by Clare Wright
The Gold Commissioners in Bendigo, wiser than their Ballarat colleagues, suspended the licence fee for a month so that the mounting tensions could die down.
(The petition, once thought to be lost, was presented to the State Library of Victoria in 1988 by a private collector.)
COURTROOM 1
Catherine Bentley was one woman who was definitely not pressing for membership of the Ballarat Reform League in mid-November. The only acceptance she needed was from a jury of her peers.
On 19 October, Catherine had been arrested after her former servant, Moody, gave evidence against her and claimed the reward of £300 for information leading to a conviction in the Scobie murder. On 1 November Catherine was transported to Melbourne, where her husband was already in jail.
By and large this made the diggers happy, but not everyone was thrilled. There were those who, like Ellen Young, believed that the Bentleys were being unduly scapegoated for wider feelings of envy, hatred and malice towards the culture of corruption: i.e. the Camp officials who were on the take, and those who were paying them off.
Certain merchants, storekeepers, diggers and residents of Ballarat and Melbourne got up petitions to proclaim James Bentley’s good character and innocence. One of the jurors at the original inquest signed a petition stating that there has been heaped on Bentley’s head a greater amount of odium than he at all deserves.
But by now the government needed a show trial to demonstrate their impartiality, and Catherine would have to play her part.
A journalist for the Argus reported with alarm that when Catherine was conveyed by steamer from Geelong Prison to Melbourne to stand her trial, she was handcuffed all the way. Her keeper, Detective Cummings, refused even to allow her to get dinner regardless of the fact that she was by now seven months pregnant with her second child.
Mrs Bentley has been moving in a respectable line of life, protested the journalist. She is not convicted of any offence, and it is not likely that she will be. The only cause to justify such harsh treatment and cowardly brutality, argued the journalist, was the supposition that it was in accordance with the public feeling to heap insults on a defenceless woman. Cummings’ behaviour was an insult to the community, especially as the public sentiment aroused by the case demonstrated not so much a virulent hatred of the alleged offenders as a mark that the people of the colony will not stand for the abuse of power and privilege by judicial authorities.
Others similarly came forward to declare that ‘the Bentley affair’ was simply another instance in a long line of disregard for the rule of law by the Ballarat authorities.
Three hundred diggers came to Melbourne for the Bentleys’ trial before Justice Redmond Barry, but it proved rather anticlimactic. The most scintillating drama occurred when Catherine was given a chair during her cross-examination in order to rest her swollen body. Dr Carr, who was there to give evidence, assessed the exhausted woman’s condition and Justice Barry called an adjournment for Catherine to have proper attention from the doctor. (No newspaper reported that she was pregnant.)
Apart from that, there were no shocks, scandals or bombshells to entertain the amassed audience. The circumstantial evidence was piled up against the Bentleys. The best John Ireland could do for the defence was to ask Mary Ann Welch whether she had any ill feeling towards Mrs Bentley that might have motivated her testimony. No, said Mary Ann.
In the end, Ireland could only argue that his clients had already suffered enough in losing all their property and being held up to public execration. And he subtly pointed out that the most guilty-looking person, according to the evidence, was Catherine Bentley, not the men. If found guilty of this most serious charge, Ireland told the jury, they must expiate this accidental calamity by death, involving too the life of a woman.
Would Catherine Bentley be the first woman to be hanged in Victoria?
Attorney-General Stawell had no problem with that. Though the reasonable man might be unwilling to believe that a woman had gone out to commit murder, Stawell thundered, the jury should lay aside all such considerations.
In summing up, Justice Barry addressed the jury for over an hour. The jury deliberated for 45 minutes. At 9pm on Saturday evening the foreman delivered the verdict. James Bentley, Farrell and Hance: guilty of manslaughter. Catherine Bentley: not guilty. (Scot free was how Carboni put it.)
On Monday, as the sun slipped behind the moon, the men were sentenced to three years’ hard labour on the roads. Catherine was released to her own version of the wilderness.
She would not hang, but in February she’d give birth to her baby Louisa alone—a mother of two with no lawful means of support. By Christmas 1855, Catherine would be brought up on charges of illegally selling alcohol from a refreshment tent in Maryborough.
What a spectacular fall: from the owner of the largest building on the most prosperous goldfield in the world to sly-grogger at an outlying diggings. The Bentley family’s brief flirtation with the world of chandeliers and champagne would never be reprised. It was all downhill from here.
COURTROOM 2
It was a busy week for Redmond Barry and John Ireland. On the same day Bentley and his co-convicted were sentenced, Thomas Fletcher, Andrew McIntyre and John Westoby were in the dock. This was a different sort of show trial. The government desperately needed a win after the Eureka Hotel riot. In the mind of the diggers’ leadership, though, the conviction of James Bentley justified the action of the mob in burning down the hotel.
The howls of protest were now coming from all quarters. The grievances at Ballarat had quickly gone from begging letters about poverty and taxation to calls for self-government—even secession from the Crown.
Hotham was eager to claw back some control of the good ship Victoria, which was veering dangerously off-course. Added to the public pressure was the fact that the military reinforcement of Ballarat was costing him a fortune, just when London was looking for him to cut costs and balance the books.
In the trial of McIntyre, Fletcher and Westoby, the jury deliberated for over five hours. A defence of provocation had been mounted, citing the wrongful conduct of the Ballarat officials; Justice Barry rejected it. It was no big surprise when all three accused were found guilty of assembling together unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously.
Then the jury added a rider to the verdict: if the government at Ballarat had done its duty properly, the jury would never have been called upon to perform this painful obligation. The hushed courtroom exploded in cheering.
Barry was unmoved. He expressed particular disgust about the horses that had been burnt to death in the hotel blaze and sentenced Andrew McIntyre to three months in Melbourne Gaol, Fletcher to four and Westoby to six.
Richard Ireland had seen six clients jailed in the space of two days. He would get the chance to redeem himself sooner than he knew.
THE DIGGERS ‘DEMAND’ AND HOTHAM CRACKS IT
When news reached the diggings that the Ballarat Three had been convicted, the executive of the Reform League met and decided to send George Black and Scotsman Thomas Kennedy to Melbourne. There they met up with J. B. Humffray and made an appointment to see the Governor himself. This delegation would present the concerns of the Ballarat diggers directly, including a copy of the Diggers’ Charter.
It is a measure of the small-town intimacy of the colony, despite its recent population explosion, that the men could get an audience with His Excellency, the Colonial Secretary and the Attorney-General on Monday 27 November.
The same familiarity had inspired Ellen Young to write to Hotham back in September, offering him her detailed ideas for an alternative licensing system. It was also the source of her resentment when Hotham went back on his promise to listen to the people. Ellen’s fury is not a sign of womanly temper but a reaction to the tantalising proximity of colonial power: it was personal.
Nor did Black, Kennedy and Humffray come to the great man shaking at the knees. Hotham might have been a darned sight more amenable if they had. Instead, the Reform League’s representatives followed Ellen Young’s lead and presented Hotham with their demands. Black demanded that Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby be released. Hotham bristled. I must take my stand on the word ‘demand’, he said. I am sorry for it, but that is the position you place me in.
The delegation did not apologise, but tried another tack. Kennedy implored Hotham to act on the diggers’ grievances before blood was spilled. Black played to one of Hotham’s pet concerns: bringing women to the diggings. I am desired by the married men of Ballarat to make a request of your Excellency, Black began, that every possible facility may be afforded by your Excellency to enable them to settle and have their wives and families there. They are all anxious to settle upon the land, but at present the difficulties of their so doing are too great. (i.e.: Unlock the lands!)
Hotham softened. That is a point which presses very much, he conceded. But he could not give an answer to take back to the married men of Ballarat, except to say that he agreed in the necessity of some provisions being made.
Ten days earlier Hotham had announced a commission of enquiry into the administration of the goldfields. It was to this decree that he now returned.
Tell the Diggers from me and tell them carefully that this Commission will enquire into everything and every body, high and low, rich and poor, and you have only to come forward and state your grievances, and, in what relates to me they shall be redressed.
So the delegates left, with a pocketful of hollow promises.
On the same day, 27 November, another batch of 150 military reinforcements from the 40th Regiment were sent to the Camp at Ballarat. By the first day of summer, there would be a total of 546 officers and soldiers stationed at Ballarat, almost five times the number that had been on the ground over winter.
Mrs Elizabeth Massey and her friends went to see off the troops as they left Melbourne. At the docks, she expected to find doleful faces, but was flabbergasted at the celebratory atmosphere.
I think I never saw a more joyous party. They reminded me of happy schoolboys bound for some party of pleasure, yet kept in unwilling restraint by the eye of the master… many were bestriding the guns, and otherwise testifying their satisfaction at the prospect of a fight.
Happy schoolboys. Unwilling restraint. The prospect of a fight.
Arriving at the barracks, Mrs Massey found an altogether different scene.
The women and children, who had turned out to see the departure of their husbands and fathers, were weeping and bewailing their sad lot in not being allowed to follow them, and kind people were doing their best to console, seemingly to no purpose, these disconsolate ones.
The only solace, concluded Mrs Massey, was that the regimental wives didn’t have poverty to bear as well as loneliness. But for some of the army wives and children, there would never be compensation for the eternal grief about to descend.
THANKSGIVING
Tuesday 28 November was Thanksgiving. For the American community on the diggings it was a chance to celebrate with a lavish dinner at Brandt and Hirschler’s Victoria Hotel at Red Hill. The proprietors had gone the whole hog, providing a perfect legion of delicacies for the 70 men who attended.
No one else was giving thanks. Popular discontent was at its peak, and there was going to be another monster meeting at Bakery Hill tomorrow, the 29th, and the talk was of rebellion. It was rumoured that a formal declaration of independence would be made. In every quarter—the pub, the field, the store, the campfire, the theatre, the church—people stopped to discuss the theory of political relationships, as the Geelong Advertiser put it.
Pennsylvanian Thomas Pierson was more specific. At the daily stump meetings being held, people speak openly in unmeasured terms against that old scamp the Governor and nearly all in office. [They] urge people to declare Independence. One speaker Pierson heard said if all the people would just assert their rights and claim a Republican Government, then we could stand here as Proud as any of the sons of America.
W. H. Foster, a civil servant on the diggings and a cousin of the previous governor, Charles La Trobe, wrote home in a letter to his parents in December 1854 that the licence tax issue was simply a convenient smokescreen for the Americans who were here in great numbers…with a view to institute independence.
There had always been a concern among some British bystanders at how quickly Victoria was becoming Americanized. It was a love–hate relationship. In George Francis Train’s assessment, the colonial government admired the energy, entrepreneurial ingenuity, can-do spirit and brash confidence of the American immigrants. It was less comfortable with the American disrespect for authority, which seemed to be rubbing off on the rest of the goldfields population—especially as the authorities did nothing to win back the people’s regard. After the Eureka Hotel blaze, George Francis Train wrote: Give the colonists their own way, and they will remain loyal—cross their path and they will have a flag of their own.
Witnesses revealed that there had been speakers at the Eureka Hotel riot urging the people to drive off all the Government officers, send the Government home and to declare their Independence, as Thomas Pierson recorded after he left the scene.
Hotham himself admitted to his boss in England, Sir George Grey, that Victoria possesses wealth, strength and competency to hold its position unaided by the Mother Country. His question was: are we to run the risk of the colony walking alone?
It was less than 80 years since the American Revolution. The memory of colonists defeating redcoats was anything but ancient history.
Rede made a point of attending the Americans’ Thanksgiving dinner. He needed to curtail, not strengthen, the influence of the Americans on Ballarat’s public culture. But he also needed to be respectful of Yankee traditions and of their consul, James Tarleton. Rede’s first act—although deference was not his favourite position—was to bow graciously to Tarleton, the guest of honour.
Tarleton, for his part, proclaimed the loyalty of the Americans to the laws of their adopted land and urged his countrymen not to get involved in the current agitation.
During the toasts Rede was suddenly called away. There had been a skirmish on the Melbourne Road and troops from the Camp were being dispatched to respond.
A company of the 12th Regiment was marching into town, part of Hotham’s next wave of fortification for the Camp. This particular small contingent was actually just a guard detail for several wagons full of ammunition and baggage: the real manpower—the regimental units waved off by Mrs Massey—would come later that night.
As the ammunition-b
earing battalion crossed Eureka, it was ambushed by a group of diggers lurking in the shadows. Incoming soldiers had become used to hostile welcoming committees of men, women and children hooting, jeering and throwing stones at them as they made their way to the Camp. But this time a violent scuffle broke out, in which the wagons were overturned and several horses wounded, a drummer boy was shot in the thigh and an old American severely injured. Onlookers predicted fatalities.
Resident Commissioner Robert Rede never got the chance to make his toast to the Queen. He left the Americans to their party, not quite convinced that Tarleton’s righteous words would be mirrored in noble action.
A FLAG OF ONE'S OWN
While the Americans were giving thanks and Rede was trying to negotiate Ballarat’s allegiances, preparations were being made on the Flat for the monster meeting.
Relations between the Camp and the diggers had broken down completely after the Reform League’s unsuccessful attempt to intercede on behalf of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby. The Camp was worrying only about its own security, not about normal law enforcement. Tent and store robberies were now occurring nightly. Horse stealing had become so common that horses without stabling were considered useless. A fierce dog was worth a king’s ransom. And the police were now vastly outnumbered by the military, which meant they had lost even more status with the community. Some diggers had started to burn their licences as a symbolic protest against the authorities.
Scandalous stories were flying every which way, gossip spinning out of control. The second Ballarat revolution is in everyone’s mouth, wrote the Argus on the morning of 29 November. Rumour with her many tongues is blabbing all sorts of stories. The Gold Commissioner had been taken hostage. The Camp was burned to the ground. The fifteen-year-old drummer boy had been killed in the ambush of the 12th Regiment. Fletcher had thoroughly broken down and was at risk of suicide. James Johnston had purchased five town allotments at the Ballarat land sales that week. (This one was true.)