And he goes on, in full flight now: ‘A single squatter pays but PS10 a year for the occupation of hundreds of thousands of acres, whilst the poor gold digger was made to pay PS13 for two or three feet of ground on which to pitch his tent. And to effect these iniquitous robberies the squatters and the Government were combined in one vile conspiracy.’ (Loud cheers)
The meeting goes for four hours and is in the vanguard of many subsequent gatherings that see men from across the land pushing for the formation of a true democracy, as opposed to a government formed only to advance the interests of the wealthy squatters. It is, broadly, exactly the same argument that had been occurring in Europe for over 20 years. The forces for true democracy had met with defeat there, with the most telling points raised against them being the sharp ends of a mass of bayonets. The question remains how the situation will be resolved in Australia.
Whatever else, however, Wentworth would be some time - specifically, never - in living down his proposal for a ‘bunyip aristocracy’. Ah, how they laugh and laugh at the very suggestion of it. Whatever else, those in New South Wales would not be accepting a bunyip aristocracy.
And nor would the people in Victoria. Few are more appalled than the lead writer at The Argus, who notes that this ‘most impudent document’ from New South Wales ‘really does constitute a new Hereditary Peerage for that colony’. The paper reminds its readers, ‘The parents of this unexpected proposition are necessarily the very persons who, from the accident of their position are most likely to benefit by its adoption.’34
As to Victoria’s new Constitution, when its Legislative Council recommences just three weeks after this Sydney meeting, Colonial Secretary John Leslie Fitzgerald Vesey Foster is heard to speak with great ‘liberality, soundness and openness to conviction’,35 as on behalf of the Executive he announces that, in agreement with public sentiment, the new Constitution will provide for an elected second chamber, not the colonial peerage many had been fearing. True, those men able to vote for both the Upper and Lower Houses would be severely restricted to those of the propertied and professional classes, but it is a start.36
In response, The Argus is quite overcome: ‘… we have no hesitation in saying that the proceedings of yesterday constitute a great epoch in the history of Australia. The time is going past, and will shortly be almost forgotten, when it seemed a sort of settled thing that the Government should be in a condition of continuous antagonism with the people.’37
18 August 1853, agitation rises a little on Ballarat
The movement across the goldfields to resist the license fee is strengthening. Leading moral-force Chartist Captain Browne - one of the Bendigo Petition delegates to Melbourne - has travelled to Ballarat drumming up support for the association and does well from the first. A series of well-attended and ever more passionate meetings is held over several days to express solidarity with the diggers of Bendigo, while also being careful to stress that the principle of ‘moral force’ is the only way to achieve their objectives. Nothing should be done to ‘unsettle the minds of the population’.38
Another speaker at one of the meetings is none other than Raffaello Carboni. Always interested in the politics of the day, he has come more to keep in touch than with any deep-seated grievance. ‘For the fun of the thing’,39 he mounts the podium to say a few eloquent words in support of the proposal.
Still, he is impressive enough in his words - and the gathering strong enough - that when he descends from the podium one of the storekeepers from Ballarat Flat that he knows, a Mr Hetherington, who happens to speak French, is more than positive in his assessment, saying, ‘Nous allons bientot avoir la Republique Australienne, Signore!’ We are going to have an Australian republic before long, sir.
‘Quelle farce!’40
For at least on this day there is not remotely enough heat in the air to move the republic idea forward by much, and after just a couple of hours of collective grumbling, the meeting disperses and the men return to their work, albeit with a few pausing to down a nobbler or two.
Despite the thrill of having spoken from the podium, Raffaello Carboni has nevertheless had enough of life on the goldfields. Just as he had fallen in love with fossicking for gold during his first try at it, he has now firmly fallen out of love with it. Climbing from his all-but-barren pit one hot day in early December, he discovers that his washing cradle has been stolen, and it proves to be the last straw, coming as it does on the back of a terrible case of dysentery - always more than problematic when a man is at the bottom of a shaft. There are swarms of flies moving all over him wherever he goes, and this last hole is marginally less satisfactory than the partner he has been digging with. In sum, basta! Enough! It is time to try something new, and he soon enough finds a job working for a squatter as a shepherd looking after large flocks of sheep, going from grassy paddock to grassy paddock.
Those 50,000-odd men who remain on the Victorian goldfields, however, are becoming increasingly more outraged, as August in Bendigo sees the birth of the ‘Red Ribbon Rebellion’, whereby all those diggers wishing to show their solidarity with each other and the whole movement start wearing red ribbons in their hats. And they mean it, too. For they are united in their view: if His Excellency won’t reduce the license fee from 30 to 10 shillings, then the diggers, in turn, will refuse to pay, bringing on a crisis for the government coffers, which currently have over PS50,000 per month in license fees pouring into them.
While the view of most of the squatters about this turn of events is unprintable, one expression of outrage does make it into the public domain, black on white. According to The Argus, some squatters in the Legislative Council - certainly not aligned with John Pascoe Fawkner - advocate that the best solution is ‘to arm the young men of Melbourne and send them on horseback to make the diggers pay!’41
For his part, the correspondent for the Geelong Advertiser, Samuel Irwin, expresses a common view well: ‘Oh, that we had but one good man and true to bring our claims before the council, not as lucky taxable vagabonds but as hardworking taxed unrepresented members of the body politic, who are hampered by regulations so absurd that we are compelled to believe that the framers of them wished merely to tolerate such a class.’ 42
‘Tolerating’ the diggers, however, is at this point far from the mind of Charles La Trobe. In the face of this general refusal by a large mass of armed men to pay the current 30 shillings license fee, he feels he has no choice.
Fifty Redcoats of the 40th regiment are immediately despatched from Melbourne to Bendigo, and an officer and 30 troops are transferred over from Forrest Creek.
By the beginning of September, La Trobe’s worries deepen that the diggers’ protests will escalate. They have now placed an embargo on those storekeepers who pay the license fee, meaning there is another source of revenue that is drying up. Contrary to Chief Gold Commissioner William Henry Wright’s conviction that ‘the current force at present on these Goldfields is sufficient’,43 La Trobe orders the ‘whole of the effective military force remaining at his command’44 - four officers and 145 men of all ranks of the 40th - to proceed to Bendigo. The total number of army men on the ground in Bendigo is now a staggering 274, in addition to the 171 police. It is obviously an unsustainable situation, and the inability of the Bench to effectively fine potentially thousands of miners across all the Victorian goldfields who refuse to pay the license fee is obvious to all. Clearly, La Trobe must look for another solution.
Chief Commissioner Wright agrees and is nothing if not frank in the report he has already submitted on 28 August: ‘We are compelled to report that the reduction of the license-fee, if not its abolition altogether is inevitable … If blood should once be shed it is impossible to foresee the consequences, but it would very possibly throw serious obstacles in the way of establishing regulations to be enforced on the goldfields.’45
It is with this in mind that the Lieutenant-Governor proposes to the Legislative Council that the whole license fee system be done away w
ith and replaced by a tax imposed on all exported gold, thus ensuring it would only be those who actually had the riches who would have to pay. But the Legislative Council - composed, after all, of merchants, officials and pastoralists from the pre-gold era - won’t hear a word of it and continues to insist that a direct tax on the diggers is the only way.
Unsurprisingly, this majority of the Legislative Council has received the full support of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, which had earlier passed a sanctimonious resolution: ‘Any restraint on exportation is contrary to established principle of the commercial system, as tending to trammel and retard the free operation of trade.’46
One of the only members of the Legislative Council who does speak up for the diggers during the second reading of the Goldfields Management Bill is John Pascoe Fawkner, who proposes that the license fee be cut to five shillings a month, pointing out that the amount exacted in license fees from the diggers is ‘more than half as much as the whole annual value of wool derived from flocks depastured nearly gratuitously on millions of acres’.47 Why should the squatters pay far less for the lease of their land, from which is derived such vast guaranteed annual profits, while the diggers are left paying such a vast sum for a relatively tiny claim with practically no guarantees at all?
But come, come, come, Fawkner. The member for the Loddon, John Goodman, takes the long handle to what he perceives to be Fawkner’s deprecation of the value of the wool industry, pointing out that with the increased price of wool and mutton, pastoral revenues had gone up four-fold from the year before to now be PS4 million!
…
In short … though the squatters are now rolling in it as never before, they’re still paying barely any tax at all?
…
Er, yes.
The most obvious loser on the day is the government of Charles La Trobe. Seen ‘to fall in with the wish of the majority’,48 it caves in and withdraws support for the very gold export duty it has proposed. In the end, amendments are made to the new gold license fees it has sought to abolish, which become law in November: PS1(20s) for one month, PS2 for three months, PS4 for six months and PS8 for a year. Alas, for the diggers, there would still be license-hunts to ensure that all diggers were fully paid up, and the licenses would only be issued for specific goldfields, meaning they were not transferable.
The whole thing is a mess, and all who follow the issue closely know it.
Captain John Dane MLC is commendably curt in recording what he thinks of the latest change of direction, claiming of the La Trobe government that he ‘would not put it to govern a colony of cats’.49
As to those in London keeping a weather eye on events in the colonies, they despair at the direction things are taking, with no less than The Times harrumphing unpleasantly, ‘The Government of Victoria is humbled in the dust before a lawless mob; the reign of order and the supremacy of the law are at an end.’50
There is, however, one particular reason for at least a little optimism. Charles La Trobe’s letter of resignation has been received and the individual charged with finding his replacement, the Secretary of State, the Duke of Newcastle, feels he has just the kind of man they need to replace the vacillating La Trobe: a military man, a man of stern character with a ramrod spine and devotion to duty, a man with a proven record of using a small military force to take on a rebellious mob. At one point in his naval career, with just over 300 men at his command, Sir Charles Hotham - for it is he - successfully routed 3500 Argentinians trying to enforce a blockade on the Parana River, and it was for this feat that he was knighted. Hotham does have fight in him, and it is the firm view of the Duke that that is what Victoria needs at this moment.
The Duke of Newcastle is pleased with the appointment, as he writes to Charles La Trobe in a note apologising for having taken so long to find his replacement: ‘I have felt so strongly the vast importance … of selecting a first rate man, that I could not conscientiously appoint anyone of whose qualifications I was not thoroughly assured.’51
It is true that there is some kerfuffle when the Crimean War breaks out, as Sir Charles tries to get out of the appointment in the hope of receiving a senior posting to command a ship in the Black Sea theatre of that war. For, as Sir Charles would later recount, ‘My previous habits had in no way qualified me for such employment … I endeavoured to convince both his Grace and the Prime Minister that a better selection might without any difficulty be made.’52
But neither man will hear of it, and it falls to the Duke to tell Sir Charles that, in the service of Her Majesty, this is his only option.
‘Notwithstanding my entire conviction that the Government were mistaken, I had either to decline serving the public or comply with their wishes,’ Hotham writes to his sponsor, the Earl of Malmesbury. ‘Thus placed, I accepted the latter alternative, and with a sorrowful heart go to Victoria.’53
Still, one more thing, sir, before you depart …
Taking a sheaf of papers that contain the financial estimates of the colony of Victoria, the Duke of Newcastle hands them to the incoming Lieutenant-Governor and says, ‘This, Sir Charles … is the difficulty you have got to face. There is an enormously extravagant expenditure going on in that colony which, if not arrested, will cause its ruin.’54
It is for Sir Charles to fix that problem, and he is not long in looking at all options, including getting the license money by force of arms. But what arms? It is with this in mind that he has written to the Colonial Office before departure, querying, ‘On what am I to depend if a struggle arises? Can I call a regiment from Sydney, Van Diemen’s Land or New Zealand?’55
4 March 1854, Ballarat, ‘Read all about it!’
And here now is something new. For on this day in a building in Mair Street, right opposite the Market Square, a massive printing press that was moved in just the week before, starts to roll. The press is substantially composed of an enormous cylinder upon which each letter of every article has been individually set. With a turn of the cylinder, each one of the newspaper’s four pages is printed and … out comes the first edition of the weekly The Ballarat Times: Buninyong & Creswick’s Creek Advertiser. It is a fresh triumph for its proprietor and editor, 25-year-old Englishman Henry Seekamp, who has invested his life savings in the venture.
From the beginning, Seekamp - closely supported by his common-law wife ten years his senior, the Irishwoman Clara, who had first come to the goldfields as a star beauty actress of her own theatrical troupe - intends his newspaper to pursue a civic-minded and radical agenda. Seekamp is a ‘short, thick, rare sort of man, of quick and precise movements, sardonic countenance; and one look from his sharp, round set of eyes tells you at once that you must not trifle with him’,56 for he is one who frequently struggles to keep his temper under control. He has no truck with the authorities, detests the amount charged for licenses and is firmly on the side of his readers - the diggers - in all things. He wants them to have the vote, to begin with, and their own representatives in parliament. He wants hospitals and schools paid for by the government and thinks it an outrage, an OUTRAGE, sir, that these things have been so long denied.
True, it would be said that he writes ‘occasionally under inspiration from the source whence tradition tells us Dutchmen have drawn their courage’,57 but there is no doubt he writes a compelling editorial, much more given to confrontation than consultation.
Not that The Ballarat Times is without competition, for all that. Also read widely on the goldfields, firstly, is the sporadically issued The Gold Diggers’ Advocate & Commercial Advertiser, with its notable masthead motto, ‘Labour found empires; knowledge and virtue exalt and perpetuate them’. It is an openly political paper re-started just a little earlier in the year with the abundantly red-haired and heavily bewhiskered George Black, as editor and proprietor. Many of those involved with The Diggers’ Advocate, including Henry Holyoake, were heavily involved in pushing the cause of Chartism in Great Britain - and they are eagerly doing the same here now. With a strong
republican slant, The Diggers’ Advocate is composed and printed in Melbourne - with the enthusiastic assistance of an intensely Christian journalist and recent arrival from Scotland, Ebenezer Syme - and rushed to the selling posts around the goldfields from there. Syme’s youngest brother, David, is on these Ballarat goldfields, and he feels the issues every bit as strongly as Seekamp, Holyoake and Black, and they are consumed with passion for their cause.
All put together, Ballarat just happens to be awash with men such as this: articulate and dedicated journalists and editors who have long ago eschewed the notion that the proper job of journalism is to merely chronicle history. For they want to help make it.
Early April, 1854, Ballarat has a strange exchange
It is only a small exchange, but as it is more than passing curious. For while there are certainly rough Vandemonians, there are rougher Vandemonians, and James Bentley, a local storekeeper of noted cunning, is very likely the roughest of them all. He is a former convict from Surrey, and his piercingly blue eyes glare from a face that bears the scars of dozens of fights every bit as much as his back bears the marks of many well-deserved lashes. And he walks with a severe limp, his ankles having spent 12 months in manacles on Norfolk Island before he was transferred to Van Diemen’s Land, before being granted a ticket-of-leave on 18 March 1850, before receiving a conditional pardon the following year.
To see the 35-year-old standing on the verandah of the Police Magistrates’ Court is not a surprise. What is a surprise is that he is not in manacles, being led away to the lockup. And what is even more surprising is the ‘business’ he is on.
‘Where is Mr Dewes?’58 he asks casually of a bystander, John Dewes being the most powerful judicial official at the Ballarat diggings - a blue-blood Englishman who had attended Rugby School and only arrived from Melbourne the month before.
Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Page 23