Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (34 page)

And yet there is one more significant speaker to be heard before the meeting is closed, a formidable figure who is visiting Sydney all the way from Melbourne, if you can believe it. He is a Member of the Legislative Council of Victoria by the name of John Pascoe Fawkner, one of the first settlers in those parts, who made a fortune of £20,000 in just his first four years there, through farming, hotel-keeping, bookselling and becoming a newspaper proprietor, before pursuing his true passion: politics. With his learned long face, aquiline nose and remarkably high forehead, he certainly looks the part of a distinguished gentleman – even if one of his contemporaries has described the former convict as ‘half-froth, half-venom’.

Now, after some preliminary remarks thanking the men of Sydney for allowing him to address them, Fawkner gets to the point. He wishes to give a few statistics to ‘show the absolute necessity of a reform in the electoral system and Government of the colony’.

No matter that one critic would say he gave the same speech for fifteen years – it is for that reason that he now knows how to deliver it so well. His special bugbear is the issue of land and the outrage of the squatters having claimed so much of it that they deny others the right to claim any for themselves – and they give so little in return. In Victoria, just 700 squatters have control of the bulk of the colony, and they exert so much influence through this that they grind ‘the bulk of the people to the very dust’. Their obvious principle concern is not to lose control of the Legislative Council as, with their licenses to squat being annually renewed, the danger is that a truly democratic government would deny them their land.

‘After all,’ Fawkner now roars in the distinctly broad and sunburnt vowels of one who has been raised in this country, ‘you must know the squatters hold 250 millions of acres of land, which they pay only a nominal rent for, and which they have the power to buy at any time, at their own price. Yet the value of the land could not be calculated at less than a thousand million of pounds sterling, being at the rate of something like half-a-million of money to each of the squatters.

‘Now, should men that rich not be able to swamp the King or the Queen or any government upon earth with taxes well-paid? In the face of this, what have we made the poor digger pay for licenses to dig on Crown lands! Why, we make them pay £60,000 for a few acres in one year, while the squatters who have 250 millions of acres between them pay a mere trifle; and this was imposed upon them only because they belong to the class to which I belong – the industrious labouring class.’

Hooray
!
Cheers ring out around the theatre. Fawkner is a new kind of ‘Australian’. He has not the slightest hint of apology about him for his rough experience, for not having been raised in England, even though he had been born there. He is not an aristocrat. He is of the people, and for the people.

And he goes on, in full flight now; A single squatter pays but £10 a year for the occupation of hundreds of thousands of acres, whilst the poor gold digger was made to pay £13 for two or three feet of ground on which to pitch his tent. And to effect these iniquitous robberies the squatters and the Government were combined in one vile conspiracy.’
(
Loud cheers
)

The meeting goes for four hours and is in the vanguard of many subsequent gatherings that see men from across the land pushing for the formation of a true democracy, as opposed to a government formed only to advance the interests of the wealthy squatters. It is, broadly, exactly the same argument that had been occurring in Europe for over 20 years. The forces for true democracy had met with defeat there, with the most telling points raised against them being the sharp ends of a mass of bayonets. The question remains how the situation will be resolved in Australia.

Whatever else, however, Wentworth would be some time – specifically, never – in living down his proposal for a ‘bunyip aristocracy’. Ah, how they laugh and laugh at the very suggestion of it. Whatever else, those in New South Wales would not be accepting a bunyip aristocracy.

And nor would the people in Victoria. Few are more appalled than the lead writer at
The Argus
,
who notes that this ‘most impudent document’ from New South Wales ‘really does constitute a new Hereditary Peerage for that colony’. The paper reminds its readers, ‘The parents of this unexpected proposition are necessarily the very persons who, from the accident of their position are most likely to benefit by its adoption.’

As to Victoria’s new Constitution, when its Legislative Council recommences just three weeks after this Sydney meeting, Colonial Secretary John Leslie Fitzgerald Vesey Foster is heard to speak with great ‘liberality, soundness and openness to conviction’, as on behalf of the Executive he announces that, in agreement with public sentiment, the new Constitution will provide for an elected second chamber, not the colonial peerage many had been fearing. True, those men able to vote for both the Upper and Lower Houses would be severely restricted to those of the propertied and professional classes, but it is a start.

In response,
The Argus
is quite overcome: ‘. . . we have no hesitation in saying that the proceedings of yesterday constitute a great epoch in the history of Australia. The time is going past, and will shortly be almost forgotten, when it seemed a sort of settled thing that the Government should be in a condition of continuous antagonism with the people.’

18 August 1853, agitation rises a little on Ballarat

The movement across the goldfields to resist the license fee is strengthening. Leading moral-force Chartist Captain Browne – one of the Bendigo Petition delegates to Melbourne – has travelled to Ballarat drumming up support for the association and does well from the first. A series of well-attended and ever more passionate meetings is held over several days to express solidarity with the diggers of Bendigo, while also being careful to stress that the principle of ‘moral force’ is the only way to achieve their objectives. Nothing should be done to ‘unsettle the minds of the population’.

Another speaker at one of the meetings is none other than Raffaello Carboni. Always interested in the politics of the day, he has come more to keep in touch than with any deep-seated grievance. ‘For the fun of the thing’, he mounts the podium to say a few eloquent words in support of the proposal.

Still, he is impressive enough in his words – and the gathering strong enough – that when he descends from the podium one of the storekeepers from Ballarat Flat that he knows, a Mr Hetherington, who happens to speak French, is more than positive in his assessment, saying,
‘
Nous allons bientot avoir la Republique Australienne, Signore
!’ We
are going to have an Australian republic before long, sir.

‘
Quelle farce
!’

For at least on this day there is not remotely enough heat in the air to move the republic idea forward by much, and after just a couple of hours of collective grumbling, the meeting disperses and the men return to their work, albeit with a few pausing to down a nobbler or two.

Despite the thrill of having spoken from the podium, Raffaello Carboni has nevertheless had enough of life on the goldfields. Just as he had fallen in love with fossicking for gold during his first try at it, he has now firmly fallen out of love with it. Climbing from his all-but-barren pit one hot day in early December, he discovers that his washing cradle has been stolen, and it proves to be the last straw, coming as it does on the back of a terrible case of dysentery – always more than problematic when a man is at the bottom of a shaft. There are swarms of flies moving all over him wherever he goes, and this last hole is marginally less satisfactory than the partner he has been digging with. In sum,
basta
!
Enough! It is time to try something new, and he soon enough finds a job working for a squatter as a shepherd looking after large flocks of sheep, going from grassy paddock to grassy paddock.

Those 50,000-odd men who remain on the Victorian goldfields, however, are becoming increasingly more outraged, as August in Bendigo sees the birth of the ‘Red Ribbon Rebellion’, whereby all those diggers wishing to show their solidarity with each other and the whole movement start wearing red ribbons in their hats. And they mean it, too. For they are united in their view: if His Excellency won’t reduce the license fee from 30 to 10 shillings, then the diggers, in turn, will refuse to pay, bringing on a crisis for the government coffers, which currently have over £50,000 per month in license fees pouring into them.

While the view of most of the squatters about this turn of events is unprintable, one expression of outrage does make it into the public domain, black on white. According to
The Argus
,
some squatters in the Legislative Council – certainly not aligned with John Pascoe Fawkner – advocate that the best solution is ‘to arm the young men of Melbourne and send them on horseback to make the diggers pay!’

For his part, the correspondent for the
Geelong Advertiser
,
Samuel Irwin, expresses a common view well: ‘Oh, that we had but one good man and true to bring our claims before the council, not as lucky taxable vagabonds but as hardworking taxed unrepresented members of the body politic, who are hampered by regulations so absurd that we are compelled to believe that the framers of them wished merely to tolerate such a class.’

‘Tolerating’ the diggers, however, is at this point far from the mind of Charles La Trobe. In the face of this general refusal by a large mass of armed men to pay the current 30 shillings license fee, he feels he has no choice.

Fifty Redcoats of the 40th regiment are immediately despatched from Melbourne to Bendigo, and an officer and 30 troops are transferred over from Forrest Creek.

By the beginning of September, La Trobe’s worries deepen that the diggers’ protests will escalate. They have now placed an embargo on those storekeepers who pay the license fee, meaning there is another source of revenue that is drying up. Contrary to Chief Gold Commissioner William Henry Wright’s conviction that ‘the current force at present on these Goldfields is sufficient’, La Trobe orders the ‘whole of the effective military force remaining at his command’ – four officers and 145 men of all ranks of the 40th – to proceed to Bendigo. The total number of army men on the ground in Bendigo is now a staggering 274, in addition to the 171 police. It is obviously an unsustainable situation, and the inability of the Bench to effectively fine potentially thousands of miners across all the Victorian goldfields who refuse to pay the license fee is obvious to all. Clearly, La Trobe must look for another solution.

Chief Commissioner Wright agrees and is nothing if not frank in the report he has already submitted on 28 August: ‘We are compelled to report that the reduction of the license-fee, if not its abolition altogether is inevitable . . . If blood should once be shed it is impossible to foresee the consequences, but it would very possibly throw serious obstacles in the way of establishing regulations to be enforced on the goldfields.’

It is with this in mind that the Lieutenant-Governor proposes to the Legislative Council that the whole license fee system be done away with and replaced by a tax imposed on all exported gold, thus ensuring it would only be those who actually had the riches who would have to pay. But the Legislative Council – composed, after all, of merchants, officials and pastoralists from the pre-gold era – won’t hear a
word
of it and continues to insist that a direct tax on the diggers is the only way.

Unsurprisingly, this majority of the Legislative Council has received the full support of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, which had earlier passed a sanctimonious resolution: ‘Any restraint on exportation is contrary to established principle of the commercial system, as tending to trammel and retard the free operation of trade.’

One of the only members of the Legislative Council who does speak up for the diggers during the second reading of the Goldfields Management Bill is John Pascoe Fawkner, who proposes that the license fee be cut to five shillings a month, pointing out that the amount exacted in license fees from the diggers is ‘more than half as much as the whole annual value of wool derived from flocks depastured nearly gratuitously on millions of acres’. Why should the squatters pay far less for the lease of their land, from which is derived such vast guaranteed annual profits, while the diggers are left paying such a vast sum for a relatively tiny claim with practically no guarantees at all?

But come, come, come, Fawkner. The member for the Loddon, John Goodman, takes the long handle to what he perceives to be Fawkner’s deprecation of the value of the wool industry, pointing out that with the increased price of wool and mutton, pastoral revenues had gone up four-fold from the year before to now be £4 million!

In short . . . though the squatters are now rolling in it as never before, they’re
still
paying barely any tax at all?

. . .

Er, yes.

The most obvious loser on the day is the government of Charles La Trobe. Seen ‘to fall in with the wish of the majority’, it caves in and withdraws support for the very gold export duty it has proposed. In the end, amendments are made to the new gold license fees it has sought to abolish, which become law in November: £l (20s) for one month, £2 for three months, £4 for six months and £8 for a year. Alas, for the diggers, there would still be license-hunts to ensure that all diggers were fully paid up, and the licenses would only be issued for specific goldfields, meaning they were not transferable.

The whole thing is a mess, and all who follow the issue closely know it.

Captain John Dane MLC is commendably curt in recording what he thinks of the latest change of direction, claiming of the La Trobe government that he ‘would not put it to govern a colony of cats’.