by Clare Wright
Bakery Hill was once again the venue for a monster meeting, set for 29 November at midday. (Bakery Hill is obtaining creditable notoriety as the rallying ground for Australian freedom, wrote the Times.) Ten thousand people downed tools, shut up stores, gathered up children and headed towards Bakery Hill. It was a hot day, with clouds of dust swirling in the gusty wind.
The meeting brought the usual catalogue of goldfields public protest: long speeches, heartfelt resolutions—one of which was that the Reform League would meet at the Adelphi Theatre at 2pm on Sunday 3 December to elect a central committee. There were fiery threats and troopers circling on horseback. Sly-groggers did a steady trade on the fringes of the crowd.
But three wholly new things happened on 29 November.
The first was that for the first time the next morning’s papers referred to those present as the rebels.
The second was that the diggers lined up to throw their licences upon a bonfire—an act of communal defiance of the law. The Ballarat Reform League had voted by a majority of three that its members should burn their mining and storekeeping licences. When committing their licences to the flames, the diggers swore to defend any unlicensed digger from arrest, with armed force if necessary. Those miners who did not become members of the Reform League could not expect the same protection. Thus the Ballarat diggings became a closed shop.
The third was that a flag was hoisted. Not a national flag, but a purpose-made flag, a flag the Geelong Advertiser dubbed the Australian flag. This was the only flag hoisted that day.
This is the flag that we now know as the Eureka Flag. But on 29 November it was briefly raised not at Eureka but above the crowd at Bakery Hill. Its purpose was to attract attention: like the band that roamed the diggings playing ‘La Marseillaise’, the French revolutionary anthem, it was meant to lure the miners away from their toil. To rally them, and direct their righteous anger towards Bakery Hill.
The flag they called the Australian Flag took its design inspiration from the one thing that united each and every resident of Ballarat: the constellation of the Southern Cross.
Five bright stars in the shape of a kite. Those five stars had alerted immigrants to the transformation that occurred when they crossed the line into the southern hemisphere. They had connected the paths of travellers from all the Australian colonies long before they became a single nation. Those stars hung in the only heaven that native-born Australians knew. Five shimmering white stars against a clear blue field hoisted, as Frederick Vern put it, under Australia’s matchless sky.
Raffaello Carboni stood before fifteen thousand people at Bakery Hill that morning. I called on all my fellow-diggers, he later recalled, irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the ‘Southern Cross’ as the refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth. Carboni was well satisfied with the crowd’s response: The applause was universal.
The Ballarat Flat now had its own flag to rival the huge Union Jack fluttering above the Camp.
Henry Seekamp was also on the spot to witness the hoisting of the new flag on its 80-foot flagstaff at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 29th. In the issue of the Times printed on Sunday 3 December, he (or perhaps Clara, as this is one of the ‘seditious’ editions for which he denied responsibility) wrote:
Its maiden appearance was a fascinating object to behold. There is no flag in Europe, or in the civilised world, half so beautiful and Bakery Hill as being the first place where the Australian ensign was first hoisted will be recorded in the deathless and indelible pages of history. The flag is silk, blue ground with a large silver cross; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural.
Ballarat’s rebel flag was, indeed, remarkably pure. It said simply: ‘We are here.’
There has always been debate about the origins of the ‘Eureka’ flag. The usual story is that it was designed by a 27-year-old Canadian miner called Henry Ross, who then recruited three diggers’ wives to sew it. Ross was friendly with artist Charles Alphonse Doudiet (another Canadian), who has left the clearest picture of the flag that was unfurled on Bakery Hill that day. But actually, there is no evidence that Ross designed the flag. That idea may come from the original cover of Raffaello Carboni’s 1855 account of the Eureka Stockade, which bears a sketch of the flag. Underneath are the words: When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross the bearer was Toronto’s Captain Ross. Elsewhere in the book, Carboni refers to Ross as the bridegroom of the flag, meaning Ross was the standard-bearer: he hoisted it up the flagpole. It doesn’t necessarily mean he designed it.
Tradition says that three women sewed the flag in secret: Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke. Frederick Vern described it as a banner made and wrought by English ladies. (Only Withers was English—Hayes and Duke were both Irish—but the distinction may not have been apparent to Vern, who was from Hanover in Germany.)
ANNE DUKE (NEE GAYNOR)
* * *
BORN Ireland, 1838
DIED Echuca, 1914
ARRIVED 1842, on the William Sharples
AGE AT EUREKA 16
CHILDREN Pregnant at Eureka with the first of twelve children.
FAQ Irish family immigrated to Australia when Anne was four years old. Lived on Bendigo diggings where her family kept a store, before she married George Duke in March 1854. Believed to be one of the women who sewed the Eureka Flag.
Some historians prefer the ‘men’s flag story’ first related by J. W. Wilson in 1885. Wilson had been told that Henry Ross gave the order for the insurgents’ flag to a local tent and tarpaulin-making firm, Darton and Walker. According to this version, Ross gave his order at 11pm on Thursday 23rd and the flag was first raised 39 hours later, at 2pm on Saturday the 25th. This flag was said to be made of bunting.
However, there is now little doubt that it was women who sewed the flag. It was made using traditional women’s sewing skills: flat-felled seams sewn by hand. When the flag was restored in the 1970s, the original pins found in the seams were the kind you might get in a mid-nineteenth-century woman’s sewing kit. According to the most recent conservator, Kristin Phillips, the flag isn’t made of bunting; it’s made of ordinary ‘clothing fabric bought off the roll’ used ‘economically’.
And it’s big: 3400 millimetres x 2580 millimetres. It could not have been made in less than 48 hours, and probably closer to 60. It would have taken many hands, gathered around the perimeter of the flag, to construct the flag with any speed at all. And you would have to keep turning it in order to sew round the edges of the stars, which would mean the other people working on it would have to move too.
An enormous job, then; and a tricky one. (And, contrary to one popular theory, the stars weren’t made out of women’s petticoats. They were made of new woollen fabric. Even in the uncomfortably dressed nineteenth century, petticoats usually weren’t made of wool.)
So where, on a camping ground like the diggings, could you meet in secret to construct a huge rebel flag?
There were few places in which a four-metre roll of fabric could be unfurled on the ground and still have room around it for a team of seamstresses. The Adelphi Theatre would have been big enough, but Sarah Hanmer was involved with the American community, n
ot the Irish. Was the flag sewn in the Catholic church where Anastasia Hayes, the doyenne of the Catholic community, was employed? St Alipius was certainly one of the few tents big enough. And it was already common knowledge that the Irish were making themselves a protest flag…
Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke probably were the English ladies that Frederick Vern refers to, but it’s likely there were more than three of them. Eliza Darcy, who by now had joined the Catholic congregation in Ballarat, was almost certainly one of the clandestine seamstresses. Her granddaughter Ella Hancock—at 97, now the oldest living Eureka descendant—grew up on stories of Eliza’s handiwork.
Between the women who probably came together under cover of darkness to sew the rebel flag there were at least nine children and two pregnancies. So there is no faulting their dedication.
Or maybe it’s just that if you are going to be up half the night with sleepless infants, you may as well do something that will be recorded in the pages of history.
BRINGING THE MATTER TO A CRISIS
On the evening of 29 November Captain Pasley, one of the military commanders now stationed at Ballarat, wrote to Hotham. The meeting at Bakery Hill had passed off very quietly, he reported, with speeches less inflammatory than previous public demonstrations.
It is therefore, I think, clearly necessary, Pasley wrote, that some steps should be taken to bring the matter to a crisis, and to teach those persons (forming, no doubt, the great majority of the mining population) who are not seditiously disposed, that it is in their interest to give practical proofs of their allegiance. Such persons, he hoped, would not only discourage the rebellious portion of the community, but also interfere to prevent their future activities.
With the appearance of the Australian Flag—the flag of the Southern Cross—community unrest had suddenly entered the realm of sedition.
Were the rebels really in the minority, as Pasley claimed?
By the end of November 1854, the population of Ballarat was around 30,000. Up to 15,000 people assembled at Bakery Hill that day, which means almost half of the total population walked off the job to attend a protest meeting.
Just imagine if that sort of percentage of citizens—say half of Melbourne’s current population of five million—turned up to any public meeting. On climate change, maternity leave, nuclear disarmament, Aboriginal land rights, bank fees, the trains not running on time—anything. It would be political chaos.
Faced with this sort of numerical opposition, the authorities of Ballarat were now itching for something simple: a violent confrontation that would assert their supremacy. Their power and legitimacy were being questioned daily—by everyone from Ellen Young, the Ballarat Times and the conscientiously objecting unlicensed diggers on the outside to the grumbling foot police on the inside.
An open rebellion would sort out the mutineers from the loyal crew and force everyone to declare: which side are you on?
Each man felt something would happen before the day was over. So wrote Alexander Dick on the morning of Thursday 30 November, as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gravel Pits. The heat was intense; the day overcast, windy, foul. The young Scotsman looked down on the usual comings and goings of a busy working goldfield. The noise and clamour. The shouts from holes and the creak of turning windlasses. Tents and flags flapping, children darting about. Shops trading. The workplace and the home as one.
And then, a torrent of foot and mounted police suddenly descended from the Camp to the Gravel Pits. A massive licence hunt began, led by James Johnston, on the very morning after so many diggers had burnt their licences in the communal protest.
It was a show of strength from the Camp, designed to restore the power they’d lost since the burning of Bentley’s Hotel.
It was a test of the rebellious miners’ pledge to defend the unlicensed among them.
It was an arm-wrestle to see who, when push came to shove, would gain the upper hand.
TREASON AND SEDITION
In law, sedition is the crime of conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch. The charge is often used against artists, writers and intellectuals. Opponents of sedition laws argue that they are a means by which authorities can frighten those who might criticise a government’s policies or actions, thus limiting free speech. In Australia today, sedition laws are contained in anti-terrorism legislation passed in 2005.
Treason is the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. A person who commits treason is known as a traitor. In English law, treason was punishable by various forms of the death penalty, including being hung, drawn and quartered (for men) and burnt at the stake (for women).
THE FIRST SHOTS
There was a tremendous uproar. All the inhabitants of the Gravel Pits scattered among the mounds of earth and tents. Joe! Joe! Joe! The cry went down the line. It was mayhem, as the mounted police began to gallop among the tents. The soldiers made a sweep of the flat, with cavalry on both flanks and in the centre, clearing off all the occupants to the high road beyond the lead.
Police fired shots into a crowded area, among tents where women and children were congregated in large numbers. The confused crowd scattered, seeking shelter among neighbouring tents. Troopers were dragged down from their horses like mere stuffed effigies of men. Police were pelted with mud, stones and broken bottles.
Robert Rede stampeded in and hurriedly blurted out the Riot Act (the action he had been criticised for not taking at the Eureka Hotel riot). Now he read the Act so quickly—with telegraphic speed—that in one journalist’s opinion the consequent proceedings were illegal.
Elizabeth Rowlands looked on. I was present, she later wrote, when the proclamation was read when the soldiers dropped on their knee and presented guns at us and told the crowd to disperse and my word they did disperse.
ELIZABETH ROWLANDS
* * *
BORN 1827
DIED Ballarat, 1914
ARRIVED prior to 1851
AGE AT EUREKA 27
CHILDREN One baby at Eureka, eight born subsequently.
FAQ Attended the monster meetings in Ballarat. Her husband Thomas was involved at Eureka. Wrote about her experiences in 1904.
Miners jumped down holes. Women and children scurried into tents. A bugle sounded. The military marched down the hill, forming a line on the grass under the southward plateau of the Camp. A very picturesque array, thought Samuel Huyghue, the line of cavalry in their bright red uniforms, their brass buttons flashing in the sunlight. Eight men were arrested for riotous behaviour but there were no serious injuries.
Round one to the Camp.
THE DIGGERS RALLY
No one at the Gravel Pits went back to work that day. As news of the chaos—and random firing on a crowd including women and children—spread to other parts of the field, sympathetic diggers stopped work to seek information and digest rumours.
Work is knocked off, wrote one official to Hotham, and the whole population is talking over events of the morning…The opinions of most disinterested persons here is [the actions of the Camp are] alike unwise and indicativ
e of a wish on the part of the authorities here to hurry on a collision.
Even upright Martha Clendinning, a self-appointed member of the peace portion of the residents, thought ordering licence hunts after the Bakery Hill meeting had been an incredible act of folly.
From all directions on the diggings, people started in the direction of Bakery Hill. The Australian flag was flying there once again. Whatever grievances had caused the loss of faith in the government—hunger, grief, shame, disappointment, harassment, indignity, humiliation, powerlessness—the object now was self-defence. The leaders of Ballarat had shown they would fire upon a civilian crowd. Neither Australia’s homegrown sons and daughters nor its ambitious immigrants had ever expected this. This was the way masters treated servants or dogs or ‘the blacks’—not free-born Britons and self-governing Yankees.
Gathered now under their new banner at Bakery Hill, the people looked for direction. Who would guide this exodus, deliver them from tyranny, lead them out of slavery?
From the crowd stepped a 27-year-old Irish man. Peter Lalor.
Peter was raised in a political family, a family that had known the oppression and hypocrisy of the Union Jack, and believed in Home Rule for Ireland. Although they were landed gentry, they had stood up for the rights of Irish peasants. At Ballarat, Peter became Timothy Hayes’ mining partner. With his fiancée Alicia Dunne working as a teacher in Geelong, Peter looked to Anastasia Hayes and her brood of children for his domestic life.