The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  The Ballarat miners had come to Victoria to be independent and free men, proud and virtuous colonists. Modern Argonauts. Young Hercules, as guidebook author Samuel Mossman had promised. Most had failed to feed, clothe or adequately house the families they brought with them or those they quickly started. And, finally, there was nothing heroic about watching your women be assaulted while standing in the dawn light in your drawers.

  Not satisfied with the show of potency occasioned by the thrust of bayonets, the order was given to burn to the ground all of the tents in the Stockade and vicinity. The Camp had failed to stop a conflagration at Bentley’s Hotel, and now it would generate its own apocalyptic ruins. Tactically speaking, fire would root out any insurgent hiding in civilian enclosures. In terms of theatre, nothing instils fear like fire. So, using a pot of burning tar, the troopers and soldiers set about torching every tent on the ground. There was no system to regulate our search, one police officer later testified. Another admitted that the police had no idea whether the occupants were in the tents before they fired them.27 From the Camp, Samuel Huyghue listened to the deep reverberations of musketry telling us that there was a real collision at last, then ghostly silence. In a trice, he could see only sheets of smoke and flame.

  In the Stockade, some of the blazing tents contained the bodies of the wounded or dead. Two men who burned to death in their tent had either passed out or were still asleep. The sight of their charred remains was so sickening that even the soldiers had to turn away. Patrick Curtain had managed to escape the Stockade without injury. He found Mary and little Mary Agnes, and delivered them to friends. On my return after leaving my family in safety at a distance, he later wrote in an unsuccessful claim for compensation, I found my store all in flames without a chance of saving anything.28

  There was a knock at Bridget Shanahan’s door. Timothy had not returned. He may still have been hiding in the outhouse. A trooper and a foot soldier barged in. Shoot that woman, ordered the trooper. The soldier begged, Spare the woman. The trooper hesitated. Well, get out of this place, he finally said, the place is going to be burnt woman. The men set fire to the tent, but Bridget managed to put it out before much was destroyed.29

  The ring of fire extended out in cataclysmic ripples. Most of the surrounding tents were diggers’ homes, stores and small grog shops. Some of these, marvelled Huyghue, were actually defended by their occupants while burning, and several contained women and children who were with difficulty rescued from the flames. John Sheehan’s wife and children were huddled inside their tent when it was set alight.30 And did not get out in time. The Curtains and Shanahans, being inside the Stockade, perhaps expected some retribution. But the Sheehans’ tent was outside the barricade and being strictly honest sober and industrious and having no part directly or indirectly in the uprising, they did not anticipate the troops’ vengeance. Other people had not even been in the neighbourhood on that Sunday morning, but similarly all lost their belongings in the wholesale torching. James Bourke and his wife and family had left their tent, unfortunately positioned next to the Stockade, on Friday night. When James returned on Sunday afternoon, I found my said Tent and all my property therein consumed.31 Like the many other families who were completely dispossessed of their tents, stores, clothes, furniture, cash and personal items, the Bourkes received no compensation.

  According to Huyghue, Lalor owed his escape to the fact that the soldier who saw him fall was fully engrossed…in rescuing an old Scotchwoman and her family of children from her burning tent, a task of considerable difficulty which evoked an expression of fervid gratitude from the relieved parent. The woman quickly snatched a piece of paper from the smouldering wreck of her home and asked her rescuer to write his name so she could remember to whom she owed what doubtless seemed to her an act of remarkable generosity.

  As the moonlit night was gently displaced by iridescent morning, the reality of the situation became clear. It was not a bad dream. There was no silver lining. Stragglers from the neighborhood of the stockade, wrote eyewitness John Fraser, some of them in a state of the greatest terror and excitement, came hurrying along close to the tents. An Irishman approached Fraser for a drink of water. He had his wife and three little children with him.

  The poor woman, crying bitterly, presented, to our mind, a picture of distress, as, nursing her infant in her arms, she bewailed in heartrending tones the loss of their little possessions—tent, clothes, everything—burnt and destroyed by the troopers.32

  William Adams, who ran a store near the stockade, was shot three times while trying to flee his burning tent with his wife and child. After he emerged from a week in the Camp hospital, he estimated the loss of his family’s worldly goods to be £937 10s. He had £4 10s in his pocket when he was taken to the hospital; the loose change was missing from his blood-splattered pants when he was released. As for the Eureka Flag, an anonymous eyewitness sent his account to the GEELONG ADVERTISER:

  The diggers standard was carried by in triumph to the Camp, waved about in the air, then pitched from one another, thrown down and trampled upon.33

  Those participating in the victory dance then proceeded to cut off little pieces of the flag and tuck them away as souvenirs. Small patches of Prussian blue wool have been turning up in public collections ever since, roosting like pigeons scattered on the breeze.34

  Commanding officers turned a blind eye to the brutal, petty and wilful misdeeds of their junior charges. As far as Hotham was concerned, it was simply a case of boys being boys.35 But apart from arson, murder and pillage, what other spoils of war might these unbridled young men have seized? There are subtle intimations of still more ‘unmanly acts’ perpetrated amid the chaos and terror, acts that Victorian sensibilities preferred to consign to the reader’s imagination. Thomas Pierson alludes to hundreds of other cruel deeds done by these fiends that would strike any civilised person with horror. Dan Calwell the young American, who, with his brother Davis, appears to have remained part of the peaceful faction, wrote home to his parents and sister reporting on the Stockade clash. The victors, reported Dan, committed all the brutalities of the darker ages. H. R. Nicholls recounted that a few nights after the Stockade, he visited the grog shop of the young and pretty girl, who attracted much attention. Her tent was close to the Stockade, but was inexplicably not burned down. The girl told him that on the morning of the attack her tent was full of fugitives—some lying on the ground, some under tables, and all afraid that they would be discovered. She stood outside the tent. Some troopers approached her. She told them she was alone and hoped that they would not hurt her. One excited soldier ran his bayonet through her dress, but his companions called him away and he didn’t enter the tent. The Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry later found that the scenes connected with this outbreak…as stated to the Commission, and as currently rumoured, exhibit some of those disgraceful inhumanities that are the customary feature of a social outbreak. The commissioners acknowledged that the mounted police, in particular, had committed the sort of acts of indiscriminate violence displayed in moments of ungovernable excitement but declined to elaborate this subject further.

  Anthropologist Roland Littlewood argues, in one of the few expositions of military rape, that sexual violence in warfare has occurred from Hebrew times through to the twentieth-century atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia. Incidents, however, are rarely reported. Sexual assault by soldiers ‘reflects badly’ not only on the perpetrators but also ‘on the victim, for an explicit justification frequently made by the soldiers who rape women is that it is to degrade and humiliate them’. Littlewood’s research shows that most military rapes occur in house-to-house searches and reprisal attacks; sexual gratification is often rationalised on the grounds that the assaulted women were housing enemies of the state.

  Here is the politics of sexuality inextricably linked to the sexuality of politics. Perpetrating male violence on the female body aims to do symbolic violence to the body politic. Just as the flag was symbolically trampled a
nd souvenired, so Ballarat’s women may well have been taken as a trophy of battle. As we have seen, women in Ballarat played an inordinately prominent role in mobilising and validating the social and political grievances of their community. If some soldiers did penetrate the sexual strongholds of Eureka’s women, it made for a far more abject surrender than Eureka’s men were prepared to concede openly.

  It was all over by the time the sun scaled Mt Warrenheip.

  For the troops and police returning to Camp at daybreak, the taste of victory was intoxicating. Still, they were given more rum—a reward, perhaps, or a timeless anaesthetic for the soul. When the soldiers were finally dismissed from duty, Huyghue tells us, they rushed cheering and capering like school boys to their tents. In his report to Governor Hotham the following day, Captain Thomas was pleased to advise that the behaviour of the troops and police, both officers and men, was very good.

  Meanwhile, the people of Ballarat woke to the smell of burning canvas and the eerie sounds of mourning. Slowly people descended on the Stockade in silent fascination and horror. Lifeless and disfigured bodies had been laid out in neat rows, their clothes saturated with blood from those horrible bayonet wounds, with military guards standing over them lest they rise from the dead and scamper off.

  During the next few hours, grieving relatives and friends retrieved the bodies, taking them home to be nursed or shrouded. Some diggers were dragged to nearby hotels turned into makeshift hospitals. Henry Powell was removed to the Albion Hotel, where the landlady Mrs O’Kell had only four months earlier brandished her gun at the murderous American Robert Clarke, peeved over a card game. She had by now passed the licence to Albert Goldstein. What was that Californian maxim about women and Jews? In Victoria, it was neither Shylock nor the shrew that blighted the limitless frontier; the British army took care of all that.

  Thomas Pierson was not in the Stockade for the battle, but like most of Ballarat’s residents, he either visited or knew those who had. The treatment of the prisoners and wounded was, in his opinion, characteristic of English warfare. Most heathenish, bloodthirsty, disgraceful and cruel. In nine years’ time America would begin its own civil war, a conflict that would last four years and claim the lives of at least 650,000 soldiers and an unquantifiable number of civilians.

  Charles Evans, too, was filled with disgust when he walked down to the Stockade on Sunday afternoon. That night he bared his troubled soul to his diary. The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, he wrote, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men. The young Shropshire lad’s world had been turned upside down. I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such savage use and cowardly use of their power as unhappily proved to be the case, he scribbled, his hand trembling with fury and pity. Newly made widows recognising the bloody remains of a slaughtered husband, Evans went on, unable to stem the flow of his rueful outpourings. Children screaming and crying round a dead father… cowardly and monstrous cruelties…It is a dark indelible stain on a British Government.

  Ballarat was in a state of shock. Instead of the noisy mirth which usually characterises Sunday here, Evans concluded his entry for 3 December, an uncomfortable stillness prevails and many seem to think it is the lull before the tempest. In fact, the storm had passed.

  Now there was the clean-up.

  All the unclaimed dead and wounded were brought to the Camp in carts that afternoon—three dray-loads full of maimed and lifeless bodies. Huyghue saw the mangled remains in the Camp hospital. The dead rebels’ faces were ghastly and passionately distorted. Half-clothed, surprised from sleep, they remained frozen in a burlesque of battle. The nameless dead were unceremoniously buried at the cemetery on Monday. Regimental and civilian surgeons attempted to patch up the shattered limbs and ragged gashes of the wounded.

  Four soldiers were dead: Privates William Webb (nineteen years) and Felix Boyle (thirty-two years) of the 12th Regiment and Michael Roney (twenty-two years) and Joseph Wall of the 40th (twenty years). At least nine more soldiers and police were wounded.

  Captain Henry Wise, a twenty-five-year-old commissioned officer and the most popular soldier in the division, died of a gunshot wound to his leg on 21 December. He had only been in the country four weeks before he sustained his mortal injury leading the first line of troops into the Stockade. Before he died, Wise gamely announced that his dancing was spoiled. Henry Wise left a wife, Jane, to dance alone. Did she have a friend to comfort her at the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, so forlorn, so far from home? Perhaps not; a Mrs Wise sailed for London in February 1855.

  It is impossible to say exactly how many civilians died at the Stockade, in the surrounding tents or in the bush and the mine shafts where the dazed and wounded fled. There were many body counts that circulated in the following days and weeks. Peter Lalor famously published a list of the Eureka martyrs, in which he named twenty-two. Timothy Shanahan also counted twenty-two. Samuel Huyghue estimated thirty to forty. Dan Calwell reported to his American relatives a figure of thirty killed. In his diary entry for 6 December, Thomas Pierson noted twenty-five deaths. But some time later he scrawled in the margin, time has proved that near 60 have died of the diggers in all. Captain Thomas wrote in his official report that the casualties of the military action had been great but there was no means of ascertaining correctly. He estimated at least thirty killed on the spot, and many more died of their wounds subsequently. The numbers of injuries and fatalities, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 8 December, were more numerous than originally supposed.

  Among the known dead were Martin Diamond, Anne’s husband; John Hynes, cousin to Bridget Hynes’ husband; Patrick Gittens, who had been the best man at Bridget’s wedding; Prussian Jew Teddy Thonen, the ‘lemonade seller’; Llewellyn Rowlands, who was shot in the chest by troopers outside his tent, half a mile from the Stockade. He wasn’t Elizabeth Rowlands’ husband, but maybe the troopers thought he was and deliberately sought him out for his wife’s presumed treachery the previous morning. So many people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, collateral damage of bitterly unfriendly fire. G. H. Mann simply recorded that an onerous number of funerals were frequently passing to the cemetery for many days.

  Of these funeral corteges, Charles Evans described only one—the one that began our story. This is the coffin trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowful group. This is the coffin containing a dead woman, whose body was claimed but not named. This is the woman mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. We don’t know whether he was spared—whether she took the bullet or the bayonet for him. We don’t know whether she left motherless children behind. We don’t know how many other women may have been among the numbers of dead that could not be ascertained correctly. This is the woman who was slipped quietly into the earth by her weeping friends and loved ones, then slipped just as silently out of history.

  The seismic front had passed, but there was one fatal aftershock. Directly after the riots, as the government would now refer to the storming of the Stockade, Ballarat was placed under martial law by order of Governor Hotham. There could be no light in any tent after 8pm. Reprisals were expected; the Camp was still jumpy as a cut snake. On Monday night, one trigger-happy sentry thought he heard gunfire coming from a tent close to the Camp. He opened fire. Among the victims of last night’s unpardonable recklessness, wrote Charles Evans in his diary on Tuesday, were a woman and her infant. The same ball which murdered the mother (for that’s the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms. He also recorded that another young woman had a miraculous escape.

  Hearing the reports of musketry and the dread whiz of bullets around her, she ran out of her tent to seek shelter. She had just got outside when a ball whistled immediately before her eyes passing through both sides of her bonnet.

  This is the Woman of ’54, the one who would write to the papers in 1884 to tell of the nig
ht she almost lost her life, a tale she related as an antidote to the noticeably chauvinistic thirtieth anniversary commemorations. This is the woman who called Humffray a coward. Closer to the action, Charles Evans had no trouble attesting to monstrous acts like these polluting the soil with the innocent blood of men women and children.

  One woman’s terror was another’s opportunity. In the midst of the chaos of renewed firing, screaming and panic on that Monday night, a lone figure stole out from the Camp. Clouds obscured the moon, waning now, and the person chose the moment to run down the hill, keeping close to the picket fence to avoid holes and tent ropes. In an instant, recalled Samuel Huyghue, a dozen rifles were pointed at the moving object when a ray of moonlight befriended her (for it proved to be a woman) and she got off scatheless. The soldiers were more discerning now than they had been the previous morning. As soon as her garments revealed her sex the deadly weapons were lowered, wrote Huyghue. It was a close shave but perhaps she never realised to the full the danger she escaped.

  It’s more likely this woman was fully aware of the risks of stealing into the Camp to see her husband, who was one of the prisoners. But Anastasia Hayes was nothing if not a risk-taker. She had five children and a newborn baby, but still she found the nerve to broker a secret communication with Timothy through the connivance of the lockup keeper, who was subsequently arrested for his perfidy. Huyghue’s own suspicion was that Anastasia was working as a spy for the reform league and that part of her plan was to rescue the prisoners by creating a diversion.