The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (2 page)

There is a vast scholarly literature on the gold rush era generally, and the Eureka Stockade specifically. I am indebted to the many fine historians who have worked over this terrain before me: Weston Bate, David Goodman, John Molony, the Geoffreys Serle and Blainey. You'll find the best of their work in the bibliography here included. I am also grateful for the pioneering archival work of local historians Dorothy Wickham, Laurel Johnson and Anne Beggs-Sunter, whose exhumation of information on Ballarat's early gold rush history, and especially its women, has been heroic.

I've tried, within narrative reason, to exclude from this book what you can readily locate in any bookshop or library. I have included, sometimes in great detail, that which you won't find anywhere else. In particular chapters focusing on women's participation in the social, economic and cultural life of the goldfields provide important data, not previously revealed.

Who knew that stores on the diggings sold breast pumps to ease the pain of lactation? Or that dances and balls provided paid childcare so that babies didn't need to be left in tents when their mothers went out for the night? This book is not simply a new inflection of an old story; it offers up a fresh body of scholarship for future dissection and, I hope, rampant expansion.

My aim is not to enter the usual interpretive controversies that have raged about Eureka for over 150 years: which side was to blame for the violence and bloodshed; whether the rebellion was a parochial tax revolt by small business or a republican insurrection; or whether Eureka even deserves the press it gets as a key landmark in Australia's democratic traditions. Nor am I looking to settle old empiricist scores: who fired the first shot; who amputated Lalor's shattered arm (historian Robyn Annear has called the rebel leader an octopus, given how many people claim their ancestor lopped off his limb); the exact topographic location of the Stockade site; whether Scobie was murdered by a blow to the head with a shovel or an axe; even who sewed the flag.

In this book, Eurekaphiles will discover previously unearthed factual details about key protagonists and events in the affair. And Eurekaphobes might reconsider their antipathy to a left-leaning legend once a more humane landscape re-emerges from the flames of political polarisation.

For Eureka is a story that is already so familiar and so emotive to Australians that successive political giants have seen fit either to make triumphant speeches on its anniversary or pointedly to scorn its relevance. On 3 December 1954, Victorian Premier John Cain Sr addressed the seventy thousand people who had flocked to Ballarat for the three-day centenary celebrations.
From Eureka came the crusading spirit against injustice
, he bellowed to the delirious crowd.
³

On 3 December 1973, unveiling the newly restored Eureka Flag in Ballarat, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam hitched the spirit of Eureka to his own progressive agenda.
The kind of nationalism that every country needs
, intoned Whitlam
, is a benign and constructive nationalism [that] has to do with self-confidence, with maturity, with originality, with independence of mind.
⁴
In 2004, national sesquicentenary events were incommoded by then Prime Minister John Howard's steadfast refusal to fly the Eureka Flag at Canberra's Parliament House.

It is neither my intention to undermine the centrality of the Eureka story in Australia's collective imagination, nor to elevate it beyond the ideological rubric of historical authenticity. But following women such as Catherine Bentley and Anastasia Hayes to
their
Eurekas has forced me to ask questions that will have wide-ranging repercussions, reaching beyond the picturesque frame of the Eureka narrative into the cultural and political heartland of Australian national identity. For the values and attributes that the Eureka Stockade has come to represent—independence, sacrifice, collectivism, unity, autonomy, dignity, dissent, resistance, self-government, the pursuit of democratic rights and freedoms in the face of oppression and humiliation—have largely been considered exclusively masculine aspirations and have been represented accordingly in our public culture.

But times have changed. Public accountability to a diverse Australian community requires socially inclusive models of institutional and popular representation. Knowledge about women's intrinsic role in the Eureka story will, from a concrete point of view, require our cultural and educational institutions to admit, respect and regard the political legacy of Australian women.

Beside the Eureka Obelisk, in the Eureka Stockade Memorial Park in the heart of Ballarat, a plaque is dedicated to
the honoured memory of the heroic pioneers who fought and fell on this sacred spot in the cause of liberty and the soldiers who fell at duty's call
. The names of twenty-eight white men follow.

Today, more than 150 years after the Eureka rebels raised their voices to demand justice and equality for the disenfranchised miner, there is a new plaque in Ballarat, at the entrance to the Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka. Its language, thanks in part to discussions arising from the research for this book, is more inclusive:

We honour the memory of all those who died during or because of the events at the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854—the men known to us, who are recalled below, as well as the other men and women whose names are unrecorded.

There is progress. But still we have to keep reminding the cultural gatekeepers that women were there too, and that their stories are just as vital, just as valid and just as vibrant as the stories of the men. This is not an ‘either…or' predicament. It is a ‘not only…but also' situation. We don't have to choose. We just have to respect the historical record.

Is it possible to imagine a nationalism that is not racist, sexist and otherwise xenophobic?

I do, and one of the reasons I can is because I have a picture in my head—indelibly inked there through my research—of men and women from many lands standing together beneath a new flag. The flag bore the symbol of the constellation that located and united them in their new home—the Southern Cross. That flag was almost certainly sewn by women of Ballarat. Under that flag the men of the Ballarat Reform League swore an oath to stand truly by each other and fight to defend their rights and liberties. Women were at that meeting too. At the time, they called that flag ‘the Australian Flag'.

And not only men but also at least one woman died beneath that flag in defence of some basic democratic principles: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

My goal, as I have said, is not to undermine the potency of the Eureka story in Australia's collective imagination. I have no desire to scoff at its centrality to our national mythology, or to deride those who have devoted themselves to the task of building a legend. Rather, I want to reinvigorate the story: to bring it with renewed relevance to a modern, diverse community for whom talk of ‘democracy and freedom' should automatically raise questions of gender equity.

The great gift of Eureka—its beauty and, in a sense, its terror—is that the story of women's effort, influence and sacrifice is both politically correct and historically true.

Let's go down.

Let's go down to where it's dark and wet. The air is thick down here and our breathing gets shallow, impatient, restless with anticipation. The damp walls touch us, squeeze in close, pin us tight. Don't panic.

Let's dig down deep. Let's find that place where the light no longer gets in. There's another world down here, a place we enter with caution. But it promises so much, we can't let it be—and so we dig until we hit the core. Eureka!

Let's go down. Pick a random spot and start digging.

The past, as they say, is not dead. It's not even the past.

INTRODUCTION

DUST AND RATTLING BONES

The ground is hard and dry. The dirt yields grudgingly as the gravedigger thrusts his shovel in. The summer sun blazes down, making thirsty work of a job that is grim enough without the intense heat. The crowd will be here soon, and there are still holes to dig. The gravedigger continues to jab and hack at the earth, grunting, choking on the dust; choking back the tears that threaten to join the course of his dripping sweat. It's lucky his hands are already callused.

Back down at the Eureka Lead, the people are gathering to perform their mournful task. They emerge solemnly from their tents, patting down rumpled clothes, straightening hats and bonnets, dusting off jackets and shawls usually kept for Sundays and subscription balls. They round up stray children, tether dogs and talk in muted whispers. When
will
these hot north winds ease? You'd think there'd be a change in the weather by now.

It's Monday morning, 4 December 1854. The township of Ballarat and its goldfields have woken to a strange dawn. A Monday morning on the richest auriferous basin in the world would ordinarily see a robust start to an energetic week. There are thirty-two thousand people on the Ballarat diggings, and none of them idle. Miners from every continent on the globe working their claims. Cartloads of goods arriving from Melbourne and Geelong to fill the stores with food and merchandise. Restaurants preparing victuals, grog shops dispensing their illicit wares, theatres preparing sets and wardrobes for the evening's farce or melodrama, newcomers erecting their tents and unloading their drays in wide-eyed fascination, children dodging and weaving through the tightly packed tents, campfires and washing lines. Everywhere the sights and sounds of a colonial frontier society going about its daily business, the din ferocious.

But this Monday morning is silent. Yesterday an inferno tore through the early hours of the still, moonlit morning, shattering the habitual rhythm of industry and domesticity.

It was a true Australian night
, miner H. R. Nicholls later recalled of the Saturday evening that had just passed,
not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the stringy-bark trees…the whole air was full of that fine haze…a haze which slightly veils but does not conceal, lending a ghostly yet beautiful appearance to all around.
¹

What happened next has been taught to Australian school children for generations.

At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and police stormed the rough barricades recently erected by a mob of armed miners. A few days earlier, the diggers had burned their mining licences in protest against the tyrannical rule of local authorities and pledged, in the words of their hastily appointed leader, Peter Lalor,
to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties
. The simple fortification of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts was intended to protect unlicensed miners from arrest.

In the twenty-minute armed conflict that followed the surprise military attack, at least four soldiers and twenty-seven civilians were killed.
²
The rebel stronghold was taken, and their blue and white flag—bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross—hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle, authorities continued to harass people within close proximity to the barricades, fearing that renegades might be hiding in surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down, hundreds were arrested.

This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.

Charles Evans was a twenty-six-year-old printer from Shropshire, England, who had kept a daily diary since arriving on the Ballarat goldfield in November 1853. He recorded what he saw on that shell-shocked Monday morning, when he too crept from his tent into the light of an altered reality. Amid the smouldering ruins of the Eureka goldfield, the bodies of those killed in and around the Stockade were being ceremoniously transported by horse-drawn carts to the nearby burial ground. This is what Evans wrote:

I have witnessed today, I think, some of the most melancholy spectacles. A number of poor, brave fellows who fell in yesterday's cowardly massacre were buried…One of the coffins trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowing group was the body of a woman who was mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. The mind recoils with horror and disgust from the thought that an Englishman can be found capable of an act so monstrous and cruel.
³

Without the eyewitness account of Charles Evans, a young man whose moral universe had just been tipped upside down, we would never have known about the death of this woman.

For the name of the miner's wife with the white-trimmed coffin was not recorded in the official government lists of those killed and wounded at Eureka. It was not included on Peter Lalor's famous published list of heroes. Nor has it crawled down the haphazard wire of folk history. There are no inquest files. No newspaper reports. You certainly won't find it inscribed on the monument to
the sacred memory of those who fell in resisting the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian government
that looms over the Old Ballarat Cemetery. Nor do we know if this woman was defending the barricade or just a helpless onlooker, her tent randomly encircled by the hasty demarcation of the rebels' cordon.