to look the officer in the eyes, that connotes honesty – and the thoroughly decent Captain Thomas reacts in kind.

‘If you really are an honest digger,’ the English officer says with a gentle stroke of his sword, ‘I do not want you, sir; you may return to your tent.’

Still, the fiery Italian is not out of danger. Upon deciding to return to his tent, he is crossing the gully once more when a trooper who has spied him in the distance smoothly holds out his gun and fires! The bullet flies ‘with such a tolerable precision’ that it blows off his cabbage-tree hat, and he is only narrowly able to escape.

At this point, a lesser man than Carboni would have done anything rather than continue to expose himself in the open but, as a man who has fought with Garibaldi, he is made of stronger stuff. In short order, when he hears himself called by name by Doctor Carr and Father Smyth, who are making their way to the Stockade to help with the wounded – and seeking his assistance – he instantly responds.

Meanwhile, many weeping, shrieking women have now emerged to throw themselves over the bleeding forms of their husbands to protect them from further bayonets and bullets, even as others collapse in anguish upon the bodies of their freshly slaughtered husbands, their frequently very young children ‘frightened into quietness’. Mercifully, some women whose husbands have survived also appear, and soon bring handkerchiefs to cover the faces of the dead, and matting to cover their bodies.

But the slaughter is still not over, as there remain many other targets for the soldiers to go after. The soldiers, as recorded by Captain Pasley, ‘hated the insurgents . . . for having wounded a drummer boy, and dangerously wounded Captain Wise, [and] were very anxious to kill the prisoners and it was with great difficulty, that they were restrained by the officers from doing so’.

When Pasley comes across a party of prisoners who are about to be bayoneted by their guard, he takes out his revolver and declares, ‘I will shoot the first man who injures a digger who has surrendered.’

‘This had the desired effect,’ he would later write to his father, ‘although I do not believe the prisoners themselves cared much, because they fully believed . . . that they would be hanged directly they got to the Camp.’ Nevertheless, beyond Thomas and Pasley, there remain other pockets of decency among the police and military forces.

Both the black American John Joseph and the Irishman John Manning have just emerged from a burning tent and are likely about to be shot when, with great force, Sub-Inspector Carter yells to the officer in charge to order his men to lower their guns.

Elsewhere, just as one digger, John Tye, is being marched away in manacles, his wife runs up in her nightdress and sobbingly pleads for his release, only for that good woman to be laughed at and pushed around roughly by the soldiers. This is witnessed by an outraged officer, who thunders up on horseback and furiously upbraids the soldiers, ordering the woman to be let alone
and
her husband to be released.

At much the same time, Mrs Shanahan is all alone in her tent, worried for the safety of her husband, when there is a knock on the door. She opens it to find a trooper and a soldier.

‘Shoot that woman,’ says the trooper without preamble.

‘Spare the woman,’ the shocked foot soldier replies.

‘Well, get out,’ says the trooper, ‘the place is going to be burnt down.’

And the intent of the other soldiers outside is clearly to do exactly that, because in shorter order the tent is set ablaze and the men gallop away. Mercifully, Mrs Shanahan manages to extinguish her tent.

Finally some equilibrium is achieved as the last of the fight goes out of the diggers and the worst of the bloodlust fades from the police and soldiers. Both the shooting and screaming at last, mercifully, stops. The red mist lifts, leaving behind the sickly sweet stench of burnt human flesh mixed with the acrid whiff of gunpowder smoke.

With each passing minute, now well after six o’clock, the growing light illuminates an ever more ghastly scene. ‘Pikes, spent balls, and pools of blood, showed where the contest had been most deadly.’ Some diggers have gushing, gaping wounds in their abdomens and the haunted eyes of men who know they are about to die. Others, who just an hour ago were living and breathing and talking, are now no more than grotesque corpses, their hideous grimaces a testament to the agony with which they met their deaths.

A distressing number of diggers from other parts of the goldfields, who have not been involved at all, have simply come to gawk with open-mouthed wonder at this tragic spectacle. Carboni, for one, is ‘amazed at the apathy shown by the diggers . . . None would stir a finger.’ Henry Seekamp and his wife are there, but not as gawkers. They are there as journalists –
witnesses
– and wander about, furiously taking notes for the next edition of
The Ballarat Times.
One man also there is the auctioneer and storekeeper Samuel Lazarus, who was asleep in his tent when the attack began.

‘A ghastly scene lay before me,’ he would shortly after confide to his diary, ‘which it is vain to attempt to describe. My blood crept as I looked upon it. Stretched on the ground in all the horror of a bloody death lay 18 or twenty lifeless and mutilated bodies. Some shot in the face, others literally riddled with wounds – one with a ghastly wound in the temples and one side of his body roasted by the flames of his tent – another, the most horrible of these appalling spectacles with a frightful gaping wound in his head through which the brains protruded, lay with his chest feebly heaving in the last agony of death.’

In one particular tent lies ‘the bodies of two men, their clothes ignited and their flesh partly consumed. They had been shot in their sleep probably, or were too drunk to escape from their burning tent and so perished. The sight caused even the rude soldiers to turn sickening away.’

Poor, brave John Hafele lies in grotesque pose, his intestines spilling onto the black dirt and still worse wounds apparent. ‘He had three contusions in the head, three strokes across the brow, a bayonet wound in the throat under the ear – I counted fifteen wounds in that carcass,’ a
Geelong Advertiser
correspondent and immediate eyewitness to the aftermath of the carnage would later report. ‘O! God, Sir, it was a sight for a sabbath morn that I humbly implore Heaven may never be seen again.’ Strangely and most movingly of all, in the face of all the devastation around and about Hafele, his dog – a tiny Irish terrier – won’t stop howling and trying to lick his master awake. Time and again, the dog is removed, for decency’s sake, but time and again the dog comes back and, ‘lying again on his master’s breast [begins] howling again.’

Not far away is the broke-legged Irishman Thomas O’Neill, who had fought so valiantly, pike in hand, also with grievous wounds all over his torso and head. Though still alive, just, he is no more than a mass of pain, and as it is obvious that his situation is hopeless, he is quickly ‘despatched’.

And, of course, there is Edward Thonen, the popular ‘lemonade man’, ‘his mouth literally choked with bullets’, the bottom part of his face and jawline shot away.

Yet another of the severely wounded not long for this world is poor James Brown, the Irishman who had first encouraged his mate Peter Lalor to take to the podium and the lead all at once. He is now all shot to pieces.

Many of the freshly wounded have blood spurting from the ‘round blue holes in their flesh, already swollen, where a bullet or bayonet entered’, pulsing in rough rhythm to every agonised rising and falling of their chests. Sometimes the blood forms bubbles as the air finds a different way out and runs in dreadful rivulets onto the parched earth below. Flies have started to buzz in from everywhere and are now crawling over unattended wounds, already laying their eggs.

One of the most terribly wounded and flyblown is Henry Powell, who, though entirely innocent, has been knocked down by horses, trampled, shot three times and then slashed with sabres. He is hanging on to life by a thread. Many such men who still have life in them are now being visited by Father Smyth, who is caught between deep grief at what he is seeing and cold fury that it has come to this. He now moves from dying man to dying man, administering the last rites to those who would receive him and to even the insensible ones when he knows they are Catholic. That Father Smyth is discouraged in this, shouted at by the troopers to move away, troubles him not at all. He continues to try to ease the diggers’ passage to the next world.

All around him are scenes that no man who believes in a just God should ever have to witness – much of it powered by the devil in the dynamic between victor and vanquished. And just as many of the police have enjoyed boosting their income by purloining a good chunk of the fines levied on the diggers when they were alive, so now do many of them loot the bodies of the dead. And not just the police, for the Redcoats, too, rifle through the corpses and the prisoners, taking everything they can get as they ‘search’ for hidden weaponry – from pound notes to watches to small collections of gold. One wounded rebel even has two Redcoats kneeling on his chest, holding him down, while another goes through his pockets.

Finally, however, one of the officers has had enough and gives a sharp command to his soldiers, who instantly obey. Taking their pistols from their holsters, they clear the Stockade – under pain of being shot on the spot – of everyone bar the prisoners, the dead and the dying. And this includes a fiercely defiant and even more furious Father Smyth, who is ‘threatened with his life, and
forced
. . . at last to desist’.