The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (56 page)

Scandalous anecdotes were flying every which way, gossip spinning out after every new or imagined bunfight or scuffle.
The second Ballarat revolution is in everyone's mouth,
wrote the
ARGUS
on the morning on 29 November.
Rumour with her many tongues is blabbing all sorts of stories.
The gold commissioner had been taken hostage. The Camp was burned to the ground. The fifteen-year-old drummer boy had been killed in the ambush of the 12th Regiment. Fletcher had
thoroughly broken down
and was a risk of suicide. James Johnston had purchased five town allotments at the Ballarat land sales that week. (This one was true.)

And yet…most miners remained buried down their holes, trapped in the daily rigour of digging. There had been some handsome finds on Eureka and the Gravel Pits these past weeks. There was not a single salary man outside the Camp, but thousands of little mouths to feed. All was work.

Bakery Hill would once again be the venue for the next monster meeting, placarded for 29 November at midday. (
Bakery Hill is obtaining creditable notoriety as the rallying ground for Australian freedom,
wrote the
TIMES
.
³³
) Ten thousand people downed tools, shut up stores, gathered up children and headed towards Bakery Hill. It was a hot day, with clouds of dust swirling in the gusty wind. In Victoria, you know when a change is about to come. The low clouds build. The air temperature can roast chickens. You take the washing off the line before the sou'westerly front rips through. You arrive at your destination with one eye on the main game, one hand on your hat and an ear out for the roar of wildfire.

The meeting brought the usual catalogue of goldfields public protest: lengthy speeches, heartfelt resolutions—one of which was that the reform league would meet at the Adelphi Theatre at 2pm on Sunday 3 December to elect a central committee—fiery threats, troopers circling on horseback and the steady sale of sly grog on the fringes of the crowd. But three wholly new things happened on 29 November.

The first was that the next morning's papers referred to those present as
the rebels
.
³⁴

The second was that the diggers lined up to throw their licences upon a bonfire—an act of communal defiance of the law. The Ballarat Reform League had voted by a majority of three that its members should burn their mining and storekeeping licences. When committing their licences to the flames, the diggers swore to defend any unlicensed digger from arrest, with armed force if necessary. Those miners who did not become members of the reform league could not expect the same protection. Thus the Ballarat diggings became a closed shop.

The third was that a flag was hoisted. Not a national flag, but a purpose-made flag, a flag the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
dubbed
the Australian flag
.
³⁵
This was the only flag hoisted that day.

This is the flag that we now know as the Eureka Flag. But on 29 November it was briefly raised not at Eureka but above the crowd at Bakery Hill. Its purpose was
to attract attention
: like the band that roamed the diggings playing ‘La Marseillaise', it was an attempt to charm democratic tempers away from their toil, rallying them on a cloud of righteous anger towards Bakery Hill.
³⁶

The flag they called the Australian Flag took its design inspiration from the one thing that united each and every resident of Ballarat: the constellation of the Southern Cross. Those five bright stars in the shape of a kite were the first thing that had alerted immigrants to the existential transformation that occurred when they crossed the line into the southern hemisphere. Those five stars connected the paths of travellers from other antipodean colonies long before a constitution federated their political bodies. Those stars were the only firmament for currency lads and lasses, who knew no other heaven. Five shimmering white stars against a clear blue field, hoisted, as Frederick Vern put it,
under Australia's matchless sky
.

Raffaello Carboni gave his tribute to the idea behind the flag when he took the stage before fifteen thousand people at Bakery Hill that morning.
I called on all my fellow-diggers
, he later recalled,
irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the ‘Southern Cross' as the refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth.
Carboni was well satisfied with the crowd's response:
The applause was universal.
The Ballarat Flat now had a single ensign to rival the huge Union Jack fluttering above the Camp.

Henry Seekamp was also on the spot to witness the hoisting of the new flag on its eighty-foot flagstaff at eleven o'clock on the morning of the 29th. In the issue of the
TIMES
printed on Sunday 3 December, he (or perhaps Clara, as this is one of the ‘seditious' editions for which he disclaimed responsibility) wrote:

Its maiden appearance was a fascinating object to behold. There is no flag in Europe, or in the civilised world, half so beautiful and Bakery Hill as being the first place where the Australian ensign was first hoisted will be recorded in the deathless and indelible pages of history. The flag is silk, blue ground with a large silver cross; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural.

Thomas Pierson saw the flag too. He sketched a little replica in his diary, labelling it
the flag of the southern hemisphere…made of silk and quite neat
. Indeed the design was very different from the flag commercial artist and republican William Dexter designed for the Bendigo miners during the Red Ribbon Rebellion in August 1853. Dexter's ensign showed a pick, shovel and cradle to represent labour, scales to signal justice, the fasces (a Roman bundle of sticks) to suggest union, and a kangaroo and emu to emote Australia. To Dexter's mind, this smorgasbord of iconography was the ultimate liberation narrative. On raising it at a Bendigo rally,
he made an onslaught on the British flag. ‘What had it done for liberty?'
³⁷
Ballarat's rebel flag, by contrast, was remarkably pure. It said simply, ‘We are here'.

There has always been controversy about the provenance of the ‘Eureka' flag. The current orthodoxy is that it was designed by Canadian miner Henry (sometimes called Charles) Ross, who then recruited three diggers' wives to sew a standard measuring 3400 millimetres by 2580 millimetres. Ross was friendly with fellow Canadian Charles Alphonse Doudiet, who has left the clearest pictorial representation of the flag that was unfurled on Bakery Hill that day. Some have speculated that the blue flag with its white cross takes its design lead from the official ensign of Quebec (from where Doudiet, not Ross, hailed). But there is no evidence that Ross designed the flag. There is a clue, however, as to how the Chinese whisper might have started. The original cover of Raffaello Carboni's 1855 account of the Eureka Stockade bears a sketch of the flag above the words,
When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross the bearer was Toronto's Captain Ross
. Elsewhere in the book, Carboni refers to Ross as the
bridegroom
of the flag, a reference that is probably more literal than is sometimes supposed. Ross was the standard-bearer; he hoisted it up the flagpole.

There is also speculation about who made the flag. The most overt documentary clue is provided by Frederick Vern, who described the flag
as a banner made and wrought by English ladies
. Carboni later confirmed this version in his 1855 account, quoting Vern directly. Was Vern referring to Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke, the three women now generally credited by oral tradition as the clandestine seamstresses? It is certainly possible, though historian Anne Beggs-Sunter has suggested that the prominence of these names is simply ‘an example of the way oral history becomes fact' when secondary accounts take descendants' theories as gospel.
³⁸

Beggs-Sunter gives equal weight to what she terms the ‘men's flag story', first told by J. W. Wilson in 1885. Wilson quoted
a reliable eye-witness
, who told him in 1893 that Henry Ross
gave the order for the insurgents' flag
to a local tent-and tarpaulin-making firm, Darton and Walker. According to Wilson's version, Ross gave his order at 11pm on Thursday 23th and the flag was first raised thirty-nine hours later, at 2pm on Saturday the 25th. This flag was made of
bunting
.

There is another possible explanation of the flag's genesis, one that draws on many plausible strands of evidence. We know from the report in the
ARGUS
on 9 November that bills had been posted around the diggings for a meeting of Ballarat's Irish; the purpose was to raise a subscription for
a monster national banner
to fly over
the once disputed ground of the Eureka
. The impetus was apparently the insult directed at Father Smyth in arresting his servant. But by 24 November—the next time a new flag was reported in the papers—the
BALLARAT TIMES
was advertising fervidly a meeting to be held on Wednesday 29 November at which the
Australian Flag shall triumphantly wave, a symbol of Liberty. Forward! People! Forward!
There is no suggestion that the Irish flag was ever stitched. But clearly the Seekamps knew that an important standard was being raised.

A Eugene von Guérard sketch, made on the spot in January 1854, gives us a strong intimation of where that flag might have been constructed.
Katholisch Kapelle aus den Gravel Pit Lunis 3u Ballarat Januav 1854
is von Guérard's rendering of Father Smyth's Catholic church, St Alipius. It shows a large tent, timber-lined with a canvas roof, and beside it the small school hut where Anastasia Hayes was the teacher. Soaring high above the church is a flag. The sepia tones of the sketch don't show the flag's colours, but the graphic is clear: a cross on a solid background. The conventional Christian chaplain's flag is a dark blue flag with a white Latin cross. It is still used today by the chaplain corps in army units around the world. In Ballarat in 1854, Father Smyth would hoist his flag half an hour before mass commenced, to alert his largely Irish Catholic flock to put aside their worldly activities and come together in ritual communion. The flag was taken down when mass commenced.
³⁹

Eliza Darcy was a member of that congregation, as was Patrick Howard. They would marry at St Alipius in August 1855. Eliza and Patrick's twelfth and last child, Alicia, born in 1879, would later tell her granddaughter, Ella Hancock, that it was Patrick who designed the Eureka Flag and that Eliza helped to sew it. Did Patrick Howard, a member of the Ballarat Reform League and a proud Irishman, look up at the mass flag, then cast his gaze further to the sky above—to a constellation that united not only his offended Catholic brethren but the whole aggrieved digging community? Did he simply affix the stars of the Crux Australis to the Latin cross?
⁴⁰

Then there is the question of who really did craft the flag, and how. As the press pre-emptively observed, the diggers' flag was a monster. Kristin Phillips, the Eureka Flag's most recent conservator (and the one with the highest level of professional qualification), has argued that it was the construction of the flag that dictated its size. She believes that the seamstresses were not working to a plan; rather the size of the available fabric determined its dimensions. For it was not bunting but ordinary ‘clothing fabric bought off the roll' and cut ‘economically' that was used to make the flag: a full piece width, selvedge to selvedge, used in the centre with a half width affixed to the top and the bottom.
⁴¹
A dark blue ground of plain-weave cotton warp and wool weft. A cream cross of twill-weave cotton warp and wool weft. And five cream-coloured, one hundred per cent wool stars.

Phillips disavows the popular theory that the stars were made out of women's petticoats. Nineteenth-century petticoats, she assures us, were rarely made of wool. Furthermore, the stars are cut from clean pieces of fabric, without visible seams; grain changes in the stars suggest they were cut, ‘economically' again, from a single piece of fabric. From a technical point of view, Phillips finds it implausible that such large stars could be taken from a single petticoat. It's a myth that might have added a touch of sexual allure to the Eureka story, but not one that the material evidence bears out.

Yet size does matter. Where to construct surreptitiously a huge rebel flag on a camping ground like the diggings? There were few places in which a four-metre roll of fabric could be unfurled on the ground, with room around it for a team of seamstresses. The Adelphi Theatre would have been big enough, but Sarah Hanmer was sheltering the activities of the American community, not the Irish. Was the flag sewn in the Catholic church where Anastasia Hayes, the doyenne of the Catholic community, was employed? It was certainly one of the few tents large enough to lay out such an expanse of fabric. And it was already common knowledge that the Irish were making themselves a protest flag.