Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (21 page)

One measure La Trobe does take to encourage those police on the goldfields to stay at their posts is to institute a system whereby, when their arrests generate fines, such as for not having a gold license or selling sly grog, the arresting officers (typically an inspector with two constables) are to be given half of the proceeds once convictions are recorded and the license fee deducted.

Yes, it is obvious that such a system will encourage perjury, corruption and blackmail, and police will inevitably focus less on preventing crime and more on going after these mere misdemeanours – and then try to get convictions, come what may – but extreme times call for extreme measures. And how else, when police constables are being paid just six shillings per day, could they possibly be kept at their posts?

Personally, La Trobe tries to live as simply as possible, believing, as he had once written to Governor Gipps, that, ‘It is my duty to set a good example & to show that it is possible to live moderately and contentedly even in the midst of a crowd of successful speculators who are making their thousands by the turn of every card.’ But it is now obvious that his is an example no-one wishes to follow. And what is most troubling is that the budget for maintaining law and order on the goldfields is blowing out. The wages and costs for civil servants on the Mt Alexander goldfields alone – including paying for Assistant-Commissioner Lydiard and his assistants to live on the goldfield and administer the license system, the police to maintain order, the magistrates in town to administer the law, and the armed escorts heading back and forth with the gold – is now around £1000 monthly. And that is in just one gold district, where for the month of November 1851 the diggers themselves pulled out a tad less than £94,000 of gold to be escorted to Melbourne!

It cannot go on, and La Trobe’s fear is that because of the invading diggers and his lack of wherewithal to provide the military security that the goldfields, cities and ports need, Victoria risks descending into anarchy or worse – no longer being a British possession.

It is with this in mind that in the first days of December, at a time when he has just 44 soldiers in the entire colony to call upon, La Trobe writes to Secretary of State Earl Grey in London, earnestly requesting him to send troops: ‘It is imperatively my duty to urge . . . that immediate steps should be taken to afford this security to the colony, both as respects internal disturbance or attack from without. Melbourne ought to be made the headquarters of one regiment at least.’

Yes, that is it. With one solid regiment of men who
couldn
’
t
just leave their posts if bitten by gold lust – because they would be shot for desertion if they did so – Melbourne might possibly be kept stable.

———

And so, the Redcoats are coming, are they? To our peaceful province?

That, at least, is the very strong view of
The Argus
when it catches wind of La Trobe’s move, and it wastes no time in condemning the Lieutenant-Governor: ‘The rumour that Mr La Trobe has sent for a supply of troops, has produced an extraordinary sensation, among many people down here . . . A man must be worse than a madman to venture on such an expedient at the present time; for the strength of the government consists most decidedly in the good sense and peaceable disposition of the diggers; if it once forfeits that, we are lost and the miserable display of a few hundred redcoats, among a population of 15,000 armed men, mad in their search for gold, will be the first thing to alienate their respect for the constituted authorities.’

Which is as may be. In the meantime, however, La Trobe, in his urgent need to get at least a makeshift force for law and order onto the goldfields until the Redcoats can arrive, makes another desperate move. He writes to his fellow Lieutenant-Governor in Van Diemen’s Land, Lord Denison, and asks him to send up soldiers, whether drawn from the 99th Regiment or some of the army pensioners who are known to have retired to his colony – men without the wherewithal to do anything else – so that the government can at least have
some
presence. It is all part of his insistence, as he assures Earl Grey, that ‘every practicable means to secure the maintenance of good order and observance of the law in the country districts will be resorted to’.

Maintaining that order is all the more difficult, not just for the numbers of men heading to the goldfields, but also for the diggers’ growing resistance to paying the license fees, all at a time when La Trobe’s advisers are very insistent that they actually should be paying
more.

More? Just as a duck is to water, so is the digger to outraged protest at any mention of the license fee. Typical is the response of one contemporary writer and digger, William Howitt: ‘[The] Government, in fact, has done nothing forever for the diggers but tax them! The whole amount of taxation which the squatters, who hold the whole country in possession . . . pay to the Government, is £20,000 a-year. The diggers, on the contrary, pay in licenses more than half a million a-year.’

But even if La Trobe did want to increase taxes on the squatters, who still paid just £10 annually apiece for their vast holdings, their resistance would be even more intense than the diggers’. For the truth of it is, the ruling class in Victoria, as in New South Wales, is the squattocracy. They are the people who have arrived here first, who settled the land and built it up, whose members crowd the Legislative Council. Getting more money out of them would be more than problematical; it would be nigh on impossible. It is a problem La Trobe continues to wrestle with, but there seems only one obvious way forward . . .

8 December 1851, across the cross Victorian goldfields

It is shocking. Outrageous. Breathtaking in its sheer bastardry. For it is on this day that the news from Melbourne reaches the diggings: the administration of Charles La Trobe has announced that from the first day of the New Year, the license fee will double to £3 per month! Even more appalling and infuriating to many is that this legal obligation to pay up will also apply to ‘all persons on the goldfields who are in any manner concerned with the search for gold, as tent keepers, cooks, &c, on the same terms as those who are digging for it.’

The outcry from the diggings is all but universal as plans are put in place to hold meetings among the angry miners to decide what to do. Typical is the large notice pinned to trees and stumps at the Forrest Creek diggings:

FELLOW DIGGERS!

The intelligence, has just arrived of the resolution of the Government to double the license fee. Will you tamely submit to the imposition or assert your rights as men?

You are called upon to pay a tax originated and concocted by the most heartless selfishness, a tax imposed by Legislators for the purpose of detaining you in their workshops, in their stable yards, and by their flocks and herds . . .

Remember that union is strength, that though a single twig be bent or broken, a bundle of them tied together yields not nor breaks . . .

As a result of those meetings and subsequent communications between the goldfields, plans are put in place for a mass meeting for every digger who can get there, while all over it is noted that there is a sudden surge in demand from the diggers for guns, pistols, ammunitions and even cutlasses for the desperate. It is for very good reason that the correspondent of
The Argus
dryly asks of its Melbourne readers, ‘What will save the Colony?’ It is a question in everybody’s mouth . . .

Mid-December 1851, Ballarat proper takes shape

A careful, considered man is Government Surveyor William Swan Urquhart. And this is an important job. For no more than four months after gold was discovered, his superiors have sent the surveyor to Ballarat to lay out streets for a township and, most particularly, designate where government buildings should be built. Having received his instructions on 3 December, Mr Urquhart arrives at Ballarat on 11 December and the next day looks around to get his bearings. With it being obvious that no township can be laid where the diggings are taking place, while it still needs to be close to such diggings, he is not long in making his selection. The choice is obvious: the township shall be laid atop a small plateau just to the west of Yarrowee Creek, and for the next fortnight he sketches his plans on his huge sheets of paper. Other men build castles in the sky, but that has never appealed to Urquhart. He loves to see a town even before it is built, to form it up beneath his fingers, and he barely notices the days passing.

The basic plan is a grid of wide streets, and he also has the honour of baptising these thoroughfares, naming them after figures already significant in the short history of Ballarat since colonisation.

Yes, the place is unrecognisable since the days when the Aborigines had this broad valley to themselves, but Urquhart at least gives a nod to their traditional ownership by assigning some Aboriginal names to the physical features. The creek is
‘
Yarrowee
’
and the swamp
‘
Wendouree
’,
while the waterholes remain
‘
Quimidupakup
’
and the hole further downstream
‘
Parmoompi
’.

From Urquhart’s map, with its precise measurements of distances and angles, it will be the job of the Royal Engineers and their workforce to actually build the streets, which will frame four large blocks containing 40 land lots that the government can eventually sell to raise revenue. No less than 20,000 acres of nearby agricultural land by Dowling Forest, Lake Learmonth and Lake Burrumbeet, Miners Rest and Glendaruel, in lots varying in size from 80 to 320 acres each, are also set aside for eventual sale, though for the moment at least the government has no interest in releasing it.

Four o’clock in the afternoon, 15 December 1851, at Forrest Creek just outside of Castlemaine, beside the Old Shepherd’s Hut

Down tools, lads, no more rocking the cradle – let’s get going and be quick about it. For the meeting has near started.

It is a meeting such as the goldfields have never seen, with men emerging from every shaft, every creek and gully, every hill for a radius as far as 20 miles, including Bendigo, and making their way to Old Shepherd’s Hut, in a paddock at the small settlement of Chewton, just outside Castlemaine, east of the junction of Forrest and Wattle creeks. As a matter of fact, there are so many men, and the cause so similar, that they will ever after refer to it as the first ‘monster meeting’, just as such meetings used to be called in the great days of Chartism in old England. For these 15,000 miners present – together with brass bands and waving flags – have come to protest. They intend to
make
the government change its mind.

And that is certainly the theme that speaker after speaker warms to as they stand on the back of a dray and scale the heights of oratory, led by one of the key organisers, Laurence Potts, a radical Englishman well steeped in the rhetoric of Chartism:

‘Brother diggers and fellow-citizens . . .’ he begins in stirring cadences, the voice of a man who knows how to move a crowd with his words alone and . . . loves . . . every . . .
syll
. . .
a
. . .
ble
of it. He goes on: ‘I see before me some 10,000, or 12,000 men which any country in the world would be proud to own as their sons, the very cream of Victoria and the sinews of her strength. Now, my friends, let it be seen this day whether you intend to be slaves of Britain, whether you would bow down your neck to the yoke or whether, like true
men
,
you would support your rights . . ! (
Cheers
)

‘On this ground are collected . . . men, who have hitherto united in the bonds of friendship, discarded all distillation of nations and needs, and lived like brothers. Why then should we bear a grievous imposition, while it is in our power to avoid it? You must be aware, that the 30 shillings charged by the government is an illegal taxation, and that His Excellency has no power to tax us. We are willing to pay a small tax, but the question is, will we pay £36 a year?
(
Voices from all parts, Never
!)

‘
The Herald
describes us as a set of “cut-throats and scoundrels”, from that journal little else could be expected . . . Talk of honesty! I defy the world to produce the same honesty among the same number as at Forrest Creek. Is there one of you who locks your door?
(
Laughter
)
When I retire to rest, the last inquiry I make of those in the tent is, whether they have put the skewer in the blanket.
(
Renewed laughter
)
Men go to work, leaving thousands of pounds in their boxes, without lock or guard, and nothing but a bit of calico between that and a robber, that is, if there is any. Do not fathers bring their daughters among us, husbands their wives and children, and where has there been a single case of one being insulted? You are living in better order here than they are in Melbourne, with all their blue coat force, pistols and carbines included. It is useless to talk of physical force, moral force is what is required. You are men, possessed of the same power of reason, strength of mind and body, as your would-be extorters. Now will you pay the £3 license . . .?
(
Never
!)

‘The Home Government do not require, nor do they possess the power to enforce unjust taxation. It was such taxation that lost Great Britain, America.
(
A pause
)