Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (35 page)

———

As to those in London keeping a weather eye on events in the colonies, they despair at the direction things are taking, with no less than
The Times
harrumphing unpleasantly, ‘The Government of Victoria is humbled in the dust before a lawless mob; the reign of order and the supremacy of the law are at an end.’

There is, however, one particular reason for at least a little optimism. Charles La Trobe’s letter of resignation has been received and the individual charged with finding his replacement, the Secretary of State, the Duke of Newcastle, feels he has just the kind of man they need to replace the vacillating La Trobe: a military man, a man of stern character with a ramrod spine and devotion to duty, a man with a proven record of using a small military force to take on a rebellious mob. At one point in his naval career, with just over 300 men at his command, Sir Charles Hotham – for it is he – successfully routed 3500 Argentinians trying to enforce a blockade on the Parana River, and it was for this feat that he was knighted. Hotham
does
have fight in him, and it is the firm view of the Duke that that is what Victoria needs at this moment.

The Duke of Newcastle is pleased with the appointment, as he writes to Charles La Trobe in a note apologising for having taken so long to find his replacement: ‘I have felt so strongly the vast importance . . . of selecting a first rate man, that I could not conscientiously appoint anyone of whose qualifications I was not thoroughly assured.’

It is true that there is some kerfuffle when the Crimean War breaks out, as Sir Charles tries to get out of the appointment in the hope of receiving a senior posting to command a ship in the Black Sea theatre of that war. For, as Sir Charles would later recount, ‘My previous habits had in no way qualified me for such employment . . . I endeavoured to convince both his Grace and the Prime Minister that a better selection might without any difficulty be made.’

But neither man will hear of it, and it falls to the Duke to tell Sir Charles that, in the service of Her Majesty, this is his only option.

‘Notwithstanding my entire conviction that the Government were mistaken, I had either to decline serving the public or comply with their wishes,’ Hotham writes to his sponsor, the Earl of Malmesbury. ‘Thus placed, I accepted the latter alternative, and with a sorrowful heart go to Victoria.’

Still, one more thing, sir, before you depart . . .

Taking a sheaf of papers that contain the financial estimates of the colony of Victoria, the Duke of Newcastle hands them to the incoming Lieutenant-Governor and says, ‘This, Sir Charles . . . is the difficulty you have got to face. There is an enormously extravagant expenditure going on in that colony which, if not arrested, will cause its ruin.’

It is for Sir Charles to fix that problem, and he is not long in looking at all options, including getting the license money by force of arms. But what arms? It is with this in mind that he has written to the Colonial Office before departure, querying, ‘On what am I to depend if a struggle arises? Can I call a regiment from Sydney, Van Diemen’s Land or New Zealand?’

4 March 1854, Ballarat, ‘Read all about it!’

And here now is something new. For on this day in a building in Mair Street, right opposite the Market Square, a massive printing press that was moved in just the week before, starts to roll. The press is substantially composed of an enormous cylinder upon which each letter of every article has been individually set. With a turn of the cylinder, each one of the newspaper’s four pages is printed and . . . out comes the first edition of the weekly
The Ballarat Times: Buninyong & Creswick’s Creek Advertiser
.
It is a fresh triumph for its proprietor and editor, 25-year-old Englishman Henry Seekamp, who has invested his life savings in the venture.

From the beginning, Seekamp – closely supported by his common-law wife ten years his senior, the Irishwoman Clara, who had first come to the goldfields as a star beauty actress of her own theatrical troupe – intends his newspaper to pursue a civic-minded and radical agenda. Seekamp is a ‘short, thick, rare sort of man, of quick and precise movements, sardonic countenance; and one look from his sharp, round set of eyes tells you at once that you must not trifle with him’, for he is one who frequently struggles to keep his temper under control. He has no truck with the authorities, detests the amount charged for licenses and is firmly on the side of his readers – the diggers – in all things. He wants them to have the vote, to begin with, and their own representatives in parliament. He wants hospitals and schools paid for by the government and thinks it an outrage, an OUTRAGE, sir, that these things have been so long denied.

True, it would be said that he writes occasionally under inspiration from the source whence tradition tells us Dutchmen have drawn their courage’, but there is no doubt he writes a compelling editorial, much more given to confrontation than consultation.

Not that
The Ballarat Times
is without competition, for all that. Also read widely on the goldfields, firstly, is the sporadically issued
The Gold Diggers’ Advocate & Commercial Advertiser
,
with its notable masthead motto, ‘Labour found empires; knowledge and virtue exalt and perpetuate them’. It is an openly political paper re-started just a little earlier in the year with the abundantly red-haired and heavily bewhiskered George Black, as editor and proprietor. Many of those involved with
The Diggers’ Advocate
,
including Henry Holyoake, were heavily involved in pushing the cause of Chartism in Great Britain – and they are eagerly doing the same here now. With a strong republican slant,
The Diggers’ Advocate
is composed and printed in Melbourne – with the enthusiastic assistance of an intensely Christian journalist and recent arrival from Scotland, Ebenezer Syme – and rushed to the selling posts around the goldfields from there. Syme’s youngest brother, David, is on these Ballarat goldfields, and he feels the issues every bit as strongly as Seekamp, Holyoake and Black, and they are consumed with passion for their cause.

All put together, Ballarat just happens to be awash with men such as this: articulate and dedicated journalists and editors who have long ago eschewed the notion that the proper job of journalism is to merely chronicle history. For they want to help
make
it.

Early April, 1854, Ballarat has a strange exchange

It is only a small exchange, but as it is more than passing curious. For while there are certainly rough Vandemonians, there are rougher Vandemonians, and James Bentley, a local storekeeper of noted cunning, is very likely the roughest of them all. He is a former convict from Surrey, and his piercingly blue eyes glare from a face that bears the scars of dozens of fights every bit as much as his back bears the marks of many well-deserved lashes. And he walks with a severe limp, his ankles having spent 12 months in manacles on Norfolk Island before he was transferred to Van Diemen’s Land, before being granted a ticket-of-leave on 18 March 1850, before receiving a conditional pardon the following year.

To see the 35-year-old standing on the veranda of the Police Magistrates’ Court is not a surprise. What is a surprise is that he is not in manacles, being led away to the lockup. And what is even more surprising is the ‘business’ he is on.

‘Where is Mr Dewes?’ he asks casually of a bystander, John Dewes being the most powerful judicial official at the Ballarat diggings – a blue-blood Englishman who had attended Rugby School and only arrived from Melbourne the month before.

Even more interesting is that when Bentley is advised that His Honour is ‘in the magistrate’s room’, Bentley simply heads off with the confident swagger of a man who knows these buildings well, even beyond the cells. And, sure enough, Bentley soon reappears with Dewes by his side and, as friendly as you please, the two cross the road to the large tent opposite the court, where His Honour lives.

Oh, yes, it is noted alright – they make a curious pair. Bentley is to the legal system what a furious welt is to a branding iron – the ugly result of its mismanagement – and Dewes
is
the legal system in these parts. Bentley had learned his discipline in gaol before being transported to Australia; Dewes learned his in the British Army for many a year before he made his way to Australia and wandered into the judicial system. And yet here the two are, clearly thick as thieves.

Oh, yes, it is noted alright.

Just as it is noted when, not long afterwards, Dewes, as Police Magistrate, finds fault with police evidence that links Bentley’s general store to sly-grog selling. He even goes so far as to recommend the dismissal of the police who have charged Mr Bentley – and their prosecution – for perjury. All this from a man who believes that ‘the prevailing failing of the colony [is] “nobblerizing”.’

And it is
certainly
noted when Bentley is indeed granted by Magistrate Dewes a highly coveted license to build a huge hotel on the diggings, with weatherboard walls, sash windows and a shingled roof. If you can believe it, this place is going to have no fewer than three bars, 80 rooms, a billiard room, a couple of Waterford crystal chandeliers in its bagatelle room, where they play a kind of billiards, and an actual bowling alley on the side run by an American – and it is all going to cost £30,000!

Where would a bloke with a background like Bentley’s have been able to put together that kind of money? Well, they reckon that, despite his lack of education and refinement, he is ruthless in business. After his release from gaol he earned a fortune in Hobart, making and flogging lemonade and ginger beer, before doing much the same with confectionery and gold-trading in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, which is where they say he met Dewes. Last year, Bentley came to Ballarat to start up that general store, and now –
now
– he wants to have the biggest hotel in all Ballarat!

Mid-April 1854, Ballarat receives significant new arrivals

The only thing worse than living on the gold diggings, scratching dirt for a living? It has taken Raffaello Carboni some time to come up with the answer:
not
living on the goldfields, scratching dirt for a living. For at least on the goldfields, as opposed to wandering after infernal sheep all day long and into the night, there is a chance – a
chance, capisci
? –
that you will strike it big. It is this hope that keeps you going day after day. And at least there is companionship and camaraderie and occasional revelry in the night, as opposed to being lost and forgotten on an even more lost and forgotten sheep run. So it is that, having spent a few months as a shepherd and a few weeks living with an Aboriginal tribe just for a complete change of scenery, the Italian now makes his way back to Ballarat. On much the same road as Carboni, and at much the same time, comes Peter Lalor.

Lalor’s path, like that of many diggers, has been a winding one since his arrival in Australia in October of ‘52. After establishing a moderately successful liquor merchant business with his brother Richard, and then working as a civil engineer on the proposed Melbourne-Geelong railway, he wandered a little, including making as many trips as possible to Geelong where Alicia, the woman he fell in love with on
Scindian
,
is now assistant teacher at St Mary’s School. Lalor had then tried his luck first at the Ovens diggings before spending a short time at Buninyong. But he has yet to make a big find or discover the place where his soul could settle . . . perhaps a place where he and Alicia could make their home, if he could just gather the necessary capital?

And so he has kept going, now heading to the newly popular Ballarat, where in recent weeks the word is that the finds have been fabulous but deep underground. More men are needed to dig that deep, and more men want to come dig in for the winter.

Lalor is eager to see the place that he, like everyone in Victoria – if not the world – has heard so much about. As he gets close, the track starts to gently fall away, even as the trees grow taller and thicker before the road bottoms out to a valley. Then he begins to see tents peeking through the trees . . . until suddenly the trees stop marching with him and he is in the open once more, with the vista of the Ballarat goldfields lying before him.

Across the muddy flat he can make out what he knows must be the curiously elongated form of Black Hill in the near distance, with Yarrowee Creek running immediately in front of it, lined with cradles being worked by what appears to be a whole army of workers, an army fed by the hundreds of workers trekking back and forth from the myriad mine-shafts, which are marked in turn by the huge piles of dirt that lie beside them. This, this before him now, dear friends, is the famous diggings of Ballarat that so many visitors to these shores had started dreaming of after seeing it in the likes of
The Illustrated London News
.

A short climb up one rise, down into a small valley, and up and over another rise, and there is the staggering sight. What had once been a pristine creek running through the wilderness is now no more. All that is left of the trees that used to line it are hundreds of bleeding stumps; all that had been undergrowth is now only dirt. And that sound? The one like ‘distant thunder’? It is the sound of hundreds of cradles, rhythmically rocking, endlessly, back and forth, forth and back . . .

And everywhere there are diggers! Diggers working, swearing, scolding, carrying dirt, carrying on – the occasional cry of exultation when something is found sounds out against a background of low rumbling and grumbling that the yield is not what had been hoped for. There appears to be not one bit of ground that has not been torn asunder, squatted upon or despoiled. Everywhere there are tents, many of which have brightly coloured flags gaily flying from their peaks. And yes, too, there is a strong smell, a kind of
eau de unwashed bodies, piled rubbish and human waste
,
but he will get used to that soon enough.