Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  The subsequent roar, they say, can likely be heard in Melbourne, and with the help of the many journalists who are there to cover the meeting, it is. Every syll-a-ble of it.

  And such is the power of Potts’s words that by the time he reluctantly concludes, the mood has moved from bitter anger to something approaching joy, as the attendees begin to realise the collective power they possess, having turned up in such numbers. This point is made well by the next speaker, Mr Lineham.

  ‘Now I will tell you what I intended to do, when the Commissioner came round. I should refuse to pay, and he would compel me to go with him. Now I should propose if one went, all went. (Yes, yes) Of course, we are too independent to walk, and it will take a curious number of horses to drag us to Melbourne. (Laughter) I am not an advocate for forcible resistance, nor do I think any of you are; we can gain the day without it, though the Herald should use its thunders. I would advise, that until something definite is settled, pay nothing; it is the height of madness for Government to try the strength of a body of men like us, united as I believe we are; we can defy the whole colony put together if compelled to do so. I trust none will pay the PS3 imposition or any royalty, though they were obtaining twenty-pound weight of gold per day …’ (Hear, hear! Hear hear!)57

  Mr Lineham then reads the key resolution, which is seconded by Mr Doyle, and carried: ‘That this meeting while deprecating the use of physical force, and pledging itself not to resort to it except in case of self-defence; at the same time pledges itself to relieve or release any or all diggers that on account of non-payment of PS3 license may be fined or confined by Government orders or Government agents, should Government temerity proceed to such illegal lengths.’ 58

  And there is another particularly impassioned speaker, a one-armed digger and former sea captain come all the way from the diggings at Bendigo Creek. It is Captain John Harrison, a former squatter already well known for his passion for republicanism and his participation in the Anti-Transportation League devoted to stopping the transportation of convicts to our continent.

  He is greeted with three hearty cheers, and immediately gets to it: ‘I am a little late, but you will bear in mind I have ridden 20 miles to address you. (A voice: ‘Put your cap on, Captain’) I took my cap off, my lads, to honour patriots, but I might not do so for Victoria or her myrmidons … What then are we paying for? We give a fee for protection, and get nothing in return … They say it’s for the Queen. Has the Queen not enough, or does she want it to buy pinafores for the children? They will tell you her salary is small. I wish to God I had 1/20th for mine!

  ‘Talk of doubling the fee, let them reduce it one-half of the present charge, instead of doubling, or they will find, like the tale of the golden egg, that in grasping all, they will get nothing. As for the statements of the Herald with respect to a royalty fee, it is only put in another and more obnoxious shape. They say, that according to law the Queen is entitled to royalty. The Colonies never cost the Queen or Government one shilling, and under those circumstances I consider that they are not entitled to the benefits of the land. It was a similar tax that lost Charles his head; it was unjust taxation that caused the United States to throw off the burden, and unless the Government learns a little wisdom, an additional tax might lead to the same result here.

  ‘We ask but for justice! (Cheers) In America, the land sold, benefited the country. It caused immigration, repaired roads, and all and every part was fully and fairly accounted for. If Mr La Trobe has any foresight, he must see this tax ought to be appropriated to similar purposes and unfold the vast resources and manifest riches to the world. Why does he require it for the Queen, who will never receive a sixpence? Let him expend it to make the Colonies what they ought to be. Let him make it a Colony of virtuous and thriving people. We have been told that the poor man is starving, that work is scarce, and they have nothing. Now the scale may be turned. The poor man may be elevated, the independency so much desired is within his grasp …

  ‘Is it not as fair to give the poor man a chance as the squatter, when wool is up? Why should so much favour be shown them? What attention have they paid to the comforts of their men - bad huts, bad food, and often bad treatment, while they were lolling in their mansions. Let the poor man get the value of his labour. If the rich would not give it, Providence, in his wisdom, has thought fit to do so. Let them make good use of it, and let them act on the great principles - morality, justice, and truth. They talk of the morality of Mr La Trobe in private life, but I unhesitatingly assert that Mr La Trobe is an immoral man, in every sense of the word. Like the man who strained at the gnat and swallowed the camel, he lay the tax upon the people that were compelled to shear, sow, and reap, until he drove them to agitate. He finds his conduct deprecated, and that destruction must follow. He says we must let it pass; the people will endure it no longer, and thus he plays with their feelings. Now, my friends, make up your minds; if you find a man who does pay PS3 for his license, although he obtain 50 lbs. of gold per day, surround his hole, and prevent him working … (Long and continued cheering, accompanied with - We will, we will!)

  ‘Let us, my friends, unite as one people (great cheering) without respect to creed or country, and victory will crown our efforts.’ (It was some minutes before the next speaker could be heard above the cheering)

  And the motion - ‘that this meeting deprecates as unjust, illegal, and impolitic, the attempt to increase the license fee from 30s to PS3’ - is carried, seemingly unanimously.59

  The meeting finishes with one more cheer for The Argus and three groans for The Herald, which had referred to them as ‘cut-throats and scoundrels’, and after a vote of thanks to the chairman, one of the brass bands that accompanies the marching men strikes up a merry tune, and - after agreeing to an ideal that each digger will contribute a shilling a month to Captain Harrison representing their interests in Melbourne - the crowd begins to disperse.

  Christmas Eve, 1851, Ballarat rejoices

  Have ye heard? Joe La Trobe! He has caved in like a rotten mine-shaft. Joe!

  He has decided not to double the license fee after all! The rumour races around the diggings like a deranged dog, even if it is far more joyously received. And though there are one or two doubters, it is in fact true. For though it has taken well over a week for the news to reach the goldfields, it is soon confirmed that the Victorian Government Gazette made the announcement in its 17 December 1851 issue that there is a change of plan, that the doubling of the tax won’t be invoked, even though there is a warning that there are new regulations being considered to replace the existing license fee, as soon as circumstances permit, based on the ‘principle of a Royalty leviable upon the amount actually raised’.60

  And that idea, to place a levy only on the gold that is raised and not trying to apply it to all diggers, irrespective of whether or not they have found gold, clearly makes a lot of sense. Certainly, the mighty Argus thinks so, noting, ‘We entirely approve of the principle of exacting a direct tax upon the gold, whether under the appellation of Royalty, or otherwise, rather than the continuance of the present most impracticable, and really inequitable license system. The charge ought to be proportioned to the amount of success, and not a mere poll-tax leviable on successful and unsuccessful alike. The new mode of impost is surrounded with serious difficulties, and we are quite prepared to expect that any fresh system may break down as pitiably as this last attempt. But the principle involved is an improvement upon the last, and with due caution there is no absolute need of failure. The rate of the charge should be a moderate one, and it should be payable in town, not upon the gold field itself …’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EXODUS

  Thank God there is some prospect of a cessation of the cursed gold seeking for some time owing to the creeks becoming dry. The rascals can’t wash [gold] without water … It is really ludicrous to see the feeling of indifference (not to say contempt) with which everything appertaining to squatters or squatting is now treated in Melbo
urne … They will not always remain under a cloud. The profits of labor will be equalized in time while we have a monopoly of the land which with the help of God we will keep in spite of the Melbourne gold worshippers. Our time will come yet, land will tell in the long run. No one can blame us using any powers circumstances may place within our reach. We are the victims at present, let us hope we shall be the sacrificers by & bye.1

  Squatter William Forlonge to C. Barnes, in late 1851

  [Outsiders] cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent.2

  Victorian squatter Alfred Burchett, January 1852

  Early 1852, London, a ship sets sail on the Thames

  In London, as the ships make ready to leave on their journey down the Thames and then into the English Channel leading to the open ocean, a colonial office clerk, John Capper, who seeks to be published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words, wanders among them, carefully formulating his lines for a forthcoming article: ‘Mid-summer of the present year is sending quite as many, and more, of our countrymen away from London, to say nothing of Liverpool and other places as fast as sailing ships and steam-vessels can carry them, to join in the Golden Fair in Australia; the great South Land …

  ‘What a sight there was upon the jetty! I would have fancied the whole export trade of this country had gone stark staring mad with the gold fever.’ 3

  As it happens, Dickens’s David Copperfield had already visited one of these ships when he had gone to farewell the Micawbers on their way to Australia.

  ‘It was such a strange scene to me,’ young David had recounted, ‘and so confined and dark that, at first, I could make out hardly anything; but, by degrees, it cleared, as my eyes became more accustomed to the gloom …

  ‘Among the great beams, bulks, and ringbolts of the ship, and the emigrant-berths, and chests, and bundles, and barrels, and heaps of miscellaneous baggage - lighted up, here and there, by dangling lanterns; and elsewhere by the yellow daylight straying, down a windsail or a hatchway - were crowded groups of people, making new friendships, taking leave of one another, talking, laughing, crying, eating and drinking; some, already settled down into the possession of their few feet of space.’4

  Many of those who are leaving Great Britain for Australia carry books by Dickens to help to occupy them on the long journey, but they also carry works of non-fiction, often about Australia, giving them a guide for what to expect. One is indeed written by John Capper, under the title Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia: containing the fullest particulars relating to the recently-discovered goldfields, the government regulations for gold seeking, etc, and includes ‘a new map of the goldfields, comprising the recent discoveries of Mr Hargraves, Mr Hunter, Rev. W. Clark and others’.5

  First up, the guide advises that the emigrant must expect to find the continent itself composed of ‘unprofitable … barren soil or rocky hills’ while its animals are ‘few and of little value’ and its fruit ‘very few and scarcely worth mention’.6

  The good news is that there is plenty of work there, even for those with little to offer bar the sweat of their brow, for they will be knocked over in the rush to secure their services as labourers and domestic servants.

  ‘Should the intending emigrant be married,’ Capper writes, ‘so much the better, provided the wife be frugal and industrious: such a helper will not only be no expense, but she will actually often earn nearly as much as the husband.’7

  But here perhaps in another guide - The Gold Colonies of Australia and Gold Seeker’s Manual - is the most important thing of all that the emigrants must understand about this strange land that they are heading to: ‘To the poorer of the aristocracy of this country, Australia offers an enticing field; but they must be careful to leave their aristocracy at home. Rank and title have no charms at the antipodes; and the most that they could affect for the bearers, would be an occasional lionization at snob dinners in the town in which the aristocrat may be wasting his time and his money. Great family connections in ancestry would only provoke, to any who should parade them, the remark that ‘he was like a potato: all that was good belonging to him was underground.’8

  Let us give the last word on the subject, however, to the opening words of Samuel Sidney, who in his book The Three Colonies of Australia, which has also come out this year, assures his readers that the discovery of gold will - yes, my friends - transform Australia from a mere ‘sheepwalk tended by nomadic burglars to the wealthiest offset of the British Crown - a land of promise for the adventurous - a home of peace and independence for the industrious - an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and the easiest best-paid employments are to be found; where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-tree not without work, but with little care living on his own land, looking down the valleys to his herds, and towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter’.9

  18 March 1852, Forrest Creek receives a military ‘force’

  It has taken a great deal of time, admittedly, but after Charles La Trobe’s desperate plea three months earlier to the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, this is the morning, at 7 am, that from out of the thick mist suddenly appears at the Forrest Creek diggings the old army pensioners - the 99th Regiment! And, look, maybe they feel they are marching onto the diggings, but that is not the way it looks to the diggers. Shuffling, more like it. There are a little over a hundred of these ghostly figures in their blue cloth coats and forage caps, with bushy white whiskers, limping along the best they can.

  One digger, Oliver Ragless, and his mates are having their usual morning repast of lightly burnt damper washed down by gallons of black billy tea when they see these extraordinary figures slowly emerge. When finally the diggers do make the arrivals out, the reaction is swift: they burst out laughing. This little posse is going to control the whole 25,000 of them? That is a riot. And it very well might result in one …

  For all the pensioners’ drunken ways, however - and Police Commissioner Sturt would say of them, ‘[They] appear to me to be the most drunken set of men I have ever met with’10 - the view of the authorities is that they are better than nothing. This very month the local foot police have gone on strike for higher wages, and it is now doubly important to have some men in uniform on the diggings. And the way things are turning out, it is becoming ever more apparent that in a choice between military and police, it is better to have military men because not only do you only have to pay them a shilling a day - ‘taking the Queen’s shilling’, as it is referred to - but, far more importantly, they can also be shot for desertion.

  Late May 1852, on the Eureka, a man does not look a gift-horse in the mouth …

  Strange, how things work out.

  Sometimes, when the horse has bolted it brings great good fortune instead of calamity. On this particular day a Ballarat storekeeper by the name of Paul Gooch sends out a blackfella to look for his animal, and it this man who, as Gooch would later explain to the Geelong Advertiser, ‘picked up a nugget on the surface. Afterwards I sent out a party to explore, who proved that gold was really to be found in abundance.’11 This place, just a mile north-east of Golden Point, comes to be known as ‘Eureka’, and within days hordes of diggers - with the Irish heavily represented - are streaming there.

  And in equally classic fashion, from the central part of the goldfields, the diggers ‘follow the lead’, branching out as they try to follow the course of the ancient creek beds far below, where the jewellers’ shops may be found - always praying to find a junction of such creek beds, where the treasures would be guaranteed to make Aladdin himself blush.

  In the case of the Eureka lead, it soon becomes apparent that it is heading to a junction with both the Canadian Lead and the Gravel Pits Lead - the latter of which lies right beneath the Government Camp. As noted by one of the first of the rou
ghly contemporary writers to do the story justice, W. B. Withers, those three leads make up ‘the Golden Trinity that made Ballarat famous throughout the civilised world’.12

  16 June 1852, Gravesend, Kent, 27 miles east of London, on the south bank of the Thames13

  She is the good ship Scindian, a three-masted barque of 650 tons, and on this sparkling English summer’s day she is shipshape and at last ready to go. For not only are her passengers all aboard and below decks, but the wind is finally blowing from the west.

  Thrilled to be leaving many of their woes in their wake, the bulk of the passengers are in fact assisted emigrants courtesy of Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society program, an organisation that receives strong support from the great Charles Dickens, among others. The system is that those emigrants (or their relatives in Australia) first put their life savings with the Society, which then lends the passenger whatever else they need to pay their fare. Then, once they land in the colony, agents of Caroline Chisholm welcome them, help them to find employment and arrange to have the debt repaid by convenient instalments.

  With the weather-worn visage of one who has spent a lifetime at sea, and the grin of one who knows the moment he has been waiting for is at hand, Captain James Cammell gives the order: ‘Weigh the anchors!’ Like an echo, that order bizarrely grows louder as it is repeated down the chain of command from the First Mate to the Second Mate and the Second Mate to the sailors, who then begin the hard haul on the ropes, then the whole ship is suddenly alive with the booming command … ‘Weigh the anchor..!’ ‘Weigh the anchor..!’ ‘WEIGH THE ANCHOR..!’