The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (51 page)

On 24 October, a company of twenty-eight mounted troops from the 40th Regiment arrived in Ballarat, led by the veteran warrior Captain Thomas. Four days later, two more companies, one from the 40th, one from the 12th Regiment, marched from Melbourne to the already swollen Camp. Defending the Camp meant strengthening its numbers. By the month's end, there were over 260 members of the military concertinaed into a few rows of ragged tents. The population of the Camp had tripled in a matter of weeks.

As the pre-summer temperature began to climb, so the pressure of living cheek by jowl intensified. The whole situation is reminiscent of that classic scene from the Marx Brothers movie
A Night at the Opera
, when the stowaway Groucho is hiding in a tiny ship's bolthole. People keep knocking on his door—a porter, a maid, another Marx brother—and he stuffs them into his cabin like sardines.
Make that two, no, make that three hard boiled eggs
, he says to the waiter outside the door, trying to keep up with the swelling numbers. Critical mass is finally reached, and when a newcomer opens the door, the whole heaving contingent spews out in a flume of cascading bodies and luggage and lunch.

High camp.

ELEVEN

CROSSING THE LINE (REPRISE)

November. There is no turning
back the clock of 1854. Whatever aspirations you might have had for this bright year either have been happily realised or are about to become history in the headlong rush towards Yuletide. It's still hard to fathom that your Christmas dinner will be consumed under the blaze of the southern sun, with these desiccated trees shedding their lizard-skin bark and the green of mistletoe replaced by dung-brown grasses that spit and fizz if they catch a wayward ember. You know bushfire is a steadfast threat. An inferno sped through this time last year, leaving its wake of black char here. And then, just like that, so soon, new green shoots like a graveyard of insolent asparagus. There are clouds of dust in place of the snowy blanket that enveloped your childhood Christmases.

Perhaps, like young Scotsman Alexander Dick, you have just travelled the road to Ballarat and arrived at this place, with its electric crackle of anticipation and agitation.
A very mutinous and excited spirit prevalent
, wrote Alexander in his diary after walking from Geelong and pitching his tent on the Eureka Lead,
ripe for an explosion.
It makes you tingle with a delicious shiver of hope and dread.

Or perhaps you thought you'd be long gone by now, sailed back over the seas, back home, transformed, triumphant. It would make you cry, then, to think of another long year of fruitless toil and bottomless yearning, earning not even enough for a ticket home. Or perhaps you are one of the many who found a mate this spring and
got spliced
; the new year will bring your first child.

One thing is certain. The time has passed to wait submissively, to wait and see whether the intimations and pleas and petitions and letters and now, since Bentley's, the explosive grass fires of public protest will nudge a mulish government over the line of reform. The time has come to take command of events. The time has come to harness the energies of an agitated and anxious multitude and steer them towards an early resolution.

In a poem called ‘The Wise Resolve' that Ellen Young published in the
BALLARAT TIMES
, she put words in the mouth of a hypothetically redeemed Governor Hotham:

Those lubberly boys—vagabond diggers—

Toil all day, like so many niggers;

Like niggers I'll drive them, and force them to do

Whatever I choose, or have mind to do…[But]

As there's among them doctors and tailors,

Parsons and clerks, there's sure to be sailors

Tell them to pipe hands and choose their own crew,

Their rights to protect, as freemen should do.
¹

Time to choose your own crew. Time for the Pollywogs to take over the ship. Time to cross the line.

If you're going to draw a line the question will inevitably arise: which side are you on?

Sarah Hanmer was among the first of Ballarat's prominent citizens to nail her colours to the mast. After the arrests of Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher for the burning of the Bentleys' hotel, a ‘monster meeting' was called for 22 October. Over ten thousand people gathered at Bakery Hill to hear thirty-year-old John Basson Humffray, twenty-four-year-old Henry Holyoake and twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Kennedy—all men with Chartist connections—deliver rousing speeches about the infringement of rights daily occurring at Ballarat.
We are worse off than either Russian serf or American slave!!
was how the
BALLARAT TIMES
framed the problem. Nothing short of the removal of the Camp officials who so flagrantly abused their offices would resolve the matter. The speakers called on the government to muck out their own stables before the people of Ballarat were forced to make a clean sweep themselves.

The ashes of the Eureka Hotel fire lay as unadorned proof of the might of the people if justice was denied them. But still, at this stage, the
TIMES
predicted that the collective angst would settle down into
a quiet constitutional agitation
, argued with moral not physical force, and fought on the twin issues of taxation and representation.
²
A Diggers Rights Society was thereby established to keep the Camp honest, and Holyoake called for subscriptions to help pay for the legal defence of McIntyre and Fletcher.

It was behind this cause, the Diggers Defence Fund, that Sarah Hanmer threw her considerable energies. She announced a benefit to be held at the Adelphi Theatre on 26 October. At the end of the monster meeting three cheers were raised for the recently defunct
GOLD DIGGERS
'
ADVOCATE
to be re-established; three groans were given for the turncoat
ARGUS
; and
three cheers and one more for the kindness of Mrs Hanmer
for her benefit at the Adelphi.
³
Sarah's theatre had earned the status of the Fifth Estate. The printing presses at Clara Seekamp's home might be giving voice to the people, but Sarah Hanmer's business was providing the stage for action as well as filling the war chest.

Apart from natural justice, there was another reason to give financial succour to those arbitrarily fingered for the Eureka Hotel fire. McIntyre's twenty-six-year-old wife, Christina, was heavily pregnant with their second child. This fact has never before been revealed, yet it is an important piece of evidence in that McIntyre's family situation would have been germane to the communal outrage over his arrest. It was common practice—almost a point of honour—for diggers to rally around the impoverished wife of a fellow miner after he was gaoled for being unlicensed.

Andrew McIntyre and Christina (née Winton) arrived in Victoria from their native Scotland on the
Success
in 1852. Their first child, James, was born at sea. By October 1854, Christina was seven months pregnant with their son Thomas, who would be born on 15 February. With her twenty-five-year-old husband committed for trial on 6 November in Geelong, Christina was left alone with her troubles. To add insult to injury, many people believed Andrew McIntyre was one of the few present at the riot who was actually trying to save the hotel property and its inhabitants. Even Assistant Commissioner Amos, who was stationed at Eureka and knew its diggers better than anyone, testified in McIntyre's defence.

Thomas Kennedy, who spoke at the monster meeting, was himself married with four children. And John ‘Yorkey' Westoby, tried along with McIntyre and Fletcher, would be married to his sweetheart Margaret Stewart in 1855. Thomas Fletcher, twenty-five, was a single man, but he was intimately connected with the social and commercial world of Ballarat. By late 1854, Fletcher had, with Charles and George Evans, established the Criterion Printing Office located opposite the Adelphi Theatre. As well as printing all Sarah Hanmer's playbills, the Criterion was also responsible for producing the posters for the monster meetings on Bakery Hill. Significantly, these posters rallied together
the diggers, storekeepers and inhabitants of Ballarat generally
. We, the people.

Fletcher
, wrote Charles Evans in his diary,
is about the last man I should have thought likely to take part in such a proceeding and besides this I knew from several circumstances that he was like myself nothing more than a passive spectator.
The arbitrary nature of the arrests left the thousands of bystanders with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god shudder.

The Eureka population was starting to coalesce around its sense of grievance and Sarah Hanmer had the capital, resources and heart to mobilise the community. Christina McIntyre reaped the advantage of this unwritten social contract in a way that Catherine Bentley, who was also pregnant with a toddler, and now homeless to boot, would not. Catherine had, according to popular assumption, crossed the line to the dark side: to bureaucratic corruption and its attendent privileges. In the moral economy of gold seeking, this would not do. It was acceptable to get rich through hard work and luck, but not through graft and influence.

At the Adelphi, Sarah hung out her star-spangled flag for the disenfranchised miners. Her benefit for the Diggers Defence Fund was a corker. The event was
of literally great benefit to the fund
, reported the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
,
Mrs Hanmer's liberality and characteristic style of acting in the piece of the evening (
The Stranger
) which she had made her own, were fully appreciated
.
⁴
On a hot and sultry night, the same night that reinforcements from the 40th Regiment rolled into town, Sarah and her troupe played to
a respectable and crowded house
. Charles Evans was present and noted the animating effect the event had on the community.
Mrs Hanmer
, Charles wrote,

gave up her theatre for their benefit and
The Stranger
was performed to a crowded house, and in fact throughout the diggings there seemed to be but one feeling, a warm sympathy for Fletcher & McIntyre and deep indignation at the conduct of the Authorities.

Sarah's benefit raised over £70. The success of the event, and no doubt the amount of press it garnered, prompted other theatre managers—Mr Hetherington at the Royal and Mr Clarke at the Queen's—to quickly follow suit. Sarah Hanmer held several more benefits for the diggers' cause during November. By the time it was all over, she had contributed more money to the popular rights movement than any other citizen.

If the crew up at the Camp had been on their game instead of worrying over the cut of their trousers, they would have been keeping a close eye on the Adelphi and its high-flying prima donna. Back in August, a seemingly routine event occurred that would have a lasting effect on the future of Ballarat's power dynamics. Frank Carey, a twenty-four-year-old boarding-house keeper from Orange County, New York, was arrested on a sly-grog charge. Carey was tried at the Ballarat Petty Sessions court on 25 August for
selling spirituous liquors without a licence
at his Excelsior Boarding House, and fined £50. Nothing unusual there. Then Carey was charged again on 18 September. Rumour had it that Carey had been framed by the roundly detested Police Sergeant Major Robert Milne. For his second offence, Carey received a sentence of six months in the vermin-infested Ballarat lockup.

Now there was outrage. Seventeen hundred people signed a petition praying for executive clemency in the case, on the grounds that there had been no violation in the second instance. The petition was signed by all of the ten boarders at the Excelsior, including Henry Holyoake, Robert Burnett and A. W. Arnold. The petitioners claimed that Carey was an upstanding, law-abiding fellow
whose house had never been the scene of any disorderly or riotous conduct whatsoever
.
⁵
Why, the only thing out of the ordinary at Mr Carey's house was his
nigger cook
. And even that wasn't so exceptional. Charles and George Evans also employed a white-haired old Aboriginal fellow to prepare their meals