The call of ‘Roll-up, roll-up!’ was spread through the Ballarat diggings on 17 October. In that time without radios, TVs, or any newspaper that hadn’t travelled up from Melbourne, the cry of ‘Roll-up’, combined with bashing pots, kettles, panning dishes and even blowing a bugle, was the call to a meeting. This meeting resolved to form a committee to get Bentley to stand trial. A larger subcommittee, so to speak, decided to take direct action: a mob of between five and ten thousand miners burned down Bentley’s hotel. Governor Hotham tried to be even-handed. He ordered Bentley arrested. He also ordered the arrest of the miners who had burnt the hotel.
But it would take more than a token display of justice to stop the growing rebellion, especially when police, troopers and magistrates were suspected, with reason, of being corrupt themselves. Roll-ups were held almost daily, with the demands becoming steadily more radical.
On 23 October four thousand miners resolved to establish a Digger’s Rights (or Right) Society. On 1 November, 3000 miners gathered at Bakery Hill – a high spot where as many as possible could see the speakers, even if they couldn’t hear them, and had to reply on the words passed through the crowd.
On 11 November a meeting of about 10,000 diggers formed the Ballarat Reform League under the leadership of the Chartists Henry Holyoake, George Black and J.B. Humffray. They demanded the abolition of the Miner’s Licence and Gold Commission and – most importantly by now – the vote for all males.
The illusions of democracy
In these days of universal suffrage, many people recognise that voters often have little sway over those who govern them, and that democracy has limited effect in a party system where there is little choice in who you vote for. But back then the idea of voting for someone who might truly represent you in parliament was heady. Democrats assumed that universal suffrage – for men, at least – would lead to the will of the majority creating just laws. The heartbreak of successful revolutions in Russia and China was yet to come, where, in the words of Henry Lawson, the world would see ‘the awful blunders the people made when at last they Woke and Rose’.7
The meeting of 11 November passed the resolution ‘that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny’. This meeting was possibly the first to make it clear that if their demands were not met, they planned open rebellion against Britain. The delegates rode down to Melbourne.
Rumours flew around the diggings: the delegates had been flung in prison. They were huddled there among the rats. No, the delegates had been shot … no, they’d been hanged and their bodies thrown into prison graves. Notices were pinned on tents and shanty walls:
DOWN WITH LICENSE FEES!
WHO IS SO BASE TO BE A SLAVE?
DOWN WITH NEPOTISM!8
On 25 November the diggers arrested for burning down the hotel were found guilty of arson, so Governor Hotham decided to send more troops to the diggings to try to keep order. At dusk on 28 November the yells spread across the diggings: troopers of the 40th Regiment were marching along the road to Ballarat.
Men left their camp fires or struggled up the shaky ladders from their mines, a human tide washing across the diggings towards the road. The troopers marched behind their little drummer boy, lifting their feet to his beat: ratty-tat, rattatty-tat …
Behind the first lot of soldiers were carts pulled by straining horses, their heavy loads hidden by tarpaulins. And then more soldiers and more carts. Again, rumours swept through the crowd: there were cannons on those carts.
Two diggers stepped out into the road, in front of the drummer boy. The child stopped and looked startled, but refused to step backwards. The diggers demanded to know if there were cannons. The drummer boy began to beat his drum again. The soldiers began to march …
What happened after that is unclear, even to those there at the time. Some claimed the soldiers fired at the crowd, others that men in the crowd had shot at the troops. The mob swarmed onto the road. Horses screamed and reared over the thunder of gunfire. The diggers cut the traces of the horses and pushed the wagons off the road. Diggers and soldiers grappled in the confusion.
As suddenly as it had begun it was over. A captured wagon vanished into the growing darkness of the diggings; another lay overturned, a digger’s body lying beneath it. A small body lay on the road, the little drummer boy, his drumstick still in his hand, shot in the leg. He was carried off unconscious but again rumour took over – the troopers believed the boy had died. (A memorial was later erected to him at Ballarat even though he continued in military service, dying in 1860.) This attack on their child mascot enraged the soldiers, and was possibly responsible for some of the savagery to come.
The wagon contained weapons. The soldiers would have carried their muskets and bayonets, but before the advent of repeat-firing firearms a soldier might need several muskets, with one or even two ‘loaders’ shoving in gunpowder and shot. Presumably the captured muskets were distributed through the diggings. The troopers tried to retrieve the wagon and its contents but were driven back by sticks and stones in the darkness.
The Monster Meeting and the Southern Cross
The next day the roll-up drum sounded, with the thin breathy noise of fifes and the hollow ring of sticks banged against pots or billies. The crowd of about 12,000 stretched for perhaps a kilometre around Bakery Hill in what was to be known as the Monster Meeting. Men jostled, crushed together along the streets and between the tents or up on mullock heaps. Others clambered up on a shanty roof to try to see. Men in mud-stained clothing, men in their Sunday best crumpled from their swags, men with beards that looked like birds had nested in them and men with raw, shiny faces who had shaved in muddy water for the occasion. Children grasped their father’s hand or their mother’s skirt.
Flags waved from makeshift flagpoles – the English flag, the American Stars and Stripes, and others of many nations. This was also probably the first time the Eureka flag was raised, with blue background and white stars based on the Southern Cross.
It would have been much like a political rally of today, the crowd, the shouting, the music and the cheers. A band played as Raffaello Carboni climbed onto a makeshift stage of pit props and stumps of wood, up on the highest point of the hill.
The bands stopped playing. Even the big drum was silent.
Carboni made a fierce gesture to the sky. ‘I hate the oppressor,’ he yelled to the multitude, ‘let him wear a red, blue, black or white coat.’
The delegates who had ridden to Melbourne reported to the crowd that Hotham refused to compromise. Licences were ceremonially burnt. Once again the miners vowed to use force, if necessary.
Rebellion had come.
The Melbourne road was crammed with diggers leaving before the violence grew worse. But even more were coming to join in, as the word slowly spread among the other diggings that a major confrontation would take place. This was not a small scuffle over mining licences. This was now true rebellion, its aim to create an independent republic, like the one that had been won in the United States.
The next day, 30 November, Gold Commissioner Robert Rede ordered not negotiation but a licence check, and the diggings exploded. When the troops turned out to check the licences the miners threw stones at them. Fights broke out and shots were fired from both sides. Eight diggers were arrested.
A second roll-up was held at Bakery Hill, and this time a new and (temporarily) more radical leader took the stage.
An Irish leader for Irish rebels
Peter Lalor was born in 1827, an Irish engineer who worked on the new Melbourne to Geelong railway before he joined the gold rush. Anecdotally, and from the list of names of the deceased, most of the rebel diggers came from Ireland. Lalor had lived through the Irish Potato Famine of 1846 to 1850, when one million died of starvation while food continued to be exported from Ireland to make money for the absent English owners of much of the country. He’d also seen the failed Irish rebellion against
Britain in 1848. His father had been an Irish member of parliament and organised farmers armed with pitchforks to resist landlords who tried to evict poor tenants who couldn’t pay their rent. A large number of those on the diggings were Irish, too, possibly a majority of the rebels. They had left their land angry and powerless in the face of the oppression of the English.
At Bakery Hill on 30 November, Lalor leapt onto a tree stump with his pistol in his hand. He demanded that all who were not rebels leave the meeting. Many did. Lalor proclaimed an oath. Men knelt on the ground and recited after him: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’9
Peter Lalor called for volunteers. His fellow rebels included the Prussian republican Fredrick Vern, who had wanted to overthrow the King of Prussia and have an elected government, Raffaello Carboni, and the Scottish Chartist Tom Kennedy. It seems as if each national group may have chosen their own leader, with Lalor elected as commander in chief.
Several hundred took the oath of allegiance to the Southern Cross. The rebels marched off to an area near the Eureka claim to erect a rough stockade – not a fort, of the sort seen in cowboy movies, but just a collection of timber, old carts and pit props about a metre high and surrounding about half a hectare of land, partly to make a defined area to act as headquarters, and partly to slow down any attack by mounted troops. It wasn’t even solely rebel territory: as well as the Eureka mine shaft there were shops, tents, a blacksmith’s forge (useful for fashioning weapons), even a washerwoman carrying on her business, scrubbing at filthy clothes, wringing them out and hanging them to dry in return for copper pennies, while the rebellion grew around her.
A barrier, not a fort
The stockade was never meant to be a fortress. When the police and troopers arrived, as the rebels knew they would, Lalor’s plan was to fight them down at the Gravel Pits.10 If the rebels were overpowered there they’d retreat up ‘Canadian Gully’11, where a relatively small number of men could hold the high ground against the attackers, and wait for the reinforcements that would undoubtedly come as the news of the rebellion spread to other goldfields.
All Friday the rebels kept working at the stockade, strengthening it with pit props, gathering as many firearms as possible and forging pike heads (sharp tools that could be used as weapons). More miners started to arrive from other diggings; there were far more discontented miners in the colonies than there were soldiers or police. Many in Australia – respectable people in the towns and cities, like merchants and teachers – already hoped for a republic like the United States, free of English taxes and control. The rebellion was growing swiftly.
The rebel army marched up and down between the tents, practising drilling, marching and firing in line. They weren’t just trying to look like soldiers – they needed to learn to stand and fire together to hit the targets. They also needed the organisation and discipline to make sure that there were loaders and shooters to take up shot or weapons and replace men who fell in battle.
So they trained, some men with pickaxes instead of swords or muskets, though a pickaxe can be a formidable tool wielded by a man who has spent years knowing its heft and hold. But there were firearms, too.
So here were 10,000 men of Eureka, plus the volunteers coming, filling the roads to Ballarat as letters and newspapers took the news of open rebellion to diggings far away, and as many bystanders, perhaps, leaving. Miners make good foot soldiers: look at their records in the Crimea, at Waterloo. They’re strong and they know how to use their tools. But Eureka had more than that. Eureka had men trained in rebellion – how to foment it, guide it and how to fight it, too. The rebels already had arms. Now they needed horses, to match the British cavalry.
By 2 December about 1500 men were drilling in or near the stockade. In the late afternoon of that day, two hundred Independent Californian Rangers, a newly formed division of former Californian goldminers under the leadership of James McGill, galloped up to the stockade armed with revolvers and Mexican knives. This meant that the rebels now had armed men with horses, not just foot soldiers. The rebels also expected to be joined by what Carboni termed the German Rifle Brigade. There was already a ‘Canadian Division’ of rebels under Henry Ross, and possibly a Scandinavian one as well.
Thousands of men, including two hundred experienced horsemen, with justice in their hearts and desperation in their bellies, against two hundred police and soldiers? How could they lose?
How darkness won Eureka
They couldn’t, except by trickery. Commissoner Rede swore that no attack would come on the Sabbath. But on Saturday, 2 December, the authorities decided to act before the rebellion spread to other colonies and mining centres – and while they still knew exactly what was going on. Governor Hotham and Commissioner Rede had spies in the camp, and they were given their orders: lead as many defenders as possible away from the stockade, into the darkness.
To understand the how the battle for Eureka Stockade failed you need to understand darkness – the deep, impenetrable darkness of twenty square kilometres of diggings, with no torchlight, and few campfires because of the scarcity of trees, already chopped down for fuel or pit props. Few people these days have any experience of trying to find their way in true darkness, with no torch to help them. If you stumbled through the darkness on the Ballarat goldfields you wouldn’t just risk bumping into a tent, you were more likely to fall down one of the thousands of mine shafts and either die doing so, or suffocate in the mud.
Darkness was a weapon. Governor Hotham used it well.
The stockade was almost deserted that Saturday afternoon. At about four o’clock the rebels returned to the stockade, and that night there were only 1500 men manning the stockade. According to Carboni:
Thanks to the password, I entered within the stockade. It must have been not far from midnight. I found everything comparatively quiet; the majority were either asleep or warming themselves round the big fire. I spoke in German face to face, for the last time, with Thonen. McGill and two-thirds of the Independent Californian Rangers’ Rifle Brigade, in accordance with the avocation expressed in the title, were out ‘starring’ to intercept reinforcements reported on the road from Melbourne. Nelson and his division were off for the same purpose.12
Once again rumour had taken over (probably started by Rede and Hotham’s spies) – reinforcements were coming from Melbourne. McGill took most of his Californian Rangers to patrol the road from Melbourne.
Lalor took the chance to have a couple of hours’ sleep. So did Carboni. Thirty or forty of the Californian Rangers, with their rifles dug into the base of the stockade, acted as lookouts.
Hotham – a soldier who had wished to serve in the Crimea rather than administer the colony of Victoria – used his next weapon.
Imagine darkness so deep you can’t see your hands, your feet. Darkness where the only light is the highway of stars above, and small, almost random flickers of red coals at your front, back, right, left. There is no way of telling what is happening. The landscape you know has vanished till the morning.
Soon after midnight, according to Lalor and Carboni’s accounts, the cry came out of the darkness again, and then again: ‘The soldiers are attacking!’ Each time, more men – armed, angry and protective – ran to help. Soldiers had attacked the camp before; every man there had probably seen innocents suffer. Both red coats and police back then were more often corrupt than law abiding, violent men used to the abuse of power.
Time after time the rebels left the stockade, led into the darkness by the spies. And there they stayed.
Imagine it, that darkness. The spies had torches or lamps to light their way. As soon as their light was extinguished they could slide unseen into the darkness, leaving the men stranded. A well-made dirt road glows faintly in starlight, but I suspect the tracks at Ballarat were more mud than road. Possibly, too, the spies led their parties away even from the roads and tracks, into the heart of the diggings and mine shafts. If
the men tried to stumble back to the stockade, the chances were that they would go in the wrong direction. Darkness won that night.
There was no real chance to return to the stockade till dawn. When dawn came it was too late.
The troops assemble
About 267 soldiers and police officers took their positions in the darkness, only three hundred metres from the stockade, at 3.30 a.m. on Sunday, 3 December. Only about 120 men were left in the stockade; the troops outnumbered the stockaders two to one. Thanks to the spies, the troops knew it was now safe to attack.
Captain Thomas had instructed his troops to spare any person who did not show signs of resistance. But by now many of the troops were too angry – or too caught up in the excitement – to care. At about 4.45 a.m. they charged.
According to Carboni:
I awoke. Sunday morning. It was full dawn, not daylight. A discharge of musketry – then a round from the bugle – the command ‘forward’ – and another discharge of musketry was sharply kept on by the red-coats (some 300 strong) advancing on the gully west of the stockade, for a couple of minutes.
The shots whizzed by my tent. I jumped out of the stretcher and rushed to my chimney facing the stockade. The forces within could not muster above 150 diggers.13
One of the Californian Rangers fired a warning shot to alert the other diggers of the attack. Lalor tried desperately to get his few men into some sort of order. Standing upon a stump, he ordered them to hold fire until the troopers advanced closer towards them, but a couple of bullets struck him in the shoulder.
Lalor yelled at his men to escape. This was not the battle they had been preparing for – this was massacre. He hid among a pile of slabs, the blood from his wound so thick it could be seen flowing down the hill. Carboni was later to write:
There was, however, a brave American officer, who had the command of the rifle-pit men; he fought like a tiger; was shot in his thigh at the very onset, and yet, though hopping all the while, stuck to Captain Ross like a man. Should this notice be the means to ascertain his name, it should be written down in the margin at once … full discharge of musketry from the military, now mowed down all who had their heads above the barricades. Ross was shot in the groin. Another shot struck Thonen exactly in the mouth, and felled him on the spot.14
Let the Land Speak Page 26