The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (32 page)

Ballarat was overflowing with budding political radicals and religious nonconformists in the winter of '54. Hunched over in their tents, warmed by brandy and outrage as they watched their children sleep, couples like the Cumings and the Fryers applied careworn dreams of liberty and justice to their beleaguered lot. Victoria promised a tabula rasa for their utopian visions.

Ellen Young spoke directly to these people. In her poem ‘Ballarat', she offered an explanation for her protesting the plight of the diggers.
Emblem of hope the poets sing
, she writes,
And I've the fancy caught
. She makes it sound almost light-hearted—impulsive—but as Ellen would have known, a form of ‘militant domesticity' was part of the Chartist tradition, with some women writing themselves into the melodramatic narrative as crusading heroines. They were champions for the right to suitable housing, decent food and companionable marriages. Such crusaders argued the need for women to be independent, not subservient to men, slaves to neither the workhouse nor their husband's dominion. Educated women from Britain to France to Germany took a leading role in the revolutionary movements that swept across Europe in 1848, raising awareness that the struggle for political sex equality was also an economic and social struggle for a better standard of living for working people.
¹³
Participatory democracy started at home.

There was also home-grown Australian precedent for the political evangelism of Ellen Young's poetry. Adelaide Ironside is best known as the first Australian woman artist to study overseas; however, she also did a smashing line in political poetry and published at least twenty of her fiery, patriotic poems in the pro-republican
PEOPLE
'
S ADVOCATE
in 1853 and 1854. Other members of the Australian League, the circle of young radicals in which she moved, encouraged Adelaide in her actions. It's quite feasible that copies of the
PEOPLE
'
S ADVOCATE
were in circulation on the Ballarat goldfields. George Lang, the twenty-two-year-old son of the group's spiritual leader, Reverend John Dunmore Lang, was in Ballarat in 1854. He was working as the manager of the local branch of the Bank of New South Wales and also wrote for the
BALLARAT TIMES
. Adelaide had worked as a governess to the younger Lang children and George would have known her. He may even have drawn attention to Adelaide's rousing poems; possibly he encouraged Henry Seekamp, who shared Lang's republican fervour, to publish Ellen Young's work. Seekamp was certainly prepared to accord Ellen a prominent space in which to forge her own identity as an intellectual leader in the local struggle for democratic reform.

Together, Ellen Young and Henry Seekamp became the mouthpiece for the people of Ballarat in late 1854. He was the hothead; she was the calm but deadly serious moral conscience of the community. Good cop, bad cop: tag-team political advocacy.

Ellen's cadence was remarkably upbeat in early months of that glacial winter. She saw reason for hope. She rallied the flagging troops. Her optimism was pinned on the new governor, due to arrive in Victoria at any moment. She published a new poem in the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
on 1 June 1854:

For much I hope a change is near;

New brooms, they say, sweep clean;

We soon shall have Sir Hotham here,

He'll make a change, I ween.
¹⁴

Ellen felt her literary role was to raise the spirits, to find a way out of the emotional morass that had settled upon Ballarat's diggers like a moorland fog. She employed homespun images—cats, brooms, fancies—to convey ideas of historically mutinous significance. She entreated the diggers to
each one join in joyous song/The song of liberty.
¹⁵
She wished
good luck to every man
. She blessed the Queen,
our Queen
, and all who
nobly toil
. In the last line of the poem she added an unconventional but apposite flourish:
God bless their babes and wives
. Ellen's words were intended to unify: to strengthen the bonds of a collective spirit in crisis. To find a common enemy.

The diggers may not have had a representative in parliament, but they had a free press and a maverick poet to call their own.

British
and
Justice
were the two words on everyone's lips in the winter of 1854. The words generally carried a question mark. This? You call
this
British justice? There were many ways to illustrate the hypocrisy. Thomas Mundy winced every time he saw the soldiers pass by. It wasn't because he was afraid they'd find the illegal alcohol stashed in his cart (he knew sly grog was tacitly approved) but because of the aristocratic pretensions of
lords and duke's sons, friends of La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country
. The indignity of educated professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops stuck in Mundy's craw, and he knew he wasn't alone.
Things will not remain long as they are
, he predicted.
The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed to, British justice
.

English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by heavy-handed, arrogant treatment from the police.
The arbitrary, Russian sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities
, he wrote, was especially galling for gentlemen. Weren't the British at the very moment fighting a war against the Czar in the Crimea for failing to honour enlightened standards of diplomacy?

Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day, burgeoning on the grapevine of community outrage. Prisoners could be left manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full or if the turnkey took a set against them. Honest but poor licence defaulters were chained together with hardened thieves and assorted ex-cons from Van Diemen's Land. Women were incarcerated with men, nothing but a flimsy partition between them. Other inmates were forced to draw water and hew wood for the camp. After a sick man died in the Ballarat lockup because there was no hospital in which to receive proper care, Thomas Pierson cried
Oh! How humane is Brittish [sic] law and Brittish freedom
. Since he was an American, Pierson's lament took on an even more divisive bent. His condemnation of seemingly local offences spiralled out into critique of transnational significance. Thomas and Frances went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning and witnessed several
licence cases
. One man had borrowed another's licence. He was gaoled for two months in Geelong.
A still more heathenish part of the matter
, Thomas later reflected in his diary,
is that the man had a wife and six children in his tent in Ballarat
. The poor woman had
just been confined
with the sixth.
The English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation
, concluded Thomas. Government oppression and negligence were beginning to be a factor in the struggle for survival. Another word was added to the lexicon of complaint: tyranny.

Ballarat society was mired in complaint. To add to the administrative quagmire, Ballarat was dealing with a new top dog. Robert Rede was appointed resident commissioner of the Ballarat goldfields on the eve of the winter deluge. Whether he was sent as a punishment or a peace offering is unclear. English-born Rede was the son of a Royal Navy man, but pursued a career in medicine before tossing in his studies and sailing to Victoria in November 1851. He soon entered the public service and, with his excitable nature, quickly came to the attention of the Gold Fields Commission. Promoted to resident commissioner on a salary of £700 a year plus accommodation and rations, the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor immediately realised the Eureka diggings was the place to be.
At Eureka more activity is to be seen at present both amongst Miners and Storekeepers than on any other portion of these Fields
, Rede's benign predecessor reported to his superiors in the Melbourne HQ of the commission.
It now forms the most
important section and contains a larger population than anywhere else
. In the first of his weekly reports, Robert Rede described Eureka as the
most populated and unruly part of the district
.
¹⁶
His reports tend to be loquacious and colourful, perhaps the better to show up his immediate junior, James Johnston, whom the colonial secretary had previously dressed down for being
very curt
with his reports, so deficient in information that
he might as well have sent none
. (The colonial secretary expected Johnston
to be more communicative
in future, but Rede took over the filing of weekly returns altogether.
¹⁷
) Rede used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order at his new post. When a prisoner was rescued from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident but assured HQ the incident
arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against the authorities
. Johnston had probably been smart. Sometimes no news is the best news.

Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the subterranean civic impulses would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, magistrate John D'Ewes wrote to the colonial secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat:

The painful impossibility that at present exists of affording relief to sick aging and destitute persons here at this inclement season of the year, and of which I am sorry to say a large number exists in this daily increasing population, owing to the nonexistence of any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted to Government servants.

The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported. A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took subscriptions for a new hospital. The
well know liberality of the
diggers
when it came to public subscriptions meant that £270 was donated by twenty-four persons that night. D'Ewes thought it ill-judged for the government not to be seen to be contributing in some way to this fund. He came up with the canny idea of auctioning confiscated sly grog and donating the proceeds to the hospital, instead of ‘destroying' the cache, a thinly veiled euphemism for handing it out to police. While Ellen Young was rallying the forces of cohesion among the diggers, D'Ewes was trying to ameliorate the toxic sense of ‘us and them' that was ever creeping into the Ballarat populace.

Destitution, lack of access to land and inadequate public services made a formidable backdrop, but the focal point of daily complaints was the method of checking licences.
Nothing
, wrote William Howitt,
could exceed the avidity, the rigidity and arbitrary spirit with which the licence fees were enforced on the diggings
. The police, charged with the task of enforcing compliance with the monthly renewal process, were uniformly despised. If the military presence was made up of the simpering sons of insolvent gentry, the police were drawn largely from the flotsam of ex-Vandemonians and other layabouts.

The Victorian Government paid peanuts and got the inevitable monkeys. The police force was young, ill trained, inexperienced and frequently shickered. A
more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found
, was Thomas Pierson's summation of the ‘traps' who gave Frances ‘a call' in her store on St Patrick's Day, a sure sign she was selling sly grog.

The Ballarat community expressed outrage that their licence fees were used to support a police force that did nothing to check crime, but was more likely to be embroiled in corruption. Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police. (Frances Pierson didn't sustain a conviction, so she may have been one of the many paying hush money.) Meanwhile, many miners disappeared down shafts in the black of night, either through mishap or misdeed, never to be seen again. Claim jumping was rife, and more often sorted out by fists and bowie knives than police investigation and arbitration. If a policeman deigned to turn up when a digger was killed in a mining accident, reported Thomas Mundy,
Yes he would say he's dead right enough
before thrusting his hand into the dead man's pocket and extracting what money or valuables he had. Chained dogs and pistols under pillows were the preferred means of safeguarding against crime. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria's finest.