Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  The honest Chartist bookseller, John Humffray, argued that those who did not now complain to the Committee of Enquiry had only themselves to blame, but the miners had no confidence in the committee. So the board left Ballarat satisfied that, with two exceptions—those of Magistrate D’Ewes and Sergeant Major Milne—the conduct of all in the Camp had been excellent. There had been a chorus of contempt and complaint against D’Ewes and Milne from publicans to storekeepers. The committee went back to Melbourne sure that the removal of the two men would be enough to pacify the goldfields. They also recommended a more equitable manner of deciding disputed claims and a decentralisation of the police, so that they could hunt for licences on their own initiative, and thus be more flexible. They also reported that the system was ‘a great source of irritation’, and that its abolition would bring only good. They advised Hotham both to listen to the diggers but also to overpower by stern means ‘every attempt on the part of the populace to take the law into their own hands’.

  The evidence the committee considered had come from only sixteen diggers, sixteen publicans and storekeepers, fifteen Camp officials and eight professional men. One of the non-British diggers who gave evidence, the German Frederick Vern, said that others would have come forward if they had had any confidence in the government.

  The home of the ‘Tipperary Mob’, Eureka was removed physically from the Camp and had its own generally respected policemen, its priests and its pubs. After the burning of the Eureka Hotel, there were still other hotels, notably the Free Trade, to help assuage the thirst of diggers, together with sly grog tents and shanties. Those with independent capital, like Peter Lalor, were secure in their endeavours, but diggers who had not yet made it rich were at the mercy of storekeepers or small entrepreneurs who backed them. Carboni depicted Ballarat as a ‘nuggetty El Dorado for a few, a ruinous field of hard labour for many, a profound ditch of sedition for body and soul to all’. And yet the gold finds were increasing. And the population was increasing despite those who left to escape the attentions of the Camp, including the continual licence hunts.

  Meanwhile a jury in Melbourne had found three diggers guilty of burning down the Eureka Hotel. But the jury also made a statement: ‘The jury feels, in returning a verdict against the prisoners at the bar, that in all probability they would never have had that fateful duty to perform if those trusted with government at Ballarat had done theirs properly.’ The judge also took the chance to address the diggers at Ballarat, telling them that ‘the eyes of the law are upon them, and, if necessary, they will be brought to justice’.

  On 11 November 1854, the Ballarat Reform League was officially launched on Bakery Hill above Eureka in the presence of 10 000 miners and their wives and children. Anastasia Hayes, for example, Irishwoman, future creator of a miners’ flag, was there, babe in arms. It was a Saturday afternoon. The meeting had begun in a large tent, where Dr Carr made a speech on equal representation in parliament and the unlocking of the land. The meeting then moved outside onto the hill where John Humffray, the fiery Scot Thomas Kennedy, and Frederick Vern, the German, addressed the crowd. Humffray was elected president of the league, and a number of motions were passed, the meeting noting that the people of the goldfields had been provoked ‘beyond the bounds of human endurance’.

  The assembly called on the governor ‘to introduce the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws [they were] called upon to obey’, declaring that ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’. The meeting further determined ‘That, being as the people have been hitherto, unrepresented in the Legislative Council of the Colony of Victoria, they have been tyrannised over, and it had become their duty as well as interest to resist, and if necessary to remove the irresponsible power which so tyrannises over them.’ According to the meeting, ‘this colony has hitherto been governed by paid officials, under the false assumption that law is greater than justice because, forsooth, it was made by them and their friends, and admirably suits their selfish ends and narrow-minded views.’ It was not, however, ‘the wish of the League to effect an immediate separation of this Colony from the parent country, if the equal laws and equal rights are dealt out to the whole free community. But . . . if Queen Victoria continues to act upon the ill-advice of dishonest ministers and wage obnoxious wars with the colony under the assumed authority of the Royal Prerogative, the Reform League will endeavour to supersede such Royal Prerogative by asserting that of the people which is the most royal of all prerogatives, as the people are the only legitimate source of all political power.’

  The folk at the meeting then made a number of Chartist demands concerning universal suffrage, regular parliament, payment of members and so on. The immediate object of the Reform League was stated to be a change in the management of the goldfields by disbanding the commissioners and totally abolishing the diggers and storekeepers’ licence tax.

  Henry Seekamp was at the meeting, and wrote in the Ballarat Times that the formation of the League was ‘not more or less than the germ of Australian independence’. The League, said Seekamp, would eventually become an ‘Australian Congress’. Karl Marx would read of these matters in 28 Dean Street, Soho, in his two-roomed apartment. Engels had once told him Australia was the United States of ‘murderers, burglars, ravagers and pickpockets’. But Marx looked at Ballarat as a symptom of a ‘general revolutionary movement in the colony of Victoria’. He was sure it would be quickly suppressed.

  In Melbourne on 27 November, George Black, editor of the Diggers’ Advocate, and Thomas Kennedy presented themselves to a rather harassed Governor Hotham in Toorak with the resolutions. Hotham was an assiduous, incorruptible and rather stiff man, but not lacking in warmth. He had already ordered that the hated magistrate D’Ewes be sacked and his name erased from the Commission of Police. (As a lost soul of Empire he would ultimately suicide in Paris.) The much complained of Sergeant Major Milne’s career was ended as well. Hotham was preoccupied with cutting the public service, and bravely trying to deal with corruption which had arisen under La Trobe. But his overriding concern was revenue, and for that he looked, not to the squatters with their vast land holdings, but to the miners and their licence fees. What did the miners expect? he must have privately asked himself. His deficit for 1854, so his auditors told him, was £2 226 616.

  Black and Kennedy, on behalf of the League, also demanded the release of Fletcher, McIntyre and Yorkey, the men sentenced over the Eureka Hotel fire. His Excellency went into a fit of rage at the word ‘demand’. The decision of the jury had to stand, said Hotham. He would not upset a verdict, though he could pardon the men if that was appropriate. But, ‘I must make my stand on the word “demand”. I’m sorry for it, but that is the position you place me in.’ Kennedy thought the word ‘demand’ could be rescinded, and solemnly implored Hotham to consider the matter, if for no other reason than to keep back ‘the spilling of blood which must be the case with infuriated men—let us have peace even if inconsistent with the dignity of the British Crown’.

  Hotham listened to them but then, after they had gone, wrote the notation ‘Put away’ on the documents they had left him. This may well have been a synonym for ‘File’, but the phrase had a symbolic eloquence. Hotham would have loved to put it all away.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE BATTLE

  Major General Sir Robert Nickle, Commander in Chief of troops in Australia, based since August 1854 in Melbourne, was a man approaching seventy. He had fought in his youth against Croppies in the Irish uprising of 1798 and Americans in 1815. He sympathised with the miners’ cause, but was told by Governor Hotham to reinforce the Camp and to put his protégé Captain Thomas of the 40th Regiment in charge. The Camp was swollen to overflowing with almost five hundred armed men enclosed in its cramped spaces. At the Camp on the evening of 28 November, the day after the meeting with Hotham, the promised detachment of the 12th Regiment arrived carrying a wounded drummer boy, winged by a miner on Eureka as the detachment marched towards
Ballarat on the Melbourne Road. After the young murdered Scobie, the drummer was the second victim of Eureka.

  On Thursday, 30 November, Raffaello Carboni, who had been working from an early hour, went to his tent at 10 a.m. for a rest. He wanted to sign off on his letter to his friend, a WH Archer, in Melbourne, whom he begged to use his influence with the governor. (This a pious rather than realistic hope.) ‘Just on my preparing to go and post this letter, we are worried by the usual Irish cry, to run to Gravel-pits. The traps [police] are out for licences, and playing hell with the diggers. If that be the case, I am not inclined to give half-a-crown for the whole fixtures at the Camp.’ The time of resistance had come. At Bakery Hill, Carboni found Peter Lalor up on the stump, his rifle in his hand, calling on volunteers to fall into ranks. According to Carboni, Lalor took him by the hand and said, ‘I want you, Signore: help these gentlemen (pointing to old acquaintances of ours, foreigners), that if they cannot provide themselves with fire-arms, let each of them procure a piece of steel, five or six inches long, attached to a pole, and that will pierce the tyrants’ hearts.’

  All the diggers fell in file two abreast and marched from Bakery Hill to Eureka. ‘Captain Ross of Toronto was our standard-bearer. He hoisted down the Southern Cross from the flag-staff, and headed the march.’ The Southern Cross flag had been run up by Anastasia Hayes and other women out of sheets. Its design was a white cross with the stars of the Southern Cross constellation at the end of the arms of the cross and one at the intersection in the middle, all on a field of blue. The Irishman Patrick Curtain, the chosen captain of the pike men, swapped his iron pike for Carboni’s sword. ‘We reached the hill where was my tent. How little did we know that some of the best among us had reached the place of their grave! Lalor gave the proper orders to defend ourselves among the holes in case the hunt should be attempted in our quarters.’

  It seems that having marched to Eureka many of the miners then dispersed to their tents throughout the area. At the Gravel Pits close to Eureka, men held small, impromptu meetings and many still carried any arms, pikes or rifles, they possessed. Commissioner Rede advanced out of the Camp, supported by a skirmishing line of infantry and cavalry, to attempt to disperse them.

  He had great trouble reading the Riot Act, partly because his horse kept rearing. A few shots were fired by both sides. Eight diggers were captured and taken to the Camp. Rede met Humffray in his role of pacifist but engaged observer, and admonished him: ‘See now the consequences of your agitation?’ Humffray responded, ‘No, but see the consequences of impolitic coercion.’

  That afternoon, a meeting of captains and interested parties occurred in a store run by Martin and Ann Diamond, and Carboni described black bottles and glasses being put on the tables to make it look like a social occasion. Amongst the others there was the young Prussian Edward Thonen, a little sliver of a man with intense eyes who sold lemonade to the diggers and was a brilliant chess player. The Irish were led by Timothy Hayes, Anastasia’s husband, the tall well-built Irishman of liberal mind ‘and, above all, of a kind heart, and that covers a multitude of sins’. John Manning, a bald-headed Irishman, about forty years of age, who had come young to the colony and had passed hard days, a self-educated man given somewhat to drinking, was there. Then long-legged Frederick Vern— from Hanover, and well-meaning Peter Lalor, the Irishman with a history, a man of some thirty-five years. There were two other ‘John Bullish fellows’, who took up the cause of the miners mainly because their sly grog was flagging, so Carboni believed.

  Lalor, despite disclaiming any knowledge of military matters and recording his disappointment that Humffray was no longer their leader, declared: ‘If you appoint me your Commander in Chief, I shall not shrink; I mean to do my duty as a man. I tell you, gentlemen, if once I pledge my hand to the diggers, I will neither defile it with treachery, nor render it contemptible by cowardice.’

  Vern pointed out that he could provide a German rifle brigade of 500 men and felt that he could be an appropriate chieftain. But Carboni felt that a Briton, even an Irishman, should be in charge. Peter Lalor was elected by show of hands or as Carboni says, unanimous acclamation. All hands now fell to to make some improvised fortifications of slabs of timber, reinforced with rough earth work. There were a few stores laid by, and diggers camped in huts within the newly constructed stockade. The ruins of Bentley’s hotel lay a few hundred metres away. Drilling went on throughout the rest of the evening while Henry Goodenough, police constable and agent provocateur, went around urging the miners to make an immediate attack on the Camp.

  The stockade was the scene of another meeting at sunset. The Southern Cross was raised with Captain Ross, sword in hand, and his division standing beneath it—the matter of an instant but a moment which would never fail to inspire Australia. Lalor, rifle in his left hand, mounted the stump again and asked all to leave who were not prepared to swear an oath. The men fell in in their divisions around the flagstaff, led by their captains, who saluted Lalor. Yet of the thousand who had marched to Eureka, only half that number took the oath. Lalor knelt, bare-headed, and with his right hand pointed upwards. The oath of the Southern Cross flag was sworn on that late afternoon of Thursday 30 November by men who in large numbers still felt fealty to Britain. ‘We swear by the Southern Cross,’ went the oath as enunciated by Lalor, ‘to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our right to liberties.’

  The five hundred oath-takers shouted ‘Amen’. The Camp was on alert all night for an attack. It did not understand that the diggers’ actions were intended to be defensive. Parties of miners and sympathisers had left the stockade to collect arms and provisions for which receipts were to be issued. Everyone was under orders to respect property. Sentries were posted between Eureka and the Camp. But there was a cost to the diggers’ resistance in that their mineshafts were gradually filling with water. A deputation was sent to Rede. As long as the commissioner would give an assurance not to reinstate licence hunts, and to release the eight prisoners he held, the diggers would lay down their arms and return to work. Carboni, George Black of the Diggers’ Advocate and Father Smyth were elected to take this message.

  It had been raining that night and men would be glad to get back to their pits to bale them out if possible. When the delegation reached the bridge over the Yarrowee, the police intervened, but an inspector eventually took them to Rede, who came out from the Camp to meet them as he thought it prudent not to permit them to enter and see his fortifications.

  ‘The deputation,’ wrote Carboni, was at last ‘before King Rede, whose shadow by moonlight, as he held his arm à la Napoleon, actually inspired me with reverence; but behold! Only a marionette is before us. Each of his words, each of his movements was the vibration of the telegraphic wires directed from Toorak [where Governor Hotham resided]. He had not a wicked heart; some knew him for his benevolence, and he helped many an honest digger out of trouble . . . I would willingly turn burglar to get hold of the whole of the correspondence between him and Toorak.’

  They turned back on the road to Eureka and found miners anxious to hear from them. Carboni’s opinion was that Rede would be out riding and hunting licence defaulters by the next day. Father Smyth made a further appeal to Rede later in the night, but found him more recalcitrant than he had been a few hours earlier. The priest said he would return to Eureka and have all the diggers back at work in the morning if the commissioner would tell him when he intended to go licence-hunting again. Rede refused to do this.

  The next day, Friday, drilling of rebels continued at the stockade. Men who had gone back to their own tents to sleep turned up again for that. In solidarity, ten thousand diggers did not return to their work that day even though it was chiefly the five hundred oath-takers who were drilling in Eureka. On that Friday afternoon a 300- to 400-strong contingent of miners arrived from the goldfields at Creswick, some twenty kilometres away, but they were unarmed, unprovisioned and exhausted.

  The same day, Major General Sir Robert N
ickle started out from Melbourne with considerable reinforcements for the Camp, including marines from HMS Electra, 600 further men of the 12th and 14th Regiments, and four pieces of field artillery. This was practically all that was left of the armed forces in Victoria.

  To the shame of Lalor and Carboni, many gangs of Vandemonians went out seizing goods on behalf of the diggers. At the Star Hotel on the main road, another, more radical, committee had its headquarters, and called now, under a document drawn up by Alfred Black, for a ‘Declaration of Independence’. Lalor and Carboni thought this talk suicidal—‘hallucinated yabber-yabber’. Vern was initially party to it, but was brought back to the Eureka fold by Lalor’s need for military advice. At the stockade, a German blacksmith was producing pikes ‘as fast as his big strong arms allowed him; praising the while his past valour in the wars with Mexico, and swearing that his pikes would fix redcoats and blue pissants especially’.

  The morning of Saturday 2 December saw a repeat of Friday with the men returning from their own quarters to the stockade. Lalor gave Father Smyth permission to speak to the Catholics, and he expressed to them his grave concern, knowing that a well-armed force he estimated at seven to eight hundred men occupied the Camp and that more were on their way. He asked them to attend mass the following morning, but when they were unable to guarantee that, the priest went away, saddened.

  When by Saturday afternoon no licence hunt had occurred, the defenders of the stockade were so unfitted for military reality that they decided they would not be troubled again until Monday. The diggers went off to eat at noon and the stockade was almost deserted. They had already planned a meeting of the Reform League, to be held at two o’clock on Sunday at the Adelphi Theatre.

  ‘I took notice of this very circumstance [the bareness of the population of the stockade] from my tent,’ wrote Carboni, who had military experience, ‘the second from the stockade, on the hill, west, whilst frying a bit of steak on the fire of my tent chimney, facing said stockade: Manning was peeling an onion.’