The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (60 page)

The central committee of the reform league must have been grateful for the timing of events. So far, there had been no grand plan. No strategy for gaining the upper hand. Every action had been responsive, protective, rearguard. The Stockade had been thrown up at random.
The flames did not devour the Eureka Hotel
, admitted Carboni,
with the same impetuosity as we got up our stockade.
The majority of the miners and storekeepers on the diggings were not overtly rebellious, nor prepared to take up arms.
We of the peace portion of the residents
, is how Martha Clendinning identified herself, though she was sympathetic to the miners' land hunger and tax grievances. Henry Mundy counted himself in that portion.
All reasonable people
, he wrote,
were willing to wait til the Commission had finished its labours and report.
Such people still had faith that Hotham would do the right thing by them.

But even the activists were divided. Some of the members of the Ballarat Reform League had sworn the oath of allegiance at Bakery Hill, but not all. Humffray refused to enter the Stockade. Henry Harris and Charles ‘Ikey' Dyte similarly clung to the hope of a constitutional resolution. Some were for a republic; others, like Lalor, claimed that the diggers' resistance was purely defensive, designed to protect each other and protest against the misrule of Ballarat's officials. Vern, cranky that Lalor had stepped so blithely into the leadership, was holding his own meetings down at the Star Hotel. Lalor had been a late starter, not part of the original reform league elite. Not everyone trusted his motives.

Tomorrow was Sunday. By custom, the Sabbath was observed as a day of rest on the goldfields. There would be no digger hunts. It would be a time to step off the rollercoaster of November's events. Time to take stock. For some, time to pray. Father Smyth had personally entered the stockade and pleaded for those of his flock to be at mass in the morning. The meeting of the reform league was scheduled for 2pm at the Adelphi. At that meeting, the leadership would be able to discuss their policies and tactics. The majority of the 1500 people who were in the stockade to hear Lalor's afternoon oration felt free to leave. People began to relax. Saturday afternoon was regarded as a half-holiday. No one recollected a licence check on a Saturday afternoon. They could go back to their own tents, back to their families, back to the hotels and refreshment tents. As H. R. Nicholls later wrote, the desire
to turn out in good trim on Sunday had an effect which probably changed the fortune of war
. One after another, the diggers left the stockade
to get a clean shirt or to prepare in some way for Sunday
. A government spy dutifully reported the unexpected exodus from behind the barricades.

Nicholls himself went to one of the many shanties on the fringe of the stockade. There he and his mates
had drinks ourselves and conversed with a young lady, decidedly good-looking, who presided over the grog.
Nicholls stayed until midnight then returned to the stockade. Jane Cuming's husband Stephen also left the stockade that night on account of
all the carousing and singing
. He had urged Lalor to close the grog shops
because if they were allowed to remain open, I concluded that it would mean absolute ruin
. Stephen went home to Jane and Martineau and did not return.
⁷

Swimming upstream was a contingent of Americans, led by James McGill. His Independent Californian Rangers had decided to defy Tarleton's pleas. They came now to the stockade, offering service. Many of McGill's troops had seen combat in the Mexican–American War. They bore arms like feathers in a cap. McGill himself carried a handsome sword, a gift of Sarah Hanmer—a precious heirloom, brought across the seas. In a dramatic flourish, McGill headed his troop of men with this sword drawn. All of the Adelphi Theatre's props—pistols, revolvers, sabres—had been distributed to the Californian Rangers. The actors themselves had swapped the stage for the Stockade. Was it as Carboni said—that the Stockade was nothing more than
our infatuation
, a higgledy-piggledy barricade containing a dozen family tents and sly-grog shops, defended by a handful of men brandishing theatre props?

By nightfall, about 1500 people remained in the Stockade, mostly those diggers and storekeepers like the Diamonds and the Shanahans, who lived in the captive tents; out-of-towners; and the sentries, chiefly Americans, posted to keep friends in and foes out.

There is another reason why so many of the men inside the Stockade on Saturday night might have gone home. There was a full moon. According to the principles of lunar menstrual synchrony, women are designed to ovulate on the full moon.
⁸
Female humans' biological blueprint is to release eggs when there is the most light in the night sky. Bleeding time thus corresponds to the new moon, a time of inward focus and self-nourishing.

The invention of electricity has changed this pre-modern prototype for human behaviour: now, not only do women menstruate at different times in the lunar cycle, but at different times from each other. However, most women are aware that when they live in close proximity to other women, their menstrual cycles start to coincide. With only candles and campfires for nightly illumination in the tents of Ballarat in 1854, women's menstrual cycles would very probably have synchronised. And they would have fallen into step with the phases of the moon.

When H. R. Nicholls rode in to Ballarat at the end of November and felt that
the whole place was electric
, could he have been reading the hormonal magnetism of the goldfield's five thousand women, a community in heat? The record is silent. Martha Clendinning was far too polite to discuss her bodily functions. Hobart Town Poll, who might have been relied on to call a cunt a cunt, didn't write her memoirs.

From the Camp, some two kilometres as the crow flies from Eureka, the Stockade site was a picture of abstract commotion. A dark ring in the centre, ragged lines of brown hats and blue shirts marching one way, then the other, then back again. A sea of white calico and canvas dots quivering in the breeze. A huge flag of blue and white rising from the ochre earth. The windlasses were still, the creeks and shafts abandoned. Distant figures darted in and out of tents. A moving canvas of conspicuous endeavour.

The details—faces, words, numbers—were a blur, but one thing was certain. Mining operations, domestic work, entertainment and commerce had ceased a day early. There were none of the usual Sunday pastimes: music, card games, bowling, shooting at targets, children playing quoits, women promenading in their finest clothes. Where was everybody? Only one person had been to the Camp to purchase a licence today—and that was a woman. Elizabeth Rowlands marched up to the commissioner's tent, clutching her baby Mary Ann, and bought herself a licence for £3. Then she took the licence back to her tent at Eureka and her husband burned it.

Was she a spy, checking the lie of the enemy's land? Perhaps the miners thought a new mother would get past the Camp's sentries. If so, they were right. This peculiar act, this unusual weekend limbo, must be a warning. A calm before the storm. An attack was surely imminent. Not if. No longer if. It was only a matter of when. The Camp was ready to fend off any assault. The territory was well and truly fortified. Sandbags, bales of hay, sacks of flour and wheat—all piled high around the most important buildings and along the front fence facing the diggings. Commissioner Rede had announced a curfew: no lights in neighbouring tents after 8pm, punishable by summary fire from the sentries.

The Camp was now under the jurisdiction of the military, which, according to civil servant G. H. Mann,
was rather awkward sometimes
. But still the troops kept piling in. Today, a contingent from the Castlemaine Camp. More backup—six hundred soldiers, plus munitions and cannon—were on their way from Melbourne, under the charge of the old warhorse Major-General Sir Robert Nickle, commander-in-chief of the forces in Victoria. Many of the soldiers at Ballarat had already been on twenty-four-hour sentry duty for days. They had passed several nights without a wink of sleep, hadn't washed or changed out of rain-soaked clothes. Over 540 edgy young men jostled for a place to lay their weary heads. But constant deliberate false alarms were given at night by Captain Thomas to keep the soldiers on their toes.

Huyghue described these men as
striplings…half weaned cubs of the Lion Mother
, newly arrived in Australia and disoriented by their long passage. Several of these boys—footsore, exhausted, unable to retaliate—had been violently ambushed as they entered Ballarat only two days earlier.

At the Camp, there were no longer any mother lions to give succour. Most wives and female servants, who helped with provisioning, had been sent away. Corporal John Neill's wife Ellen and their baby Fanny were an exception; they stayed put despite the privations and fear of attack. Rations were basic. All of the stores had been removed from the commissariat building and dumped outside, so as to vacate the space for shielding any remaining women and children, or the sick and infirm. Food was covered in grit, spoiled by damp. Water was in short supply, as the contracted carrier had not filled the week's order. Tradesmen either feared crossing the insurgents or were supporting them with an embargo on the Camp. The whole length of Lydiard Street was an unbroken row of horses, tied to pickets, obliviously munching their fodder.

Samuel Huyghue was in the Camp on Saturday night.
An ominous and oppressive silence brooded over the deserted workings
, he later wrote. The full moon rose high in the cloudless sky. The breeze was gentle, still warm after the heat of the day. At 2.30am, Captain Thomas called on his troops to fall in. This time it was no false alarm. One hundred mounted and 175 foot soldiers assembled at the rear of the Camp, joined by a contingent of officers, police and civil commissioners. Police Inspector Gordon Evans handed around bottles of brandy to his men. They were told it was
for the benefit of all
.
⁹
The remaining 384 soldiers would stay to defend the Camp. At 3am, those chosen to fight slipped silently down the hill.

Military historian Gregory Blake has written a 240-page book about what happened next. The book offers a forensic dissection of the fifteen-minute gun battle to take the stockade. What follows here is a more impressionist account.

Corporal Neill, like most of his regiment, had slept in his clothes. He quietly fell in behind his sergeant, leaving Ellen and baby Fanny behind in bed. Captain Thomas, an old India man, led the troops the back way, down Mair Street, across Black Hill, past the Melbourne Road to the Free Trade Hotel. From here, detachments of the 12th and 40th regiments extended in skirmishing order. Part of the mounted force of military and police moved around the flank and rear of the slumbering Stockade. The idea was to get as close as possible without being seen. It was 4am on Sunday. No one was watching.

Of course, the question of who fired the first shot has been hotly contested for over 150 years. Both sides of the Stockade wished to claim the strategic immunity of self-defence. The moral economy of armed conflict requires an aggressor. Captain Thomas later reported to Hotham that when the troops were 150 metres from the barricade, he detected
rather sharp and well-directed fire from the insurgents…then, and not until then, I ordered commence firing
. Lalor wrote in a letter to the
AGE
on 9 April 1855 that, without warning or provocation,
almost immediately, the military poured in one or two volleys of musketry, which was a plain intimation that we must sell our lives as dearly as we could.
Blake reasons that on evidence and by logic ‘there may have been several “first shots” within seconds of each other'. But from his extensive research and ballistic reconstruction, he is certain that the first shot came from within the Stockade.

Does it matter? The scene tells its own story. A sentry realises the Stockade is suddenly surrounded. Like mercury, in the magical hour of darkness between the full and waxing moon, the noose of the law has slipped around the stronghold.
¹⁰
A shot rings out, followed by deafening volleys. The sleeping residents of the Stockade jerk to attention at the sound of gunfire. Men scamper to get dressed, falling out of their tents with one leg in their pants. Women lie flat to the ground, folding their bodies around children and babies. Twenty-six-year-old Scotswoman Mary Faulds is in labour with her first child; her anguished cries cannot be distinguished from the frantic shouting around her. Bridget Shanahan hears the firing before her husband Timothy, who has not long gone to bed. She pulls him out of his cot, thrusts his gun in his hand, and tells him to go out. Timothy leaves the tent, but goes and hides in an outhouse. Bridget stays in the tent with their three children. Elizabeth Wilson, who keeps a store just outside the Stockade perimeter, loads rifles for her husband Richard. They have not bothered to change into nightclothes and are ready for action. Bridget Callinan distracts the soldiers while her wounded brothers Michael, Patrick and Thomas are helped away. (What did she do to divert the redcoats' attention? History does not record the nature of the distraction but a flash of thigh or breast might have done the trick.
¹¹
)