We Are the Rebels (2 page)

Normally, there would be newcomers putting up their tents and unloading their drays
in wide-eyed fascination. There'd be children dodging and weaving through the tents,
campfires and washing lines. Everywhere the sights and sounds of a colonial frontier
society going about its daily business. And the noise would be ferocious.

But this Monday morning is silent.

An inferno has just torn through the dark hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning,
shattering the rhythms of work and home.

It was a true Australian night
, one miner later recalled,
not a breath of wind stirred
the leaves of the stringy-bark trees…the whole air was full of that fine haze…which
slightly veils but does not
conceal, lending a ghostly yet beautiful appearance to
all around.

What happened next has been taught to Australian schoolchildren for generations.
At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and Victorian police stormed
the rough barricades that had just been erected by a mob of armed miners.

A few days earlier, the diggers had burnt their mining licences as a form of protest
against the way local authorities bullied and harassed them. They were sick of being
pushed around. And they were sick of the government charging them a licence fee but
never listening to their complaints. The diggers pledged, in the words of their brand
new leader Peter Lalor,
to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights
and liberties
.

Then they hurriedly built the Stockade, which was really just a pile
of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts. It was intended as a bolt hole: a hiding
place for any newly unlicensed miner threatened with arrest.

When the military attacked
in the early hours of Sunday, the armed conflict lasted no more than 20 minutes. At least four soldiers and 27 civilians were killed. The rebel stronghold
was taken, and the rebel flag of blue and white—bearing the symbol of the Southern
Cross—was hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle,
authorities continued
to hound people close to the barricades, in case more renegades were hiding in the
surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their
protectors were pursued and cut down with swords, and hundreds were arrested. It
was called
the Ballarat massacre
.

This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.

WHY WEREN'T WE TOLD?

This is the way I learned about the Eureka Stockade when I was in high school: a
bunch of soldiers in red coats with gold buttons fought against a bunch of miners
in blue shirts with cabbage-tree hats. The diggers staged an uprising because they
didn't want to pay the unfair licence tax. The British army needed to restore order
to save face. Blood stained the wattle, men got the vote and out of all this—the
so-called ‘first' instance of civilian armed conflict on Australian soil—democracy
was born. All the participants were men, of course. That went without saying.

It was a Ballarat historian called William Withers who started the myth of the Australian
goldfields as an exclusively masculine place. In his popular
History of Ballarat
,
first published in 1870, Withers stated that the diggers were
young and wifeless
for the most part
; that to see a woman
was an absolute phenomenon
; that the diggings
were
womanless fields
.

But Withers' bold descriptions referred to the earliest days
of the gold rush: late
1851 and early 1852. This was conveniently overlooked by later historians, eager
to romanticise the digging life as one of masculine freedom and independence.

These later writers, including famous poets such as Henry Lawson, were trying to
contrast their dull city lives with the bravery, adventurousness and risk-taking
of the pioneers. They liked the idea of the diggers as free spirits: both classless—irreverent
about authority—and womanless.

Then, when the second wave of ‘diggers' appeared—the ANZACs of World War I—they extended
the myth. Classless, womanless. Eureka was the birthplace of democracy and Gallipoli
was the birthplace of the nation.

When I was at school, even though I went to an all-girls school and was taught by
a female history teacher, I never questioned these assumptions. We were encouraged
to identify with the diggers of the goldfields who had stood up against injustice
to fight for their rights. It never occurred to me to ask, on behalf of my sisters
and my fellow students: where are
we
in this story?

It was only many years later, after I had become a historian myself, that I began
to wonder if there were women in and around the Eureka Stockade on that brutal Sunday
morning. What if the hot-tempered, free-wheeling gold miners we learned about at
school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons?

My first book,
Beyond the Ladies Lounge
, was a history of women who ran pubs in Australia.
When I was researching it I discovered an interesting fact: a woman called Mrs Bentley
ran the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat in 1854. I also read that, according to legend,
it was women who made the famous Eureka Flag, the emblem of the rebellious miners.

I put fact and folklore together and came up with a question: if Mrs Bentley and
the flag-sewers were in Ballarat in 1854, how many other women might also have been
there?

That simple enquiry set off a domino effect in which each question tripped off another.
If there
were
women there, what were they doing? What drove them to leave their homelands
in search of a new life? Did they come for the same opportunities as men: for wealth,
freedom and independence? If so, did they fight side by side with the men when those
freedoms were denied?

Eventually the only thing left to do was put aside the history books written over
the past 160 years and go back to the archives: to the original documents written
by the people who were actually living in Ballarat in 1854.

It took me ten years to do this historical detective work. But that wasn't because
searching for women on the goldfields was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Quite the opposite. I found the evidence of women's lives everywhere: clinging to
dusty files at the Public Record Office, trapped in the yellowing pages of newspapers,
caught in the creases of letters and the spines of diaries, transmitted down through
generations of descendants.

Ten years on, this is what I know. Ballarat in 1854 was far from being a wild-west
outpost of bachelors out to make a quick buck. It was a surprisingly domestic community
of men and women, many with small children, intent on building a new life and a better
future for themselves.

What went so horribly wrong?

A COFFIN TRIMMED WITH WHITE

On that shell-shocked Monday morning of 4 December 1854 a young printer from Shropshire,
England crept from his tent to gaze on an altered reality. Charles Evans had kept
a daily diary since arriving on the Ballarat goldfield in November 1853. Now he recorded
what he saw.

Amid the smouldering ruins of the Eureka goldfield, horse-drawn carts were solemnly
transporting the bodies of those killed in and around the Stockade to the burial
ground nearby. This is what Evans wrote:

I have witnessed today, I think, some of the most melancholy spectacles. A number
of poor, brave fellows who fell in yesterday's cowardly massacre were buried… One
of the coffins trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowing group
was the body of a woman who was mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while
she was pleading for the life of her husband. The mind recoils with horror and disgust
from the thought that an Englishman can be found capable of an act so monstrous and
cruel.

Without the eyewitness account of Charles Evans, a young man whose moral universe
had just been tipped upside down, we would never have known about the death of this
woman.

For the name of the miner's wife with the white-trimmed coffin was not recorded in
the official government lists of those killed and wounded at Eureka. It was not included
on the famous list of heroes published by Peter Lalor. Nor has it come down to us
through folk history. There are no inquest files.
No newspaper reports. You certainly
won't find it inscribed on the monument to
the sacred memory of those who fell in
resisting the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian government
that looms
over the Old Ballarat Cemetery.

We know nothing about this woman. Not even whether she was defending the barricade,
or just a helpless onlooker, her tent encircled at random when the rebels threw together
their defences.

The speeches delivered in Ballarat on the second anniversary of the Stockade in
1856 recalled the day
the first blood was shed for Australian liberty
. They were
talking only about the blood of men.

In countless books, poems, paintings, films and school curriculums, the Eureka Stockade
has been portrayed as a violently masculine episode in which male passions were inflamed,
male blood was shed and, ultimately, manhood suffrage—voting rights for men of every
class—was won.

But one simple line in a young man's journal helps us to imagine the Eureka Stockade
differently. We see that the people there were more than just a rabble of male miners
and their red-coated tormentors locked in a David and Goliath–type battle. We are
back in the land of the mortals.

And that is a good thing: it's more interesting there.

Knowing that women were not only at the Eureka Stockade, but
killed
in the crossfire
of new beginnings transforms things. It doesn't just add colour. It changes the
very outline of a story we thought we all knew.

EUREKA!

In August 1851 a blacksmith named Thomas Hiscock went looking for gold in the country
of the Wathaurung people, some 110 kilometres north-west of the port of Melbourne.
And amazingly—eureka!—he found it.

It's not really true to say that Hiscock ‘discovered' gold in Victoria. The Wathaurung,
Ballarat's original inhabitants, had always known it was there. But until they realised
that whitefellas were fools for the stuff, the Wathaurung had not considered the
medicine earth
to be a precious metal.

Within days of Hiscock's find, news of the strike in the central highlands had spread
to Melbourne and Geelong, and nobody wanted to miss out.
News of gold at Ballarat
,
wrote Henry Mundy, who had emigrated to Australia as a boy in 1844,
set the Geelong
people and those of the surrounding district crazy.
Within weeks, eager prospectors
were making their way overland from all corners of Australia.

The reports in the papers drove everyone mad
, explained Mundy.
Every shepherd, hutkeeper,
stockrider, every man, woman and child. All the world and his wife were looking for
and examining quartz.
Farms, building sites, ships, police barracks, government
offices, shearing sheds—all were deserted. Schools closed and postal services were
disrupted. The public service staggered along on a skeleton staff.

The township of Geelong was virtually emptied of men overnight; St Kilda found itself
devoid of menfolk
. Women banded together to draw water, chop wood, mind children
and safeguard each other from the perceived dangers of being
‘without natural protectors'.
Not all men wanted to leave their wives behind, and not all women would consent to
be left. But the famous ‘grass widows' of the gold rush existed in plenty—left in
the forsaken towns like the soapy ring around a bathtub.