by Clare Wright
There is a theme emerging.
By late August, Evans was asked to explain what he intended to do about his force’s appalling behaviour and morale. He responded that he couldn’t discharge all the men whom he rightfully should due to their inveterate habitual drunkenness. If he took such drastic action, he wouldn’t have enough men to do the job. The number of commissioned officers was already much below its authorised number and those who were in the Camp frequently complain of their duties being rendered more arduous in consequence of this insufficiency. Guards on night shift were forced to perform on the following day various backbreaking tasks (including carting wood and water, which should have been the job of a paid labourer) and frequently that of searching for unlicensed miners. He also wished to point out:
the great discomfort and hardships endured by the men during the past winter owing to the want of proper accommodation and which no doubt of itself tended to make them unhappy and discontented, there being no Barracks and on many occasions no stretchers or blankets for them in the miserable tents they were compelled to live in.
Many men had either applied for discharges, committed some heinous act in the hope of being discharged or simply deserted. In July, one brave and uncommonly literate constable, L. H. Webb, had written directly to the chief commissioner of police requesting a discharge. He knew the proper procedure was to go through Ballarat’s inspector, but he was loath to do so because of Evans’ past form in taunting and bullying his men. I am not a drunken soldier, wrote Webb,
I can pluck up spirit to complain of oppression… petty tyranny should be restrained and the advantages of position should not be a vantage ground wherein the officer may insult and wound the feelings of an inferior with impunity.
Was this a trap or a digger? The language employed by those on the hill and those on the flats to express grievance was eerily similar.
The third sibling squabbling over its puny share of the pie of the civil service and the police was the military. By the winter of 1854, the members of the 40th Regiment stationed at Ballarat were still housed in leaky, breezy tents. The garrison included some army wives. Corporal John Neill, an Irishman, lived in the Camp with his wife, Ellen, and their baby, Fanny, who had been born in Waterford shortly before her parents’ departure for Australia. Neill kept a diary that speaks poignantly of the conflict between his family duties and his military role. He wrote of having to coax his daughter to sleep in her cot on the hill, only to have her awaken screaming as gun shots rang out on the flats each night.7 Ellen Neill was certainly not the only military wife in the Camp, but since the army didn’t keep records of its wives, there is no information about any others.
There was, however, a surfeit of correspondence regarding all other matters of daily intercourse. From June to December, the military leadership waged a campaign of paper warfare on the Colonial Office, with the strategic aim of securing a new barracks for the soldiers stationed at Ballarat. A barrage of letters flew between Ballarat and Melbourne. As the Camp was so overcrowded, the military proposed constructing a new building adjacent to but not within the present limits of the Camp. The Colonial Office prevaricated, suggesting it planned to sell the present Camp site and build a far more commodious Camp of stone buildings on a site one hundred yards from the present one. It was clear to all, however, that this could not happen. Town allotments had already been sold all around the Camp, which was now boxed in by private property. There was simply no room to expand. It was a great error in the first instance not to have made a larger Reserve for the Government Establishments, wrote Assistant Engineer Henry Lane—if for no other reason than that the Camp’s congested tangle of wood and canvas structures was a perfect firetrap. One spark and the whole place would go up in flames.
Meanwhile, once the police command got wind of the military’s intention to station its contingent outside the Camp’s perimeter, it made a rearguard pitch to secure any new barracks for itself. Who would get the improved quarters, should they ever be built, was now in dispute. Robert Rede conceded the impossibility of ever making the Ballarat Camp a good one.8
If it was tense and uncomfortable on the inside, there was no relief to be had outside the Camp. Relations between the mining community and the police, soldiers and government officials had been on the nose for months. There are no Standing Orders for the guidance of the Force, one man wrote anonymously to the Police Commission of Enquiry, consequently the men are very often led unwittingly into the committal of acts of harshness which inflames the Public Mind against the Government and its employees.9 The informant suggested that issuing a rulebook to every officer would be a good start to rebuilding trust. But it would take more than an etiquette manual to restore public confidence. After the Eureka Hotel riot, the serfs began to smell fear in their masters. On 22 October, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary that the soldiers and police don’t dare leave the Camp. People would hoot at them in the street, jeer as they rode high in their saddles, shout Joe! Joe! Joe!—a snappy goldfields pejorative for the pigs, the filth.
And there was precedent for what could happen when local outrage against the British imperial ruling class, and its blatant disregard for citizens’ aspirations to democratic rights and freedoms, boiled over. In Canada in 1837, eight hundred followers of a popular reformist movement marched on Toronto armed with pitchforks, staves and guns, in an attempt to overthrow the oligarchic administration and establish self-government. Local militias mercilessly put down the uprising. But the Upper Canada rebellions of 1838 ultimately led to the introduction of responsible government and the end of authoritarian rule in Canada. Gordon Evans’ father was a general in the British army stationed in Canada and may have been stationed in Quebec—a witness to the carnage.
On 27 October, the day after Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher were arbitrarily arrested for their alleged role in the Eureka Hotel arson, a plan was hatched to defend the indefensible Camp.
There was more pissing on posts happening in the Ballarat Camp than all the chained guard dogs of the diggings could manage in a month of Sundays. As chief of the civil force, Resident Commissioner Robert Rede was theoretically entitled to choose his post. Or was he? In-fighting about accommodation was just the acquisitive tip of a looming iceberg of power struggles within the Camp.
The foremost clash was between Rede (aged thirty-nine) and Police Inspector Gordon Evans (aged twenty-nine). Evans was appointed to Ballarat in February 1854, Rede in May. They were both on a salary of £700 a year. As we have seen from the parliamentary fallout over the Eureka Hotel fire, both manipulated the curious power vacuum when it suited them to avoid ultimate responsibility. But the fact is that these men were engaged in a dispute that began in June over the Camp’s hierarchy and demarcation. The conflict started when Evans wrote to the chief commissioner of police in Melbourne regarding Rede’s requests to station more police at Creswick Creek. Was Evans in charge of his men’s movements or not? Why was Rede involving himself in matters of policing? By late September, the dispute was putatively resolved when a circular was sent from Melbourne stating that at all times Rede was to have paramount authority.10 Evans was clearly still smarting about this when he blamed Rede for the riot outside Bentley’s Hotel.
The riot was the unanticipated turning point in Rede’s one-upmanship with Evans. He now had to back up his dominant position: prove that the powers-that-be in Melbourne had shown faith in the right fellow. He wasn’t just demonstrating to the irritated and unruly digging community that insubordination would not be tolerated. He was performing for his own troops as well. And not all in Melbourne were in one mind about Rede’s fitness to command a sinking ship. A week after the hotel riot, the chief commissioner of police publicly recorded his opinion that in consequence of the still excited state of this Gold Field [Ballarat]… it is probable that we may not be able to avoid a collision. In the face of a powerful mob—in particular the Tipperary Mob, one of the most powerful and troublesome to contend with and who seem bent
on mischief—the chief commissioner called for a reinforcement of police numbers. The Camp, he believed, was impossible to defend.11 Did Rede take it as a personal slight or a judgment on the architectural and geographic insecurity of the site? It was Rede who ordered the arrest of Fletcher and McIntyre to give a fearful lesson.12 But a lesson to whom?
What Ballarat’s resident commissioner needed was an ally. Instead, he had Gordon Evans.
When Evans was appointed as police inspector of Ballarat in February 1854, his appointment met with great dissatisfaction from both residents and the force he was to command. On first hearing the news, police officers piled their arms and refused to serve under Evans, while the GEELONG ADVERTISER labelled his appointment a decided insult to the inhabitants of Ballarat. At twenty-nine, Evans had already made a lifetime’s worth of enemies. In March, the diggers and storekeepers of Ballarat got up a petition against the appointment, outlining instances of his past abuses of power and insisting that no self-respecting man will submit to the control of a tyrannical Inspector. The GEELONG ADVERTISER, reporting the signing of the petition, warned of the rapidly increasing dangerous position of disorder under Evans.13 This was all before Evans and Rede began their cutthroat pas de deux. Frederick Vern later wrote that it was the sneering conduct of Captain Evans during the meeting to protest Scobie’s murder that was the direct cause of the burning down of the Eureka Hotel. Evans drew heated criticism from many quarters, but the most open challenge to his fitness for office, the loudest call for the redress of wrongs inflicted by his hand came from a woman. The stone was cast by one of those troublesome non-commissioned officers’ wives.
On 27 October—just eleven days after the Eureka Hotel riot and the same day that the Camp drew up plans for its defence—Mrs Catherine McLister served a written complaint to the chief commissioner of police, Captain McMahon. Catherine was the wife of Sergeant Robert McLister, who was based at the Ballarat Camp. Catherine was a twenty-eight-year-old Irish woman from County Donegal, newly married to Robert, then a clerk. Marrying down, she had arrived in Victoria in late 1853. This is what she wrote in her explosive letter to McMahon:
I beg to state that about two months ago Capt Evans grossly insulted me a non-commissioned officer’s wife by indecently expressing his person in his own room and also by his frequent visits to my tent in the absence of my husband.14
Catherine was clearly literate and unfazed by the bureaucracy of sin. As the second daughter of William Fenton, a member of the Northern Irish Protestant gentry and the governor at the jail in Lifford, a British army garrison, she had been raised on a diet of discipline and punishment.
Captain McMahon took Catherine’s complaint with due gravity. He investigated her claim and found that the explanation forwarded by the Inspector of Police was insufficient. McMahon came to Ballarat and assembled a board to hear evidence from both parties. The board was comprised of Police Magistrate Charles Hackett, a Protestant Irish barrister with a splendid set of blond whiskers, Police Magistrate Evelyn Pitfield Shirley Sturt, the East India man who took over from D’Ewes after his dishonourable discharge, and Robert Rede. Hackett and Sturt had both served on the board of enquiry into the burning of the Eureka Hotel. Sturt would go on to serve as a member of the royal commission on the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition. The three men made for a formidable inquisition.
The board of enquiry sat on 28 October. Catherine’s original letter was read aloud. Then Gordon Evans came out swinging. He wholly disputed Catherine’s claim of impropriety. He did craftily admit that a certain degree of familiarity has existed between us but said that he had always considered that that familiarity was sought for by her. But Catherine was not intimidated by the suggestion of her implied consent to Evans’ familiarities. Before the board, with Evans present, Catherine gave this extraordinary testimony:
I was working at my tent. Mr Evans came down and asked me to sew a few buttons on his shirt. I told him to send them by his servant. He said the servant was busy and asked me to go for them. He said if he was not there I should find them on the table. I said if my husband will allow me, I will go. I asked my husband who had no objection—this was in the evening not dark about 4. I went to Mr Evans and he shut the door and locked it—I did not know it was locked until it had occasion to be opened. He pointed out the shirts…Mr Evans came behind me and put his arm round my waist. He was dressed, the front of his pantaloons were open and his person exposed…Mr Evans did not use any violence when he put his arm round my waist. He said ‘look at this’ and then I saw his trousers were undone.
Catherine was not finished. I was always suspicious of Mr Evans, from the way he looked at me, she said, he was very often down at my tent. I often would not answer him. He came when he knew my husband was off the camp as he had given him leave. She distrusted his motives, she said, but never thought he would accost her.
The offence had taken place two months earlier. Catherine had not told anybody, including her husband. She was coming forward now, she said, because her husband had recently been arrested and mistreated by Evans, which, she believed, was because she had not complied with Mr Evans desire.
Perhaps Catherine was also inspired to action by a meeting of fifteen thousand members of the digging community who had gathered on 22 October—five days before the date of her complaint—at Bakery Hill to raise funds for the defence of McIntyre and Fletcher. At the meeting, the people had passed a resolution condemning the daily violation of the personal liberty of the subject. Did Catherine see a parallel between the scape-goating of McIntyre and Fletcher and her husband’s susceptibility to Evans’ wrath? Did she equate the violation of her own body with the liberal agenda of the mass body politic? Did she liken male predation and female vulnerability to the autocratic misrule that was clearly occurring on both sides of the Camp’s white picketed perimeter? Perhaps she was simply a wrathful woman responding to the anger in the air. Perhaps Evans was simply a letch, and Ballarat’s culture of complaint gave Catherine licence to warn him off for good.
Next Evans cross-examined Catherine. She acknowledged that she had been in Evans’ room several times, in order to do small jobs for him, with her husband’s permission. Evans had never before insulted her. He had joked but was tartly answered. Nothing a girl who had grown up in a garrison town could not handle. Evans had often been to her tent, but was never admitted. I positively deny that any improper familiarity existed between myself and Mr Evans, she told the board firmly.
Mrs Elizabeth Crowther, another officer’s wife, came forward as a witness. Mrs Crowther was often in Mrs McLister’s tent because it was more comfortable than mine and for the sake of company. She testified that [Catherine] never told me that Mr Evans had taken any liberties with her, but she seemed to be afraid of being with Mr Evans alone. Robert Kane, servant to Evans, swore that Mrs McLister had previously been to the captain’s room to put buttons on his shirts but I never saw her look excited when she left. Would ‘looking excited’ be a good thing or a bad thing, though? A sign of guilty pleasure or of furious indignation?
Catherine herself cross-examined the witnesses, who could not fault her character. Only one witness, Sergeant Major Robert Milne, hinted at a motivation for Catherine to make a false claim: that Evans had put her husband under arrest and that he had overheard Captain McLister say that somebody would have to pay for it. Evans swooped on this logic, claiming that the vindictive motives of the prosecution were self evident.
The board deliberated briefly before declaring that Catherine’s charge could not be supported. The decision was unanimous. Rede might have made use of the occasion in the war against his rival; he chose not to. The board’s reasoning was that Catherine had not told anyone about the incident at the time, not even her intimate friend Mrs Crowther. Surely an offended woman would admit the source of her shock to another woman. Further, the board found it improbable that such a gross insult—Evans flashing his John Thomas—would not occasion a woman to cry for help.
&
nbsp; That the impulse of the moment would naturally have led to exclamation on the part of Mrs McLister, which must have been heard, on the contrary the shirts alluded to were taken away by Mrs McLister for the purpose required.
So, if Catherine had made a more womanly scene—throwing the shirts up in the air and running from the room shrieking—she might have been believed. But having calmly instigated an official enquiry, she found her claim dismissed as vexatious.
The McLister incident was not quietly dismissed as a quaint colonial bedroom farce. The board’s decision was forwarded to Governor Hotham in Melbourne. In the context of other recent acts of rebelliousness in Ballarat, Catherine’s stand might have been viewed as yet more evidence of the mounting tension, antagonism and complex web of deceit of which His Excellency needed to be kept abreast. A woman taking senior officials to task—the inspector of police, no less—was further proof that the entire Ballarat population was disorderly and ungovernable and thus required a firm hand.
On 6 November, Hotham appended a note to the McLister file with his characteristic brevity: The Report of the Board is conclusive. That the complainant was a woman may have been another factor in keeping close tabs on the intra-Camp skirmish. Men who made a fuss in the Camp could be dealt with by their immediate hierarchical superiors. But wives like Catherine McLister were not servants of the state; only their husbands could discipline them. And if their husbands could not?