The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  George Francis Train predicted an inexorable flourishing of republican sentiment in the months ahead, a colonial rite of passage that he expressed in particularly gendered terms:

  Grant all the diggers ask, and they will not be satisfied. Abolish the licence fee, unlock the lands, give them universal suffrage, retrench government expenses, and it will not save the ultimate independence of the colony…Victoria’s history is quickly written. The girl is hardly marriageable, yet her freedom is close at hand.

  Witnesses revealed that there had been speakers at the Eureka Hotel riot urging the people to drive off all the Government officers, send the Government home and to declare their Independence, as Thomas Pierson recorded after he left the fracas. W. H. Foster, a civil servant on the diggings and a cousin of Charles La Trobe, wrote home in a letter to his parents in December 1854 that the licence tax issue was simply a convenient smokescreen for the Americans who were here in great numbers…with a view to institute independence.29 Hotham himself admitted to Sir George Grey that Victoria possesses wealth, strength and competency to hold its position unaided by the Mother Country.30 Are we to run the risk of the colony walking alone? he asked. Fewer than eighty years had passed since the American Revolution. In collective memory, the thought of colonists defeating redcoats was anything but ancient history.

  Rede knew that his attendance at the Americans’ Thanksgiving dinner was politic to say the least. He needed to curtail, not strengthen, the influence of the Americans over Ballarat’s public culture. But he also needed to be respectful of Yankee traditions and of their consul, James Tarleton. James and his wife had lived with George Francis and Winnie Davis Train when they first arrived in Melbourne. Train was Melbourne’s leading merchant and transport magnate, and a foreign correspondent. It required an adroit act of diplomacy to negotiate this thorny terrain.

  Rede’s first act—although obeisance was not his favourite pastime—was to bow graciously to Tarleton, who was, after all, the guest of honour. Tarleton, for his part, used the occasion to proclaim the loyalty of the Americans to the laws of their adopted land. He urged his countrymen to refrain from entering into the present agitations. Such entreaties were heartily welcomed by the crowd, who represented the upper echelons of Ballarat society, men like Dr Charles Kenworthy and Dr William Otway, who both ran successful medical practices in town and on the diggings. Following Hotham’s instructions, Rede had sent government spies onto the diggings. One spy had delivered him a long list of names of people who had pledged themselves to attack the camp and drive the officials off the Gold Field.31 One of the spies was said to be Dr Kenworthy.32 There was a reason this dinner was being held at Brandt and Hirschler’s, and not at the Adelphi.

  If Rede and Kenworthy were planning a little reconnoitre over whiskey and rye, their liaison was cut short. During the toasts, Rede was suddenly called away. There had been a skirmish on the Melbourne Road and troops from the Camp were being dispatched to respond.

  A company of the 12th Regiment was marching into town, part of Hotham’s next wave of fortification for the Camp. This particular small contingent was essentially a guard detail for several wagons full of ammunition and baggage: the real manpower would come later that night, with the arrival of the regimental units waved off by Mrs Massey. By the first day of summer, there would be a total of 546 officers and soldiers stationed at Ballarat, almost five times more than had been on the ground over winter.

  As the ammunition-bearing battalion crossed Eureka, it was ambushed by a group of diggers lurking in the shadows. Incoming soldiers had become used to hostile welcoming committees of men, women and children hooting, jeering and throwing stones at them as they hup-two’d their way to the Camp. But this time a violent scuffle broke out in which the wagons were overturned, a drummer boy was shot in the thigh, an old American carrier was severely injured and several horses were wounded. Onlookers predicted fatalities. Resident Commissioner Robert Rede never got the chance to make his toast to the Queen. He left the Americans to their yankee doodle dandying, not quite convinced that Tarleton’s righteous words would be mirrored in noble action.

  While the Americans gave thanks and Rede tried to unpick the tangled web of Ballarat’s allegiances, preparations were being made on the Flat for another monster meeting. Relations between the Camp and the diggers had broken down completely after the reform league’s unsuccessful attempt to intercede on behalf of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby. Some diggers had started to burn their licences as a symbolic protest against the constituted authorities. Tent and store robberies were now occurring nightly. Horse stealing had become so common that horses without stabling were considered useless. A fierce dog was worth a king’s ransom. Security measures were directed exclusively towards the Camp, and the police were now vastly outnumbered by the military, further eroding any skerrick of prestige they may have enjoyed with the community.

  Scandalous anecdotes were flying every which way, gossip spinning out after every new or imagined bunfight or scuffle. The second Ballarat revolution is in everyone’s mouth, wrote the ARGUS on the morning on 29 November. Rumour with her many tongues is blabbing all sorts of stories. The gold commissioner had been taken hostage. The Camp was burned to the ground. The fifteen-year-old drummer boy had been killed in the ambush of the 12th Regiment. Fletcher had thoroughly broken down and was a risk of suicide. James Johnston had purchased five town allotments at the Ballarat land sales that week. (This one was true.)

  And yet…most miners remained buried down their holes, trapped in the daily rigour of digging. There had been some handsome finds on Eureka and the Gravel Pits these past weeks. There was not a single salary man outside the Camp, but thousands of little mouths to feed. All was work.

  Bakery Hill would once again be the venue for the next monster meeting, placarded for 29 November at midday. (Bakery Hill is obtaining creditable notoriety as the rallying ground for Australian freedom, wrote the TIMES.33) Ten thousand people downed tools, shut up stores, gathered up children and headed towards Bakery Hill. It was a hot day, with clouds of dust swirling in the gusty wind. In Victoria, you know when a change is about to come. The low clouds build. The air temperature can roast chickens. You take the washing off the line before the sou’westerly front rips through. You arrive at your destination with one eye on the main game, one hand on your hat and an ear out for the roar of wildfire.

  The meeting brought the usual catalogue of goldfields public protest: lengthy speeches, heartfelt resolutions—one of which was that the reform league would meet at the Adelphi Theatre at 2pm on Sunday 3 December to elect a central committee—fiery threats, troopers circling on horseback and the steady sale of sly grog on the fringes of the crowd. But three wholly new things happened on 29 November.

  The first was that the next morning’s papers referred to those present as the rebels.34

  The second was that the diggers lined up to throw their licences upon a bonfire—an act of communal defiance of the law. The Ballarat Reform League had voted by a majority of three that its members should burn their mining and storekeeping licences. When committing their licences to the flames, the diggers swore to defend any unlicensed digger from arrest, with armed force if necessary. Those miners who did not become members of the reform league could not expect the same protection. Thus the Ballarat diggings became a closed shop.

  The third was that a flag was hoisted. Not a national flag, but a purpose-made flag, a flag the GEELONG ADVERTISER dubbed the Australian flag.35 This was the only flag hoisted that day.

  This is the flag that we now know as the Eureka Flag. But on 29 November it was briefly raised not at Eureka but above the crowd at Bakery Hill. Its purpose was to attract attention: like the band that roamed the diggings playing ‘La Marseillaise’, it was an attempt to charm democratic tempers away from their toil, rallying them on a cloud of righteous anger towards Bakery Hill.36

  The flag they called the Australian Flag took its design inspiration from the one thing that uni
ted each and every resident of Ballarat: the constellation of the Southern Cross. Those five bright stars in the shape of a kite were the first thing that had alerted immigrants to the existential transformation that occurred when they crossed the line into the southern hemisphere. Those five stars connected the paths of travellers from other antipodean colonies long before a constitution federated their political bodies. Those stars were the only firmament for currency lads and lasses, who knew no other heaven. Five shimmering white stars against a clear blue field, hoisted, as Frederick Vern put it, under Australia’s matchless sky.

  Raffaello Carboni gave his tribute to the idea behind the flag when he took the stage before fifteen thousand people at Bakery Hill that morning. I called on all my fellow-diggers, he later recalled, irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the ‘Southern Cross’ as the refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth. Carboni was well satisfied with the crowd’s response: The applause was universal. The Ballarat Flat now had a single ensign to rival the huge Union Jack fluttering above the Camp.

  Henry Seekamp was also on the spot to witness the hoisting of the new flag on its eighty-foot flagstaff at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 29th. In the issue of the TIMES printed on Sunday 3 December, he (or perhaps Clara, as this is one of the ‘seditious’ editions for which he disclaimed responsibility) wrote:

  Its maiden appearance was a fascinating object to behold. There is no flag in Europe, or in the civilised world, half so beautiful and Bakery Hill as being the first place where the Australian ensign was first hoisted will be recorded in the deathless and indelible pages of history. The flag is silk, blue ground with a large silver cross; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural.

  Thomas Pierson saw the flag too. He sketched a little replica in his diary, labelling it the flag of the southern hemisphere…made of silk and quite neat. Indeed the design was very different from the flag commercial artist and republican William Dexter designed for the Bendigo miners during the Red Ribbon Rebellion in August 1853. Dexter’s ensign showed a pick, shovel and cradle to represent labour, scales to signal justice, the fasces (a Roman bundle of sticks) to suggest union, and a kangaroo and emu to emote Australia. To Dexter’s mind, this smorgasbord of iconography was the ultimate liberation narrative. On raising it at a Bendigo rally, he made an onslaught on the British flag. ‘What had it done for liberty?’37 Ballarat’s rebel flag, by contrast, was remarkably pure. It said simply, ‘We are here’.

  There has always been controversy about the provenance of the ‘Eureka’ flag. The current orthodoxy is that it was designed by Canadian miner Henry (sometimes called Charles) Ross, who then recruited three diggers’ wives to sew a standard measuring 3400 millimetres by 2580 millimetres. Ross was friendly with fellow Canadian Charles Alphonse Doudiet, who has left the clearest pictorial representation of the flag that was unfurled on Bakery Hill that day. Some have speculated that the blue flag with its white cross takes its design lead from the official ensign of Quebec (from where Doudiet, not Ross, hailed). But there is no evidence that Ross designed the flag. There is a clue, however, as to how the Chinese whisper might have started. The original cover of Raffaello Carboni’s 1855 account of the Eureka Stockade bears a sketch of the flag above the words, When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross the bearer was Toronto’s Captain Ross. Elsewhere in the book, Carboni refers to Ross as the bridegroom of the flag, a reference that is probably more literal than is sometimes supposed. Ross was the standard-bearer; he hoisted it up the flagpole.

  There is also speculation about who made the flag. The most overt documentary clue is provided by Frederick Vern, who described the flag as a banner made and wrought by English ladies. Carboni later confirmed this version in his 1855 account, quoting Vern directly. Was Vern referring to Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke, the three women now generally credited by oral tradition as the clandestine seamstresses? It is certainly possible, though historian Anne Beggs-Sunter has suggested that the prominence of these names is simply ‘an example of the way oral history becomes fact’ when secondary accounts take descendants’ theories as gospel.38

  Beggs-Sunter gives equal weight to what she terms the ‘men’s flag story’, first told by J. W. Wilson in 1885. Wilson quoted a reliable eye-witness, who told him in 1893 that Henry Ross gave the order for the insurgents’ flag to a local tent-and tarpaulin-making firm, Darton and Walker. According to Wilson’s version, Ross gave his order at 11pm on Thursday 23th and the flag was first raised thirty-nine hours later, at 2pm on Saturday the 25th. This flag was made of bunting.

  There is another possible explanation of the flag’s genesis, one that draws on many plausible strands of evidence. We know from the report in the ARGUS on 9 November that bills had been posted around the diggings for a meeting of Ballarat’s Irish; the purpose was to raise a subscription for a monster national banner to fly over the once disputed ground of the Eureka. The impetus was apparently the insult directed at Father Smyth in arresting his servant. But by 24 November—the next time a new flag was reported in the papers—the BALLARAT TIMES was advertising fervidly a meeting to be held on Wednesday 29 November at which the Australian Flag shall triumphantly wave, a symbol of Liberty. Forward! People! Forward! There is no suggestion that the Irish flag was ever stitched. But clearly the Seekamps knew that an important standard was being raised.

  A Eugene von Guérard sketch, made on the spot in January 1854, gives us a strong intimation of where that flag might have been constructed. Katholisch Kapelle aus den Gravel Pit Lunis 3u Ballarat Januav 1854 is von Guérard’s rendering of Father Smyth’s Catholic church, St Alipius. It shows a large tent, timber-lined with a canvas roof, and beside it the small school hut where Anastasia Hayes was the teacher. Soaring high above the church is a flag. The sepia tones of the sketch don’t show the flag’s colours, but the graphic is clear: a cross on a solid background. The conventional Christian chaplain’s flag is a dark blue flag with a white Latin cross. It is still used today by the chaplain corps in army units around the world. In Ballarat in 1854, Father Smyth would hoist his flag half an hour before mass commenced, to alert his largely Irish Catholic flock to put aside their worldly activities and come together in ritual communion. The flag was taken down when mass commenced.39

  Eliza Darcy was a member of that congregation, as was Patrick Howard. They would marry at St Alipius in August 1855. Eliza and Patrick’s twelfth and last child, Alicia, born in 1879, would later tell her granddaughter, Ella Hancock, that it was Patrick who designed the Eureka Flag and that Eliza helped to sew it. Did Patrick Howard, a member of the Ballarat Reform League and a proud Irishman, look up at the mass flag, then cast his gaze further to the sky above—to a constellation that united not only his offended Catholic brethren but the whole aggrieved digging community? Did he simply affix the stars of the Crux Australis to the Latin cross?40

  Then there is the question of who really did craft the flag, and how. As the press pre-emptively observed, the diggers’ flag was a monster. Kristin Phillips, the Eureka Flag’s most recent conservator (and the one with the highest level of professional qualification), has argued that it was the construction of the flag that dictated its size. She believes that the seamstresses were not working to a plan; rather the size of the available fabric determined its dimensions. For it was not bunting but ordinary ‘clothing fabric bought off the roll’ and cut ‘economically’ that was used to make the flag: a full piece width, selvedge to selvedge, used in the centre with a half width affixed to the top and the bottom.41 A dark blue ground of plain-weave cotton warp and wool weft. A cream cross of twill-weave cotton warp and wool weft. And five cream-coloured, one hundred per cent wool stars.

  Phillips disavows the popular theory that the stars were made out of women’s petticoats. Nineteenth-century petticoats, she assures us, were rarely made of wool. Furthermore, the stars are cut from clean pieces of fabric, without visible seams; grain changes in the stars sugge
st they were cut, ‘economically’ again, from a single piece of fabric. From a technical point of view, Phillips finds it implausible that such large stars could be taken from a single petticoat. It’s a myth that might have added a touch of sexual allure to the Eureka story, but not one that the material evidence bears out.

  Yet size does matter. Where to construct surreptitiously a huge rebel flag on a camping ground like the diggings? There were few places in which a four-metre roll of fabric could be unfurled on the ground, with room around it for a team of seamstresses. The Adelphi Theatre would have been big enough, but Sarah Hanmer was sheltering the activities of the American community, not the Irish. Was the flag sewn in the Catholic church where Anastasia Hayes, the doyenne of the Catholic community, was employed? It was certainly one of the few tents large enough to lay out such an expanse of fabric. And it was already common knowledge that the Irish were making themselves a protest flag.

  There is little doubt that it was women who sewed the flag. Kristin Phillips has confirmed that the flag was made using traditional women’s sewing skills: flat felled seams done by hand.42 Val D’Angri, the Ballarat craftswoman employed in 1973 to restore the flag for presentation at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, found original pins in the seams that were a common component of a mid-nineteenth-century woman’s sewing kit. The ‘men’s flag story’, as relayed by J. W. Wilson, is crucially undermined by two factors: the flag is not made of bunting, and it could not have been made in less than forty-eight hours. Kristin Phillips reckons that it would have taken many hands, gathered around the perimeter of the flag, to construct the flag with any haste. (It took Val D’Angri seventy-five hours to hand sew a reproduction flag.)

  Anastasia and her compatriots were probably the English ladies that the German Frederick Vern refers to. Vern certainly had no political motivation to attribute the Australian Flag’s origin to women. Yet whether the seamstresses were English is debatable. Did the Hanoverian consider that white women from the British Isles all looked the same? Anastasia Hayes, as we know, was Irish, born in Kilkenny and reared through a famine, although she and Timothy had lived in England prior to emigrating. Their daughter Anastasia was baptised in Stafford in 1850. As the wife of the chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Anastasia Sr was certainly close to the action. Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke, heavily pregnant with her first child in the summer of 1854, was also Irish, but she had arrived in Victoria with her family when she was four years old and her accent may have receded. Anastasia Withers, née Splain, was the only ethnic Englishwoman among the group widely accepted as the flag’s makers. Born in Bristol in 1825, she was transported to Tasmania for the theft of five shawls in 1843. There she married Samuel Withers in 1849 and had two children. The couple was one of the earliest arrivals on the Victorian goldfields. By the time they were digging at Ballarat in November 1854, Anastasia Withers had three children under five and another on the way. There is every reason to think that Eliza Darcy was also part of the team of workers, as her ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter, Ella Hancock, will tell you today.