Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  About four o’clock that afternoon, however, there were 1500 men in and around the stockade and James McGill, the captain of the Independent Californian Rangers, whom Carboni had earlier dismissed as a poseur, arrived with his men. The Americans had stayed fairly aloof till now. A few Americans had joined the oath-takers as individuals, but this was the first American company to join Lalor’s men. McGill was appointed second-in-command to Lalor. The password into the stockade for Saturday evening was the name of both the old Irish and newer colonial battlefield—‘Vinegar Hill’.

  McGill rode out that night to set up a series of outposts to prevent the surprise arrival of reinforcements for the Camp from Melbourne. Lalor retired at midnight without appointing any second-in-command in McGill’s absence. By then only about 120 diggers remained in the stockade.

  In fact the Camp was ready for an attack. Fireballs had been prepared to throw on the houses to rob the diggers of vantage points. Rede had a notice put up ordering all lights in tents near the Camp to be doused by 8 p.m. and no firearms to be discharged. Offenders would be shot by the sentries. His information was that there were six companies formed at Eureka—one French, one composed of Swedish and Germans, one American and the others made up of Irishmen and Vandemonians. He had no overall sense of their number, but he believed they were ‘determined men and the greatest guns in the Colony’.

  Sometime during the night he heard from a spy that the stockade was almost deserted and that the Americans had wandered off on a mission of McGill’s devising. The commissioner held a night council with Captain Thomas and others. Since Nickle was on his way from Melbourne, it was up to Thomas and his troops if they wished to make a pre-emptive move before the meeting of the Reform League at the Adelphi that afternoon. An approach to the stockade was planned that would not alert the men sleeping in it.

  At about 2.30 a.m., 182 mounted and foot soldiers and 94 police were quietly and suddenly ordered to fall in. Thomas gave them their instructions and issued them with rum. The stockade was to be attacked, and the ambiguous order was that only those who ‘ceased to resist’ would be spared. The important thing was to get close to the stockade and thus confine the battle within it, rather than the holed ground the miners knew well. The Camp party set out at 3.30 a.m. past the Free Trade Hotel, the first glimmer of dawn showing beyond the hills named Buninyong and Warrenheip.

  The attacking force quietly approached the stockade from the north, at its rear attended by three magistrates, to read the Riot Act if necessary. Henry de Longville, a digger, saw them approaching and fired a signal. Frederick Vern called, ‘Here they are coming, boys: now I will lead you to death or victory!’ There was some panic amongst the diggers. Few of them knew what to do in a real fight, and of course the soldiers and police did. Carboni was stuck nearby in his tent. But Lalor reacted quickly and prepared a knot of men around him to make a defensive stand. He kept cool, and told his men not to fire until the police and soldiers were close. The slaughter of miners had already begun on the edges of the stockade, and it was obvious that surrender was not a choice. The first returning fire of the diggers caused the troops to pause. Captain Wise fell wounded, but soldiers and police poured in upon the diggers. Under the leadership of Patrick Curtain, the pike men fought wildly. Only a handful in Curtain’s group would survive.

  Shots sang past Carboni’s tent and penetrated his chimney. ‘The shepherds’ holes inside the lower part of the stockade had been turned into rifle pits and were now occupied by Californians of the IC Rangers’ Brigade, some twenty or thirty in all . . . Ross and his division northward, Thonen and his division southward, and both in front of the valley, under the cover of the slabs, answered with such a smart fire, that the military who were now fully within range did unmistakeably appear to be swerved from their ground . . .’

  Inevitably, the troops soon breached the flimsy rampart, and the cavalry started striking down those who tried to escape. Thonen, the lemonade seller, was killed when he was shot in the mouth. Captain Ross, the Canadian, had taken up a position at the foot of the Southern Cross flagpole but was lying mortally wounded in the groin when a constable hauled it down.

  There was a spate of hand-to-hand fighting, and then the engagement ended. Three privates were dead, and Captain Wise was dying. The police had contributed little to the battle but now were guilty of atrocities against the wounded. The police also attacked the homes and tents of diggers, and harried any wives and children stuck inside the stockade. A digger, shot through the thighs, was fallen upon by three soldiers, one of whom knelt upon him while another tried to choke him and a third went through his pockets for money. A miner from Creswick, Henry Powell, appeared outside his tent well away from the stockade and mounted police struck him with a sword to the head, fired at him and rode over him several times. Another incongruous victim was the correspondent of the Melbourne Morning Herald. He was stopped by a mounted policeman three hundred metres from the stockade and shot through the chest. AW Crowe, an advocate of moral force, witnessed the killing of two Italians, neither of whom had taken any part in the uprising. One of these Italians had his tent on Specimen Hill, also three hundred metres from the stockade. The other had a tent in the stockade but had not joined in the battle. He was shot, and as he lay wounded, his gold was taken and then he was bayoneted to death. Of the wounded, Carboni wrote, ‘What a horrible sight! Old acquaintances crippled with shots, the gore protruding from bayonet wounds, their clothes and flesh burning all the while. Poor Thonen had his mouth literally choked with bullets; my mate Eddie More, stretched on the ground, both his sides shot, asking for a drop of water. Peter Lalor, who had been concealed under a heap of slabs, was in the agony of death, a stream of blood from under the slabs heavily forcing its way downhill.’

  Carboni went to fetch water. ‘On my reaching the stockade with a pannikin of water for Teddy, I was amazed at the apathy showed by the diggers, who now crowded from all directions round the dead and wounded. None would stir a finger . . . The valorous who had now given such a proof of their ardour in smothering with stones, batons, and broken bottles the 12th Regiment on their orderly way from Melbourne on Tuesday, November 28, at the same identical spot on the Eureka, now allowed themselves to be chained by dozens, by a handful of hated traps.’

  The dragoons, swords in hand, rifles cocked, brought them in chains to the lock-up in the Camp. Comissioner Rede wrote a notice: ‘Her Majesty’s forces were this morning fired upon by a large body of evil-disposed persons of various nations, who had entrenched themselves in the stockade on the Eureka, and some officers and men killed. Several of the rioters have paid the penalty of their crime, and a large number are in custody. All well-disposed persons are requested to return to their ordinary occupations.’

  Lalor estimated there were 34 digger casualties, of whom 22 died, and said that the unusual proportion of the killed to the wounded was ‘owing to the butchery of the military and troopers after the surrender’. Carboni, with his red hair and previous prominence in the movement, was not in the stockade during the engagement, but he was arrested by Sub-Inspector Carter soon after. Ironically, he was safe until he was released by Captain Thomas. As he walked away from his arrest that morning, a trooper fired his carbine at him. The shot struck the brim of his cabbage-tree hat.

  Carboni was then called on by the physician Dr Carr to give assistance with the wounded at the nearby London Hotel. He was sent to procure some stretchers and to fetch Carr’s box of surgical instruments from the hospital on Pennyweight Hill, six kilometres away. He returned with the instruments and another surgeon, Dr Glendinning. Re-entering the stockade, a friend of his from Canadian Gully took Carboni warmly by the hand and said, ‘Old fella, I’m glad to see you alive, everyone thinks (pointing to a dead digger among the heap) that’s poor Great Works!’

  At about 8.30 a.m. Carboni was attending an American digger who had six gunshot wounds to his body when Henry Goodenough, a trooper and spy who knew the Italian well, burst in the
door of the London Hotel. Goodenough arrested Carboni at pistol point. He was taken outside and chained to a dozen more prisoners and found himself marched into the Camp where he was stripped of his clothing, kicked, knocked down and thrown naked and senseless into the suffocating lock-up. He passed into a state of delirium. In the small hours of Monday, Rede had the prisoners removed to the storehouse, which was more commodious and better ventilated.

  On Monday morning, Governor Hotham met with the Executive Council, and they jointly decided to proclaim martial law in and around Ballarat, though they were cautious enough to order that no death sentences be carried out without Hotham’s express consent.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE AFTERMATH

  The afternoon of Sunday 3 December, after the battle, Peter Lalor spent hiding at Warrenheip, but that evening or next morning, he walked into Ballarat, suffering greatly from his wounds. He sheltered for a while in the tent of a friend, Stephen Cummins, until it became clear that he was going to die without medical help. A desperate Cummins approached Father Smyth, who told him to get Lalor to the presbytery. Once darkness had fallen, Cummins managed to move Lalor across the gully to the priest’s house where medical assistance was waiting. The two doctors fetched by Smyth, Doyle and Stewart, decided that amputation of Lalor’s arm was an immediate necessity. They performed their task in the presbytery with the priest, Anastasia Hayes and Mrs Cummins present to assist. It is part of Lalor’s legend that as he came to his senses during his period under ether, he cried, ‘Courage! Courage! Take it off!’

  Some days later Lalor was moved from the presbytery to the home of Michael Hayes, Timothy’s brother, from where, after a few weeks, he was taken by dray to Geelong, to the house of his fiancée, Elysia Dunn. A reward of £200 had been offered for his apprehension.

  There was a hunt on not only for Lalor but for George Black and Frederick Vern as well. But none of the rewards were paid. No one came forward. Vern was sheltered by various diggers and wrote blustering letters to the newspaper. Black was similarly saved from those searching for him.

  On Monday morning, 4 December, Henry Seekamp, the editor of the Ballarat Times was arrested and joined the rebels in the Camp storeroom, where Timothy Hayes, John Manning and Carboni, among others, were still prisoners. Only about one-third of the 114 captives were Irish and only eleven were ‘foreigners’, that is, German, Spanish or Italian, which made it hard to pass off the uprising as an Irish-foreign plot. Yet, ‘The insurgents are principally Foreigners,’ Hotham told William Denison, lieutentant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, in a letter written the day after the battle. Nickle’s view, in commemorating the death of Captain Wise, was that the Eureka Stockade was a place ‘which a numerous band of foreign anarchists . . . had converted into a stronghold’.

  When the prisoners were paraded that morning in the Camp, an Irish prisoner asked the others, ‘Where do you read in history that the British lion was ever merciful to a fallen foe?’ The prisoners believed that a mass grave was being dug, and even feared they might be buried alive.

  John Dunmore Lang summed up a lot of public opinion in a letter to Henry Parkes’s Empire. He was a former member of the Legislative Council at Port Phillip (even though he lived in New South Wales) and had travelled widely throughout Victoria. His was the normal democratic cry that government officials and government nominees and squatters had blotted out the voice of the people. ‘There had not been a more incapable, a more extravagant, a more unprincipled or a more unjust and oppressive government in Christendom.’

  An Age editorial chimed in: ‘Let the Government be undeceived. There are not a dozen respectable citizens in Melbourne who do not entertain an indignant feeling against its weakness, its folly and its last crowning error . . . they do not sympathise with injustice and coercion.’ A crowd of people was assembled in Swanston Street in Melbourne by the mayor and asked to show fealty to the Union Jack over the Southern Cross, but refused to do so. On Wednesday, 6 December, 6000 people who gathered outside St Paul’s refused to support the government because to do so would betray ‘the interests of liberty’. The countryside was full of similar meetings demanding redress, representation and land, the freeing of the prisoners, and a larger measure of justice. Independence from Britain was claimed as both a right and a necessity, and republican ideas were asserted. The days of arbitrary or despotic rule in Victoria were finished, but Hotham wanted the leaders of Eureka to face charges of high treason.

  Carboni found himself hobbled to John Joseph, a black American alleged to have been one of those who shot Captain Wise, during preliminary hearings in front of the authorities at Ballarat, and listened while various government witnesses perjured themselves by claiming he had attacked them with a pike and that he had been captured inside the stockade. Carboni called his own witnesses, including Dr Carr, but as they did not present themselves, fearing retaliation from the Camp, he—like Joseph—was committed to stand trial for high treason.

  Carboni spent the night of Tuesday, 5 December, shackled to another American, Charles Ferguson, who was kind enough to leave him his blue blankets upon his release from prison after claiming that he had been forcibly seized and detained by the stockaders and that his participation was involuntary. His countryman, Dr Kenworthy, had supported him in that. Similarly Captain McGill was let go, but not John Joseph, probably because he was black.

  As Carboni waited for trial with Joseph, whom he called Joe, Hotham would not contemplate amnesty, even though William Westgarth, chairman of a new government-appointed Commission on the Goldfields, expressed the opinion that an amnesty was essential. Some weeks after the events at the stockade, the thirteen remaining state prisoners, including Carboni and Joseph, were moved under escort to Melbourne Gaol, taking two days to get there. Melbourne juries would be less prejudiced in their favour, it was believed: at Ballarat, Arthur Purcell Akehurst, a Clerk of the Peace, had been found guilty by a coroner’s jury of wilfully and feloniously slaying the visiting Creswick digger, Henry Powell, but a Melbourne jury had later acquitted him.

  In Melbourne Gaol, the prisoners were locked in their cells, four or five together, for thirteen hours at a time, with no tobacco, writing materials or newspapers. Their food was vile. They were stripped naked and searched. But that was nothing beside the consequences if they were found guilty of high treason. The thirteen men stood on trial for their lives.

  The February and March trials of the Eureka accused would be crucial to the future of justice in the colonies. If they were found guilty, the old authoritarian and corrupt system would be validated. If not guilty, then political representation for diggers, good administration, the unlocking of the land and the abolition of a property basis for the electorate would be the unavoidable outfall.

  Carboni was pleased to welcome in prison James Macpherson Grant, a canny Scottish solicitor. ‘God bless you, Mr Grant!’ he wrote. ‘For the sake of you and Mr Aspinall, the barrister, I smother down my bitterness, and pass over all that I have suffered . . .’ Richard Davis Ireland, an Irish barrister in the style of Daniel O’Connell, also defended the prisoners.

  The first to stand trial was John Joseph—some thought this was because the jury would find it easier to bring down a guilty verdict against a black man, and then would be bound by precedent to find others guilty. Chief Justice a’Beckett, the arch conservative, was on the bench and the prosecutor was the Attorney-General, William Stawell. The Crown challenged all Irish potential jurors, and anyone who was a publican, while Joseph amusingly objected to gentlemen and merchants. Ultimately there were no men of ‘doubtful exterior’ or of Irish extraction in the empanelled jury and the trial began.

  Two government spies swore to seeing Joseph in the stockade, and two privates of the 40th Regiment claimed he had fired a double-barrel gun at the military, perhaps wounding Captain Wise. The problem for the Crown, however, was to convince the jury that it had been Joseph’s intention to make war ‘against our Lady the Queen’. His defence barrister, Asp
inall, made some fun out of the idea that Joseph, as ‘a riotous nigger’ or ‘a political Uncle Tom’ sought ‘to depose our Lady the Queen from the kingly name and Her Imperial Crown’.

  The jury came back quickly with a verdict of Not Guilty, and the cheering was so loud that a’Beckett singled out two members of the public in the gallery for a week in gaol.

  John Manning, a former schoolteacher and possibly the author of an article deemed seditious in the Ballarat Times, was next. The same arguments were made and the jury again brought in a verdict of Not Guilty, which so enraged Mr Stawell that he sought a month’s leave of proceedings so he could compile a new list of jurymen. All the Melbourne papers thought this a gross misuse of the jury system. The Sydney Morning Herald, however, anxious that the behaviour of the Melbourne juries and of the diggers would delay passage of the Constitution Bill for New South Wales, wrote, ‘If the Melbourne jurors choose to perjure themselves under the intoxication of popular passion, that is their concern.’

  Governor Hotham was now so unpopular that people cat-called him as he passed in the streets. But he did not have the flexibility to back away from pursuing the other prisoners, and by mid March the Attorney-General had a new list of 178 jurors. The first to be tried this time would be Timothy Hayes, a definite ringleader in the eyes of the Crown. Richard Ireland was his defence counsel.

  All Irish and publicans were again kept out of the jury and Redmond Barry, a good Orangeman, was to be the judge. He and Ireland had been admitted to the Irish Bar together in 1839 after they had both graduated from Trinity College. Once more, police spies came forward and reported on Hayes’s doings. In Hayes’s defence, John O’Brien, a digger, testified that he was in Hayes’s tent near the Catholic chapel while the firing was going on at the stockade and that Hayes had been in bed but got up to go to the priest’s house. Father Smyth swore that Hayes had indeed come to him and told him that his services were needed at the stockade. Grey, an Argus journalist, testified that he heard no seditious words from Hayes, except perhaps the question that Hayes had asked at a meeting on Bakery Hill, ‘Are you prepared to risk your lives in defence of your liberties?’ And when Hayes had been arrested 300 metres from the stockade, a current licence had been found on his person.