by Clare Wright
This tall, charismatic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man stepped out of the crowd and said one word. He said it with feeling.
Liberty!
Mrs Ann Shann, 24-year-old wife of digger John Shann, was there. Later, she vividly remembered the moment when Lalor was chosen leader of the diggers, and it was decided to drill and oppose the police and military by force. Mrs Shann joined with other diggers, their wives and children, and the assembled group of a thousand marched en masse from Bakery Hill to Eureka. The Eureka was a better place to defend: further from the Camp; more protected.
They took the flag with them.
A COUNCIL OF WAR FOR DEFENCE
At Eureka, the self-appointed leadership of the young solidarity movement met in the home/store of Anne and Martin Diamond. It was a veritable United Nations of malcontents: Lalor; Carboni (who was needed to translate orders to the non-English-speaking rebels); Irishmen Patrick Curtain, John Manning (the schoolmaster at St Alipius), Patrick Howard (who would soon marry Eliza Darcy) and Timothy Hayes; Englishman George Black; Scotsman Thomas Kennedy; Frederick Vern the Hanoverian; Canadian Henry Ross; American James McGill, who was a close friend of Sarah Hanmer, and Edward Thonen, a 30-year-old Jewish ‘lemonade seller’ (i.e. sly-grogger) from Prussia.
John Basson Humffray abstained from the group, saying he preferred moral force to physical force, and watched his former shipmates Anne and Martin Diamond give shelter to the rebels. Charles Evans sided with Humffray (with whom he’d walked to Ballarat) over Hayes (with whom he’d sailed to Victoria). By temperament, Evans was a cautious observer. Kennedy, by contrast, had told a cheering crowd at the Bakery Hill monster meeting that mere persuasion is all a humbug; nothing succeeds like a lick in the lug [a smack around the ear].
The new group who met at the Diamonds’ store saw themselves as a ‘council of war for the defence’, though there was, at present, no territory to defend. Lalor was elected ‘commander-in-chief’ and began to organise squads to protect the unlicensed diggers.
Thousands of miners had burnt their licences in the protest fires and were now, technically, not authorised to be on the diggings. They were easy targets for the authorities to fine or arrest, and the Gravel Pits incident that morning had shown that the government was in the mood to crack down hard.
Lalor concluded that the miners must resist force by force. But how to make that resistance concrete? A flag was one thing; it could stir hearts, but it could not shelter bodies. There needed to be a neighbourhood refuge, an unassailable place of shelter, to defend and protect from arrest those diggers who had burnt their licences.
DRAWING THE LINE
The war chiefs decided to throw up a barricade. The question was how you would construct such a refuge. In Europe, revolutionaries would block off the streets. You couldn’t do that on the diggings: there were no real streets or buildings, only rough alleys between the tents and shanties. There was no wall of buildings to contain an enemy. A crowd (or an army) could leak out into the gaps between the canvas shelters—even ride over them. This being Australia, and the frontier, there was simply too much space.
The barricade would have to be self-contained: it would have to close in on itself. The ‘line’ would have to be a circle.
Thus an area around the Diamonds’ store was immediately barricaded. It was all hands on deck, with any form of timber serving to construct a crude fortification: overturned carts, empty barrels and crates, felled trees, the thick timber slabs used to shore up mine shafts.
Made hurriedly with scavenged resources, the barrier was an uneven mess. Only waist-high at some points, closer to two metres in others. Some sections were held together with ropes, some fixed into the ground; some of the slabs were given picket-like points, other parts of the barrier were just mounds of earth. The ring was not even closed. It was a broken circle from the start, its ‘rear wall’ being the scrub of Brown Hill.
In all, about half a square kilometre of ground was enclosed, on a gentle slope running up to the Melbourne Road only a few hundred metres from the charred remains of Bentley’s Hotel. The barricade surrounded at least ten tents, the Diamonds’ immediate neighbours. These tents were the homes and businesses of diggers and their families; men and women randomly caught up in the drama. As Anne Diamond would later testify, her tent was half in and half out of the ramshackle cordon.
ANNE DIAMOND (NEE KEANE)
* * *
BORN Galway, Ireland, 1826
DIED 1885
ARRIVED September 1853, on the Star of the East
AGE AT EUREKA 28
CHILDREN One deceased, with Martin Diamond.
FAQ Irish Catholic, father a publican. Arrived with two brothers. Met Martin Diamond on the Star of the East. Their store was in the Stockade, and used as headquarters for meetings of Eureka leaders. It was burned down at Eureka; Martin was killed, Anne unsuccessfully claimed compensation for the destruction of her store.
At the heart of the enclosed area, a flagpole was erected and the Australian Flag hoisted briefly to stake the claim. The Eureka Stockade, as it would later come to be known, made a mighty fine amphitheatre but a lousy fortress.
SWEARING AN OATH
Peter Lalor led his war council—carrying their flag—past the teams of diggers still drilling on the flat ground beside their new stringybark citadel, and back up to Bakery Hill. The Southern Cross was once more unfurled.
The new stronghold at Eureka could be glimpsed from the Camp, but the Bakery Hill rise was more prominent. It would attract the attention of potential recruits as well as the wide-eyed glare of the authorities.
A division of Americans who called themselves the Independent Californian Rangers fell in behind Captain Henry Ross. Frederick Vern rallied a troupe of European freedom fighters. There is no evidence of any Chinese being recruited, but it is not impossible that someone like John Alloo, who ran a popular restaurant on the diggings, acted as an interpreter, just as Carboni did for the Italians, French and Prussians. Local Indigenous inhabitants may have been there too. (They were certainly present at the public meetings in Bendigo for the Red Ribbon Rebellion.)
This was the pointy end of a momentous day, and those still standing beneath the flag—now flapping wildly in the hot late-afternoon wind—were here to pledge allegiance to a cause that had escalated rapidly. What had started as a lawful outpouring of communal grievance was now a calculated show of armed resistance. Humble petitioners were suddenly rebels.
Lalor kneeled. He removed his hat and raised his hand towards the flag. We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties. A chorus of five hundred true believers chanted Amen.
Then they moved back down the hill to Eureka. Once more they brought the flag with them. This time, it would not return.
A SPY AND SOME WET SOLDIERS
On that afternoon of Thursday 30 November, storm clouds were building. Police Constable Henry Goodenough, a government spy embedded with the rebels, started a rumour that the Camp would be attacked at 4am. (Henry’s 26-year-old wife, Elizabeth, and their six-month-old baby, Mary Anne, had no doubt been sent away from the Camp with the other government wives.)
Goodenou
gh prowled the various scattered diggers’ meetings dressed in miner’s clothing, swearing loudly and pretending to be drunk. At one gathering Raffaello Carboni gave the mouthy oaf a kick in the privates to shut him up. When Judas Iscariot Goodenough, as Carboni later called him, planted the story that the Camp was soon to be attacked, there was every reason to think it might be true. The eight men arrested at the Gravel Pits that morning were considered political prisoners, just as Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby had been for the burning of the Eureka Hotel.
And if the rebels were to start something? That would suit the Camp just fine. We shall be ready to receive them, wrote Captain Pasley. I am more convinced than ever that…sedition must be put down by force…before many days have passed, it will be necessary for us to sweep the whole goldfield.
Had somebody instructed Goodenough to bring matters to a crisis, even if none truly existed?
That evening a violent thunderstorm shook the night sky. It rained for three hours solid, a great drenching of fat summer rain. During the whole night, the police troopers were exposed to the downpour, waiting beside their horses, saddled and ready for action.
Fortifications were made to various sections of the Camp, including Rede’s and Johnston’s quarters (a particularly exposed locality) and the military barracks. It was the job of the police to guard these vulnerable targets. So the exhausted and no doubt frightened young men lay wrapped in their cloaks on the saturated ground or crouching under their horses for shelter. To kill time, recounted Samuel Huyghue, the lads sat spinning yarns of former service in the field. For some, there would have been an element of truth to their tales. For most, the one-upmanship was pure bravado.
Robert Rede, dry and fortified in his quarters, scratched out a letter to Melbourne by candlelight. The absolute necessity of putting down all meeting Public/Private I think should now be apparent, he wrote, for the abolition of the Licence Fee is merely a watchword. The real agenda, suggested Rede, was revolt.
A LATE-NIGHT DEPUTATION
But the diggers were still not sticking to Commissioner Rede’s script. Late that night, with the dust settled by hours of soaking rain, Lalor decided to send a deputation to Rede. These go-betweens would speak with him in a gentlemanly manner to negotiate for the release of the prisoners. Lalor chose George Black—one of the men who so recently had been on a similar mission to see Hotham—along with Raffaello Carboni and the Catholic priest Father Smyth.
When the trio reached the Yarrowee River below the Camp, the police stopped them. Only Smyth was allowed to proceed. He was taken directly to Rede. Flanked by his deputies, Rede accompanied Smyth back to where Black and Carboni waited in the company of the police. Black immediately repeated the mistake he’d made with Hotham. He demanded the release of the prisoners, and for good measure added his opinion that the soldiers were bullies and that Britons would not stand for such brutal treatment.
The situation was hopeless. Rede expected the obedience and submission that his office vested in him. Black represented diggers who would no longer submit to tyranny, men who were desperate to have a voice after months of humiliation and neglect. The new codes smacked up against the old like waves against a cliff face.
Rede knew the licensing system was unworkable and must be replaced. Like Ellen Young, he had written directly to Hotham, on 7 November, suggesting other ways of raising revenue. His letter stated baldly: I look at all direct taxation now as impolitic. He must also have known that ordering a full-scale licence hunt on the morning after the impulsive licence-burning protest at Bakery Hill was sure to cause trouble. But he was not prepared to risk giving the impression he was not in complete control.
Black now offered him a solution. Stop the licence hunts until the people had once more had the opportunity to put their case to Hotham. In return for such consideration, the people would lay down their weapons and pick up their shovels. They would cease their armed resistance if they were sure they would not need to defend themselves and their families against actions such as the morning’s digger hunt.
But Rede smelled a rat. Or perhaps the acrid stench of his own reputation going up in smoke. Was this a trick? He already believed that the protest against the licence tax was merely the thin end of the wedge. The leaders of this agitation were revolutionaries, he was convinced: nothing short of self-government would appease them and he didn’t want to be the one who rolled out the red carpet for them. He could not afford to be the one who stepped cautiously back from the brink. He would have to stand firm.
He could not promise that there would be no more digger hunts, he told the deputation. Then he dismissed them: they could go now.
I can only say that things look as bad as they almost possibly can, lamented the Geelong Advertiser after the deputation’s second failed attempt to broker a truce. Is there no peacemaker? Martha Clendinning wondered the same thing. Things must come to a violent ending, she predicted, and that very soon.
1 DECEMBER—FRIDAY
On the first day of summer, Friday 1 December 1854, the Ballarat diggings ground to a halt. Miners downed tools. Storekeepers closed their doors. Families regrouped. Mates gathered in furtive clumps. Blacksmiths began fashioning pikes, the traditional weapon of peasant rebellion.
Teams of diggers swept through the city, first requesting, then insisting, that the occupants hand over their guns and ammunition. (All requisitioned arms, it was promised, would be returned when they were no longer needed.) The hotels and shanties were humming with rumour, but there was a surprising lack of drunkenness. An eerie hush fell over the festive season as a community held its breath.
That night at the Adelphi Theatre, Sarah Hanmer held a benefit performance. It was a tribute to herself, under the patronage of Resident Commissioner Robert Rede and the American consul, James Tarleton. During the evening she was presented with a gold watch and chain, as a mark of respect for her private worth and public character. The watch was purchased with funds raised from the benefit Mrs Hanmer had previously held to free the alleged sly-grogger Frank Carey. (Carey, after being reprieved by Hotham, had refused to take the money.)
Owing to the circumstances, neither Tarleton nor Rede was present to see Mrs Hanmer receive her gift. If they had been, they might have wondered what sort of game this formidable woman was playing at.
Earlier that evening, the Americans had held a meeting at the Adelphi to determine what their position would be in the looming crisis. The atmosphere was tense. Tarleton had warned his countrymen to stay out of any impending conflict, but, as American Charles Ferguson reported from the meeting, others complained that we were doing nothing, while it was a matter of as much interest to us as to them, and began to accuse us of cowardice. If Thomas and Frances Pierson joined their fellow Americans at the meeting, Thomas wasn’t prepared to write it in his diary.
Publicly, the Americans voted to stay out of it. They would not be seen as instigators. We regarded ourselves as foreigners, recounted Ferguson, and had no right to be foremost in an open outbreak against the government.
Privately, it was obvious that many Americans, notably Mrs Hanmer’s friend Captain McGill, were right in the thick of it. The diggers could count on their support. Like other foreign nationals who were joining the drilling corps at the Stockade, they believed they were defending themselves. They were taking a stand against a government that had
proved at the Gravel Pits that it had no hesitation in firing on the people.
Sarah Hanmer was directing the proceeds of all her benefits to the Diggers Defence Fund. She was the war chest’s principal contributor. Yet the shrewd theatre manager was still able to play it both ways, counting Ballarat’s highest official and the honorary consul of the most influential immigrant group in the colony among her patrons. Rede and Tarleton sponsored a benefit in her honour, despite the fact that within two days her theatre would be used to host the Ballarat Reform League’s most important meeting yet.
Why would these men flatter her with their sponsorship and affirm her prestige? Did they think this leading lady, who commanded the respect and affection of the American diggers, would use her influence to act as a go-between? Did Commissioner Rede court Sarah Hanmer’s power, hoping it would be used to his benefit? Or fearing it would be used against him?
Peacemaker or firebrand? Sarah Hanmer kept everyone guessing. Sometimes it pays to have one foot in both camps.
2 DECEMBER—SATURDAY
Saturday morning.
Business is entirely suspended, wrote Charles Evans, but one topic of conversation engrosses the attention of diggers and storekeepers. Those who could afford it were sending their families away while others whom poverty compels to keep their wives and families amidst the scene of threatening danger were filled with dread. Evans thanked his lucky stars he was a single man.