Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution

by Peter Fitzsimons

  The one-time proprietor of the Eureka Hotel, James Bentley, came to a bad end. After being released from Pentridge Prison on 18 March 1856, his capital was gone, as were his job prospects. All that was left was, effectively, the bottle. Finally, on 10 April 1873, while living in Ballarat Street, Carlton, he took his own life by poisoning himself with laudanum.17 The investigating constable was told by Catherine Bentley, ‘My husband has never been quite right since he lost his property at the Ballarat Riots. He has never recovered from the effects of it, and for the last two years he has never ceased to talk about it. He has been low spirited …’18

  He was just 54 when laid beneath the sod.

  As E. B. Withers, one of the first of the Eureka writers, rather poignantly commented, ‘Let us hope that Scobie’s ghost, so romantically referred to by one of the Eureka orators one day, is at rest with his revenge now.’19

  In another touch of odd historical synchronicity, the man whose corruption had helped to facilitate the Bentleys’ fall, John Dewes, met a similar fate. After losing his commission in 1854, Dewes was not long in leaving Australia and soon took up a position as Acting Postmaster of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada, before suddenly disappearing in October 1861, owing money all over town and taking with him around PS600 in post office funds.

  He reappeared in England, but in April 1862 it was reported by the British Colonist that he had committed suicide, ‘blowing out his brains, at Homburg, a watering place in Germany … Mr Dewes, it will be remembered, was a defaulter to the Government and fled from the Colony about eight months ago to avoid a criminal prosecution.’20

  The troubled Dr Alfred Carr, whose loyalty to the cause of the digger was never sure, also came to an unhappy end. Upon his return to England for a holiday in March 1855, Dr Carr was devastated to have it reported in The Liverpool Times that he was ‘one of the Ballarat rioters who had turned approver, and so escaped the just punishment that was due to him’.21 At Dr Carr’s highly anguished insistence, the editor published an unqualified apology, but was subsequently sued for libel anyway.

  In 1857, by which time Dr Carr had returned to Australia, he had become so mentally ill that he was placed in the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, where his condition deteriorated to the point that he was described as the most dangerous man there. He was eventually confined to a small cell in a straitjacket before being transferred to the infamous Ararat Asylum where - in that curious cosmic quirk that sometimes keeps the most deeply unhappy alive for the longest time, while taking the happiest at a young age - he stayed for many decades until he at last mercifully died on 26 June 1894, aged 78.

  In Bendigo, on 24 July 1858, John Joseph, the black American who had been the first to be put on trial for treason after Eureka, aged just 41, suddenly succumbed to a heart condition and is now buried in an unmarked grave in White Hills Cemetery. (This is not right, in my view. The final resting place of such a significant man in Australian history should at least be honoured with a tombstone or plaque. The Embassy of the United States, in Canberra, is looking to rectify that.)

  After his acquittal, the one-time Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Timothy Hayes, returned to his family in Ballarat and soon took up a post as town inspector of Ballarat East, overseeing new constructions and the like, before becoming a special constable - with the role of helping to maintain the peace! And yet, restless and unhappy, he decided that perhaps the Americas might be a better place for him and departed, sadly without his wife, Anastasia, or their children. After working in Chile and Brazil, Hayes drifted north to San Francisco, where he settled for a time, working as a military engineer, helping to construct military field works. He drifted back to Melbourne in 1866, where he remained, still separated from his family. He died on 31 August 1873.

  Anastasia continued to raise their children alone, working and living in Ballarat as a schoolteacher, right to the end. She died in her home, alone, on 6 April 1892, at the age of 74. (I weep!)

  Henry Seekamp’s time in prison did nothing to curb his volatile ways. When the great Irish-born dancer and courtesan Lola Montez visited Ballarat in February 1856, he took an extremely dim view of her dancing, which he thought crossed the border from exotic to erotic, and penned his vitriolic views for The Ballarat Times. Lola Montez took an even dimmer view of these views being so publicly expressed and, after lying in wait for him, famously took to him with a horsewhip in the main street. Seekamp whipped her back and the result was a sensational public scandal, with the two accusing each other in the courts of assault and libel.

  The cases were dismissed, though Seekamp lost in the court of public opinion. In October of that same year, he and his wife, Clara, sold their paper and moved north to Sydney, before going further afield to Queensland. It was there, at the Drummond diggings, Clermont, on 19 January 1864, that Henry Seekamp - still only 35 years old - died of ‘natural causes accelerated by intemperance’.22

  Clara, though ten years his senior, lived another 44 years and died in Melbourne on 22 January 1908, at the age of 87.

  And Raffaello Carboni?

  The Eureka Stockade was but one fascinating episode in his supremely peripatetic life. After penning a colourful book on the whole episode, which he released on the first anniversary of the attack, Carboni left Australia just six weeks later, on 18 January 1856 - his ticket purchased with some gold he had mercifully found at Ballarat - as the only passenger on Empress Eugenie. (This, of course, was the ship that had brought the second division of the 12th Regiment to Melbourne in November 1854.) After spending time in India and the Middle East, including such holy places as Jerusalem and Bethlehem, he returned to Italy in time to again fight for Garibaldi in his campaign for the unification of Italy. Thereafter, Carboni settled in Naples and continued writing everything from plays to libretti - though none of them ever made it to the stage. His most appreciated writings were to his friend, Peter Lalor, in faraway Melbourne.

  He died at the age of 58 in Rome on 24 October 1875, with his death certificate recording him as ‘unmarried’ and a ‘man of letters.’23

  On Monday, 28 January 1974, Gough Whitlam’s equally flamboyant Immigration Minister, Al Grassby, visited Carboni’s hometown of Urbino to honour him and unveil a plaque on the house where he was born. Minister Grassby noted his visit and the plaque were ‘a tribute from the Australian Government and people’, while describing him as a ‘leader of the rebel forces which fought at the Eureka Stockade in a battle described as the birth of Australian democracy’.24

  Fare thee well, Raffaello. You were a beaut.

  And what of the ‘long-legged’ Vern?

  After having escaped Ballarat dressed as a woman, the Hanoverian emerged from hiding at much the same time as Peter Lalor and returned to mining. He again came to public notice when, as recorded by E. B. Withers, in 1856 he was put on trial in Ballarat for ‘rioting at Black Lead on the 7th April’,25 a charge which, once proved, saw him sentenced to three months in the lockup.

  In fact, this riot had nothing to with anything that had occurred on the Eureka in 1854, as it was a fight between diggers over who had the right to which claims, rather than a fight against the authorities. Little more is known of Vern’s fate after this episode, apart from having his offer of service to the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61 turned down, and the fact that he was reported to have lived in the New South Wales town of Forbes in later years.

  After being found ‘not guilty’ at his trial, the Irish firebrand and writer John Manning moved to New Zealand, where, after working as a journalist, he co-founded the New Zealand Celt in October 1867, supporting the Fenians and Irish nationalism. After writing supportively in 1868 of the attempted assassination in Sydney of Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred, he was arrested and charged with - goodness, can that be the time again? - seditious libel. After a stern warning by the judge, he was released and moved to the United States, where he continued writing, mostly stories with Australian and Maori themes. His last recorded writings
are as late as 1892, but it is not known when he died.

  Despite Sir Charles Hotham’s quiet word that he should leave the colony, Lalor’s American second-in-command at the Stockade, James McGill, had declined - hiding out instead at the Quarantine Station on the shores of Port Phillip Bay until the amnesty had been declared, whereupon he returned to mining. Yet the controversy concerning Eureka never quite left him, with allegations that he had been missing in action when the shooting started. Vern even went so far as to slanderously suggest that McGill had been bribed PS800 by the government to abandon the diggers. In my view, this is demonstrably untrue as Lalor had been in complete agreement with McGill that he and his men position themselves at Warrenheip to intercept the Redcoats coming from Melbourne. It would later be McGill’s widow’s curious claim that her husband had left the Stockade on the specific instruction of the US Consul, James Tarleton, though this also seems highly unlikely.

  For a time, McGill prospered in his second stint at mining, though - perhaps unable to shake off the allegations of desertion - he eventually descended into alcoholism and finally died destitute in Melbourne in 1883, not long after his 50th birthday. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Melbourne General Cemetery.

  As to Tarleton, the US Consul who had been the key representative of the American Government during Eureka, he came to an equally sad, strange end. As reported in The Washington Post on 24 December 1880, after staying on as Consul in Melbourne until near the end of James Buchanan’s administration, he returned to the United States and soon thereafter fell on hard times. Such hard times, in fact, that on the eve of Christmas Eve, 1880, the 72-year-old was found in the streets of Washington DC and died just hours later.

  The editor and proprietor of The Diggers’ Advocate and Commercial Advertiser, George Black, made good his escape after the battle of the Eureka Stockade, and only re-emerged after the announcement of the amnesty. He then twice stood for parliament against John Basson Humffray, and failed both times. What he did after this is something of a mystery beyond a partial return to mining, for it is known that with another brother, William, he was the owner of the Homeward Bound Quartz Crushing Company in Ballarat, where their third brother, Alfred, Lalor’s ‘Secretary of War’ and the author of the long-winded Declaration of Independence - was killed in a mining accident on 25 June 1859. The next time that George Black showed up on the public record was when he died in Kew, Victoria, in May 1879, aged 62.

  For all his fine oratory, Tom Kennedy - who never licked any lugs at Eureka - did not go on to particularly great things. He drove a bullock team for a time after the battle and died in Ballarat on 7 March 1859 at the age of just 32. He is buried in the old Ballarat Cemetery, though his grave is unmarked.

  Father Smyth left Ballarat in October 1856 after being transferred to St Mary’s Catholic Church in Castlemaine. Sadly, he too, was destined to die too young, just like many of the diggers he had tried to save at Eureka. After falling ill with tuberculosis, he died on 14 October 1865 at the age of just 41.

  As to the finder of gold in Victoria, James Esmond stayed in mining and, typical of that generation, made and lost several fortunes - sadly with the latter finally prevailing. Near the end of his life, in the latter part of the 1880s, he was so impoverished that the people of Ballarat raised a public subscription for him, which was PS150 to the good when he died of a kidney disease on 3 December 1890. There were few mourners at the 68-year-old’s funeral, though at least his widow and nine children were there.

  And then there are Esmond’s contemporary great discoverers, Edward Hargraves, James Tom and the Lister brothers in New South Wales. The dispute between them concerning who was the first discoverer of ‘payable gold’ in Australia would go on for decades, through courts, parliamentary inquiries and the popular press - very nearly until the turn of the century. Hargraves remained steadfast in his denial that he had ever considered them as his partners - they were no more than his guides, pure and simple. And he was still the one who had chosen the spot to search for gold.

  While Tom and the Listers were given an initial PS1000 by the government in 1853 in recognition of their input, they remained profoundly dissatisfied. They published their own account of what had happened in 1871, entitled History of the Discovery of the first Pay-able Gold-field (Ophir). Hargraves did not emerge well from it, being described as one well habituated to having ‘played the part of deception’,26 as well as one who had recorded ‘extraordinary failures’27 until such times as Tom and the Listers had told him where the gold was to be found. Still nothing changed in the official stance and the frustration of the younger men continued for another two decades.

  Finally, however, in 1890, a committee of the New South Wales Parliament conducted an inquiry as to whom the credit properly belonged. Alas, on the very day he was due to give evidence, 17 September 1890, John Lister died. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the process, the parliament found that Lister and Tom’s April 1851 discovery of four ounces was indeed the first discovery of ‘payable gold’ in New South Wales, and they deserved better reward.

  Hargraves’s own feelings were firm: ‘Now as to the “honour of the discovery,” I have always thought it of trifling importance, as any person of ordinary observation might have done the same as myself; but the impudent pretensions put forward by persons for the purpose of gain, only on a mere speculation, is to be deplored. I look upon it as a disgrace to the country to have rewarded such charlatans in any way.’

  The strangest thing? It was only a week after Hargraves died at the age of 75 on 29 October 1891 - leaving an estate worth around PS375 to be divided between his two sons and three daughters - that an assembly of the New South Wales Parliament rejected the findings of the committee, which left the late Edward Hargraves still acknowledged as founding finder of payable gold in New South Wales. The epitaph on Hargraves’s tombstone in Waverley Cemetery was firm in its own conclusions:

  EDWARD HAMMOND HARGRAVES

  BORN ENG. 7/10/1816

  DIED 29/10/1891

  THE ORIGINAL DIGGER WHOSE

  GOLD DISCOVERY STARTED THE

  GREAT AUSTRALIAN GOLD RUSH IN 1851

  Nevertheless, there was a last word etched on the matter, and it was unveiled 72 years after the discovery of payable gold when, on 28 December 1923, no fewer than 300 people journeyed down ‘15 miles of the roughest road in the Orange district’ to witness the unveiling of a commemorative obelisk at Ophir, on which the inscription read:

  THIS OBELISK WAS ERECTED BY THE NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT TO COMMEMORATE THE FIRST DISCOVERY IN AUSTRALIA OF PAYABLE GOLD, WHICH WAS FOUND IN THE CREEK IN FRONT OF THIS MONUMENT. THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DISCOVERY WERE EDWARD HAMMOND HARGRAVES JOHN HARDMAN AUSTRALIA LISTER JAMES TOM WILLIAM TOM FROM EXPERIENCE GAINED IN CALIFORNIA, HARGRAVES FORMED THE IDEA THAT THE DISTRICT WAS AURIFEROUS AND HE FOUND THE FIRST GOLD ON 12TH FEBRUARY, 1851, ABOUT TWO MILES UP LEWIS PONDS CREEK. HE EXPLAINED TO THE OTHERS HOW TO PROSPECT AND MAKE USE OF A MINER’S CRADLE, AND LISTER AND W. TOM FOUND PAYABLE GOLD BETWEEN 7TH AND 12TH APRIL, 1851.28

  And let that be an end to it! (But if you go looking for it, get to the Ophir camping ground, cross the creek, walk 50 metres to the north, go up the stairs and you will see it there. Take some metho - the plaque needs a scrub.)

  Sir Robert Nickle did not long survive his strenuous exertions at Ballarat. After falling ill in early 1855, Sir Robert applied for leave to return to his homeland, but he did not even get close. On 26 May of that year, at his home of Upper Jolimont House - one of the houses first brought to Victoria by Charles La Trobe - the old soldier died. He is buried at Melbourne General Cemetery.

  Captain John Wellesley Thomas, who was promoted to Major shortly after the battle of the Eureka, went on to a glittering military career, in which his performance at Eureka was just one of many jewels. He served in North China in 1860 with the 67th Regiment of Foot and was both mentioned in dispatches and wounded while in command of a half-battalion attacking the North
Taku Forts. Recovering, two years later he was promoted to Colonel and commanded the 67th Regiment and a brigade at the second capture of Khading during the Taiping Rebellion in China, which proved to be his last active service. Promoted to Major-General in 1877, he retired in 1881 with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-General. In 1882 he was appointed to the colonelcy of the Hampshire Regiment, and in 1904 was made a Knight Commander. He lived until the age of 85, dying in February 1908. He never had a family and left no widow to grieve.

  After the seat on the Legislative Council of Captain Thomas’s second-in-command, Charles Pasley, was withdrawn in 1855 (with the introduction of the Victorian Constitution Act, the old Legislative Council was replaced with the new Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly), he decided that he would stand himself, winning the seat of South Bourke in 1856 in the Legislative Assembly, thus taking his place in the same chamber as Peter Lalor and John Basson Humffray! William Stawell was briefly there at the same time, as one of the members for Melbourne, and he was the Attorney-General of the first elected ministry before taking up his post as Chief Justice when Sir William a Beckett retired.

  Pasley’s time in politics was only short-lived, however, as he resigned in March 1857 and soon returned to his military career, serving first in the Maori War in New Zealand in 1860, where he was wounded. After convalescing in England, he returned to Melbourne, where he served in a vast array of civil and military posts that required his engineering expertise. He finally returned to Great Britain in 1880 as Victoria’s Agent-General, where he was appointed a civil C.B. - the Order of the Bath Companions Decoration - shortly before being promoted to Major-General. He died, aged 66, on 11 November 1890 at his home in Chiswick, survived by his wife, who was also his cousin. They had no children.