We Are the Rebels (24 page)

BRINGING THE MATTER TO A CRISIS

On the evening of 29 November Captain Pasley, one of the military commanders now
stationed at Ballarat, wrote to Hotham. The meeting at Bakery Hill had
passed off
very quietly
, he reported, with speeches less inflammatory than previous public demonstrations.

It is therefore, I think, clearly necessary
, Pasley wrote,
that some steps should
be taken to bring the matter to a crisis, and to teach those persons (forming, no
doubt, the great majority of the mining population) who are not seditiously disposed,
that it is in their interest to give practical proofs of their allegiance.
Such persons,
he hoped, would not only discourage the rebellious portion of the community, but
also interfere to prevent their future activities.

With the appearance of the Australian Flag—the flag of the Southern Cross—community
unrest had suddenly entered the realm of sedition.

Were the rebels really in the minority, as Pasley claimed?

By the end of November 1854, the population of Ballarat was around 30,000. Up to
15,000 people assembled at Bakery Hill that day, which means almost half of the total
population walked off the job to attend a protest meeting.

Just imagine if that sort of percentage of citizens—say half of Melbourne's current
population of five million—turned up to any public meeting. On climate change, maternity
leave, nuclear disarmament, Aboriginal land rights, bank fees, the trains not running
on time—anything. It would be political chaos.

Faced with this sort of numerical opposition, the authorities of Ballarat were now
itching for something simple: a violent confrontation that would assert their supremacy.
Their power and legitimacy were being questioned daily—by everyone from Ellen Young,
the Ballarat Times and the conscientiously objecting unlicensed diggers on the outside
to the grumbling foot police on the inside.

An open rebellion would sort out the mutineers from the loyal crew and force everyone
to declare: which side are you on?

Each man felt something would happen before the day was over.
So wrote Alexander
Dick on the morning of Thursday 30 November, as he sat on a hill overlooking the
Gravel Pits. The heat was intense; the day overcast, windy, foul. The young Scotsman
looked down on the usual comings and goings of a busy working goldfield. The noise
and clamour. The shouts from holes and the creak of turning windlasses. Tents and
flags flapping, children darting about. Shops trading. The workplace and the home
as one.

And then, a torrent of foot and mounted police suddenly descended from the Camp to
the Gravel Pits. A massive licence hunt began, led by James Johnston, on the very
morning after so many diggers had burnt their licences in the communal protest.

It was a show of strength from the Camp, designed to restore the power they'd lost
since the burning of Bentley's Hotel.

It was a test of the rebellious miners' pledge to defend the unlicensed among them.

It was an arm-wrestle to see who, when push came to shove, would gain the upper hand.

THE FIRST SHOTS

There was
a tremendous uproar
. All the inhabitants of the Gravel Pits scattered among
the mounds of earth and tents.
Joe! Joe! Joe!
The cry went down the line. It was
mayhem, as the mounted police began to gallop among the tents. The soldiers made
a sweep of the flat, with cavalry on both flanks and
in the centre, clearing off
all the occupants to the high road beyond the lead.

Police fired shots into a crowded area,
among tents where women and children were
congregated in large numbers
. The confused crowd scattered, seeking shelter among
neighbouring tents. Troopers were dragged down from their horses
like mere stuffed
effigies of men
. Police were pelted with mud, stones and broken bottles.

Robert Rede stampeded in and hurriedly blurted out the Riot Act (the action he had
been criticised for not taking at the Eureka Hotel riot). Now he read the Act so
quickly—
with telegraphic speed
—that in one journalist's opinion
the consequent proceedings
were illegal
.

Elizabeth Rowlands looked on.
I was present
, she later wrote,
when the proclamation
was read when the soldiers dropped
on their knee and presented guns at us and told
the crowd to disperse and my word they did disperse
.

Miners jumped down holes. Women and children scurried into tents. A bugle sounded.
The military marched down the hill, forming a line on the grass under the southward
plateau of the Camp.
A very picturesque array
, thought Samuel Huyghue, the line of
cavalry in their bright red uniforms, their brass buttons flashing in the sunlight.
Eight men were arrested for riotous behaviour but there were no serious injuries.

Round one to the Camp.

THE DIGGERS RALLY

No one at the Gravel Pits went back to work that day. As news of the chaos—and random
firing on a crowd including women and children—spread to other parts of the field,
sympathetic diggers stopped work to seek information and digest rumours.

Work is knocked off
, wrote one official to Hotham,
and the whole population is talking
over events of the morning…The opinions of most disinterested persons here is
[the
actions of the Camp are]
alike unwise and indicative of a wish on the part of the
authorities here to hurry on a collision.

Even upright Martha Clendinning, a self-appointed member
of the peace portion of
the residents
, thought ordering licence hunts after the Bakery Hill meeting had been
an incredible act of folly
.

From all directions on the diggings, people started in the direction of Bakery Hill.
The Australian flag was flying there once again. Whatever grievances had caused the
loss of faith in the government—hunger, grief, shame, disappointment, harassment,
indignity, humiliation, powerlessness—the object now was self-defence. The leaders
of Ballarat had shown they would fire upon a civilian crowd. Neither Australia's
homegrown sons and daughters nor its ambitious immigrants had ever expected this.
This was the way masters treated servants or dogs or ‘the blacks'—not free-born Britons
and self-governing Yankees.

Gathered now under their new banner at Bakery Hill, the people looked for direction.
Who would guide this exodus, deliver them from tyranny, lead them out of slavery?

From the crowd stepped a 27-year-old Irish man. Peter Lalor.

Peter was raised in a political family, a family that had known the oppression and
hypocrisy of the Union Jack, and believed in Home Rule for Ireland. Although they
were landed gentry, they had stood up for the rights of Irish peasants. At Ballarat,
Peter became Timothy Hayes' mining partner. With his fiancée Alicia Dunne working
as a teacher in Geelong, Peter looked to Anastasia Hayes and her brood of children
for his domestic life.

This tall, charismatic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man stepped out of the crowd and
said one word. He said it with feeling.

Liberty!

Mrs Ann Shann, 24-year-old wife of digger John Shann, was there. Later, she vividly
remembered the moment when Lalor
was chosen leader of the diggers, and it was decided
to drill and oppose the police and military by force.
Mrs Shann joined with other
diggers, their wives and children, and the assembled group of a thousand marched
en masse from Bakery Hill to Eureka. The Eureka was a better place to defend: further
from the Camp; more protected.

They took the flag with them.

A COUNCIL OF WAR FOR DEFENCE

At Eureka, the self-appointed leadership of the young solidarity movement met in
the home/store of Anne and Martin Diamond. It was a veritable United Nations of malcontents:
Lalor; Carboni (who was needed to translate orders to the non-English-speaking rebels);
Irishmen Patrick Curtain, John Manning (the schoolmaster at St Alipius), Patrick
Howard (who would soon marry Eliza Darcy) and Timothy Hayes; Englishman George Black;
Scotsman Thomas Kennedy; Frederick Vern the Hanoverian; Canadian Henry Ross; American
James McGill, who was a close friend of Sarah Hanmer, and Edward Thonen, a 30-year-old
Jewish ‘lemonade seller' (i.e. sly-grogger) from Prussia.

John Basson Humffray abstained from the group, saying he preferred moral force to
physical force, and watched his former shipmates Anne and Martin Diamond give shelter
to the rebels. Charles Evans sided with Humffray (with whom he'd walked to Ballarat)
over Hayes (with whom he'd sailed to Victoria). By temperament, Evans was a cautious
observer. Kennedy, by contrast, had told a cheering crowd at the Bakery Hill monster
meeting that
mere persuasion is all a humbug; nothing succeeds like a lick in the
lug
[a smack around the ear].

The new group who met at the Diamonds' store saw themselves as a ‘council of war
for the defence', though there was, at present, no territory to defend. Lalor was
elected ‘commander-in-chief' and began to organise squads to protect the unlicensed
diggers.

Thousands of miners had burnt their licences in the protest fires and were now, technically,
not authorised to be on the diggings. They were easy targets for the authorities
to fine or arrest, and the Gravel Pits incident that morning had shown that the government
was in the mood to crack down hard.

Lalor concluded that the miners must
resist force by force
. But how to make that
resistance concrete? A flag was one thing; it could stir hearts, but it could not
shelter bodies. There needed to be a neighbourhood refuge, an unassailable place
of shelter, to
defend and protect
from arrest those diggers who had burnt their licences.

DRAWING THE LINE

The war chiefs decided to throw up a barricade. The question was how you would construct
such a refuge. In Europe, revolutionaries would block off the streets. You couldn't
do that on the diggings: there
were
no real streets or buildings, only rough alleys
between the tents and shanties. There was no wall of buildings to contain an enemy.
A crowd (or an army) could leak out into the gaps between the canvas shelters—even
ride over them. This being Australia, and the frontier, there was simply too much
space.

The barricade would have to be self-contained: it would have to close in on itself.
The ‘line' would have to be a circle.

Thus an area around the Diamonds' store was immediately barricaded. It was all hands
on deck, with any form of timber serving to construct a crude fortification: overturned
carts, empty barrels and crates, felled trees, the thick timber slabs used to shore
up mine shafts.

Made hurriedly with scavenged resources, the barrier was an uneven mess. Only waist-high
at some points, closer to two metres in others. Some sections were held together
with ropes, some fixed into the ground; some of the slabs were given picket-like
points, other parts of the barrier were just mounds of earth. The ring was not even
closed. It was a broken circle from the start, its ‘rear wall' being the scrub of
Brown Hill.

In all, about half a square kilometre of ground was enclosed, on a gentle slope
running up to the Melbourne Road only a few hundred metres from the charred remains
of Bentley's Hotel. The barricade surrounded at least ten tents, the Diamonds' immediate
neighbours. These tents were the homes and businesses of diggers and their families;
men and women randomly caught up in the drama. As Anne Diamond would later testify,
her tent was
half in and half out
of the ramshackle cordon.

At the heart of the enclosed area, a flagpole was erected and the Australian Flag
hoisted briefly to stake the claim. The Eureka Stockade, as it would later come to
be known, made a mighty fine amphitheatre but a lousy fortress.