We Are the Rebels (18 page)

Not just Irish. Not a mob either. Constitutional, meaning lawful. Legitimate. By
the book.

Governor Hotham was alerted to the sectarian crisis brewing in Ballarat. He briefly
considered transferring Johnston to another district, but decided it would be
impolitic
to do so. Robert Rede thought it would be unwise to undermine his deputy, and so
Johnston stayed. Perhaps he was also loath to uproot his wife Maggie, who was now
pregnant.

The Irish of Ballarat made plans to sew a large flag to illustrate their solidarity:
a
Monster national banner
, reported the Argus, to fly over
the disputed ground of
the Eureka.

The tension was building.

SCOT FREE

The court was packed on the morning of the judicial enquiry into the murder of James
Scobie. It was 12 October. James and Catherine Bentley and their servants, Farrell
and Hance, were in the dock. D'Ewes, Rede and Johnston presided over an agitated
crowd. There was no jury.

The Ballarat Times had been spitting chips about the case for days. James Bentley
was characterised as exhibiting
all the wiles and blandishments of a wealthy publican
.
Scobie's death was described as
melancholy
. The newspaper detailed inconsistencies
and irregularities of the coronial inquest, and proffered ‘facts' different from
the ones given at the inquest.

Over two nail-biting days, the witnesses took the stand. All the residents of the
hotel testified that Mr and Mrs Bentley had not left that evening; that they remained
in their bedroom together until Dr Carr arrived with Scobie's body. Mary Gadd, Catherine's
sister, swore that she could
hear every thing that passes in [their] room
. A butcher
who lived opposite the hotel swore that Bentley was not one of the men he saw fighting.
It was moonlight
so he could see clearly and
[I] would know him by his general appearance
and being lame
.

Mary Ann Welch and her son Barnard were called last. The fatal scuffle had taken
place outside their tent. Mary Ann testified that she heard Catherine Bentley say,
‘How dare you break my window.'
The voice, to the best of my belief, was Mrs Bentley's
,
said Mary Ann.
I live within a few yards at the back of the hotel, and often heard
Mrs Bentley's voice before
.

Eleven-year-old Barnard Welch said he'd been asleep when
he was woken by voices outside
the tent. He peeped through a flap to see Mr and Mrs Bentley and three or four men.
One of them, Barnard couldn't say which one, picked up a spade from the corner of
the Welches' tent. The Times thought him
a very intelligent boy
.

The magistrates retired to an adjoining room for half an hour to make their decision.
Before a hushed crowed, John D'Ewes declared that after assessing all the evidence,
not a shadow of an imputation remained on Mr Bentley's character
. Robert Rede concurred.
James Johnston dissented, unpredictable as ever, but it made no difference. The prisoners
were free to go.

Thomas Pierson made a tally of the grievances under which Ballarat was now groaning.
The Governor's actions didn't match his promises. Hotham's hypocrisy had
created
quite a dislike for him
. There was no representation of the miners in the legislature.
Digger hunts had increased to five days per week. Sixteen bullies on horseback, their
muskets loaded and swords drawn, would descend on the diggings. Fifty foot-soldiers
with clubs would
vomit themselves forth
from the Camp.

The diggers felt under siege, with no benevolent governor to shield them and no
elected leader to represent them. Constitutionally, they had nowhere to run and nowhere
to hide.

HOUSE OF THE RISING DIGGERS

Commissioner Rede read the verdict into the Scobie enquiry on Saturday 14 October.
The court and its verandah were filled to overflowing. Hot winds from the arid north
whipped up clouds of dust. People choked on their own breath, just as they gagged
over what they now considered the greatest miscarriage of justice yet seen in a
town that had thought, after the Gregorius incident, that matters could get no worse.

A wealthy and influential man was walking away unscathed from a crime that, to many
people, he'd quite obviously committed. The Ballarat Times thundered about the stink
of corruption—a
fetid atmosphere
of
putrescent particles which offend the senses
.
Thomas Pierson feared for Bentley's safety, such was the hostility.
I should not
wonder if his whole house was razed to the ground
, Pierson wrote in his diary that
night.

The Bentleys did have the support of certain sections of Ballarat society. A letter
to the Ballarat Times (addressed to James and signed by more than a hundred of Ballarat's
storekeepers, diggers and inhabitants
) was published on 14 October. It stated the
signatories' feeling
that you could not either directly or indirectly, in the late
lamentable occurrence, have been in any way accessary
[sic]. So a portion of the
Ballarat population was confident of the Bentleys' innocence.

But to most, it was a scandal that Bentley had been cleared. A public demonstration
was called for the following Tuesday, 17 October. It was to be held within spitting
distance of the Eureka Hotel, on the site of Scobie's murder.

Thousands attended. Pierson says ten thousand in his diary; a subsequent parliamentary
enquiry reckoned five, and noted that women were among the crowd. A few mounted troopers
hung back warily. Speakers got up before the crowd to decry the outrage of Bentley's
acquittal and rail against incompetence and corruption. Rede was a puppet, a fool,
it was said; the Bench had no transparency and the Camp was a kind of legal store,
where justice was bought and sold
.

Where was British liberty? Were the diggers slaves or serfs? Why, the Russians treated
their people better than the diggers of Ballarat were treated! The accusations went
on, and the emotional temperature of the crowd soared.

At 10am, Police Inspector Gordon Evans sent a garrison of his men to the Eureka Hotel.
Police officers snuck into the hotel, unseen by the crowd. Bentley had asked the
police to watch over his property. He had received threats that the people intended
to
hang him by the lamp post
. Bentley also had a pregnant young wife, a toddler and
a hotel full of employees and guests, not to mention a mountain of private property,
to protect. By this stage, the crowd had begun to bay for his blood.
The cries of
the mob were for Bentley
, one officer later testified.

At some point, the mood of the crowd changed. The sun was beating down. The wind
was gusting. A peaceful public assembly began to turn ugly.
Symptoms of riot began
to show themselves
, wrote Thomas Pierson in his tent that night. He left, and watched
from a safe place as the multitude became a mob, moving with a vicious urgency towards
the hotel.

James Bentley, convinced he was going to be lynched, fled on horseback to the Camp.
On the way, he passed Charles Evans.
I think I never saw such a look of terror on
a man's face,
Evans wrote in his diary. Ellen Young saw him too,
without hat
or coat
his white shirt sleeves tucked up
,
a trooper closely following
. Ellen thought it
was
a race in fun
. She turned to her next-door neighbour and said
white shirt will
win
. But this was no game.

Was Bentley on a mission to call for more protection? Was he saving his own neck?
Or trying to create a diversion, thinking that the mob might change course and follow
him, like a swarm of angry bees?

But the crowd wanted more from the publican than his scalp. A miner named John Westoby
stepped in front of the hotel.
I propose that this house belong to the diggers
, he
proclaimed, to wild cheering.

It was the first time during this eventful spring that Ballarat's diggers defined
themselves as a community. The time had come for the body politic of Ballarat to
take matters of justice into its own hands. And how better to cut a man down to size
than to invade his ‘castle'? Shame him in front of his wife and child. Show him to
be no better than the rest of the dispossessed, disempowered crowd outside his painted
door.

And so, in the words of public servant Samuel Huyghue,
the match was applied to the
train of long gathering discontent
.

IT BURNED LIKE PAPER

Once the crowd had surrounded the Eureka Hotel and its half-acre of funhouses, stables
and storage facilities, Robert Rede was called from the Camp. Rede attempted to quell
the mob's
fury. He stood up on a window ledge. He called for order.

At this stage, as critics later pointed out, he might have taken control by ‘reading
the Riot Act'. This refers to the proclamation which British law states must be read
out to any unruly crowd before the authorities can unleash deadly force upon them.
(The law was not significantly amended in Victoria until 2007.) If Rede had done
this, his men would have had the power to disperse the crowd at the point of guns
and bayonets.

Instead, he was hooted and jeered, pelted with bottles, bricks, stones and eggs while
his men looked on. Someone threw a rock at a window. One report says a little girl
cast the first stone; another says it was a teenage lad.

It doesn't matter who it was. Once the glass shattered, so did the last of the crowd's
equilibrium.

That very morning, tradesmen had put the final touches to the hotel's major construction
works. Now, within minutes, the crowd set about disassembling all the Bentleys had
taken months to build: ripping at boards, smashing windows, throwing stones at lamps.
The edifice of the Bentleys' success was demolished.

Imagine Catherine Bentley's terror. As the hotel rocked with the force of the crowd's
fury, the police officers holed up inside the hotel scattered. Catherine and the
other residents were left to fend for themselves.

Climbing through shattered windows and splintered doors, the rioters began to invade
the building. Kegs of liquor were dragged out of storage rooms and eagerly tapped.
Furniture was hurled from windows. Someone found Catherine's bedroom and began throwing
her jewellery to the people below, their arms reaching up like a pack of savage bridesmaids.

A cry of
Fire!
went up. Someone had set light to the canvas of the bowling alley.
The wind had been blowing hot all day, recalled Raffaello Carboni, and at
this fatal
precise hour…
[it was]
blowing a hurricane
. And that was it. The fire in the bowling
alley leapt to the main building. Flames consumed the hotel before the glistening,
vengeful eyes of the crowd.
It burnt like paper
, said Robert Rede.

A few hours before
, said D'Ewes,
had stood by far the most extensive building in
the diggings, painted and decked out in gay and gaudy colours, with a long row of
stables and outhouses, erected at an expense of £30,000, and totally uninsured
.

Minutes after the blaze was started, Charles Evans arrived. He saw only
a black heap
of smoking ashes.

Ellen Young could clearly see the rioters and the fire from her vantage point outside
her tent at Golden Point. She saw clothes and linen being thrown from upstairs windows.
She watched a bonfire
made of the contents of the house of every description
. As
goods rained down from the hotel windows, people tossed them into the inferno. One
person threw Catherine Bentley's jewellery box on the bonfire, quickly fished it
out again, studied it, then
threw it with great force into the flames
. Finally a
handsome gig, the horse-drawn equivalent of a sports car, was backed onto the fire.

Status turned to cinders.

MOSH PIT

James Bentley, having fled to the Camp on horseback, spent the night in Captain Gordon
Evans' tent. But what happened to Catherine as her home burned around her?

Emily Eliza Boyce, twelve years old in October 1854, was present at the burning of
Bentley's Hotel. She saw
Mrs Bentley and her child landed safely from one of the
windows
. Kenneth McLeod, a wine and spirit merchant, had rushed to the hotel when
it was engulfed. He entered the building and found Catherine. With the assistance
of a man named Robert McLaren, and
at the risk of my own life
, he tossed Catherine
and little Thomas from the second storey, into the arms of the crowd. As in a chivalrous
mosh pit, Catherine was caught and released.

Did she join James at the Camp? Ellen Young says
the inmates fled in terror
. It's
not clear whether Catherine was among them. But Catherine did find someone to take
her in. One of her later petitions for financial compensation for the loss of her
property states that she was
dependent on the kindness of a few friends for her
daily bread
after being
reduced from comparative affluence to absolute poverty
.

Perhaps the Bentleys, Catherine and James alike, had been too cocky. Parading their
success at a time when the mining community was becoming increasingly alienated and
aggrieved. Martha Clendinning knew that ‘dressing down' was the key to her business
success. Lady Hotham knew better than to maintain aristocratic pretensions. Did
Catherine Bentley give herself ‘airs'?

The evidence of witness Mary Ann Welch, who identified Mrs Bentley's voice in the
fight with Scobie, hints as much. She said
Mrs Bentley was a stranger to her; had
never spoken to her but had often heard her speak
, even though the Welches' tent
was not ten yards from Bentley's Hotel. Perhaps Mary Ann, a 39-year-old miner's wife,
was affronted that the 22-year-old publican's wife had never made her acquaintance,
despite one of her eight children being a similar age to Catherine's Thomas. Perhaps
she resented the bejewelled Irish mother with the small army of live-in servants.