Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  As to the judicial power previously borne by the Gold Commissioners as mini-dictators, that now passes to local courts presided over by men who have been elected by the diggers themselves, a la the American system. And who should be one of the ten such magistrates so elected for the first time, on 14 July 1855?

  It is none other than Raffaello Carboni, gone in the space of just a few short months from being in the dock as an accused prisoner to now presiding over the entire court from the big chair behind the magisterial bench. On the first day that the Italian turns up to the courthouse, he pauses beneath the shady gum tree outside and recognises it as the same spot where, on the night of 30 November the year before, he, George Black and Father Smyth had tried to convince Commissioner Rede to do everything possible to prevent bloodshed. A shadow of sorrow and regret passes over him, as it always does when he thinks of those terrible events, followed by cold rage. If only the three men could have succeeded …

  Yet, as 1855 progresses, this newfound thing beneath the Southern Cross called ‘democracy’ still has some way to go to demonstrate its true wonders. This includes Henry Seekamp being released from gaol three months early, on 28 June, a month after Governor Hotham had been presented with a monster petition signed by 30,000 people. In the meantime, the first two men proposed by Ballarat to represent them in Victoria’s Legislative Council this year are John Basson Humffray and … Peter Lalor!

  Lalor’s election manifesto is clear.

  ‘I am in favour of such a system of law reform,’ he states, ‘as will enable the poor man to obtain equal justice with the rich one, which at present I believe to be impossible.’95

  Both men stand unopposed and, on 10 November 1855, before the crowd gathered at the Ballarat Local Court, they are formally elected to take their place in the newly enlarged96 Legislative Council as two of the eight representatives from five electorates of the goldfields.

  In his acceptance speech, after being cheered as wildly to the echo as he is to the podium, Lalor is typically eloquent.

  ‘Gentlemen and fellow diggers,’ he begins, ‘not twelve months ago a reward was offered by Government for my apprehension, and now by your suffrage I am going into the Legislative Council to meet that Government, and depend upon it I shall not shrink from my duty …

  ‘I wish briefly to allude to the affair of the “Eureka Stockade” - not that I intend to vindicate the course of action, for I am free to confess that it was a rash act; nevertheless the most honourable man might have acted under similar circumstances as I did then. You are my witnesses that I never harangued the diggers to take up arms against the Government, and therefore, never would I have entertained the idea of becoming their commander-in-chief any more than I do this day expect to be made the Governor of Victoria. On the Thursday, I was present at the meeting, and one of my mates, James Brown, who was killed in that sad affair, asked me to get up, and having so done I could not conscientiously turn back having once put my hand to the plough - that hand which Signor Raffaello has said, “was never polluted by treachery or cowardice” - I could not, would not, retreat. It has been said that nothing was ever yet obtained by physical force, but there is something to be learnt from past historical events …

  ‘When King John granted to England that memorable institution the great Magna Carta, it was to the Barons of England, with arms in their hands, and not to the petition of the people …

  ‘And I will affirm,’ he continues, ‘that, if Sir Charles Hotham had ruled in Victoria in accordance with the principles of the British Constitution, the diggers of Ballarat would not have taken up arms - the Eureka Stockade would never have been erected, and, instead of standing here a mutilated man, should now be an unknown, but a happy digger …’97

  More thunderous applause.

  And so it is that Peter Lalor, who is also soon to be a father - for he had married Alicia on 10 July 1855 at St Mary’s Church, Geelong, and she had all but instantly fallen pregnant - heads off to take his place in the very chamber that only a year earlier he had led the revolt against.

  On Tuesday, 27 November 1855, just three days shy of a year after he had led 500 rebels in raising their right hand to the Southern Cross to swear their solemn oath - and 343 days after having a reward placed on his head for having done exactly that - Peter Lalor raises his right hand once more, to swear an entirely different kind of oath. In the august chambers of the Victorian Legislative Council, under full magisterial sail, he is ushered forward by none other than John Pascoe Fawkner, to swear an oath to take his own place there.

  ‘I, Peter Lalor, do sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as lawful Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of this Colony of Victoria. So help me God.’98 The transformation from one swearing to the other is, of course, breathtaking.

  And yet, in that last year, Lalor has not changed - his new homeland has, because of the very action he and his fellow rebels had taken.

  And it would never be the same again …

  EPILOGUE

  Stand up my young Australian, in the brave

  light of the sun, and hear how Freedom’s battle

  was in the old days lost - and won,

  ‘Ere the year was over; Freedom rolled in like a flood,

  They gave us all we asked for - when

  we asked for it in blood.1

  Victor Daley, late 19th-century Irish-Australian poet

  Democracy is much more than a system. It is an ideal and a spirit born day by day in those who believe in it. Eureka had its brief and bloody day 150 years ago. Eureka lives on in the heart and will of every Australian who understands, believes in and acts on the principle that the people are ‘the only legitimate source of all political power’.2

  Author John Molony in his ‘Eureka and the Prerogative of the People’ - a paper presented as a lecture in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series at Parliament House on 23 April 2004, in the year of the 150th anniversary of the battle

  Just 18 months after Sir Charles Hotham made his grand entrance to Victoria with more pomp and pageantry than he had ever previously been accorded in his life, and certainly as much as the colony had ever been able to muster, on the last day of 1855 he prepared to make his exit in rather less-exalted circumstances.

  Isolated, discredited and tired, he had written and dispatched his letter of resignation the month before, and it had been his intention to return to England. Yet, just in the week before Christmas, he had fallen ill after catching a chill at the opening of the Melbourne gas-works and steadily deteriorated from there with what was thought to be a combination of influenza, dysentery, epilepsy and perhaps even a stroke.

  At 11 o’clock that oppressively hot morning, lying in a mess of his own making, he fell into a coma so deep that he could see eternity from there. At 12.30 pm he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was just 49 years old.

  In the Legislative Council on 10 January 1856, it was none other than the colony’s most famous politician, John Pascoe Fawkner, who rose to propose a motion that the Council accord a sum ‘not exceeding PS1500 to defray the expenses of the public funeral of the late Governor, and to erect a monument over his tomb - the design for the monument to be subjected to the approval of the widow’.3

  Acknowledging that the memory of Sir Charles was not universally revered, Fawkner added generously that he, at least, believed that the public was satisfied that at all times Sir Charles wished to do right, even if ‘his want of knowledge of the constitutional forms of Government prevented him giving that satisfaction which otherwise he would have done’.4

  Peter Lalor, however, sitting in that same august chamber, would have none of it.

  ‘While I am willing to accede to the proposition of PS500 for the funeral,’ he said, ‘I am unwilling to sanction the expense of erecting a monument over Sir Charles Hotham. I do not wish to offend the living or insult the character of the dead, but I must say that there i
s a sufficient monument already existing in the graves of the thirty individuals slain at Ballarat. These tombs form a standing monument …’5

  Lalor was supported in this contention by his fellow member of the Legislative Council, John Basson Humffray, and though they were making what was surely no more than a fair point, Fawkner proved to be on the winning side of the argument and the motion was passed.

  Sir Charles Hotham was buried in Melbourne General Cemetery, and an impressive monument now lies above his grave, bearing the relatively neutral inscription:

  TO THE MEMORY OF SIR CHARLES HOTHAM CAPTAIN IN THE ROYAL NAVY AND ONE OF HER MAJESTY’S NAVAL AIDES DE CAMP KNIGHT COMMANDER OF THE MOST HONOURABLE MILITARY ORDER OF THE BATH AND THE FIRST CAPTAIN-GENERAL AND GOVERNOR-IN-CHIEF OF VICTORIA.

  As we have seen, while travelling to Australia aboard Scindian in the middle of 1852, Peter Lalor had told his shipmate William Craig that, ‘I intend to have a voice in its government before two years are over … and I intend to sit in the Victorian Parliament after I find out where improvements are needed.’6 Despite having led Australia’s most famous revolt in the interceding period, Peter Lalor very nearly kept to that timetable, and his nomination to the Legislative Council was no more than the bare beginning of a very long and successful political career. His voice would be heard for decades afterwards in the Victorian parliament, just as it was once heard when standing on a stump, exhorting his fellow diggers to ‘stand truly by each other and to fight to defend our rights and liberties …’7

  Lalor remained as the Member for Ballarat in the Legislative Council until March 1856, and then in November of that year, once the new Electoral Act was passed, he moved to the newly established Legislative Assembly - a body that the diggers who held Miner’s Rights had the franchise for - representing Ballarat’s seat of North Grenville.

  Despite his role at Eureka, Lalor did not prove to be the voice of ‘the common man’ that many had expected him to be.

  In late 1856, Peter Lalor voted in favour of reforms to the Electoral Act that included continuing to allow plural voting (giving a man as many votes as he has properties valued at PS50 in different districts), while placing a six-month residency restriction on the Legislative Assembly franchise! His apparent turncoat attitude caused bitter scorn to be heaped upon him from all quarters, most particularly from his constituents on Ballarat, who had put him into parliament in the first place. They now found - at least those itinerants without property - that they were threatened with continued disenfranchisement.

  In the words of one of Lalor’s fellow rebels at Eureka, John Lynch, referring to the property qualification for the franchise and Lalor’s support for it, ‘This relic of effete feudalism, brought in as a ruling factor in future legislation, was more than true democracy could bear, and a howl of indignation admonished him of the revulsion setting in. The semi-Chartist, revolutionary Chief, the radical reformer thus suddenly metamorphosed into a smug Tory, was surely a spectacle to make good men weep.’8

  Lalor stuck to his guns regardless - as he was always wont to do - maintaining that those itinerants who did not put down roots in a community should not have a say in how it is run. Still not content with that - but upping the ante, as was also his instinct - Lalor then went on to speak in favour of a nominee Upper House.

  What on earth was going on?

  So great was the outcry, with a ‘Lalor Resignation Committee’ being formed and a petition with over 2000 signatures upon it calling upon him to stand down circulating widely, that Lalor felt obliged to publicly respond. In an open letter in The Argus to ‘The Electors of North Grenville’, he attacked in turn those constituents and journalists who had claimed that he had gone from ultra-democrat before his election to base Tory now - and so was no longer worthy of the people’s trust.

  ‘I would ask these gentlemen,’ he wrote, ‘what they mean by the term “democracy”. Do they mean Chartism or communism or republicanism? If so, I never was, I am not now, nor do I ever intend to be, a democrat. But if a democrat means opposition to a tyrannical press, a tyrannical people or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been, I am still, and will ever remain a democrat.’9

  The feeling against Lalor was so strong that at a meeting back in Ballarat in January 1857 there was such uproar - and even a threat of violence - that Lalor told the baying crowd straight: ‘If anything can disgrace human nature it is the tyranny of a mob towards the man who has suffered for them. You may murder me, but you can’t frighten me!’10

  Though mercifully no murder took place, there seemed little doubt that Lalor would be murdered at the coming polls if he stood for re-election for this particular seat, and so he wisely swapped to the electorate of South Grant. He continued to be elected there for almost all of the next three decades, losing just one election in 1871 before retaking it at the next poll.

  Outside parliament, however, controversy still attended him, and never more so than when, in December 1873, in his role as the director of the Lothair goldmine at Clunes, he attempted to break a union strike lasting 14 weeks - the issue was the miners wanting to knock off the working week by midday on Saturday - by reportedly hiring Chinese labourers from Creswick to do the work instead.

  As noted by author Geoff Hocking, ‘On 9 December 1873, the miners barricaded the Ballarat and Clunes roads and pelted the Chinese with stones and bricks in a scene reminiscent of the entry of the 40th Regiment to the Eureka lead twenty years earlier.’11 As it turned out, the miners were victorious on both counts. They succeeded in keeping the Chinese workers out of town and mine management backed down - the miners were granted a shorter working week.

  Oddly, none of the controversy affected Lalor’s parliamentary career, and just two years later he rose to the position of Minister of Trade and Customs and Postmaster-General before becoming the Speaker of the House in 1880, a position he held through three successive parliaments throughout the 1880s. So highly esteemed was he that on two occasions he was offered a knighthood by the very Queen he had once been accused of committing High Treason against, but twice he did refuse the Queenly crown.

  Throughout the decades his one unshifting rock of support was his wife, Alicia, and their family of three children, though tragedy befell them in August of 1885 when their third child, Annie, died at her parents’ home of consumption, aged just 29. Alicia Lalor herself became ill shortly afterwards, dying in May 1887 at 55, to be laid in the grave alongside her beloved Annie.

  ‘She died on the 14th as she had lived,’ Peter Lalor wrote sorrowfully to Alicia’s sister, Anne, in Ireland, ‘in perfect sanctity.’12

  Suffering from diabetes himself, Lalor resigned as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly on 27 September 1887 and went on medical leave soon afterwards, hoping that a trip to California might help revive him.

  It didn’t. After returning to Melbourne he became progressively more frail and finally arrived at the house that held his death bed in early 1889 - the home of his son, Dr Joseph Lalor, in Church St, Richmond.

  ”Tis better as it is now,’ Lalor said as he lay dying, looking back on his colourful life, and of course focusing on its most colourful episode. ‘We not only got what we fought for, but a little more. It is sweet and pleasant to die for one’s country, but it is sweeter to live and see the principles for which you have risked your life triumphant. I can look back calmly on those days. We were driven to do what we did by petty malice and spite.’13

  He died at the age of 62 on 9 February 1889.

  One who mourned him was his then five-year-old grandson Peter, who was destined to die as a Captain of G Company, 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, on the first day of the landing at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915. The official history of his battalion recorded that he ‘rallied his men and, waving his arms, shouted, “Come on, the 12th”,’ just before the fatal bullet hit, depriving the 12th of ‘one of its most gallant and capable officers’.14

  In a tight piece of Australian historical symmetry, further lege
nd has it that he died holding the sword his grandfather had brandished at Eureka. Many years later The Sydney Morning Herald would report that ‘contrary to regulations, he smuggled the famous sword in his kit. At the landing on Gallipoli, Captain Lalor unsheathed it and charged up the hill against the Turks. He was found dead at one of the foremost points reached by the Australians. Around him were the bodies of 10 dead Turks.’15 In 1945, according to a contemporary newspaper story, ‘Australian authorities in London asked the co-operation of the Turkish Government in finding the sword and the Turks showed great interest in the search, but it has now been given up without result.’16

  As to John Basson Humffray, as the member for Grenville and the Minister of Mines for the first couple of years in the Richard Heales government, he remained in parliament until defeated in 1864. He was re-elected in 1868 and then defeated twice, in 1871 and 1874, at which point he retired from politics.

  After losing a great deal of money in failed mining speculations, Humffray lived out the rest of his days quietly in Ballarat, relying a great deal on charity, and died on 18 March 1891, aged 66. At his request, his modest grave - which soon enough fell into disrepair - is located in Old Ballarat Cemetery, no more than a stone’s throw from many of the graves of the rebels who had died in the Stockade 40 years earlier.

  Many other key characters in the saga of the Eureka Stockade did not match Lalor and Humffray’s long and productive lives, most particularly the perceived villains …