The Night They Stormed Eureka (18 page)

Mrs Puddleham blushed. ‘Oh, it’s not for me. It’s for my daughter.’

‘Didn’t know you had a daughter as well as Sam,’ said the woman.

‘She’s back in Melbourne,’ lied Mrs Puddleham easily. ‘And she’s the prettiest girl you’ll ever see.’

‘Well, she’ll look even prettier in this. But I tell you what, Mrs Puddleham,’ the woman leaned over the counter. ‘You’ll find hats a tenth the price back in Melbourne. You wait till you’re back there to buy any more. You’re a good woman and a hard worker,’ she added. ‘An’ even if it’s cutting me own throat I don’t want to see you waste your money.’

Mrs Puddleham patted her hand. ‘That’s right nice of you. But it ain’t no waste. I’ll get more pleasure looking at this hat and imagining my girl in it than I’d have got from wearing the crown of England.’

The heat hit them like an oven door had been opened as they left the shop. The days were getting hotter. Summer was coming, thought Sam. Summer and revolution …

A cry echoed up the dusty road. ‘Joe! Joe! Joe’s on the diggin’s!’

Suddenly the tide of men working the cradles at the gravel pits surged up towards the main road.

‘What?’ Mrs Puddleham stared as a mob of soldiers strode down the main street.

‘They must be crazy!’ cried Sam, peering out the door. Surely the troopers knew it wasn’t safe for them to be on the diggings now.

But these were soldiers, not troopers. One of them grabbed the elbow of a man sitting outside the grog shop opposite. ‘Licence!’

The man spat, leaving a gob on the redcoat’s boot. ‘I’ll hawk your guts up from yer garters afore I show a licence to the likes of you.’

‘Licence!’

‘Licence! Here, you, show us your licence!’

‘Them redcoats must be crazed,’ muttered Mrs Puddleham. ‘The diggers’ll strangle the lot o’ them.’ She stepped back into the shop doorway, pulling Sam next to her, as miners surged up from the gravel pits waving their shovels and crowbars.

The cries of ‘Joe!’ were spreading across the diggings again. This time the voices held fury, not warning.

‘I don’t like this!’ panted Mrs Puddleham. ‘I don’t at all.’

Suddenly Sam heard the sound of marching boots. She glanced down the road, more worried with every footfall. But these weren’t troopers or soldiers, though they were approaching in formation, muskets over their shoulders.

They were miners, part of the rebel army of the diggings. Most carried muskets over their shoulders and, even as she stared, another band marched across from the gravel pits, and another from behind Bakery Hill.

All at once the soldiers were surrounded by a jeering crowd. Men yelled all around them.

The soldiers formed a circle, moving with quick precision. The ones on the outside kneeled to let the redcoats behind aim their muskets at the crowd over their backs.

The marching miners drew closer. The watching crowd yelled in triumph, standing back to let the marchers get closer to the redcoats.

‘Please, lads, don’t use them muskets,’ whispered Mrs Puddleham.

The first rock hit a soldier in the chest. The next hit one on the cheek.

One of the soldiers yelled something. He wore a different uniform from the rest — grander, with gold lacing. He was reading something out. Sam tried to hear the words, but there was too much noise to make them out. Something about a riot …

Why is he reading? thought Sam desperately. Why have the redcoats come here at all, so few of them? They must know how dangerous it is! If they had to come, why not bring more soldiers?

Suddenly another noise added to the din.

I should know that noise, thought Sam. I’ve heard it lots of times before. On TV, at the movies …

‘We need to go get Mr Puddleham,’ said Mrs Puddleham uncertainly. ‘Families need to be together at times like this.’

‘No!’ Sam pushed Mrs Puddleham back into the shop, just as the first of the horses arrived.

Soldiers on horseback galloped up one road; more soldiers on horseback surged along the other, swords in their hands, slashing down, down. And after them line upon line of redcoats marched, bayonets fixed as they forced their way into the crowd of diggers. They pushed the bayonets into flesh and kept on marching, marching as the street below turned red.

Horses reared, half in terror, half sharing their riders’ fury. Men screamed under their hooves. Swords bit into arms and necks and heads. Blood spurted like someone had turned a hose on. Sam stared. She had never realised that blood could arc so high.

Mrs Puddleham made a small noise. She thrust Sam behind her, and tried to hold her hands over the girl’s eyes. Sam pushed the hands away and peered out.

Men ran. Others lay, shrieking, curling and twisting to try to staunch or ease their wounds. Part of her wanted to dart out to help them. Another part — the rational part — said to go out was to risk her own death too. Yet another simply felt the cold shock wash over her in the face of so much agony. Just a few minutes ago this road had been calm …

‘Mr Puddleham, ‘ whispered Mrs Puddleham.

Sam hugged her fiercely in their doorway. Mrs Wilson cowered behind the counter inside. ‘He’ll be all right. His squad was drilling down near our gully. They wouldn’t have had time to get up here.’

Mrs Puddleham nodded numbly. She clutched Sam to her, no longer trying to stop her looking.

The army of miners had vanished now, apart from the dead and the wounded, slumped or desperately trying to crawl to safety. The only people upright in the street were redcoats, assembling again in straight lines of men and horses, and a few troopers in their blue uniforms, grinning, heading into the gravel pits among the cradles, demanding licences. Along the road, women peered out of doorways and tents; miners who had heard the din put their heads out of their holes, then ducked back down.

Even as Sam and Mrs Puddleham watched, the troopers hauled up some of the wounded or stunned and chained them together. Eight miners, thought Sam, trying to count as the men struggled and swore.

An officer barked an order. The horses tossed their heads and stamped and rolled their eyes, nervous at the yells and the smell of blood. Troopers and redcoats marched away, dragging the miners with them in their chains.

Sam glanced up at Bakery Hill. The rebel flag that had flown so bravely had vanished.

This meeting was the largest yet. If there had been ten thousand at the last meeting, then perhaps there were fifteen thousand now.

Is there anyone on the goldfields, wondered Sam dazedly as she was jostled closer to Mrs Puddleham, who isn’t here this afternoon? The hills and streets of the diggings near Bakery Hill were dark with men, bearded, dirty, their yelling and their muttering turning to cheers as Peter Lalor stepped up onto a stump and waved his rifle in the air.

Somehow he looked bigger than he had at the cook tent. Impossible to mistake him now, with his Irish voice and shaggy hair and beard.

‘The time for talking is past! I call on you — call on the best of you — to form into divisions, so we can fight the oppressor, whether he wears a blue coat or a red one. Who will answer me? Who will join the army of the goldfields?’

Voices roared like a thundering waterfall as men rushed forwards. Lalor held up his rifle for silence again.

‘Let each division elect its best comrade as captain. For never again will birth and privilege hold sway!’

Once again they cheered him, cheered themselves, cheered a vision more intoxicating than anything sold in the grog shops. How many men in the mob have even thought what the new world they fight for might be like? thought Sam, dazed by the noise, the sheer numbers, the emotion. A few hundred, perhaps, at most.

But they knew what they hated. They hated the troopers, the redcoats, hated the governor, the magistrates who took bribes. Hated being hungry, powerless and without a voice when injustices were done.

They’re running away from something, just like the Professor said, she thought. These were men who had abandoned homes. Now they abandoned the queen’s law.

It was frightening. It was exciting. Part of her would always be proud that she was here. But the rest of her — the sensible part, she told herself — knew that her duty was to keep those she loved safe.

That was the most important thing, wasn’t it? For, after all, you couldn’t change the past. Australia still had not broken away from Britain. The stockade had fallen. Glorious as all this was, eventually they’d lose.

Peter Lalor waved his rifle once more. Someone yelled for silence, then shot a musket into the air to attract attention.

The yelling died away again.

It was so quiet now you could almost hear the breathing of each of the thousands there. Peter Lalor raised his voice again.

‘Hear me with attention! The man who after this solemn oath does not stand by our standard is a coward in heart. I order all persons who do not intend to take the oath to leave the meeting at once.’

He grinned down at them, as though he knew their decision already, as though the hopes and dreams of all of them had made him larger than he’d ever been before. ‘Are you with me?’ The yell echoed across the silent diggings.

The cries of
Yes!
were so loud it hurt.

Lalor stepped down. For a moment Sam couldn’t see him. Then one by one the men around him kneeled as well, and then the men behind.

Suddenly it seemed that every person on the diggings was kneeling. Even Sam kneeled, helping Mr Puddleham get Mrs Puddleham down too. There was something red in the dust under her knees. Blood, she thought, from when the soldiers attacked. I am kneeling in someone’s blood.

Mr Puddleham gripped his wife’s hand. ‘For Lucy,’ he whispered. ‘For you and Sam.’

The new flag flew high above them. Lalor yelled the words, and those who could hear him muttered them first, with others catching them and passing them on. Thousands upon thousands chanting where their friends had fallen: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

Such simple words, thought Sam, helping Mr Puddleham heave Mrs Puddleham to her feet again and brush the dust from her skirts. Back in her own time they’d be a cliché. But now they meant so much.

The men began to build the stockade that afternoon — a fort from which they could defend the land they had declared independent of the governor and the queen. Hundreds of diggers shovelled soil for freedom now, not for gold, as they dug the foundations of a fortress that they hoped could hold back charging cavalry with its trenches four feet deep. Other men carted pit props, logs and slabs from shanties, bags of sand and branches, carts …

Sam could still hear the oath they’d sworn ringing in her brain. So could the men labouring here on the hill, she was pretty sure, and the women helping them, bringing food and water. Perhaps people were still hearing it in her own time, she thought.

She watched, her arms around the trembling Mrs Puddleham as they stood in the shade outside Wilson’s shop, while little Mr Puddleham panted, helping haul pit props up from mines deep below the ground, then joined teams of men to lug the props over to the growing fort.

It isn’t what I imagined, thought Sam. How could anybody imagine this? She’d thought the stockade would be like something from a cowboy movie, a lot of neat poles lashed together vertically and sharpened at the top, with towers perhaps, for guards to peer down from.

It wasn’t like that at all.

This fort was about a metre high, enclosing ground the size of the oval back at school. It rambled across the hillside, enclosing tents and mineshafts, a coffee house, a shop, and the shanty where two women still scrubbed the clothes of any miners lucky enough to be able to pay a washerwoman.

It looked like a pile of wreckage — until you looked closer. And then you saw the plan behind it all, the way the outside sloped inwards, an almost unbroken wall of thick slabs of wood. Even if the inside looked a mess, the outer walls would hold back an army and protect the men inside.

Unless, thought Sam, the men inside were taken by surprise. Unless the redcoats charged when most of the diggers were away or asleep. That’s what had happened, wasn’t it? What was going to happen?

She had only to run up to Peter Lalor, and warn him not to be taken unawares. It was easy to make him out now. Somehow since the last big meeting he had become the leader, climbing up on a carriage that formed part of the barricade to give more orders, urging men to work harder, faster.

But what would happen if she did warn him? Could she really change history?

And did history need to be changed?
Could
it be changed? Surely, if a girl called Sam had warned Peter Lalor that the redcoats would take them by surprise one dawn the Eureka Stockade would not have fallen.

And then perhaps she would not have been born. She’d never have come back to the past, never changed it, then the stockade would fall and she might be born after all … but then —

Maybe she couldn’t change things, no matter how hard she tried. Maybe if she did change things, the future would be worse, not better.

Maybe if the diggers took over the Ballarat diggings, England would send out lots more soldiers, and there’d be years of war. And after all, the things the miners wanted
had
happened eventually, even though the Eureka Stockade had failed. Would Australia really be a better place if it had rebelled against England and become an independent republic like the USA?

She didn’t know. History was too big. She couldn’t fit it all in her brain, even if she had the books or a computer to begin to look things up and write them down in order. How could one girl work out what was best for a whole country?

‘Mr Puddleham shouldn’t be up there,’ whispered Mrs Puddleham. ‘It ain’t right, not at his age, carrying those big things, not in this heat. He’ll bring on the apoplectics.’

Apoplectics? Heart attack, Sam supposed, or stroke. ‘He wants to help,’ she said gently. Time enough to get him away when night falls, she thought. He’d be safe as long as he wasn’t at the stockade when the soldiers attacked one morning.