We Are the Rebels

by Clare Wright

  Any government spy worth his salt would have realised that the Adelphi Theatre had become the centre of radicalism over the winter of 1854. Digger activists could gripe and moan and rally and plot and plan in the open air, huddled around their shafts or the campfire at night, but it was warmer, drier and harder to be overheard in a spacious theatre tent guarded by a trustworthy collaborator. The Adelphi was a safe house, presided over by Mrs Hanmer, a respectable widow and acclaimed theatrical manager. She provided a refuge for the disaffected, with whose cause she clearly sympathised.

  Back in August one Frank Carey, from Orange, New York, had been arrested on a sly-grog charge and fined £50. Nothing unusual there. Then he was charged again a few weeks later, on 18 September, and there were strong rumours that he had been framed. For this second offence, Carey received a prison sentence of six months in the vermin-infested Ballarat lockup. Now there was outrage. Mary Stevens, an actor at the Adelphi, organised a petition for his release signed by 1700 people. Mrs Hanmer gave a benefit to raise funds for his release.

  It was tricky for the goldfields administration because the Americans in Victoria formed a large and prosperous class of merchants and entrepreneurs with a great deal of influence. The American Telegraph Line of Coaches, later to be known as Cobb and Co., was particularly important. The company ran coaches that linked all the major goldfields with Melbourne and with each other. This transport network was crucial to pastoral and commercial expansion in Victoria. In Melbourne, George Francis Train, Henry Nicholls and others were prosperous merchants with links to large international financiers.

  A goldfields fracas involving an American citizen was a delicate balancing act of diplomacy between local affairs and the bigger picture of American influence.

  It was for this reason that 21-year-old Mary Stevens’ petition, with its lengthy trail of signatures, went straight to the top of the government’s in-tray. It prompted the intervention of Robert Rede’s superior, Chief Commissioner McMahon, and of the American Consul in Melbourne, James Tarleton, who approached Governor Hotham on behalf of Frank Carey. The Americans at Ballarat were law loving and law abiding citizens, he insisted.

  On 29 October, Carey’s sentence was remitted. Mrs Hanmer’s players—take a bow. Your encore is yet to come.

  A CUNNING PLAN?

  Governor Hotham made two slick moves in response to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. He empowered a Select Committee to investigate the matter, taking evidence from any person who wished to speak up. At the same time, he ordered the extra companies of the 12th and 40th regiments to fill the Camp with redcoats.

  It seemed a cunning plan. Give the people the chance to vent, while establishing a very obvious military presence.

  Not everyone was convinced, however, that Hotham had Ballarat’s best interests at heart. We ask for bread and we get a stone, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser. We demand some attention be paid to our miserable conditions and get sent an army.

  The Committee took evidence at Bath’s Hotel from 2 November to 10 November. The weather was oppressively hot during this week, and hundreds of diggers took the opportunity to sit for a while in the lounge bar and tell the commissioners what they thought was wrong. Women gave evidence too, although their testimony didn’t make it into the published report that was tabled in Parliament on 21 November.

  The commissioners’ job was to establish two things. First, was there any reason to think that the magistrates who found James Bentley innocent of Scobie’s murder were influenced by improper motives? And second, had the officers of the Camp generally conducted themselves so as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population?

  When the enquiry was completed, the answers were NO and YES. Not popular news. But at least James and Catherine Bentley were to be retried before a proper judge in Melbourne—Justice Redmond Barry, no less. As another sop to the offended diggers, John D’Ewes and Milne, the unpopular policeman who had arrested Frank Carey, were relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of Ballarat, who thought James Johnston, Robert Rede and Gordon Evans should have copped a punishment as well.

  The second half of Hotham’s plan was about as effective as the first. The arrival of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little sardines into an already overpacked tin.

  Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses now poured in on us, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser, the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence. Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.

  The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas’s new plan of defence, meant that soldiers and police were on 24-hour patrols: overworked and losing sleep. From the outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.

  REDMOND BARRY

  THE MAN IN A WIG

  * * *

  A LOVER OF LIBRARIES BUT NOT OUTLAWS

  BORN Cork, Ireland, 1813

  DIED Melbourne, 1880

  ARRIVED NSW 1837

  AGE AT EUREKA 41

  CHILDREN Never married but had four kids with his lover Louisa Barrow.

  FAQ One of twelve siblings in establishment Irish Protestant family. Appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1852. Established the Melbourne Public Library (now SLV). Famously sentenced Ned Kelly to death in 1880. Barry died twelve days later.

  On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military. The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the whole thing had been hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the Ballarat Times. He complained of the conditions endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. His detachment was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily. They were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding as if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers. With the inadequate remuneration of only two shillings a day, the soldier is unjustly dealt with, complained the man.

  But who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers’ cause? The military leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might extend some brotherly love? Or his fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion of their own?

  WE, THE PEOPLE

  While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised. A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together, noted the Geelong Advertiser: it was a mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat.

  On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would be the attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers. A German band played. Diggers gave speeches for over four hours.

  The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn.

  The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for events that would now tumble like dominoes towards a catastrophic resolution.

  On 11 November 1854,
a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier Alpheus Boynton was there. He noted in his diary the talented men who put down picks and pans and took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men.

  The Ballarat Reform League united the smaller groups that had been popping up over the previous weeks: an Irish union here, a German bund there. The Reform League elected its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of Anastasia, was appointed as chairman. Humffray and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting. They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that put in writing the chief grievances and goals of the League.

  A manifesto of democratic principles, the Charter’s primary tenets were:

  free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of Parliament; fixed parliamentary terms.

  These were the moral rights the diggers cried out for—dignity, fairness and justice—translated into political demands.

  The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely seen as the first formal step on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter’ was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant historical documents. Yet oddly enough, the Ballarat Times makes only brief mention of this monster meeting in its edition of 18 November.

  CHARTISM

  In 1854, Ballarat was awash with budding political radicals and religious nonconformists. Chief among these idealists were the Chartists.

  Chartism was a British-based political reform movement that existed from the late 1830s to the 1850s. The movement organised huge mass demonstrations and petitions attracting millions of signatures that lobbied the government to make the British political system more democratic. The People’s Charter of 1838 called for voting rights for working men and the abolition of property qualifications for the franchise. It is considered one of the most significant political manifestos of the nineteenth century.

  Originally, Chartists included voting rights for women in their wishlist of reforms. By the 1850s, however, the platform of sex equality had been dumped. The Chartists wanted to focus on universal manhood suffrage, which was perceived as a more achievable goal.

  Some female Chartists—such as Ellen Young—brought their thwarted dreams of liberty and justice with them to Victoria. Here, they hoped, it might be possible to make universal participatory democracy a reality.

  It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country, wrote Henry Seekamp, that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus of Australian Independence.

  A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.

  (It is possible that this edition of the Ballarat Times may in fact have been edited and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her influence to propel Ellen’s unfeminine outspokenness into the public eye. When Henry later faced trial for sedition, the editions of the newspaper in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and 2 December. Henry argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management of the paper at that time.)

  The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the League that day were not, of course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat’s only newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:

  However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the free subjects of a great nation.

  Not ‘request’. Not ‘humbly pray’. Demand. Others had publicly spoken of cleaning out but none had gone so far as lopping off. And it is not Black, not Hayes, Humffray or Vern, who commit their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous, but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity.

  The novelty was apparent to Ellen herself. Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist on the above demands?

  NO ADMISSION

  Clara Seekamp and Ellen Young may have been driving the agitation, but that didn’t mean they were allowed to join the movement.

  The Ballarat Reform League charged a shilling to join, and thereafter a subscription of sixpence per week. Significantly, the membership excluded women. It’s not clear exactly who wrote the association’s rules, but the effect was to turn Ellen’s people into men only.

  This was not unheard of. The British Chartist movement had gone through a similar trajectory, with their early goal of political equality—votes for all—giving way to a model that demanded the vote for a male head of household supporting a dependent wife. It was a backward step that the unbiddable women of Ballarat strenuously resisted.

  Raffaello Carboni alerts us to this drama playing out off-stage at Bakery Hill: Bakery reformers leagued together on its hill [No admission for the ladies at present].

  Why would Carboni specifically note the omission of women from the membership of the Ballarat Reform League? Surely, in 1854, it would simply be assumed that women were to be excluded? And what about that phrase at present? Carboni’s implication seems to be that women may not be eligible now, but it is not out of the question that they will be eligible in the future.

  Was this because certain women were requesting, maybe even demanding, inclusion? Arguing that it was only a matter of time before women would find themselves on an equal footing with their male co-conspirators?

  They were, after all, writing newspaper editorials, organising petitions, starting businesses, buying property, financially supporting families, working beside their husbands on the fields, owning shares in mining ventures, speaking their minds freely, making ample use of the judicial system to assert their rights, drinking, fornicating and otherwise behaving like perfect men.

  So which ladies might have been pressing for political inclusion? Ellen Young? Anastasia Hayes, who later took on the Catholic Church over the issue of fair wages? Mrs Rowlands, who attended the monster meetings? Sarah Hanmer, who was contributing more coin to the Diggers Defence Fund than anyone else in Ballarat? Christina McIntyre, whose wrongfully accused husband was up on charges of arson? Fanny Smith, who in 1856 would agitate for universal municipal representation on behalf of myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat?

  It is clear that women’s rights were part of the conversation: that at least some of the goldfields stirrers envisioned something more than just manhood suffrage when they made their political wishlists.

  During the
Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion of August 1853, William Dexter took the stage to argue for women having votes as well as men. (William’s wife, Caroline, would bring her bloomer costume and lectures on women’s rights to Melbourne in January 1855.)

  A young man named Thomas Loader stood against John Basson Humffray in the 1856 elections for the seat of North Grant, covering East Ballarat and the Eureka Lead. Loader’s policies included rights of women although he declined to commit himself on the question of suffrage. (He lost anyway.)

  The Australian people would have to wait quite a while, however, for such revolutionary ideas to bear fruit. It was another 48 years before the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902 gave (white) women full political equality with men: the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament.

  Even so, it was a world first, making Australia the most democratic nation on earth. America would not pass the constitutional amendment that ensured these liberties until 1920. British women would not enjoy such rights until 1928. Aboriginal women (and men), of course, would not be fully enfranchised until the 1960s. But Australia’s world-leading position on women’s formal political inclusion was born on the goldfields of Ballarat.

  RED RIBBON REBELLION

  There was unrest about the mining licence on several other goldfields. In Bendigo, supporters of the agitation wore red ribbons: the colour of defiance and unity.

  Bendigo diggers organised a mass petition calling for a reduction in monthly licence fees and land reform for diggers. It was delivered to authorities in Melbourne by the diggers’ representatives in August 1853. When they returned to Bendigo more than ten thousand people assembled (under the Diggers’ Flag designed by William Dexter) to greet them.