It is on that same reckoning that Carboni bids gute Nacht to Thonen, the one member of the Council for the Defence on duty through the night. Thonen gives the nod to the Californian sentries that the Italian should be allowed to leave, and Carboni returns to the place where he can get the best night’s rest for himself: his own tent outside the Stcokade. He leaves Thonen gazing out from his position halfway down on the western perimeter of the Stockade.
All is quiet on the western front …
Nearing two in the morning, Henry and Charles Nicholls also start to leave - after Henry persuades his brother that it is too dangerous to stay in the Stockade - though, this time, their way is barred by two big Irishmen with pikes, who also refuse the right of exit without the password.
‘Vinegar Hill,’ says Henry - the pikes are lowered and they are out. Still anxious about the feeling of menace in the air, Henry also convinces his brother to take a circuitous route back to their tent, which lies by the main road near Red Hill, not far from the Government Camp. On the off-chance the troops launch an attack tonight, it would not be wise to be between them and the Stockade.
‘It was a true Australian night,’ Nicholls would later recount, ‘not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the stringy-bark trees, which then grew thickly on the ranges, or of the gums whose white stems gleamed ghostly on the flats as we passed … The most profound silence prevailed; no lights were to be seen, the whole visible world was at rest … the very tents seemed to be asleep.
‘The whole air was full of that fine haze which is seen on such nights once or twice in the year, a haze which slightly veils but does not conceal, lending a ghostly, yet beautiful appearance to all around.’ 84
It feels good to be alive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE QUEEN’S PEACE IS DISTURBED
Riot was rapidly growing into a revolution.1
Lieutenant-Governor Hotham on the events of the morning of 3 December 1854 to the Colonial Secretary in London
Although in a military point of view the thing is trifling enough - in a political sense the fate of the Colony hinged upon it, and if any mistake had been made, the results would have been fearful …2
Captain Charles Pasley in a subsequent letter to his father, 27 June 1855
Rule Britton, rule the slave
Till Liberty points you out a grave …3
Digger Thomas Pierson in his diary on 10 October 1854
6 pm, 2 December 1854, Windsor Castle, England and the valley of death
Despite her relative youth at 35, Queen Victoria has already been on her throne 17 years and has seen the respect - even adoration - of her people grow over her reign. She has been happily married to Prince Albert for most of that time and loves to entertain, most particularly here at Windsor Castle.
On this very evening, as a matter of fact, she is sitting at the end of the dining table in the glorious State Dining Room, which has frescoes of food painted over the ceiling, while the walls are covered with red damask upon which hang portraits of kings and queens, forever staring glumly at each other across the festive tables they once knew. Many of the solid surfaces are gilt-edged, perhaps the tiniest of reminders to the reigning Queen of her prospering goldfields in faraway colonies.
Prince Albert sits at the other end of the table, while ranged down each side are such luminaries of the regal world as the Queen Mother, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent; His Serene Highness Prince Ernest of Leiningen; the Lord Chancellor and Lady Cranworth; the Ladies Augusta and Frances Bruce; the Right Hon. William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mrs Gladstone; Sir George Cooper and Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis, commanding officer of the 94th Regiment. As ever, Queen Victoria displays her strong appetite as she tucks into each course with gusto. The other guests try hard to keep pace - they know from experience that as Her Majesty finishes each plate, they must finish too.
It is a reasonably happy gathering, though tempered by the news that has only arrived a few days earlier that in the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War - ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!/ Charge for the guns, he said:/ Into the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred’ 4 - nearly half of her brave military servants there had been killed or wounded.
Entirely unbeknownst to Queen Victoria, of course, at this very time, in a far-flung outpost of her Empire, some more of her loyal subjects are about to make their own charges against some of her disloyal subjects. At least that is the way the loyal ones see it.
Pre-dawn, Sunday, 3 December 1854, a girding of loins at the Government Camp
Startled grunts fill the night. It is just after 2.30 am. One by one, very quietly, 182 men of the 12th and 40th Regiments and 94 police, together with their officers, are being silently woken inside the Government Camp. Stay quiet. It’s on. We’re moving against the rebels - now. Leaving from the back of the camp to shield their move from possible observers outside the main gates, they are told to form up in the gully just to the east of that small rise in the ground known as ‘Soldiers Hill’, a little under one mile north of the Camp.
Usually such an exercise would be accompanied by any number of shouted orders or bugle calls. But not on this occasion. The men know what to do. All their training, all their drills, have led to them this moment, to be able to form up quickly and move with stealth.
Once his men are gathered on the eastern flank of Soldiers Hill in the chill damp air, Captain Thomas, his epaulettes still lustrous in the thin moonlight, the rest of his body seemingly covered in a cloak of shadows, steps forward, while an aide de camp holds the bridle of his horse. Now each man, carefully holding his regulation smooth-bore, single-shot musket by his side, leans in close as the officer whispers instructions, even as they are served a tot of rum to warm their bellies.5 (The police have already had a nobbler of the same before formal assembly.) Captain Wise hovers closely, ensuring that no man overindulges, that all is as it should be, that every man is ready.
Captain Thomas’s words are crisp and precise: they are about to launch an attack on the rebels’ Stockade up on the Eureka, and they will go in just before dawn. Now, listen carefully. The soldiers of the 12th and 40th Regiments - 65 mostly youthful soldiers under Captain William Queade and 87 rather more grizzled veterans led by Captain Wise, with Thomas personally in overall command - are to move on foot from the north-west, up the gully that lies just to the west of Stockyard Hill, against the Stockade at the point where the defences are at their thinnest.
As to the 30 mounted men of the 40th Regiment under Hall and the dozen mounted police under Kossack, they are to move to the high ground of Stockyard Hill, where the Free Trade Hotel lies. From there they will not only be able to watch proceedings, but Kossack’s men (armed with rifled carbines) will be able to fire down into the Stockade if necessary. All of them can hold there until ordered to move down the east side of the Stockade. The foot police under Sub-Inspector Charles Carter are to advance alongside the infantry. Meanwhile, Samuel Furnell’s 55 mounted police will move out to the right of the infantry and down along the western face of the Stockade towards the south-west corner. Once Kossack and Hall have led the Mounted 40th and police down along the eastern side, the Stockade will effectively be encircled.
Meanwhile, 175 soldiers are to remain in the Government Camp under Captain Atkinson, should the diggers attack while well over half the garrison is away. This splitting of the available force does not sit easily with Pasley, but he reluctantly accepts that it has to be done. For those moving against the Stockade, they are not to fire upon the diggers until so ordered. Those insurgents who ‘cease to resist’6 are to be spared. And a last point: the soldiers are to do everything possible to remain silent - it is extremely important to get as close as possible to the Stockade without being detected.
All good? All understood? All content?
No, not entirely. Two soldiers, knowing they will be expected to fire on men whom they regard as innocent, promptly fall out of the ranks and resolutely an
nounce that they will not march - only to be immediately arrested for their trouble.7
No matter. Better off without cowards in our ranks. Now we can go. Company, advance.
‘We marched off in the dark,’ Captain Pasley would later tell his father, ‘in such perfect silence that you could almost have heard a pin drop.’8 Soft whinnying in the moonlight. The light grunts of horses suddenly bearing the weight of big men. And all of it at an unaccustomed hour.
No fewer than 100 are on horseback, while 176 - composed of foot police and men from the 12th and 40th Regiments - are on foot. The soldiers with their muskets are in the middle, the police with their pistols, carbines and shotguns on the flanks, with the mounted men at the rear - a military spear. Unsure if they may be ambushed as soon as they move beyond the protective embrace of the Camp, the formation is framed to react quickly to any such possibility.
They are a formidable force with ferocious firepower. And they have legal firepower, to boot, with Police Magistrate Charles Prendergast Hackett and Civil Commissary George Webster accompanying them. The presence of these officials is intended to make the difference between this being a brutal military exercise to crush rebels who do not recognise Her Majesty’s authority - which would not do at all - and a far more sophisticated judicial and civil action to restore order among those who refuse to obey Her Majesty’s laws. Though for reasons of security Captain Thomas has not confided it to the man in question, his plan is for Hackett to loudly read the Riot Act to the rebels, commanding them to disperse, whereupon, once they refuse, the military would be permitted by law to respond with firepower. Ideally, the diggers would see the formidable military array surrounding them, hear the Riot Act and lose all will to fight - as had happened at the great armed Chartist demonstrations in Great Britain, bar one.
As to Assistant-Commissioner Gilbert Amos, he is coming along as something of a guide, since he knows the area well, particularly the route they are taking to the Stockade. (Neither Commissioner Rede nor Assistant-Commissioner Johnstone, however, will go. It is Rede’s opinion, as expressed to the Chief Commissioner of the Goldfields, that the rebels would have but to see Mr Johnstone and himself, and the two would be ‘doomed … [as] in their instructions in drilling they especially point out the necessity of first shooting the officers’.9 Far better to not give them such a target and remain in the barracks, ready to give authority to the group of armed men staying back to defend the Camp.)
Pre-dawn, Sunday, 3 December 1854, many cloaks of shadows stalk the Eureka
All is quiet in the Stockade. True, there had been great excitement a couple of hours earlier when the defenders received two reports in fairly quick succession from the Californian pickets that a large body of Redcoats was on its way towards them, but things had settled quickly after both proved to be false alarms. The rebels seek the comfort of their own tents, while others adhere to Father Smyth’s admonition and try to stay clear of the trouble that is clearly brewing. It has been one thing to march drills back and forth and talk of revolt, but as the pressure has started to boil like a billy … it’s quite another matter to actually stay there and bear arms.
There are sentries on duty at the Stockade, of course, and a few men are awake, keeping the large fire in the middle of the Stockade stoked. The vast majority, however, are sleeping the sleep of the dead, the dead-drunk and the dead-exhausted. All up, of the more than 500 men who were in the Stockade the previous afternoon, maybe just 120 remain now, if you count a few of the shadows too.
At least the way she would tell it ever afterwards, alone in her bed in a small house in Geelong at the time, Alicia Dunne wakes with a start. Something is not right. And from the first she knows it is Peter. She worries about him constantly - she knows how dangerous the goldfields can be - but now her worry focuses. There! In this ‘vision of the night’ she sees her Peter ‘wounded and bleeding’.10 A cold, gripping horror possesses her, and she cannot shake it. Somewhere in the distance a dog is barking.
Pre-dawn, Sunday, 3 December, the Redcoats close in
Carefully now in that early pre-dawn where they are less men than ghostly spectres - their red jackets making little impact on the all-enveloping blackness that is just starting to lift - Thomas keeps his forces moving down into the gully and eastwards for some fifteen minutes along the northern banks of Yarrowee Creek. Then, on Amos’s signal, at a point a little less than one mile north-west of the Stockade, they cross the creek and head due south. The going is not easy, particularly for the foot soldiers carrying their heavy muskets over their shoulders and watching every step carefully in the dark, but … theirs is not to reason why. In the thin, frozen moonlight, every breath from the horses’ nostrils and mouths instantly condenses into a smoky mist.
They navigate their way by moonlight through a landscape shorn of all landmarks, past endless mullock heaps, cruel shafts, shepherds’ holes, fallen logs, piles of slabs, muddy pools, pits full of trash and broken bottles, huts and tents held up by innumerable ropes as long as they are taut. It’s all but impossible to see in this light - made even more so since Thomas’s own edict that no lights are to be shown after dark has been obeyed everywhere but inside the Stockade, and all the tents and huts remain dark.
Still, with the tail obliged to follow the body, as the body must follow the head, the main thing is that the head is Commissioner Amos, and he knows the route well. Carefully, quietly, he now turns the column due east parallel to the north bank of Specimen Gully as the men keep moving in their ‘muffled tramp’.11
A shot rings out in the night, coming from somewhere up on the curiously elongated mound of Black Hill. Mercifully, it has come from a great distance away. The crack of the gun has not faded before, among the advancing troops, Captain Thomas cocks his ear towards where the shot originated and whispers, ‘We are seen. Forward, and steady men! Don’t fire; let the insurgents fire first. You wait for the sound of the bugle.’12
They push on a little faster than before, and there is no further gunfire.
After 50 careful minutes, the men and horses arrive at their appointed position, just 300 yards to the north of the Stockade, hidden from whatever rebels might be on the lookout by the small rise of Stockyard Hill. The moon has now set, leaving only the most determined stars behind. On the eastern horizon, the first flush of dawn is starting to creep into the night sky above Warrenheip.
It is just after 4.20 am.
‘The Infantry,’ Captain Pasley would recount to his father, ‘were then formed in skirmishing order, with supports, and the Cavalry sent round to turn the left flank of the entrenchment. By Thomas’s desire I kept in the Centre of the skirmishers whilst he went to the right flank to be able to communicate with the Cavalry.’13
Indeed, as Sub-Inspector Samuel Furnell takes his mounted police out onto that right flank to come at the Stockade from the south-west, the mounted infantry of the 40th Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Hall, and the mounted police under Sub-Inspector Ladislaus Kossak, move up to the Free Trade Hotel on Stockyard Hill, to initially cover the north-east face of the Stockade - effectively its rear - about 250 yards away. Captain Thomas, meanwhile, whispers more instructions to his soldiers and they arrange themselves in battle order. And so, just as they have been trained to do, drilling for many months and even years, the government’s real soldiers arrange themselves into formation to advance. As they do so, officers on horseback - distinguishable from other mounted troopers by their golden braid and epaulets - wheel their mounts back and forth behind their men to be certain that all is just so.
Meanwhile, the rest of the infantry, waiting to the rear in close-packed ranks, are to remain in reserve and called up as required.
Once all is in place, near silence again reigns supreme as the men await the order to advance.
Among those readying to move closer to action, the more experienced of the soldiers take half a dozen rounds from their cartridge boxes and stuff them under their waist belts or into the waistband of t
heir trousers. This tactic makes the ammunition easily accessible when the battle begins - when bullets are whizzing past your ears, the last thing you want is to be fumbling for cartridges in a box on your hip. Heard, too, are whispered prayers and the click of rosary beads.
All up, it is a great satisfaction to captains Thomas, Pasley and Wise that so far they have been able to manoeuvre this close to the Stockade without alerting the diggers inside. And yet, as quiet as the soldiers have been, it has not been possible to move such a large body of armed men so close to the Stockade, some of them on horseback, without having now been noticed outside its walls.
One man who has been aroused, who heard the approaching corps and reacted instantly, is Canadian digger Thomas Budden, camped just a couple of hundred yards from the Stockade. Realising that the worst is about to happen, Budden, who went to school in Toronto with Captain Charles Ross, now takes a courageous risk by racing to the Stockade, dodging the mounds of tailings and gaping mine-shafts as he goes, to warn Ross that the soldiers are coming. Running as silently as he can, he tells the sentries what is about to befall them and is allowed to pass, whereupon he immediately makes his way to rouse Ross. Speaking feverishly, Budden urges his old friend to get out now, while he still can. If he stays he risks losing his life. Come NOW, Charles!
Ross thanks his old friend but calmly refuses. If the Redcoats are about to attack, then his place is right here. What sort of a man would he be to turn tail at the first sight of the armed foe? He is staying and it is all that Budden can do now to safely get away.
At least Budden has given some warning that the troopers are indeed on their way, and the sentries now gaze down the hill. In the tepid and tragic light, there is suddenly an enormous sense of menace in the air as the realisation hits those in the Stockade: it really has come to this; they will shortly be under attack.
Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Page 47