Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (72 page)

A Scottish digger by the name of Robert Lorimer, however, will not hear of it. He talks urgently but quietly to Lalor, his words tumbling over each other like a small waterfall. ‘If you wish to escape, now is your time. The soldiers are gone, and the troopers have cleared away also.’ Not waiting for a reply this time, Lorimer urges, ‘Down with the pile of slabs, boys,’ and many willing hands set to.

Lifting the slabs from his hiding place, they soon have the exceedingly pale and groaning Lalor in the open air, where the severity of his wounds are reflected in his ashen face. His left arm is still well-attached to his shoulder, but he has no control of it. Now that he is standing, the blood comes from the wound in spurts.

Lorimer had completed some medical studies at Edinburgh University before coming to Australia, and he now takes Lalor’s own coloured neckerchief and ties it tightly over the worst of his wounds, attempting to stem the continuing blood loss.

Then, after getting Lalor onto Father Smyth’s horse, they put him in the charge of a trustworthy digger by the name of Billy Smythe, who rides beside him and practically holds him on the saddle. The two head off for Warrenheip, and they arrive not long after Independent California Rangers’ Revolver Brigade Commander James McGill has left for Melbourne in a Cobb coach. The 21-year-old is disguised in women’s clothes provided by – who else? – Sarah Hanmer of the Adelphi Theatre. (She did such a good job that a story would circulate afterwards that a male passenger on the coach proposed to McGill.)

Another who manages to get away, in his case to Geelong, is James Esmond. He was in the thick of the action throughout and fought with the best of them as captain of one of the companies. Once resistance ceased, he was able to make his way out of the Stockade unmolested. The fact that he is far and away Victoria’s best known and most prestigious goldminer – credited and rewarded by the government as one of the discoverers of gold in the state – cannot have hurt him in this endeavour. Should it be known that a man of Esmond’s pedigree was in the thick of the fight against government forces, it would be an embarrassment to both that government and those forces.

———

Many of the wounded diggers who have escaped being marched off to the lockup – it is considered they will likely die anyway – are being tended by Doctor Carr and his helpers in the nearby London Hotel, where the Englishman’s surgical skills have never been on such call as now. Many of the bayonet gashes are not mere flesh wounds or slashes to the skin; they have penetrated deep into vital organs. There is little that can be done, bar make the injured as comfortable as possible as their life ebbs.

In the bar, just after 8.30 am, Raffaello Carboni is engaged in bandaging the wounds of a brave American digger, a man who stood his ground throughout the entire battle despite taking six wounds – all on the front of his body – and had only finally fallen when he fainted through loss of blood. For such a man, there is not a lot that a person as limited in medical experience as Carboni can do beyond cleaning and dressing those wounds the best he can and offering soothing words.

Yet, just as he is assisting in the dressing of the man’s thigh, he looks up to see a digger he never liked, Henry Goodenough, enter the salon with wild eyes and gasping breath, holding a cocked pistol. The same fellow who was always exhorting them to attack the Camp, without ever wanting to get involved himself.
Che cosa? What on earth is going on?
Does Goodenough think the battle continues? And why is he poking the muzzle of the pistol right in Carboni’s face?

‘I want you!’ he roars at the Italian.

‘What for?’

‘None of your damned nonsense, or I will shoot you down like a rat.’

‘My good fellow, don’t you see? I am assisting Dr Carr to dress the wounds of my friends!’

Goodenough has no interest in any explanation that Carboni has to offer, and it is only now that the Italian understands. Far from being a rebel, the Englishman reveals he has been working for the troopers all along. Goodenough is a traitor, in the pay of those who have visited this terrible injustice upon them and then slaughtered them for daring to protest. Carboni is speechless with rage, but he’s also surprised that Dr Carr does not speak up for him, does not step forward and demand that trooper Goodenough unhand the Italian immediately. Despite Carboni now begging him to intervene, Dr Carr speaks not a word and stands silently as the fiery Italian is roughly dragged outside and manacled to a dozen other straggling rebels who have also been taken prisoner inside the Stockade and are in all states of exhaustion, trauma and injury. Bound to each other, some weeping, they are marched to the Camp, where, at this very time, there is a sudden outcry . . .

Him! That’s HIM!

Seeing a black man among the prisoners – none other than John Joseph – a soldier is convinced that he is the one who shot the now grievously wounded Captain Wise. The man is quite prepared to shoot Joseph on the spot, and this is exactly what would have occurred, ‘had it not been for the officers’ who restrain the soldier. It has been one thing for summary executions to take place in and around the Stockade, but it is quite another here.

———

At the Star Hotel, the worthy Captain Ross of Canada, the bridegroom of the Eureka flag, is even now rattling out his last agonising breaths. He was carried there as soon as the battle was over and lain on a sofa, but though two doctors work feverishly, his wounds are simply too grave.

As desperate as the situation is, the licensee, William McCrae, is so panicked by having a rebel on his premises that he sends out a Camp runner to inform them of the situation. It is not long before a trooper arrives, pistol loaded. After telling McCrae that his license would not be renewed for harbouring a rebel, he searches the hotel and finds Ross, dead on the sofa in a pool of his own blood.

———

Of course, it is not just the diggers that misfortune and tragedy have descended upon. Within the confines of the Camp’s rough hospital, the medical staff are doing what they can for Captain Wise and the other wounded soldiers, but it is little enough.

The wounds to Wise’s legs are deep, he has lost a lot of blood, and he is now breathing with some difficulty on a cot. It is touch and go whether he will survive – only amputation might save him. Around and about, many of the other soldiers who have been seriously wounded are also having those wounds and slashes attended to. The lucky ones only have bits of lead dug out of their bodies. In both cases, the blood flows freely and the scene is terribly grisly and sad. Outside the hospital, however, among the soldiers in the Camp courtyard, the mood is entirely different.

Upon the smoke and dust of the dispersing battle, there is a human dynamic that sees the misery of the shattered and scattered rebels more than matched by the joy of the victors coming together to toast each other three times over and once more for luck.

The soldiers, some of them still smeared with blood, are laughing, chiacking and joyfully jostling each other as they dip their pannikins into a bucket full of brandy and gulp it down deeply. Rodomontade abounds: did you see the corporal and how his bayonet went right
through
that rebel?

More laughter, more drinking and more jeering at the swell of prisoners who continue to dribble in.

These last now include the dirty dozen with the dazed Raffaello Carboni, who is struggling to grasp what is happening and how, despite not even having been inside the Stockade when the attack came, he is under arrest. In short order he joins over 100 prisoners in the poisonously overcrowded log gaol.

Two hours later, police inspector Henry Foster commands all the prisoners to strip down to their bare shirts and line up so that their details can be taken.

One by one they step forward.

‘Timothy Hayes.’

‘John Joseph.’

‘William Atherden.’

‘John Manning.’

‘Raffaello Carboni.’

Raffy Carbi-what? asks the trooper, not a little confused at such a bizarre and entirely unpatriotic name.

He finally masters it, however, and writes down ‘Charles Raffaello’. In order to help him spell it, the Italian pulls out the small bag he has with him, which contains both his mining license and some of the gold he has gathered over previous days. Mr Foster takes the bag while the trooper takes the license, whereupon the next lot of prisoners arrives and he is again called outside the room. At this point Carboni is ordered to strip, when a trooper suddenly steps up and identifies Carboni as the very man he has seen whipping up the miners at the monster meeting, making him guilty of sedition.

‘It was easy to see,’ Lynch would record, ‘that the enmity of the police was particularly directed against a few, whom they blamed for instigating the others to insurrection. Hayes, Raffaello . . . Manning (non-combatants) were particularly disliked. So was a coloured gentleman, who was arrested in the thick of the fight, and who bore himself throughout the whole ordeal with a degree of dignity.’

In the confusion of it all, Carboni tries to keep his waistcoat with him, since it contains both money and papers. This request is not only refused but his clothes are now physically torn from him. Carboni is then kicked to the ground, knocked out and thrown – clothed only in his undershirt – into a cell with the other moaning men who used to be proud diggers but are now rather pathetic prisoners.

True, those cells had only been intended to cope with a bare handful of prisoners, but that is just too bad. Just like bellowing cattle, the rest of the prisoners are herded, poked and prodded into the wooden enclosure, each one forced to press up hard against the other, with not even room enough to change their mind.

Since each man is manacled to another, the only way they can cope is to take it in turns to stand or lie, but always in tandem. When they do rest, they have to ‘lie on the floor in rows, with narrow lanes between’. There is no straw on the floor, and they don’t even have their boots to use as pillows.

With a rumour circulating that the mass of diggers outside is going to attempt a rescue, the soldiers are taking no chances. So seriously do they guard their prisoners that, as Lynch would record, they ‘were . . . separated from us by a rampart formed of hay-trusses, sand-bags, and such materials; behind this stood the guards with levelled muskets all night.’ At least in all the madness Lynch is able to remove the small powder flask hanging around his neck and drop it between the cracks in the floorboards.

Not far away in the main administrative building, just before half past one in the afternoon, Captain Thomas has no sooner finished writing a report of the battle and its result – they have recorded a decisive victory and those inside the Stockade have been crushed – than a despatch rider puts it in his satchel and gallops past the heavily armed sentries on his way towards Melbourne.

In the meantime, Commissioner Rede is now having notices printed that will shortly be placed prominently all over the diggings:

V. R. NOTICE.

Government Camp, Ballarat, Dec. 3rd, 1854.

Her Majesty’s forces were this morning fired upon by a large body of evil-disposed persons of various nations, who had entrenched themselves in a Stockade on the Eureka, and some officers and men were killed or wounded.

Several of the rioters have paid the penalty of their crime, and a large number are in custody.

All well-disposed persons are earnestly requested to return to their ordinary occupations, and to abstain from assembling in groups, and every protection will be afforded to them.

Robt. Rede,

‘Resident Commissioner’

And now, out and about in Ballarat, hammering is heard again. This time it is not to construct a podium, but rather to quickly knock together some coffins. There is no need for inquests – there is no mystery as to how any of them died – so the dead can be buried immediately.

At lunchtime, a digger by the name of Charles Rich had received sudden notice from the government contractor, Mr Watkins, asking him to join a young Welshman to make a large excavation in Ballarat’s makeshift cemetery. In truth it is less a cemetery than a relatively flat piece of ground that, rarely for Ballarat, is judged to be better for putting bodies into than getting gold out of.

The two immediately set to and late that afternoon, just as the sun is beginning to fade, this final resting place is only just ready before the ‘mournful cavalcade’ arrives. It is a procession of diggers some 200 strong, bearing the bodies of seven diggers who had been slain just that morning. The cortege passes right by the Government Camp – a camp under arms at this moment, ready for a fresh outbreak of violence – and creates a great deal of tension that somehow remains in check.

The seven coffins arrive before the freshly dug hole and are placed in two tiers – four on the bottom and three on top – reaching to within a foot of the surface. So makeshift are the coffins that the bodies and faces of the dead are plainly discernible through the joints in the lids, and it somehow doesn’t seem quite right, as they throw shovelfuls of earth into the grave, that some of that dirt goes straight into their dead faces.