The Night They Stormed Eureka (26 page)
Read The Night They Stormed Eureka Online
Authors: Jackie French
Captain Thomas had instructed his troops to spare any person who did not show signs of resistance. But by now many of the men were too angry — or too caught up in the excitement — to care.
And then they charged.
At 4.45 am the sentry posted to guard the stockade fired a warning shot to alert the other diggers to the attack. Lalor tried desperately to get his few men into some sort of order. Standing upon a stump, he ordered his men to hold fire until the enemy advanced closer to them, but a couple of bullets struck him in the shoulder.
Lalor yelled at his men to escape and hid among a pile of slabs, the blood from his wound so thick it could be seen flowing down the hill.
The battle was over in fifteen to twenty minutes, but the redcoats and bluecoats kept bayonetting and shooting wounded diggers, burning tents and slashing at people with their swords. Five troopers and twenty-two diggers at the stockade were killed or later died of their wounds, but no one knows how many miners were bayonetted in other places on the diggings after the battle, or burned alive in their tents by the troopers. Over a hundred diggers were taken prisoner.
Many innocent people got caught up in the violence. Henry Powell was twenty-three and had walked over tovisit a mate. The police shot him, thinking he was one of the rebels. They then ran their horses back and forth over him and slashed at him with their swords while he screamed for help. Powell died three days later. He identified his killer, but the man was let off because Powell hadn’t sworn a legal oath before he died.
Several children, like Catherine Kelly and six-year-old Catherine Donnelly, whose father had a store inside the stockade, were separated from their parents and terrified by the violence. Some ran to the distant bush where they were sheltered by the Indigenous people till it was all over.
What happened next
There was terror in Melbourne when news of the Eureka Rebellion first reached town. Was an army of desperate miners marching, under a new flag, about to invade Melbourne? But public opinion soon swung to support the miners, partly because of the troopers’ savagery. Public meetings condemning the government were held in Melbourne, Geelong and Bendigo, and Governor Hotham had to post troops to keep order. Hotham and his secretary, Foster, were blamed for the disaster. Foster resigned.
Troopers stopped checking licences. The Victorian jury let off all but one of the miners who had been arrested. Only Henry Seekamp, the editor of
The Ballarat Times,
was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for seditious libel. Harry Seekamp’s crime was to call for the reform of a rotten government, not for rebellion. Hepublished another issue of the paper after the Eureka Rebellion, saying it had been a foul and bloody murder. Luckily friends burned all but one issue, or he might have been hanged for treason, instead of only spending three months in prison.
A Gold Fields Royal Commission was held and gave the miners almost everything they had asked for. The gold licence was abolished and replaced by a miner’s right costing one pound per year, which gave the digger a right to mine for gold
and
vote in the elections for parliament. Lalor and Humffray were elected unopposed in 1855 to the legislative council and Lalor became Speaker of the house of assembly in 1880.
But the Eureka Stockade led to many other things too. It became a rallying point for freedom of speech and the right of every (white) man (not woman) to have a vote and the right to a fair trial.
The new feeling that ordinary Australians had a right to vote for their leaders meant a growing push for selfgovernment. New South Wales got an elected government in 1855, though Britain could still override any of its decisions. South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania all got parliaments between 1856 and 1857. The Moreton Bay District separated from New South Wales in 1859 and was renamed Queensland, with its own government too.
When the colonies joined together (federated) to become a single nation — the Commonwealth of Australia — in 1901 they would still be part of the British Empire. But most, though not quite all, political decisions would bemade by those who voted in Australian elections. And while we are now part of the British Commonwealth, not Empire, politically that is still the case today.
Kids like Sam
According to the enquiry by the National Youth Commission in 2008, about 36,000 Australians under the age of twenty-five do not have stable accommodation: they are on the streets, in temporary supported accommodation, or staying for a short while with friends (couch surfing). The commission also stated that the number of young homeless people in Australia has doubled in the past two decades.
Why don’t we see them? Because most try very hard
not
to be seen. Many have run from abuse, some are on drugs — sometimes both — and some are also mentally ill. And there just aren’t enough places for them to go, or people to help them.
In 2008 there were also about 310,000 notifications to child protection authorities about kids living with their own families who were perhaps being hurt or abused in some way, or whose homes were considered unsafe. Child protection workers are overwhelmed — there just aren’t enough to do the job. (Interestingly, after the completion of 7,433 of the Intervention’s checks on Indigenous children in remote Northern Territory communities, only thirty-nine Indigenous children were found to be at risk of serious neglect or abuse. Kids at risk come from every background, and the poorest families can be the most safe and loving, too.)
Why aren’t governments doing more? Surely the main aim of any government is to look after the young — everything, absolutely everything else, is less important. Why is it so often left to volunteers and voluntary organisations to help kids in need?
Good question.
OR
MRS PUDDLEHAM’S COMPENDIUM OF USEFUL RECIPES AND INFORMATION FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Griddle scones
These are very good.
1 tablespoon mutton fat (Jackie substitutes butter or margarine)
3 cups flour and 1 tablespoon saleratus, or water that has been strained through wood ash, to help the flour rise (Jackie uses self-raising instead)
½ cup currants (pick out dead flies and beetles)
1 egg (check it’s fresh before you ruin the mix)
(Jackie adds a teaspoon of vanilla as well)
a little milk
Mix it all together with your fingers. (Wash yer hands if you’ve been rubbing liniment on the bullock’s legs.) Roll out pastry on a flat rock. Cut into rounds. Cook on a hot rock by the fire or in a greased frying pan till both sides are light brown.
Welsh cakes
Fit fer a queen or a hungry miner. And you don’t need an oven, neither.
1 cup flour and 1 tablespoon saleratus (Jackie uses self-raising flour)
½ cup butter (or fresh dripping)
1 egg
two handfuls currants
(Jackie adds ½ cup caster sugar. I don’t use none, o’ course, but you people expect sweeter ‘cakes’)
extra butter for greasing
extra flour
Usin’ the tips of your fingers, rub the butter into the flour till it’s like breadcrumbs. Add sugar, currants and egg. Dust a cutting board or a clean rock with flour. Roll out the mix till it’s thick as your little finger. Cut it into rounds with the top of a mug. Loosen each one with a knife. Mix the bits together and roll ‘em out again to cut out more cakes.
Warm a frying pan — use a low heat, but let it warm for about five minutes afore you add the cakes or they’ll have burned bums and soggy innards. You can also bake these on a hot stone by the fire — the dust from the stone and the fat in the cakes stops ‘em sticking.
Rub a lump of butter over the pan and put the cakes in straightaway. Don’t let ‘em touch as they’ll swell as they cook. They’ll need about three minutes each side, and should be golden brown. Turn ‘em carefully with a spatula,and take ‘em out carefully too, as they’ll be very fragile. They firm up as they cool.
Eat warm, or store in a tin for up to a month — they stay fresh if you can keep the ants out of ‘em.
If you don’t have any currants and the ants have got into the sugar, make plain cakes, and spread ‘em with jam before you eat ‘em.
Treacle dumplings
¾ cup plain flour with a tablespoon of saleratus (Jackie uses self-raising flour)
2 tablespoons butter or dripping
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk or water (slightly sour milk makes the dumplings lighter; you can ‘sour’ milk with white vinegar — 1 teaspoon vinegar to 1 cup milk)
Syrup
2 tablespoons butter or dripping (smell it ain’t gone off)
1 cup sugar (no ants)
4 tablespoons treacle or golden syrup (Jackie says modern readers will probably prefer golden syrup, which isn’t as strong-tasting as treacle)
juice of a lemon, or ½ cup of water
Sift the weevils out of the flour. You don’t notice weevils in a stew or gingerbread but they make dumplings lumpy.
Mix flour and butter or dripping with the tips of your clean fingers till it’s like breadcrumbs. Mix in the egg and milk or water. Roll out lumps the size of walnuts.
Now boil all the syrup ingredients together for a minute. Add the dumplings and simmer on a very low heat for fifteen minutes or time for ten choruses of ‘Botany Bay'. Add more water and stir gently if it looks like it’ll burn or the dumplings stick. Serve hot with cream or custard, or eat ‘em cold. Store in a clean pillowslip hung up from a branch to stop the ants getting to ‘em.
Damper
If you add sugar and fruit and spices you turn your damper into ‘brownie'. If you fry rounds of damper in dripping in your frying pan you’ve got ‘Johnnie cakes'.
a good fire, burned down to lots of coals
a spade
a camp oven, billy or a large tin can
3 cups plain flour with 2 tablespoons saleratus (Jackie uses self-raising flour)
1 tablespoon butter or mutton dripping (Jackie uses olive oil)
1 cup water or buttermilk or sour milk (sour milk makes your damper lighter, but don’t use milk that smells bad or has green lumps)
If you’ve got ‘em ½ cup currants, or ½ cup chopped dates, or 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, or 1 teaspoon mixed spice, or ¼ cup mixed peel or ½ cup of sugar. You can add the blinkin’ lot if you’re in funds.
Mix it all with a knife. This is the secret to a light, fluffy damper — knead as little as you can. Don’t you be telling all and sundry, neither.
Grease the bottom of the camp oven, or the sides and base of the billy or tin can. Make sure the damper don’t take up more than a third of the space as it’ll get bigger as it cooks.
Put the lid on the oven or find a rock to cover the billy.
Scrape the coals from the fire. Put the oven, billy or can where the coals were. Scrape the coals back
over
the billy or camp oven — all around and on top as well. (If you tries to cook damper on top of the fire you gets a hard burned bottom and raw insides.) Leave to cook for forty-five minutes or the time it takes to peel two hundred spuds, then use a spade to haul it out of the ashes.
Get your gob round that straightaway — they ain’t good keepers — with butter or just a bit o’ golden syrup or treacle. Damper is good with jam and cream (even old doormats is good with jam and cream).
In the oven: a note from Jackie
If you’re cooking damper in the oven, preheat to 275°C and place the dough on a greased tray. Make two deep crisscross cuts in the top (this helps the dough to expand) and bake till the crust is pale brown and it sounds hollow when you tap it. This should take about thirty minutes.
Sinkers
You need to be a good cook to make light damper, but even a new chum can make sinkers.
Make some damper dough. Now find some clean green sticks.
Press bits o’ dough into small, thickish pancakes. Roll ‘em around sticks and press the edges together.
Hold your stick out over the fire. Turn it every now and then till the sinker is brown. Don’t hold the dough too close to the fire or the outside will burn and so will your fingers, and the inside will be raw and doughy.
Gingerbread
¾ cup milk
7 tablespoons butter or dripping (doesn’t matter if it’s a bit pongy: the spices will cover the taste)
1 egg
½ cup brown sugar
1 dessertspoon treacle
⅓ cup plain flour and 1 teaspoon saleratus (Jackie uses half plain, half self-raising flour)
1 dessertspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
chopped glacé ginger or almonds (if you’ve got ‘em)
Melt the butter, treacle and milk in a pan, stir in the sugar and egg and whisk well. Mix the rest. Pour into a greased and floured tin, scatter on the ginger and almonds if the dog ain’t ate ‘em while your back was turned.
Bake in the camp oven under hot coals for about forty-five minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean when you poke it in the middle. (Jackie cooks it in an oven at 150°C.)
Gingerbread is even grander a day or two after baking, if you can keep the ants out of it.
Corn in the ashes
Soak corn on the cob, still in its green leaves, in a bucket of water. Throw it in the hot coals. It’ll be ready in about half an hour, or time enough to mix the dampers.
The Lemonade Man’s Lemonade
6 cups white sugar
4 teaspoons citric acid
2 teaspoons tartaric acid
a bit o’ lemon juice
6 cups water
Jackie uses 1 cup of lemon juice. The Lemonade Man would have used more citric acid and less juice — lemons were expensive.
Boil for five minutes, or long enough to wash the bottles. Pour into clean bottles.
Add 1 tablespoon of ‘lemonade’ to every glass of cold water. Serve with drums and revolution.
