by Clare Wright
What happened next has been taught to Australian school children for generations.
At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and police stormed the rough barricades recently erected by a mob of armed miners. A few days earlier, the diggers had burned their mining licences in protest against the tyrannical rule of local authorities and pledged, in the words of their hastily appointed leader, Peter Lalor, to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties. The simple fortification of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts was intended to protect unlicensed miners from arrest.
In the twenty-minute armed conflict that followed the surprise military attack, at least four soldiers and twenty-seven civilians were killed.2 The rebel stronghold was taken, and their blue and white flag—bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross—hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle, authorities continued to harass people within close proximity to the barricades, fearing that renegades might be hiding in surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down, hundreds were arrested.
This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.
Charles Evans was a twenty-six-year-old printer from Shropshire, England, who had kept a daily diary since arriving on the Ballarat goldfield in November 1853. He recorded what he saw on that shell-shocked Monday morning, when he too crept from his tent into the light of an altered reality. Amid the smouldering ruins of the Eureka goldfield, the bodies of those killed in and around the Stockade were being ceremoniously transported by horse-drawn carts to the nearby burial ground. This is what Evans wrote:
I have witnessed today, I think, some of the most melancholy spectacles. A number of poor, brave fellows who fell in yesterday’s cowardly massacre were buried…One of the coffins trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowing group was the body of a woman who was mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. The mind recoils with horror and disgust from the thought that an Englishman can be found capable of an act so monstrous and cruel.3
Without the eyewitness account of Charles Evans, a young man whose moral universe had just been tipped upside down, we would never have known about the death of this woman.
For the name of the miner’s wife with the white-trimmed coffin was not recorded in the official government lists of those killed and wounded at Eureka. It was not included on Peter Lalor’s famous published list of heroes. Nor has it crawled down the haphazard wire of folk history. There are no inquest files. No newspaper reports. You certainly won’t find it inscribed on the monument to the sacred memory of those who fell in resisting the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian government that looms over the Old Ballarat Cemetery. Nor do we know if this woman was defending the barricade or just a helpless onlooker, her tent randomly encircled by the hasty demarcation of the rebels’ cordon.
There are no clues in the speeches delivered in Ballarat on the anniversary of the Stockade in 1856, when speakers eulogised the day the first blood was shed for Australian liberty. At that service, five hundred people met on the Stockade site to remember the cause for which [the patriots] bled. Leading citizen Dr Hambrook urged the crowd to remember those who left the bosom of their families, the comfort of the domestic hearth, to live among strangers—dependent on their own manly energies for subsistence, ruled over by men increasing these sufferings and privations by arbitrary laws… goaded into resistance.4
Hambrook concluded: They would have been less than men if they had continued tamely to have submitted to it. In that idea of manly defiance against oppression germinated the robust beanstalk that is the Eureka myth. Its tendrils have wound through every milestone moment in Eureka pageantry ever since. In countless books, poems, paintings, films and curricula, the Eureka Stockade has been portrayed as an essentially masculine episode in which male passions were inflamed, male blood was shed and, ultimately, manhood suffrage won.
Yet suddenly, one simple line in a young man’s journal helps us to imagine the Eureka Stockade as a place populated by more than just a rabble of zealous male miners and their red-coated tormentors. Instead of an archetypal David and Goliath battle where, as the usually balanced historian Geoffrey Serle put it in 1954, ‘the wavering Eureka men were compelled to write history with their blood’, we are back in the land of the mortals.
We may never know her name, but the woman captured by Charles Evans’ pen was not destined to lie mute in her rocky grave.
It was another woman’s story that first brought me to Eureka. Catherine Bentley was a reluctant guide, her story a simple and a sad one; so well worn it was hardly worth telling. An Irish girl emigrates to Australia during the gold rush, marries an ex-convict, makes a fortune and loses the lot.
In 1854, when Catherine Bentley was the landlady of the Eureka Hotel, Ballarat, she was briefly the protagonist in a drama that attracted the attention of the times. Celebrity being a fickle creature even in 1854, her hour upon that stage passed quickly and she bowed out of the limelight seemingly without a trace.
But as I was to discover, the road to and from Eureka is littered with the documentary fallout from her heady rise and spectacular fall.
I first made Catherine’s acquaintance when I was researching the history of women as hotel keepers in Australia. Female publicans have always been close to Australia’s cultural, social, economic and political epicentre. My research about Ann Jones, the owner of the Glenrowan Inn, where Ned Kelly made his last stand, led me to look for other female publicans tangled up in Australia’s iconic events. Reading C. H. Curry’s 1954 staple The Irish at Eureka introduced me to Catherine. Here I found an account of the murder of the Scottish miner James Scobie outside the Eureka Hotel on the night of 7 October 1854, and the presumed involvement of the landlord James Bentley, two male associates and his wife. The wife remained anonymous in Curry’s tale, but evidently aspersions were cast upon her good name and character by the drunken Scobie, and this was the singular motivation for the crime. I learned that Mrs Bentley was acquitted of a charge of murder for the miner’s death, while her husband and the other men were convicted of manslaughter.
Tantalised by this chimeric glimpse of a female publican in the dock for murder, I set out to discover more about the exonerated Mrs Bentley. I read numerous secondary accounts of the Scobie murder and subsequent inquest in Ballarat; the torching of the Eureka Hotel by a riotous mob, indignant that official corruption had perverted the course of justice by absolving James Bentley; and the subsequent Melbourne trial in front of Justice Redmond Barry, the man who later sentenced Ned Kelly to death. But I could find no further details about the publican’s wife, and so my initial foray into Eureka ended.
Later, through months of intense investigation of primary sources, I ascertained that twenty-two-year-old Catherine Bentley was just one of the 5165 women in Ballarat in December 1854. Her two-year-old son, Tommy, was one of 6365 children. Together, women and children accounted for thirty-two per cent of the entire Victorian goldfields population, and thirty-six per cent of Ballarat’s restless, resourceful community.5 Moreover, Catherine was seven months pregnant with her second child when her hotel was burned down by the mob. Young, recently married, pregnant and now impoverished, Catherine fitted Ballarat’s dominant demographic to a tee. I also discovered this: Catherine was neither a silent witness nor a shrinking violet. There she is, in the letters and petitions she wrote, the court appearances she made, the births and deaths of babies she certified: the evidentiary fragments of an embattled woman dealt a perpetual raw deal.
And I realised I wasn’t the only person trying to breathe life back into Catherine’s deflated story.
Andrew Crowley is a man with a mission. His task is to recoup the £30,000 compensation his great-great-grandmother, Catherine Bentley, claimed in 1855 after her hotel was burned down while under the stewardship of the Victorian police. Andrew estimates that sum t
o be worth two million dollars today. His legal brief, which he has prepared and is pursuing himself, is as thick as a phone book. Some would call him a crank, a serial pest. The Victorian Government has long considered him a vexatious litigant and dismissed his claims.
To Andrew and his father Frank, the money would make a difference. But it is the Bentley family honour that they hope to resurrect. The Eureka era is not over as most believe, Andrew maintains, and it won’t be until the Bentleys are cleared once and for all time…it means our family’s lives past and present vindicated! 6 A few hours into our interview, Andrew broke down as he told me how important it was to Catherine that the truth be told.
And then he handed me a note written in Catherine’s hand, dated 10 April 1892, sixteen years to the day after her husband James Bentley had taken his own life. It was one of those moments when the historian realises that the past really isn’t past.
Ballarat winters are miserable. Anyone who has stood outside the majestic Craig’s Royal Hotel in June knows the icy blast that blows up Lydiard Street, rattling bones and chilling you to the core. It is eye-popping, spirit-crushing cold. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the winds blow harder and colder in Ballarat than any other place in Victoria.
I had left the cosy haven of the library to meet Anne Hall, the great-great-granddaughter of Anastasia Hayes, a Ballarat folk hero, reputed to have been one of three women to sew the Southern Cross flag. Anastasia, her husband Timothy and their five children arrived in Victoria in October 1852 aboard the Mobile, the same ship that was ferrying Charles Evans to his new homeland. Anne Hall and I had arranged to meet at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, where the Eureka Flag presently resides. I’d seen a million reproductions of the flag—I’d even bought my husband a souvenir Eureka Flag stubby holder—but this was my first visit to the real thing.
Anne led me into the darkened room that is designated to and dominated by the flag. The flag is pinned behind glass, but somehow still shimmers as if rippling in a wayward breeze. It is bigger than I expected, much bigger. The room has a grave aura; it calls for quiet murmurs and reverence.
Anne drew beside me as I stood gazing up at the giant blue and white standard. I can’t look at this without wondering which are her stitches, she whispered. Her eyes darted from star to star, resting on the patch before her, clearly possessed by her ancestor Anastasia.
This was why I’d come to Ballarat today, an outsider and an ingénue. To be reminded, lest we forget, that what’s done is not done. Neither forgotten nor lost, beyond hope and redemption and promise. Not for Andrew Crowley or Anne Hall, or for the hundreds of descendants who band together as Eureka’s Children or the thousands of Australians who wear the image of the Eureka Flag on their hard hat or their bumper bar or their skin. For them, as for all of us, the past is a whisper away.
I have never met Ellen Campbell, but letters pecked out on her ribbon typewriter, dotted with liquid-paper corrections, regularly arrive in my mailbox. I first contacted Ellen after I learned of the precious family jewel she keeps guarded in her home in rural New South Wales: the diary of her grandmother, Margaret Brown Howden Johnston.
Newly married to Assistant Resident Gold Commissioner James Johnston and already pregnant with their first child, Margaret was living in the Government Camp in Ballarat during the time of the troubles. Later, when we had got to know each other better, Ellen sent me a photocopy of the diary. The real thing, rescued by her father from a backyard clean-up in the 1940s, never leaves her possession: I guard this jealously as it is very fragile.7
Margaret’s diary would become as valuable to my research as it is to Ellen’s family history. But it seems that not everyone has been as eager to embrace the Johnston legacy.
I must say I feel a bit frustrated, Ellen wrote to me on 4 December 2004, as I would love to have been invited to celebrations conducted on 150th anniversary of Eureka—after all I am the granddaughter of the Ass. Gold Commissioner!!
Ellen readily grasps the reason for her exclusion from the official festivities. Much emphasis on the diggers, of course. Just a thought! Have a Happy Christmas.
When the American historian Marilyn Yalom wrote her masterful Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory, she had more than eighty contemporary accounts penned by women on which to draw. These women had ‘emerged from the Revolution with an urgent need to howl out their losses and cry for justice’, writes Yalom. ‘The more they had suffered, the more they felt compelled to chronicle the past.’
Having sifted through hundreds of gold rush diaries, private reminiscences and published memoirs, I have no doubt the women of Eureka endured exquisite suffering. But I have not found one contemporary account penned by a woman at the time of the tumultuous events. Unlike their French counterparts, the women of Ballarat apparently found their distress subsumed by the imperatives of material survival.
As we shall see, most of Ballarat’s five thousand-odd women were young, newly married and raising small children. Many were illiterate. Almost all were working in some economic capacity. Unlike the French aristocrats and bourgeoises for whom ‘the Revolution shaped their life trajectory more than any other historical event’, it was dislocation, subsistence and sheer physical endurance in a tent city on a colonial frontier that characterised this Australian experience.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory imagines a pyramid bottom-heavy with the physiological needs: breathing, food, water, sleep and so on. Just above is the safety layer: economic security, property and freedom from threat. Self-actualisation—the opportunity for creative projects, moral judgment and personal expression—forms a needle-point summit, and the women of Eureka found themselves much lower down: floating somewhere between food and freedom.
It makes sense, then, that the women of Eureka did not begin, in Yalom’s words, ‘to create out of disaster an art of survival and transcendence’ until much later in the nineteenth century, when permanent homes had been made, families reared and the institutions and social structures of colonial life firmly established.
By the thirtieth anniversary of Eureka, in 1884, some women made a conscious decision to cut a swathe through the masculinist rhetoric that filled the papers and strode the podiums. In July 1884, when Ballarat was in full swing planning for the biggest-yet Eureka commemoration and its associated civic boosterism, this appeared in the BALLARAT STAR:
The Eureka Stockade (by a Lady who was there)
Ballarat, the golden,
Onward, onward go
And may nothing ever
Thy prosperity o’erthrow
May all your sons and daughters
A glorious future see
And ne’er forget the old, old spot
Where we fought for liberty.8
The Lady Who Was There wrapped her civic pride around a collectivist morality to which she clearly felt an abiding sense of kinship. The Eureka fight was her fight, and she publicly claimed a direct part in the spectacle of democratic progress.
On 28 November, another anonymous woman wrote a letter to the editor of the BALLARAT STAR with a less exalted but equally significant assertion. (The fact that these correspondents didn’t commit their names to paper indicates both the strength of Victorian-era restrictions on women’s public role and the intense local controversy that Eureka memory still evoked.) Identifying herself as a Female of ’54, the woman disputed the memory of a previous correspondent—none other than Eureka hero, town father and Member of the Legislative Assembly J. B. Humffray—who declared, despite persistent rumours to the contrary, that no one had been shot by the authorities on that grim Monday when Charles Evans watched the funeral processions.
The woman wrote: I for one was wounded on that night, and by the soldiers too. A bullet fired from the Government Camp had grazed her head and completely carried away hair and skin from the crown to the forehead. She had waited thirty years to tell this story, and there was more:
I felt stupi
d for a moment or so, I then caught my baby in my arms, and tried to run across the flat, having only my night-dress on. I tried to run with my child before me in a stooping manner, for the soldiers were still firing. My night-dress became entangled in my feet and I fell to the ground. At that moment, a cloud passed over the moon. It became dark instantly and the firing of the soldiers stopped.
This correspondent was in no doubt of the dramatic conclusion to her story: Had the moon not clouded at the moment that it did, I should not have been here to tell you this.9
Another woman was not so lucky. On the centenary of Eureka in 1954, thousands of people gathered in Ballarat on a weekend of torrential summer rain. Townsfolk who had braved the storm marched to City Hall, where a local actor, Mr Bernard D’Arcy, read ‘the Lalor oration’. The ARGUS noted that one of the sodden attendees, Mr L. Moyle, had travelled from distant Upwey in order to honour his grandmother, Mrs Catherine Smith, who was shot in the side at Eureka and died three weeks later from her wounds.10
Was there more than one woman who died that brutal December day?
One thing is certain. The women of Eureka felt an unbreakable bond of belonging with an epic community and influential history, and they wanted their participation recognised and remembered.
Catherine Bentley, Anastasia Hayes, Margaret Johnston and the murdered wife of a Stockader are calling us across a century and a half. Forcing us to reimagine life on the Victorian goldfields and to interrogate the received wisdom of a masculinist Eureka. The material and documentary residue of their lives is everywhere: clinging to dusty files at the Public Record Office, trapped within the yellowing pages of newspapers, transmitted by generations of descendants. It demands that we ask new questions.