We Are the Rebels (26 page)

On Saturday afternoon, Lalor once again stepped forward to take command. Emerging
from
the committee room
of Diamond's store, he climbed onto an old log and delivered
a simple message:
We must make this a country we can live in
.

So far, there had been no grand plan. No strategy for gaining the upper hand. Every
action had been responsive—protective. The Stockade had been thrown up at random.
The flames did not devour the Eureka Hotel
, admitted Carboni,
with the same impetuosity
as we got up our stockade.

The majority of the miners and storekeepers on the diggings were not overtly rebellious,
nor were they prepared to take up arms.
We of the peace portion of the residents
,
is how Martha Clendinning identified herself, though she was sympathetic to the
miners' grievances. As Henry Mundy put it,
All reasonable people were willing to
wait til the Commission had finished its labours and report.
Such people still had
faith that Hotham would do the right thing by them.

And even the militants were divided. Some of the members of the Ballarat Reform
League had sworn the oath of allegiance at Bakery Hill, but not all. J. B. Humffray
refused to enter the Stockade, and others also clung to the hope of a constitutional
resolution. Some were for a republic. Others, including Lalor, claimed that the diggers'
resistance was purely to defend themselves against the misrule of Ballarat's officials.
Frederick Vern, cranky at the new boy, Lalor, stepping straight into the leadership,
was holding his own meetings down at the Star Hotel.

Tomorrow was Sunday, a day of rest on the goldfields. There would be no digger hunts.
Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold
fields
? asked Mrs Massey,
and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum
of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised
places
.

Sunday was a sacred day, the day to worship but also to wash. On Sundays, scores
of men could be seen in front of their
tents with tin dish or bucket washing their
weekly shirt and flannel
, recalled Henry Mundy. It was also a day
consecrated to
cookery
. Families went on picnics in the bush.

People began to relax, and the majority of the 1500 who were in the Stockade to hear
Lalor's Saturday afternoon oration felt free to leave. One after another the diggers
left the Stockade, H. R. Nicholls later wrote,
to get a clean shirt or to prepare
in some way for Sunday
. A government spy dutifully reported the unexpected exodus
from behind the barricades.

At the same time, headed
into
the Stockade were James McGill's Americans, his Independent
Californian Rangers, many of them veterans of the Mexican–American War. They had
decided to defy Tarleton's pleas, and came now to the Stockade, offering service.
McGill himself carried a handsome sword—a precious heirloom, brought across the seas.
It was a gift from Sarah Hanmer. In fact all of the Adelphi Theatre's props—pistols,
revolvers, sabres—had been distributed to the Californian Rangers. The actors themselves
had swapped the stage for the Stockade.

By nightfall, about 150 people remained in the Stockade, mostly those diggers and
storekeepers, like the Diamonds and the Shanahans, who lived in the captive tents;
out-of-towners; and the sentries, chiefly Americans, posted to keep friends in and
foes out.

NIGHT OF A FULL MOON

It was about two kilometres as the crow flies from the Camp to the Eureka. From that
distance the Stockade site looked like a sea of white calico and canvas dots quivering
in the breeze. A huge flag of blue and white rising from the ochre earth. Tiny figures
darting in and out of tents.

The windlasses were still; the creeks and shafts abandoned. Mining operations, domestic
work, entertainment and commerce had ceased a day early. There were none of the usual
Saturday afternoon pastimes: music, card games, children playing quoits, women promenading
in their finest clothes. Where was everybody?

Only one person had been to the Camp to purchase a licence today—and that was a woman.
Elizabeth Rowlands marched up to the commissioner's tent clutching her baby, Mary
Ann, and bought herself a licence for £3. Then she took the licence back to her tent
at Eureka and her husband burned it.

Was she a spy, checking the lie of the enemy's land? Perhaps the miners thought a
new mother would get past the Camp's sentries; if so, they were right.

The Camp, as Elizabeth would have observed, was ready to fend off any assault. The
territory was well and truly fortified. Sandbags, bales of hay, sacks of flour and
wheat—all piled high around the most important buildings and along the front fence
facing the diggings. Commissioner Rede had announced a curfew: no lights in neighbouring
tents after 8pm, punishable by summary fire from the sentries.

And still the troops kept piling in. Today, a contingent from the Castlemaine camp.
More backup—six hundred soldiers, plus munitions and cannon—were on their way from
Melbourne.

Many of the soldiers at Ballarat had already been on 24-hour sentry duty for days.
They had passed several nights without a wink of sleep. They hadn't washed, or changed
out of their rain-soaked clothes. Constant deliberate false alarms were given at
night by Captain Thomas to keep the soldiers on their toes, as more than 540 edgy
young men jostled for a place to sleep.

Most of the women—wives and female servants, who helped with provisioning—had been
sent away. (Corporal John Neill's wife Ellen and their baby Fanny were an exception;
they stayed put despite the privations and fear of attack.) Rations were basic. All
of the stores had been dumped outside the commissariat building so the space could
be used to shield any remaining women and children, or the sick and infirm. Now the
food was covered in grit, spoiled by damp. Water was in short supply—the carrier
who was supposed to bring it had not turned up that week. Tradesmen either feared
antagonising the insurgents or were supporting them with an embargo on the Camp.

Samuel Huyghue was in the Camp on Saturday night.
An ominous and oppressive silence
brooded over the deserted workings
, he later wrote. The full moon rose high in the
cloudless sky.

At 2.30am, Captain Thomas called on his troops to fall in. This time it was no false
alarm. One hundred mounted and 175 foot soldiers assembled at the rear of the Camp,
joined by a contingent of officers, police and civil commissioners. The remaining
384 soldiers would stay to defend the Camp.

Police Inspector Gordon Evans handed around bottles of brandy to his men. They were
told it was
for the benefit of all
. At 3am, those chosen to fight slipped silently
down the hill.

Corporal Neill, like most of his regiment, had slept in his clothes. He quietly fell
in behind his sergeant, leaving Ellen and baby Fanny behind in bed. Captain Thomas
led the troops the back way, down Mair Street, across Black Hill, past the Melbourne
Road to the Free Trade Hotel.

From here, detachments of the 12th and 40th regiments extended in skirmishing order.
Part of the mounted force of military and police moved around the flank and rear
of the slumbering Stockade. The idea was to get as close as possible without being
seen.

It was 4am on Sunday. No one was watching.

3 DECEMBER—BLOODY SUNDAY

The question of who fired the first shot has been hotly contested for over 160 years.
Both sides were eager to claim the moral high ground. The other lot started it, so
it was self-defence.

Captain Thomas later reported to Hotham that when the troops were 150 metres from
the barricade, he detected
rather sharp and well-directed fire from the insurgents…then,
and not until then, I ordered commence firing
.

Peter Lalor wrote in a letter to the Age the following April that, without warning
or provocation,
almost immediately, the military poured in one or two volleys of
musketry, which was a plain intimation that we must sell our lives as dearly as we
could.

Gregory Blake is the historian who has made the closest investigation of the battle
at the Stockade. He says: ‘There may have been several “first shots” within seconds
of each other.' But from extensive research and ballistic reconstruction, he is certain
that the first shot came from inside the Stockade.

Does it matter? The scene tells its own story.

A rebel sentry realises the Stockade is suddenly surrounded. A shot rings out, followed
by deafening volleys of gunfire. The sleeping residents of the Stockade jerk to attention
at the sound. Men scamper to get dressed, stumbling, falling out of their tents with
one leg in their pants. Women lie flat to the ground and fold their bodies around
their children and babies.

Scotswoman Mary Faulds, 26 years old, is in labour with her first child. Her anguished
cries cannot be distinguished from the frantic shouting around her.

Bridget Shanahan hears the firing before her husband Timothy, who has only just gone
to bed. She pulls him out of his cot, thrusts his gun in his hand and tells him to
go out. Timothy does leave the tent, but goes to hide in an outdoor dunny. Bridget
stays in the tent with their three children.

Elizabeth Wilson, who keeps a store just outside the Stockade perimeter, loads rifles
for her husband Richard. They have not bothered to change into their nightclothes
and are ready for action.

Bridget Callinan distracts the soldiers while her wounded brothers, Michael, Patrick
and Thomas, are helped away. (History does not tell us what she did to divert the
redcoats'
attention. It's tempting to think maybe she flashed a glimpse of thigh.)

The exchange of fire went on for no more than fifteen minutes before soldiers from
the 40th Regiment managed to get over a low section of the barricade.

Now it was a hand-to-hand fight—between trained members of the British army and an
under-strength team of gung-ho amateurs, their ardent wives and screaming children.
The miners knew the game was up.

The entrenchment was then carried
, reported Captain Thomas,
and taken by the point
of bayonet, the insurgents retreating. I ordered the firing to cease.

NIGHTMARE ON EUREKA STREET

It's what happened after the surrender that really matters. It's what happened after
the firing ceased that caused people at the time to call the events of 3 December
the Ballarat Massacre.

The barricade was breached. The adrenaline was surging. The lid was finally lifted
off the steaming cauldron of military and police discipline.

What bubbled over was a lethal stew of hunger, discomfort, exhaustion, boredom,
insult, exasperation, sexual depravity, bravado, spite, homesickness, terror and
relief. Charles Schulze, who operated a bakery on Bakery Hill, was an eyewitness
to the violent outpouring that followed the rebels' surrender. He could see what
the weeks of tension had produced.
Jaded, tired, not allowed to return the insult
,
he wrote,
you can imagine. That when the time came, they revenged themselves to the
fullest extent
.

It was the bayonets, not the bullets, that did the damage. Mayhem and carnage reigned
as the crazed soldiers and police thrust their blades into dead, dying and wounded
miners. Gold lust gave way to blood lust and the Eureka line became a killing field.

It was a trooper that did it
, Anne Diamond later testified.
I know that my husband
got three hurts from a sword on the back; he fell on his face and he got three cuts
of a sword and a stab of a bayonet.
Anne and her husband were fleeing from the Stockade
when Martin was shot.
They treated the dead bodies very badly
, Anne reported 22 days
after Martin's death.
The woman that laid him out could prove that
.

Some soldiers hacked at the bodies lying on the ground. Others surrounded tents and
sliced and jabbed at the bullet-riddled canvas. Supposedly, they were on the hunt
for prisoners, trying to ensure that no insurgent was allowed to escape. In effect,
as the Geelong Advertiser thundered on 5 December,
those perfectly innocent of rebellious
notions were murdered, fired at and horribly mangled by the troopers
. Outnumbered
and trapped, many insurgents were literally butchered. One eyewitness later reported:
the corpses of the slain had been hacked by the mounted troopers out of sheer brutality…It
was a needless massacre. Not even at the siege of Sebastopol did British soldiers
kill enemies who lay wounded and defenceless.

The residents of the Stockade could not believe their eyes.

Those who were able began
to run towards Brown Hill, at the rear of the Stockade where the barricade did not
quite join
up. The scrub was thick and the broken ground held up the troopers' horses;
Brown Hill would shelter outlaws for weeks to come. There is some evidence that Wathaurung
people looked after the children of fugitive miners.

Others jumped down flooded mine shafts, too terrified to worry about deep water.
Their bloated bodies were fished out days later. Some fled into neighbouring tents,
where they clambered up sod chimneys or squeezed under camp beds.

Some of the wounded within the Stockade found themselves shielded by the shuddering
bodies of women, who pretended they were mourning their dead and prayed that the
soldiers would pass without further investigation. Bridget Hynes threw herself over
an injured man and cried,
He is dead! He is dead!
so that the troopers would not
bayonet him. Bridget was two months pregnant with her first child.