Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (85 page)

He died at the age of 58 in Rome on 24 October 1875, with his death certificate recording him as ‘unmarried’ and a ‘man of letters.’

On Monday, 28 January 1974, Gough Whitlam’s equally flamboyant Immigration Minister, Al Grassby, visited Carboni’s hometown of Urbino to honour him and unveil a plaque on the house where he was born. Minister Grassby noted his visit and the plaque were ‘a tribute from the Australian Government and people’, while describing him as a ‘leader of the rebel forces which fought at the Eureka Stockade in a battle described as the birth of Australian democracy’.

Fare thee well, Raffaello. You were a beaut.

And what of the ‘long-legged’ Vern?

After having escaped Ballarat dressed as a woman, the Hanoverian emerged from hiding at much the same time as Peter Lalor and returned to mining. He again came to public notice when, as recorded by E. B. Withers, in 1856 he was put on trial in Ballarat for ‘rioting at Black Lead on the 7th April’, a charge which, once proved, saw him sentenced to three months in the lockup.

In fact, this riot had nothing to with anything that had occurred on the Eureka in 1854, as it was a fight between diggers over who had the right to which claims, rather than a fight against the authorities. Little more is known of Vern’s fate after this episode, apart from having his offer of service to the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61 turned down, and the fact that he was reported to have lived in the New South Wales town of Forbes in later years.

After being found ‘not guilty’ at his trial, the Irish firebrand and writer John Manning moved to New Zealand, where, after working as a journalist, he co-founded the
New Zealand Celt
in October 1867, supporting the Fenians and Irish nationalism. After writing supportively in 1868 of the attempted assassination in Sydney of Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Alfred, he was arrested and charged with – goodness, can that be the time again? – seditious libel. After a stern warning by the judge, he was released and moved to the United States, where he continued writing, mostly stories with Australian and Maori themes. His last recorded writings are as late as 1892, but it is not known when he died.

Despite Sir Charles Hotham’s quiet word that he should leave the colony, Lalor’s American second-in-command at the Stockade, James McGill, had declined – hiding out instead at the Quarantine Station on the shores of Port Phillip Bay until the amnesty had been declared, whereupon he returned to mining. Yet the controversy concerning Eureka never quite left him, with allegations that he had been missing in action when the shooting started. Vern even went so far as to slanderously suggest that McGill had been bribed £800 by the government to abandon the diggers. In my view, this is demonstrably untrue as Lalor had been in complete agreement with McGill that he and his men position themselves at Warrenheip to intercept the Redcoats coming from Melbourne. It would later be McGill’s widow’s curious claim that her husband had left the Stockade on the specific instruction of the US Consul, James Tarleton, though this also seems highly unlikely.

For a time, McGill prospered in his second stint at mining, though – perhaps unable to shake off the allegations of desertion – he eventually descended into alcoholism and finally died destitute in Melbourne in 1883, not long after his 50th birthday. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Melbourne General Cemetery.

As to Tarleton, the US Consul who had been the key representative of the American Government during Eureka, he came to an equally sad, strange end. As reported in
The Washington Post
on 24 December 1880, after staying on as Consul in Melbourne until near the end of James Buchanan’s administration, he returned to the United States and soon thereafter fell on hard times. Such hard times, in fact, that on the eve of Christmas Eve, 1880, the 72-year-old was found in the streets of Washington DC and died just hours later.

The editor and proprietor of
The Diggers
’
Advocate and Commercial Advertiser,
George Black, made good his escape after the battle of the Eureka Stockade, and only re-emerged after the announcement of the amnesty. He then twice stood for parliament against John Basson Humffray, and failed both times. What he did after this is something of a mystery beyond a partial return to mining, for it is known that with another brother, William, he was the owner of the Homeward Bound Quartz Crushing Company in Ballarat, where their third brother, Alfred, Lalor’s ‘Secretary of War’ and the author of the long-winded Declaration of Independence – was killed in a mining accident on 25 June 1859. The next time that George Black showed up on the public record was when he died in Kew, Victoria, in May 1879, aged 62.

For all his fine oratory, Tom Kennedy – who never licked any lugs at Eureka – did not go on to particularly great things. He drove a bullock team for a time after the battle and died in Ballarat on 7 March 1859 at the age of just 32. He is buried in the old Ballarat Cemetery, though his grave is unmarked.

Father Smyth left Ballarat in October 1856 after being transferred to St Mary’s Catholic Church in Castlemaine. Sadly, he too, was destined to die too young, just like many of the diggers he had tried to save at Eureka. After falling ill with tuberculosis, he died on 14 October 1865 at the age of just 41.

As to the finder of gold in Victoria, James Esmond stayed in mining and, typical of that generation, made and lost several fortunes – sadly with the latter finally prevailing. Near the end of his life, in the latter part of the 1880s, he was so impoverished that the people of Ballarat raised a public subscription for him, which was £150 to the good when he died of a kidney disease on 3 December 1890. There were few mourners at the 68-year-old’s funeral, though at least his widow and nine children were there.

And then there are Esmond’s contemporary great discoverers, Edward Hargraves, James Tom and the Lister brothers in New South Wales. The dispute between them concerning who was the first discoverer of ‘payable gold’ in Australia would go on for decades, through courts, parliamentary inquiries and the popular press – very nearly until the turn of the century. Hargraves remained steadfast in his denial that
he
had ever considered
them
as his partners – they were no more than his guides, pure and simple. And he was still the one who had chosen the spot to search for gold.

While Tom and the Listers were given an initial £1000 by the government in 1853 in recognition of their input, they remained profoundly dissatisfied. They published their own account of what had happened in 1871, entitled
History of the Discovery of the first Pay-able Gold-field (Ophir).
Hargraves did not emerge well from it, being described as one well habituated to having ‘played the part of deception’, as well as one who had recorded ‘extraordinary failures’ until such times as Tom and the Listers had told him where the gold was to be found. Still nothing changed in the official stance and the frustration of the younger men continued for another two decades.

Finally, however, in 1890, a committee of the New South Wales Parliament conducted an inquiry as to whom the credit properly belonged. Alas, on the very day he was due to give evidence, 17 September 1890, John Lister died. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the process, the parliament found that Lister and Tom’s April 1851 discovery of four ounces was indeed the first discovery of ‘payable gold’ in New South Wales, and they deserved better reward.

Hargraves’s own feelings were firm: ‘Now as to the “honour of the discovery,” I have always thought it of trifling importance, as any person of ordinary observation might have done the same as myself; but the impudent pretensions put forward by persons for the purpose of gain, only on a mere speculation, is to be deplored. I look upon it as a disgrace to the country to have rewarded such charlatans in any way.’

The strangest thing? It was only a week after Hargraves died at the age of 75 on 29 October 1891 – leaving an estate worth around £375 to be divided between his two sons and three daughters – that an assembly of the New South Wales Parliament rejected the findings of the committee, which left the late Edward Hargraves
still
acknowledged as founding finder of payable gold in New South Wales. The epitaph on Hargraves’s tombstone in Waverley Cemetery was firm in its own conclusions:

EDWARD HAMMOND HARGRAVES

BORN ENG. 7/10/1816

DIED 29/10/1891

THE ORIGINAL DIGGER WHOSE

GOLD DISCOVERY STARTED THE

GREAT AUSTRALIAN GOLD RUSH IN 1851

Nevertheless, there was a last word etched on the matter, and it was unveiled 72 years after the discovery of payable gold when, on 28 December 1923, no fewer than 300 people journeyed down ‘1
5 miles of the roughest road in the Orange district’ to witness the unveiling of a commemorative obelisk at Ophir, on which the inscription read:

THIS OBELISK WAS ERECTED BY THE NEW SOUTH WALES

GOVERNMENT TO COMMEMORATE THE FIRST DISCOVERY IN

AUSTRALIA OF PAYABLE GOLD, WHICH WAS FOUND IN THE CREEK

IN FRONT OF THIS MONUMENT. THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE

DISCOVERY WERE

EDWARD HAMMOND HARGRAVES

JOHN HARDMAN AUSTRALIA LISTER

JAMES TOM

WILLIAM TOM

FROM EXPERIENCE GAINED IN CALIFORNIA, HARGRAVES FORMED

THE IDEA THAT THE DISTRICT WAS AURIFEROUS AND HE FOUND

THE FIRST GOLD ON 12TH FEBRUARY, 1851, ABOUT TWO MILES

UP LEWIS PONDS CREEK. HE EXPLAINED TO THE OTHERS HOW TO

PROSPECT AND MAKE USE OF A MINER’S CRADLE, AND LISTER AND

W. TOM FOUND PAYABLE GOLD BETWEEN 7TH AND 12TH APRIL,

1851.

And let that be an end to it! (But if you go looking for it, get to the Ophir camping ground, cross the creek, walk 50 metres to the north, go up the stairs and you will see it there. Take some metho – the plaque needs a scrub.)

Sir Robert Nickle did not long survive his strenuous exertions at Ballarat. After falling ill in early 1855, Sir Robert applied for leave to return to his homeland, but he did not even get close. On 26 May of that year, at his home of
Upper Jolimont House
–
one of the houses first brought to Victoria by Charles La Trobe – the old soldier died. He is buried at Melbourne General Cemetery.

Captain John Wellesley Thomas, who was promoted to Major shortly after the battle of the Eureka, went on to a glittering military career, in which his performance at Eureka was just one of many jewels. He served in North China in 1860 with the 67th Regiment of Foot and was both mentioned in dispatches and wounded while in command of a half-battalion attacking the North Taku Forts. Recovering, two years later he was promoted to Colonel and commanded the 67th Regiment and a brigade at the second capture of Khading during the Taiping Rebellion in China, which proved to be his last active service. Promoted to Major-General in 1877, he retired in 1881 with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-General. In 1882 he was appointed to the colonelcy of the Hampshire Regiment, and in 1904 was made a Knight Commander. He lived until the age of 85, dying in February 1908. He never had a family and left no widow to grieve.

After the seat on the Legislative Council of Captain Thomas’s second-in-command, Charles Pasley, was withdrawn in 1855 (with the introduction of the
Victorian Constitution Act,
the old Legislative Council was replaced with the new Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly), he decided that he would stand himself, winning the seat of South Bourke in 1856 in the Legislative Assembly, thus taking his place in the same chamber as Peter Lalor and John Basson Humffray! William Stawell was briefly there at the same time, as one of the members for Melbourne, and he was the Attorney-General of the first elected ministry before taking up his post as Chief Justice when Sir William a Beckett retired.

Pasley’s time in politics was only short-lived, however, as he resigned in March 1857 and soon returned to his military career, serving first in the Maori War in New Zealand in 1860, where he was wounded. After convalescing in England, he returned to Melbourne, where he served in a vast array of civil and military posts that required his engineering expertise. He finally returned to Great Britain in 1880 as Victoria’s Agent-General, where he was appointed a civil C. B. – the Order of the Bath Companions Decoration – shortly before being promoted to Major-General. He died, aged 66, on 11 November 1890 at his home in Chiswick, survived by his wife, who was also his cousin. They had no children.

Two more players in the saga of Eureka who made their way into that first Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1856 were the notable barristers for the defence in the John Joseph case, Henry Samuel Chapman and Butler Cole Aspinall. (With such a cast of characters in the Victorian Parliament who had first laid eyes on each other across the rampart, or from the prisoner’s dock, one can only imagine what crossways looks were exchanged as they passed in the corridors.)

As to Aspinall, he rose to the position of Solicitor-General in John MacPherson’s ministry by 1870. He was very much the man about town and said to be the most coveted dinner guest in Melbourne, revered for his wit, intellect, aristocratic looks and – in some quarters – his ability to burn the candle at both ends. Alas, it was not only the candle that was burnt and, after suffering a complete mental breakdown in 1871, he had to resign all his posts before returning to England, where he died on 4 April 1875.

Judge Redmond Barry, who presided over the latter Eureka trials, went on to ever great respect as one of Victoria’s most prominent judicial figures, though there was great surprise after Sir William a Beckett retired as Chief Justice of Victoria in 1857 that Barry did not succeed him. Instead, the post went to none other than William Stawell. Barry felt that this was because of political manoeuvres by Stawell, and their friendship never recovered.