The Night They Stormed Eureka (25 page)

None of the weapons at Eureka could be fired more than once unless they were reloaded. Soldiers — and the rebel army — usually had one or two men loading for each manwho actually fired the weapon. This also needed lots of practise, as well as discipline to make sure that there were loaders and shooters to take up the weapons of men who fell in battle.

Roll up! Roll up!

In a land without radio, TV or internet — and where even newspapers were too expensive for most people to buy (and where many also couldn’t read) — news was passed from person to person, or announced at town meetings.

On the diggings anyone who wanted to call a meeting would bang a drum or iron pot and yell ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ The meetings came to be known as ‘roll ups'.

Savoury

The herb Mrs Puddleham used in this book would have been winter savoury, an old-fashioned, twiggy, small-leafed fragrant herb, which likes heat and survives drought. And, as Mrs Puddleham says, it does make a stew — or a pizza — taste very good indeed. You probably won’t find it dried in the supermarket (I’ve never looked) but you can usually find a pot of it at good garden centres.

Socrates

When I was seven I discovered a small red book in my parents’ bookshelf. It had small print too, and thin pages. But there weren’t a lot of books around when I was seven, so I read it. (I even read the ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’ in the paper too, just in case someone made a mistake andput an adventure in there. It didn’t occur to me for years that Births, Deaths and Marriages were the most extraordinary adventures I could find.)

Back to Socrates. I fell in love with Socrates. He wanted young people to question everything — their lives, their elders’ lives, what the world was like and what it should be like. My parents and teachers snapped at me when I asked questions (okay, I asked awkward ones and too many), but here was a guy who taught
how
to question.

I wanted Socrates for a parent, for a teacher, for a friend, despite the fact that he had died about 2,400 years before I was born. But it was only when I began to think about this book that I realised that Socrates was all three. Time doesn’t matter, sometimes. The past can still speak to us, even if it was a long time ago.

Just like Eureka.

PS: If you want to know more about Socrates, and his discussions with his pupils, you don’t need me to introduce him. Just find his words yourself.

Sparrowgrass and holidays sauce

Mrs Puddleham’s version of asparagus and hollandaise sauce.

Tents

Some tents at the diggings were fancy and even had canvas windows that could be opened. Others were just a sheet of old canvas or sailcloth draped over a couple of sticks in the ground.

Wide skirts

Skirts in those days were very wide — crinolines weren’t worn yet, especially not on the goldfields, but the skirts were supported by many starched petticoats, reinforced with whalebone or rope at the hem to make them stand out even further. It was hard to work in them but they were useful for one thing — hiding men.

Patience Wearne and Elizabeth Wilson are said to have sheltered rebels under their skirts after the stockade fell. Elizabeth and her husband had a store opposite the stockade and Patience’s husband was one of the rebels. Peter Lalor was said to have sheltered under Mrs James Young’s skirts for a time. (Until the 1970s many women were only known by their husbands’ names, so we don’t know what Mrs James’s own name was.)

The Eureka Stockade

In 1854 Australia was still very much part of the British Empire — even if England was half a world away. Britain had started sending convicts to Australia in 1788. For the couple of decades before 1850 Britain had been sending out her poor to Australia too. If they were respectable and looked like being good workers, they didn’t even have to pay their ‘passage money’ on a ship to get here.

But in the late 1840s and early 1850s two things happened. First of all was ‘the year of revolutions’ — 1848 — when people in many countries in Europe rebelled against their various monarchies, dreaming of democracy in some form or another, a land free of kings and queens and tyranny, or even just the right to join trade unions to work for better conditions.

The revolutions failed. Many of the rebels started to dream of gold, instead — or needed to leave their countries to escape persecution. Many went to California in the USA — a land where the colonies had successfully rebelled against England. In those days the USA was a symbol of freedom and liberty.

And in 1851 gold was discovered in Australia, first in NSW and then in Victoria.

The colonies went crazy.

Passages on sailing boats to California were cancelled. Clerks and labourers didn’t turn up for work. Ladies coming down to breakfast in London or Melbourne found the servants had dashed off to dig for gold. And employees were left unemployed and homeless when their bosses joined the rush. Wives and children were left behind as their husbands and fathers sailed for Australia and the promise of great and sudden riches.

Suddenly more ships than ever before were arriving, laden with gold-hungry prospectors from England, Europe, China, the USA and New Zealand. They weren’t just the poor who’d come to Australia in the past few decades or the younger sons of rich farmers looking for cheap land,either. There were sailors, tailors, young aristocrats out for adventure, teachers, coachmen, cooks …

The first gold was ‘panned’ or washed out of creeks and from sandbanks along the rivers. As the surface deposits of gold ran out, prospectors had to dig for gold — at first by the creeks and rivers, where past floods had washed the ‘alluvial’ gold and it lay buried, and later where ancient rivers or glaciers might have dropped it.

Finding gold was a wonderful dream — but few even made enough to live on. In February 1852, maybe five people in a hundred got rich, forty-five made enough to live on … and fifty starved. By the end of that year, as there was less gold to be found just by panning, maybe ninety per cent of diggers didn’t even make enough to buy food or clothes.

And you couldn’t just pan for gold either. The government appointed special Gold Commissioners to sell licences to the diggers to allow them to look for gold. The licence cost thirty shillings ($7.30) a month. (A good wage was about twelve pounds — $30 — a month.) This gave a party of usually three to six men a claim of about 15 to 24 feet along a creek.

The trouble was that the licence fee was more than most diggers could pay.

The diggers were also angry that the government didn’t give them anything in return for their fees — no roads to the goldfields and almost no protection against bushrangers. And as most miners didn’t own any land, they couldn’t vote either, as the right to vote was reserved for men of property.

The first riots

The discontent began in New South Wales, right at the start of the gold rushes. Diggers on the Turon field, on the Turon River near Bathurst, threatened to riot over the expensive licence fees.

Diggers had to carry their licences at all times and any official could stop them and demand to see it. The licences got wet at the diggings — but if the miner left it in his tent he’d be chained up to a tree or a log then marched off at bayonet point. It could also take three days of queuing every month just to get the licence.

The diggers got angrier.

The high cost of the licences was only part of the problem. The commissioners, police and troopers who collected the fees had extraordinary powers and most treated all the diggers like crooks. In fact many diggers
were
crooks — ex-convicts or crooked adventurers. But the constables were often crooks too — ex-convicts, often drunk, who took bribes to let the real villains go. Even the commissioners and magistrates sometimes — or even mostly — took bribes from illegal grog-shop owners, and got land for themselves or their friends in illegal ways.

And there was no one to stop them. Power came from the queen to the governor to the magistrates to the police. The queen was a most moral woman — and the governor was a decent character, too. But they didn’t quite care enough — or perhaps, to use Socrates’s idea, hadn’t ever examined their lives closely enough — to make sure theirsubjects received justice — and they certainly didn’t seem to worry if they starved.

At Ballarat in Victoria, things got even worse when the government started sending soldiers to collect the fees too. And when Sir Charles Hotham replaced Latrobe as governor of Victoria in June 1854 he cut back all government spending and began rigorous enforcement of all licensing laws, starting with twice-weekly checks of licences.

The diggers were poor, angry, often hungry — and even more often drunk. It was only going to take a small thing to spark a riot.

And then it happened …

On 6 October 1854, two drunken Scottish diggers demanded that James Bentley, the man who owned the Eureka Hotel, give them a drink.

Bentley was an ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land — and he had a short temper. He refused; there was an argument that became a brawl — and one of the Scots, James Scobie, was kicked and clubbed to death. It seemed pretty obvious that Bentley had done the kicking and clubbing and he was arrested. But Bentley was mates with the local government officials. Police Magistrate Dawes said he didn’t have to stand trial and he was let go.

The call of ‘Roll up, roll up!’ went out on 17 October 1854. The meeting decided to form a committee to get Bentley to stand trial. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy many of the men. A crowd gathered outside the Eureka Hotel and burned it to the ground.

Governor Hotham ordered Bentley and his mates arrested, as well as the diggers who had burned the hotel. Three diggers were found guilty of arson on 25 November.

While all this was happening the diggers held meetings and formed the Ballarat Reform League under the leadership of the Chartists Henry Holyoake, George Black and J B Humffray.

On 11 November a meeting of about ten thousand miners demanded the release of the three diggers, the abolition of the Licence and Gold Commission and — most importantly by now — the vote for all males, so that people could have some control over the way they were governed.

But Governor Hotham refused — and sent more troops to the diggings. On 28 November the troopers of the 40th Regiment were stoned by crowds as they approached the diggings.

A drummer boy was shot in the leg. It was reported that he’d been killed (he certainly was unconscious for a while), and it may have been the anger and frustration over this, as well as the beatings that many of the troopers got from the crowd, that made the troops’ revenge after the Eureka battle so violent a few days later.

On 29 November at Bakery Hill about twelve thousand diggers met in what was to be known as the Monster Meeting. They decided to burn their licences.

On 30 November, Gold Commissioner Rede ordered a licence hunt. And the diggings exploded. When thetroopers turned out to check the licences the miners threw stones at them. Fights broke out and shots were fired from both sides. Several diggers were arrested.

A second roll up was held. Peter Lalor hadn’t been prominent before, but now as diggers gathered he took control. He leaped onto a tree stump with his pistol in his hand and proclaimed an oath.

The men kneeled on the ground and recited the oath after him: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

Lalor called for volunteers. His fellow rebels included a Prussian republican, Frederick Vern, who had wanted to overthrow the King of Prussia and have an elected government; the Italian redshirt Raffaello Carboni, who had fought for the many countries of what is now Italy to unite the various principalities into a nation state; and the Scottish Chartist Tom Kennedy who, like other Chartists, had defied the British government to try to form a union to improve working conditions.

Several hundred took the oath of allegiance to the Southern Cross. They marched off to the Eureka diggings and built a stockade from timber and slabs, reinforced with carts. More and more men joined them.

The Eureka Stockade was just over a metre high around about half a hectare of land. But it didn’t just have those preparing to fight inside. It enclosed part of the camp, including a blacksmith’s forge and people’s tents and women doing their laundry in big tubs.

There were shops inside the stockade as well. Shopkeeper Martin Diamond was bayonetted in front of his shop in the stockade while his wife Anne watched.

Other women were in the stockade too, like Anne Duke, one of the women who sewed the flag, Agnes Franks, who was in her tent, Molly Gavin and Nancy Quinane. The Quinanes’ tent was burned after the battle, and Nancy was there when Lalor’s arm was amputated.

All Friday the diggers kept working at the stockade, gathering as many firearms as possible, and forging pike heads. But others urged non-violence. More miners started to arrive from other diggings. And there were a lot more unhappy miners in the colonies than there were soldiers or police. Many in Australia — respectable people in the towns and cities, like merchants and teachers — already hoped for a republic, like the USA, free of English taxes and control. The rebellion could so easily grow.

On Saturday, 2 December, the authorities decided to act before the rebels could get more organised — and while they still knew exactly what was going on. Governor Hotham had spies in the camp, who reported back to him.

By Saturday night about fifteen hundred men manned the stockade. But shortly after midnight two false alarms were given — almost certainly by Hotham’s spies — saying that soldiers were attacking elsewhere in the camp. Men rushed out into the darkness.

By 3.30 am, Sunday, 3 December, when about two hundred soldiers and police officers took their positions, no more than 300 metres from the stockade, only aboutone hundred and twenty men were left in the stockade. The troops outnumbered the stockaders two to one. Thanks to the spies, the bluecoats and redcoats knew it was now safe to attack.