Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  In their own tent inside the Stockade, Matthew Faulds and his heavily pregnant wife, Mary, cower in terror. Mary is due to give birth at any moment, fleeing is out of the question, and all Matthew can do is have her lie on her back, roll two logs either side of her for protection and put a blanket over her as they pray for a miracle. A mounted trooper suddenly slashes open the tent, the flooding light revealing the situation. He turns and leaves them be. Their daughter, Adeliza, is born not long afterwards.

  Ah, but there are many more atrocities to come, as recorded by Samuel Lazarus: ‘Another man, a considerable distance from the Stockade … went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers and seeing the savage butchery going on cried out in terror to a trooper galloping by, “For God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children,” his prayer may as well have been addressed to a devil. He was shot dead on his own threshold.’66 Not far away and only shortly afterwards, former Ballarat Times and Melbourne Morning Herald correspondent Frank Hasleham turned digger and part-time reporter (he provides information to the current Geelong Advertiser correspondent) is trying to find a safe place away from the danger of the Stockade. He happens upon a quiet gully when he looks up to see three horsemen heading his way.

  ‘One of them,’ he would later recount, ‘who rode considerably ahead of the other two arrived within hailing distance, [and] he hailed me as a friend.’67

  The trooper now addresses him, asking pleasantly, ‘Do you wish to join our force?’

  ‘No,’ Hasleham replies a little uncertainly, surprised by the question. ‘I am unarmed, and in a weak state of health. I hope this madness with the diggers will soon be over.’

  Ah, but there is some madness yet to go: at a distance of just four paces, the trooper raises his pistol, points at Hasleham’s breast and shoots.

  Hasleham falls hard, bleeding heavily. The trooper isn’t done, however. Dismounting, he handcuffs the innocent man, who lies there for the next ‘two hours, bleeding from a wound in his breast, until his friends send for a blacksmith who forces off the handcuffs with a hammer and cold chisel’.68

  In their humble abode some two miles from Eureka, Henry Seekamp and his wife, Clara, are woken by a furious pounding on the door and before they can even open it, a friend by the name of Underwood bursts in.

  ‘I’m as glad as if I’d got a thousand pounds to find you in bed,’ says he. ‘The military have gone down and fired upon the diggers.’69

  No sooner have the Seekamps tried to absorb this appalling news than a young boy comes and says to their servant girl, ‘Your brother’s been shot dead.’70 The distressed young girl falls away into a dead faint.

  Meanwhile outside the Stockade, Raffaello Carboni, seeing that the tent next to his own is in flames and that his own is likely next, rushes to retrieve some important papers. Once they are secured, he has just emerged again when he comes face to face with the commander of the foot police, Sub-Inspector Carter, pointing his pistol and giving him the sharp order to fall in with the other prisoners.

  With no other choice, Carboni obeys. Then, in the middle of the gully, he spies Captain Thomas, whom he knows a little. Thomas asks the Italian whether he had indeed been made a prisoner within the Stockade.

  ‘No, sir,’71 Carboni replies frankly, before adding a brief explanation of where he had been. There is something in the way the Italian speaks, in the way he is happy to look the officer in the eyes, that connotes honesty - and the thoroughly decent Captain Thomas reacts in kind.

  ‘If you really are an honest digger,’ the English officer says with a gentle stroke of his sword, ‘I do not want you, sir; you may return to your tent.’72

  Still, the fiery Italian is not out of danger. Upon deciding to return to his tent, he is crossing the gully once more when a trooper who has spied him in the distance smoothly holds out his gun and fires! The bullet flies ‘with such a tolerable precision’73 that it blows off his cabbage-tree hat, and he is only narrowly able to escape.

  At this point, a lesser man than Carboni would have done anything rather than continue to expose himself in the open but, as a man who has fought with Garibaldi, he is made of stronger stuff. In short order, when he hears himself called by name by Doctor Carr and Father Smyth, who are making their way to the Stockade to help with the wounded - and seeking his assistance - he instantly responds.

  Meanwhile, many weeping, shrieking women have now emerged to throw themselves over the bleeding forms of their husbands to protect them from further bayonets and bullets, even as others collapse in anguish upon the bodies of their freshly slaughtered husbands, their frequently very young children ‘frightened into quietness’.74 Mercifully, some women whose husbands have survived also appear, and soon bring handkerchiefs to cover the faces of the dead, and matting to cover their bodies.

  But the slaughter is still not over, as there remain many other targets for the soldiers to go after. The soldiers, as recorded by Captain Pasley, ‘hated the insurgents … for having wounded a drummer boy, and dangerously wounded Captain Wise, [and] were very anxious to kill the prisoners and it was with great difficulty, that they were restrained by the officers from doing so’.75

  When Pasley comes across a party of prisoners who are about to be bayoneted by their guard, he takes out his revolver and declares, ‘I will shoot the first man who injures a digger who has surrendered.’

  ‘This had the desired effect,’ he would later write to his father, ‘although I do not believe the prisoners themselves cared much, because they fully believed … that they would be hanged directly they got to the Camp.’76 Nevertheless, beyond Thomas and Pasley, there remain other pockets of decency among the police and military forces.

  Both the black American John Joseph and the Irishman John Manning have just emerged from a burning tent and are likely about to be shot when, with great force, Sub-Inspector Carter yells to the officer in charge to order his men to lower their guns.

  Elsewhere, just as one digger, John Tye, is being marched away in manacles, his wife runs up in her nightdress and sobbingly pleads for his release, only for that good woman to be laughed at and pushed around roughly by the soldiers. This is witnessed by an outraged officer, who thunders up on horseback and furiously upbraids the soldiers, ordering the woman to be let alone and her husband to be released.

  At much the same time, Mrs Shanahan is all alone in her tent, worried for the safety of her husband, when there is a knock on the door. She opens it to find a trooper and a soldier.

  ‘Shoot that woman,’ says the trooper without preamble.

  ‘Spare the woman,’ the shocked foot soldier replies.

  ‘Well, get out,’ says the trooper, ‘the place is going to be burnt down.’77

  And the intent of the other soldiers outside is clearly to do exactly that, because in shorter order the tent is set ablaze and the men gallop away. Mercifully, Mrs Shanahan manages to extinguish her tent.

  Finally some equilibrium is achieved as the last of the fight goes out of the diggers and the worst of the bloodlust fades from the police and soldiers. Both the shooting and screaming at last, mercifully, stops. The red mist lifts, leaving behind the sickly sweet stench of burnt human flesh mixed with the acrid whiff of gunpowder smoke.

  With each passing minute, now well after six o’clock, the growing light illuminates an ever more ghastly scene. ‘Pikes, spent balls, and pools of blood, showed where the contest had been most deadly.’78 Some diggers have gushing, gaping wounds in their abdomens and the haunted eyes of men who know they are about to die. Others, who just an hour ago were living and breathing and talking, are now no more than grotesque corpses, their hideous grimaces a testament to the agony with which they met their deaths.

  A distressing number of diggers from other parts of the goldfields, who have not been involved at all, have simply come to gawk with open-mouthed wonder at this tragic spectacle. Carboni, for one, is ‘amazed at the apathy shown by the diggers … None would stir a finger.’79 Henry Seekamp and his wif
e are there, but not as gawkers. They are there as journalists - witnesses - and wander about, furiously taking notes for the next edition of The Ballarat Times. One man also there is the auctioneer and storekeeper Samuel Lazarus, who was asleep in his tent when the attack began.

  ‘A ghastly scene lay before me,’ he would shortly after confide to his diary, ‘which it is vain to attempt to describe. My blood crept as I looked upon it. Stretched on the ground in all the horror of a bloody death lay 18 or twenty lifeless and mutilated bodies. Some shot in the face, others literally riddled with wounds - one with a ghastly wound in the temples and one side of his body roasted by the flames of his tent - another, the most horrible of these appalling spectacles with a frightful gaping wound in his head through which the brains protruded, lay with his chest feebly heaving in the last agony of death.’80

  In one particular tent lies ‘the bodies of two men, their clothes ignited and their flesh partly consumed. They had been shot in their sleep probably, or were too drunk to escape from their burning tent and so perished. The sight caused even the rude soldiers to turn sickening away.’81

  Poor, brave John Hafele lies in grotesque pose, his intestines spilling onto the black dirt and still worse wounds apparent. ‘He had three contusions in the head, three strokes across the brow, a bayonet wound in the throat under the ear - I counted fifteen wounds in that carcass,’ a Geelong Advertiser correspondent and immediate eyewitness to the aftermath of the carnage would later report. ‘O! God, Sir, it was a sight for a sabbath morn that I humbly implore Heaven may never be seen again.’82 Strangely and most movingly of all, in the face of all the devastation around and about Hafele, his dog - a tiny Irish terrier - won’t stop howling and trying to lick his master awake. Time and again, the dog is removed, for decency’s sake, but time and again the dog comes back and, ‘lying again on his master’s breast [begins] howling again.’83

  Not far away is the broke-legged Irishman Thomas O’Neill, who had fought so valiantly, pike in hand, also with grievous wounds all over his torso and head. Though still alive, just, he is no more than a mass of pain, and as it is obvious that his situation is hopeless, he is quickly ‘despatched’.84

  And, of course, there is Edward Thonen, the popular ‘lemonade man’, ‘his mouth literally choked with bullets’,85 the bottom part of his face and jawline shot away.

  Yet another of the severely wounded not long for this world is poor James Brown, the Irishman who had first encouraged his mate Peter Lalor to take to the podium and the lead all at once. He is now all shot to pieces.

  Many of the freshly wounded have blood spurting from the ‘round blue holes in their flesh, already swollen, where a bullet or bayonet entered’,86 pulsing in rough rhythm to every agonised rising and falling of their chests. Sometimes the blood forms bubbles as the air finds a different way out and runs in dreadful rivulets onto the parched earth below. Flies have started to buzz in from everywhere and are now crawling over unattended wounds, already laying their eggs.

  One of the most terribly wounded and flyblown is Henry Powell, who, though entirely innocent, has been knocked down by horses, trampled, shot three times and then slashed with sabres. He is hanging on to life by a thread. Many such men who still have life in them are now being visited by Father Smyth, who is caught between deep grief at what he is seeing and cold fury that it has come to this. He now moves from dying man to dying man, administering the last rites to those who would receive him and to even the insensible ones when he knows they are Catholic. That Father Smyth is discouraged in this, shouted at by the troopers to move away, troubles him not at all. He continues to try to ease the diggers’ passage to the next world.

  All around him are scenes that no man who believes in a just God should ever have to witness - much of it powered by the devil in the dynamic between victor and vanquished. And just as many of the police have enjoyed boosting their income by purloining a good chunk of the fines levied on the diggers when they were alive, so now do many of them loot the bodies of the dead. And not just the police, for the Redcoats, too, rifle through the corpses and the prisoners, taking everything they can get as they ‘search’87 for hidden weaponry - from pound notes to watches to small collections of gold. One wounded rebel even has two Redcoats kneeling on his chest, holding him down, while another goes through his pockets.

  Finally, however, one of the officers has had enough and gives a sharp command to his soldiers, who instantly obey. Taking their pistols from their holsters, they clear the Stockade - under pain of being shot on the spot - of everyone bar the prisoners, the dead and the dying. And this includes a fiercely defiant and even more furious Father Smyth, who is ‘threatened with his life, and forced … at last to desist’.88

  It is now that Doctor Carr and Raffaello Carboni come to the fore, and it is at their direction that the severely wounded are at least separated from the rest, put on makeshift stretchers and carried up the Melbourne Road to the London Hotel, which is being converted into an even more makeshift hospital.

  (And if several diggers are staring at Carboni with wonder on their faces, it is for very good reason. ‘Old fellow, I am glad to see you alive!’ a digger by the name of Binney says to Carboni, gripping him with one hand while pointing at a dead digger with flowing red hair and bushy red beard with the other. ‘Everyone thinks that’s [you]!’)89 Another case of a mistaken identity, mercifully, proves to be the tragic report about the brother of the servant girl of the Seekamps. Yes, he has been shot and has lost an arm, but he will live.

  An officer gallops into the Camp at full cry. He has come from the Stockade and reports to all the soldiers, officers and officials now gathered around that it is all over. They have won the day, and now he needs horses and carts to bring in the dead and wounded.

  What is left of the Stockade is already being pulled down or simply burnt. By the end of the day it will be no more than a black scar on the earth, much like the Eureka Hotel had been. Terrified groups of prisoners who have been rounded up and put in manacles are now vainly trying to come to terms with their fate. Yes, the prospect of the battle had been so exciting yesterday that it stiffened the sinews, flared the nostrils and had them breathing fire, but now they are left with a truly horrifying reality. The danger of fighting for your freedom is that you are not only in danger of losing the freedom you do enjoy but the spectre of an even worse possibility dances before you.

  ‘What will become of us?’ many of the prisoners want to know.

  Their jeering guards are quick with their response: ‘Why, hung of course!’90

  It is a matter of curiosity to Charles Ferguson that, in regards to the prisoners, ‘Some who were the most frightened were the bravest only a few hours before; others were sullen and said nothing.’91

  A shattering bugle call rings out across the Stockade … and there is an instant reaction from the soldiers - ‘general assembly’. It is time for the victorious forces to gather the dead, the wounded and their prisoners and head back to the Camp. One of those prisoners is a digger, Samuel Perry, and though he has just been arrested after being caught in the thick of the fight, his chief hope is that the gold nugget he has managed to secrete in flour in a baker’s trough will remain undetected until he can get free once more.

  In a curious resemblance to the Stockade itself, the prisoners are put in the rough formation of a ‘hollow square’,92 wedged between the three carts in front and three carts behind, bearing the government force’s wounded and dead - and, more particularly, the digger dead. And there are many of them.

  On a rough count by Captain Thomas, ‘not less than thirty [were] killed on the spot’,93 while others have clearly not got long to live.

  A little over half are identifiable, while the rest will have to go to their graves anonymously. At least ten of the latter group are likely Americans, perhaps because, given the political sensitivities of the day, it is better not to have it recorded that these men of a famous and newly important republic have taken part
.

  The thing now is to get everyone back to the Camp.

  Alas, when the body of John Hafele is lifted into the dray, his little terrier reaches new depths of misery and jumps up to sit on his master’s chest, where he once more tries to lick him awake as the cart crunches and sways its leaden way towards the Government Camp.

  ‘No human being,’ Christopher Cook would later write, ‘could have lamented more at the loss of their dearest relative or friend than that affectionate and faithful dog bewailed the loss of his master.’94

  Those judged able are marched to the Government Camp. No matter that some of the rebels can barely walk, they must limp along the best they can, sooled from behind by military bayonet. Those unconscious are piled on top of each other in the drays like sacks of potatoes, in the same manner as the digger dead.

  It does not matter that there appears to be little fight left in this defeated group, just to be sure, the troopers guard them closely on each side, their swords up and ready to strike, their pistols and carbines cocked and primed to fire.

  The order comes - move out - and the first mass of 40 prisoners heads off with some mounted troopers in front and beside. The joyous foot soldiers fall in behind, pricking the stragglers with the points of their bayonets, even as many of the other soldiers joyously throw around the captured ‘Australian flag’95 between them, waving it around in the air and then throwing it in the dust to trample upon it. Eventually, it is hilariously tied to a horse’s tail and dragged to the Camp.

  And the indignities do not stop there. As they continue on their way towards the Camp, there are many troopers jumping around, flourishing their swords in victory and mockingly shouting in the face of their prisoners, ‘We have waked up Joe!’ to which other troopers reply uproariously, ‘And sent Joe to sleep again!’96