The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (62 page)

Not satisfied with the show of potency occasioned by the thrust of bayonets, the order was given to burn to the ground all of the tents in the Stockade and vicinity. The Camp had failed to stop a conflagration at Bentley's Hotel, and now it would generate its own apocalyptic ruins. Tactically speaking, fire would root out any insurgent hiding in civilian enclosures. In terms of theatre, nothing instils fear like fire. So, using a pot of burning tar, the troopers and soldiers set about torching every tent on the ground.
There was no system to regulate our search
, one police officer later testified. Another admitted that the police had no idea whether the occupants were in the tents before they fired them.
²⁷
From the Camp, Samuel Huyghue listened to the
deep reverberations
of musketry
telling us that there was a real collision at last
, then ghostly silence. In a trice, he could see only
sheets of smoke and flame
.

In the Stockade, some of the blazing tents contained the bodies of the wounded or dead. Two men who burned to death in their tent had either passed out or were still asleep. The sight of their charred remains was so sickening that even the soldiers had to turn away. Patrick Curtain had managed to escape the Stockade without injury. He found Mary and little Mary Agnes, and delivered them to friends.
On my return after leaving my family in safety at a distance
, he later wrote in an unsuccessful claim for compensation,
I found my store all in flames without a chance of saving anything
.
²⁸

There was a knock at Bridget Shanahan's door. Timothy had not returned. He may still have been hiding in the outhouse. A trooper and a foot soldier barged in.
Shoot that woman
, ordered the trooper. The soldier begged,
Spare the woman.
The trooper hesitated.
Well, get out of this place
, he finally said,
the place is going to be burnt woman
. The men set fire to the tent, but Bridget managed to put it out before much was destroyed.
²⁹

The ring of fire extended out in cataclysmic ripples. Most of the surrounding tents were diggers' homes, stores and small grog shops.
Some of these
, marvelled Huyghue,
were actually defended by their occupants while burning, and several contained women and children who were with difficulty rescued from the flames.
John Sheehan's wife and children were huddled inside their tent when it was set alight.
³⁰
And did not get out in time. The Curtains and Shanahans, being inside the Stockade, perhaps expected some retribution. But the Sheehans' tent was outside the barricade and being
strictly honest sober and industrious
and having
no part directly or indirectly
in the uprising, they did not anticipate the troops' vengeance. Other people had not even been in the neighbourhood on that Sunday morning, but similarly all lost their belongings in the wholesale torching. James Bourke and his wife and family had left their tent, unfortunately positioned next to the Stockade, on Friday night. When James returned on Sunday afternoon,
I found my said Tent and all my property therein consumed.
³¹
Like the many other families who were completely dispossessed of their tents, stores, clothes, furniture, cash and personal items, the Bourkes received no compensation.

According to Huyghue, Lalor owed his escape to the fact that the soldier who saw him fall was
fully engrossed…in rescuing an old Scotchwoman and her family of children from her burning tent, a task of considerable difficulty which evoked an expression of fervid gratitude from the relieved parent
. The woman quickly snatched a piece of paper from the smouldering wreck of her home and asked her rescuer to write his name so she could remember
to whom she owed what doubtless seemed to her an act of remarkable generosity
.

As the moonlit night was gently displaced by iridescent morning, the reality of the situation became clear. It was not a bad dream. There was no silver lining.
Stragglers from the neighborhood of the stockade
, wrote eyewitness John Fraser,
some of them in a state of the greatest terror and excitement, came hurrying along close to the tents.
An Irishman approached Fraser for a drink of water. He had his wife and three little children with him.

The poor woman, crying bitterly, presented, to our mind, a picture of distress, as, nursing her infant in her arms, she bewailed in heartrending tones the loss of their little possessions—tent, clothes, everything—burnt and destroyed by the troopers.
³²

William Adams, who ran a store near the stockade, was shot three times while trying to flee his burning tent with his wife and child. After he emerged from a week in the Camp hospital, he estimated the loss of his family's worldly goods to be £937 10s. He had £4 10s in his pocket when he was taken to the hospital; the loose change was missing from his blood-splattered pants when he was released. As for the Eureka Flag, an anonymous eyewitness sent his account to the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
:

The diggers standard was carried by in triumph to the Camp, waved about in the air, then pitched from one another, thrown down and trampled upon.
³³

Those participating in the victory dance then proceeded to cut off little pieces of the flag and tuck them away as souvenirs. Small patches of Prussian blue wool have been turning up in public collections ever since, roosting like pigeons scattered on the breeze.
³⁴

Commanding officers turned a blind eye to the brutal, petty and wilful misdeeds of their junior charges. As far as Hotham was concerned, it was simply a case of boys being boys.
³⁵
But apart from arson, murder and pillage, what other spoils of war might these unbridled young men have seized? There are subtle intimations of still more ‘unmanly acts' perpetrated amid the chaos and terror, acts that Victorian sensibilities preferred to consign to the reader's imagination. Thomas Pierson alludes to
hundreds of other cruel deeds done by these fiends that would strike any civilised person with horror
. Dan Calwell the young American, who, with his brother Davis, appears to have remained part of the peaceful faction, wrote home to his parents and sister reporting on the Stockade clash. The victors, reported Dan,
committed all the brutalities of the darker ages
. H. R. Nicholls recounted that a few nights after the Stockade, he visited the grog shop of the
young and pretty girl, who attracted much attention
. Her tent was close to the Stockade, but was inexplicably not burned down. The girl told him that on the morning of the attack her tent was
full of fugitives—some lying on the ground, some under tables, and all afraid that they would be discovered
. She stood outside the tent. Some troopers approached her. She told them she was alone
and hoped that they would not hurt her
. One
excited soldier
ran his bayonet through her dress, but his companions called him away and he didn't enter the tent. The Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry later found that
the scenes connected with this outbreak…as stated to the Commission, and as currently rumoured, exhibit some of those disgraceful inhumanities that are the customary feature of a social outbreak
. The commissioners acknowledged that the mounted police, in particular, had committed the sort of acts of indiscriminate violence displayed
in moments of ungovernable excitement
but
declined to elaborate this subject further
.

Anthropologist Roland Littlewood argues, in one of the few expositions of military rape, that sexual violence in warfare has occurred from Hebrew times through to the twentieth-century atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia. Incidents, however, are rarely reported. Sexual assault by soldiers ‘reflects badly' not only on the perpetrators but also ‘on the victim, for an explicit justification frequently made by the soldiers who rape women is that it is to degrade and humiliate them'. Littlewood's research shows that most military rapes occur in house-to-house searches and reprisal attacks; sexual gratification is often rationalised on the grounds that the assaulted women were housing enemies of the state.

Here is the politics of sexuality inextricably linked to the sexuality of politics. Perpetrating male violence on the female body aims to do symbolic violence to the body politic. Just as the flag was symbolically trampled and souvenired, so Ballarat's women may well have been taken as a trophy of battle. As we have seen, women in Ballarat played an inordinately prominent role in mobilising and validating the social and political grievances of their community. If some soldiers did penetrate the sexual strongholds of Eureka's women, it made for a far more abject surrender than Eureka's men were prepared to concede openly.

It was all over by the time the sun scaled Mt Warrenheip.

For the troops and police returning to Camp at daybreak, the taste of victory was intoxicating. Still, they were given more rum—a reward, perhaps, or a timeless anaesthetic for the soul. When the soldiers were finally dismissed from duty, Huyghue tells us,
they rushed cheering and capering like school boys to their tents
. In his report to Governor Hotham the following day, Captain Thomas was pleased to advise that the behaviour of the troops and police, both officers and men, was
very good.

Meanwhile, the people of Ballarat woke to the smell of burning canvas and the eerie sounds of mourning. Slowly people descended on the Stockade in silent fascination and horror. Lifeless and disfigured bodies had been laid out in neat rows, their clothes saturated with blood from those horrible bayonet wounds, with military guards standing over them lest they rise from the dead and scamper off.

During the next few hours, grieving relatives and friends retrieved the bodies, taking them home to be nursed or shrouded. Some diggers were dragged to nearby hotels turned into makeshift hospitals. Henry Powell was removed to the Albion Hotel, where the landlady Mrs O'Kell had only four months earlier brandished her gun at the murderous American Robert Clarke, peeved over a card game. She had by now passed the licence to Albert Goldstein. What was that Californian maxim about women and Jews? In Victoria, it was neither Shylock nor the shrew that blighted the limitless frontier; the British army took care of all that.

Thomas Pierson was not in the Stockade for the battle, but like most of Ballarat's residents, he either visited or knew those who had. The treatment of the prisoners and wounded was, in his opinion,
characteristic of English warfare. Most heathenish, bloodthirsty, disgraceful and cruel
. In nine years' time America would begin its own civil war, a conflict that would last four years and claim the lives of at least 650,000 soldiers and an unquantifiable number of civilians.

Charles Evans, too, was filled with disgust when he walked down to the Stockade on Sunday afternoon. That night he bared his troubled soul to his diary.
The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men
, he wrote,
but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men
. The young Shropshire lad's world had been turned upside down.
I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such savage use and cowardly use of their power as unhappily proved to be the case
, he scribbled, his hand trembling with fury and pity.
Newly made widows recognising the bloody remains of a slaughtered husband
, Evans went on, unable to stem the flow of his rueful outpourings.
Children screaming and crying round a dead father… cowardly and monstrous cruelties…It is a dark indelible stain on a British Government
.

Ballarat was in a state of shock.
Instead of the noisy mirth which usually characterises Sunday here
, Evans concluded his entry for 3 December,
an uncomfortable stillness prevails and many seem to think it is the lull before the tempest
. In fact, the storm had passed.