We Are the Rebels (28 page)

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.

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
and 10 shillings. He had £4-10s in his pocket when he was taken to the hospital.
The loose change was missing from his blood-spattered pants when he was released.

UNGOVERNABLE EXCITEMENT

By the time the sun rose over Mount Warrenheip the troops and police were returning
to Camp, where they were given more rum. 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.

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.

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.

Commanding officers turned a blind eye to the brutal, petty and wilful misdeeds of
their soldiers. As far as Hotham was concerned, it was simply a case of boys being
boys.

There is ample evidence in reports from the Stockade of arson, murder and pillage
(thieving). These are three of the traditional ‘spoils of war'. The fourth is rape,
of which there are no direct reports. Was that because it didn't happen?

According to anthropologist Roland Littlewood, sexual violence in warfare has occurred
from Hebrew times through to the twentieth-century atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia.
But it is very rarely reported. Sexual assault by soldiers ‘reflects badly' not only
on the rapists but also on the victims, who feel degraded and humiliated. Indeed,
that is its purpose: ‘An explicit justification frequently made by the soldiers who
rape women,' writes Littlewood, ‘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. The assaults are rationalised on the grounds that the women
were housing enemies of the state.

What we do find in reports from Eureka are veiled references to ‘unmanly acts' perpetrated
amid the chaos and terror: acts that Victorian sensibilities preferred to leave to
the reader's imagination.

Thomas Pierson referred to
hundreds of other cruel deeds done by these fiends that
would strike any civilised person with horror
. The young American Dan Calwell wrote
home to his parents and sister reporting on the Stockade clash. The victors, reported
Dan,
committed all the brutalities of the darker ages
.

The Goldfields Commission of Enquiry later found that—
as currently rumoured—
there
had indeed been
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 violence of the sort displayed
in moments of ungovernable
excitement
, but decided not
to elaborate this subject further
.

Just as the flag was symbolically trampled and souvenired, so Ballarat's women may
also have been taken as a trophy of battle. As we have seen, women in Ballarat played
a prominent role in expressing the social and political grievances of their community.

If they too suffered bodily harm for crossing the line, it was an act of revenge
more terrible than anyone was prepared to disclose.

THE MORNING AFTER (REPRISE)

On that bloody Sunday morning, the people of Ballarat woke to the smell of burning
canvas and the spine-chilling sounds of mourning. 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 bayonet wounds. Military guards
stood over them in case they should 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. Nearby hotels were turned into makeshift hospitals.
Thomas Pierson thought the treatment of the prisoners and wounded was
characteristic
of English warfare. Most heathenish, bloodthirsty, disgraceful and cruel
.

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 man'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…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. Now there was the clean-up.

All the unclaimed dead and wounded were brought to the Camp in carts that afternoon—three
dray-loads full of maimed and lifeless bodies to be buried at the cemetery on Monday.
Huyghue saw the mangled remains in the Camp hospital, the dead rebels' faces
ghastly
and passionately distorted
.

Army and civilian surgeons attempted to patch up the shattered limbs and ragged gashes
of the wounded.

Four soldiers were dead: Privates William Webb (19 years) and Felix Boyle (32 years)
of the 12th Regiment and Michael Roney (22 years) and Joseph Wall (20 years) of the
40th Regiment. At least nine more soldiers and police were wounded. Captain Henry
Wise, a 25-year-old commissioned officer and the most popular soldier in the division,
died of a gunshot wound to his leg on 21 December. Before he died, Wise gamely announced
that
his dancing was spoiled
.

It is impossible to say exactly how many civilians died either at the Stockade, in
the surrounding tents or in the bush and the mine shafts where the dazed and wounded
fled. There were many body counts that circulated in the following days and weeks.

Peter Lalor famously published a list of the Eureka martyrs, in which he named 22.

In his diary entry for 6 December, Thomas Pierson noted 25 deaths, but some time
later he scrawled in the margin,
time has proved that near 60 have died of the diggers
in all
.

General Thomas wrote in his official report that the casualties of the military
action had been
great
but there was
no means of ascertaining correctly.
He estimated
at least 30 killed on the spot, and
many more died of their wounds subsequently
.

G. H. Mann simply recorded that
an onerous number of funerals were frequently passing
to the cemetery for many days
.

Of these funeral processions, Charles Evans describes only one—the one that began
our story. This is the coffin trimmed with white and followed by
a respectable and
sorrowful group
. This is the coffin containing a dead woman, whose body was claimed
but not named. This is the woman mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while
she was pleading for the life of her husband. It was
monstrous acts like these
that
Charles Evans denounced as
polluting the soil with the innocent blood of men women
and children
.

We don't know whether the dead woman's husband was spared—whether she took the bullet
or the bayonet for him. We don't know whether she left motherless children behind.
We don't know how many other women may have been among the number of dead that could
not be ascertained correctly. This is the woman who was slipped quietly into the
earth by her weeping friends and loved ones, then slipped just as silently out of
history.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

DECEMBER 3 SUNDAY

The awful day of the attack made at

the Eureka at 5 in the morning.

DECEMBER 4 MONDAY

All day long funerals passing.

DECEMBER 5 TUESDAY

Somewhat similar.

DECEMBER 6 WEDNESDAY

Mrs Lane staying with me for a week.

So Maggie Johnston recorded the events of that weird, savage week. Life went on.
By the end of the month, most of the funerals were over, the shops were once again
open, mining operations were in full swing and the rattle of the windlass chimed
in with the usual goldfields din.

Peter Lalor was in hiding in Geelong, under the care of his fiancée Alicia Dunne.
Along with Lalor, Frederick Vern, George Black and James McGill had a price on their
heads. Anastasia Hayes made a reckless attempt to broker a
secret communication
with her husband while he was in the lockup, and was lucky to escape with her life.
A dozen rifles were pointed at the moving object,
recorded Samuel Huyghue
when a
ray of moonlight befriended her (for it proved to be a woman) and she got off scatheless
.
Thirteen men—including Timothy Hayes, Raffaello Carboni and the African-American
John Joseph—were sent to Melbourne to be tried for treason. Henry Seekamp had been
arrested in his home, with Clara and her children looking on, and would face a charge
of sedition. The rest of the prisoners were released to the ruins of their burnt-out
tents, grief-stricken families and uncertain futures.

Robert Rede's report for the last week of December notes an increase of 855 women
and 1955 children, and a decrease of 4130 men.
A better state of order is returning
,
he writes,
and the miners are resuming work…little gold has been raised
.

Eureka Wright, whose parents Thomas and Mary Wright were in their tent inside the
Stockade when it was stormed, celebrated her first birthday.

Dear Jamie and I spent a quiet day alone
, wrote Maggie.
Our first Christmas
.

HOPE

But if daily life returned to its normal routines, rituals and rites of passage,
Victorian political life would never be the same again.

When the multicultural gold miners of Ballarat hastily constructed a rough barricade
around a dozen tents, they intended to provide a place of armed refuge. A haven for
unlicensed diggers against the official licence hunts designed to oppress, entrap
and humiliate them. They raised a flag that would fly beside the French, German,
American, British, Canadian and other standards that were usually flown at public
meetings. They called it the Australian Flag. Standing below that flag's simple design—a
design inspired by their new homeland—they swore an oath. They vowed to stand by
each other to defend their rights and liberties. Those rights, they considered, were
nothing more or less than their entitlement as free-born Britons to be treated like
men. Not animals, serfs or slaves: men.

The miners were not disloyal to their sovereign, but they had lost any shred of respect
for the underlings who served her. They did not want to change the system of government;
they wanted to be included in it. At no time did they riot against or launch an assault
on authorities.

They were not insurgents. They were not revolutionaries. They were escapees from
old-world hierarchies who had been promised liberty in the new world they'd sacrificed
so much to reach.

They rebelled against an unpopular and viciously policed poll tax when all their
peaceful protests had been smacked down. They fought back when the military launched
a pre-emptive strike intended to restore the authority of a government that taxed
but would not listen and an imperialist agenda that had pledged so much but delivered
precious little.

They sewed a flag and built a fence.

Following bloody Sunday, however, Governor Hotham needed a more dangerous enemy than
that. He quickly determined that only
foreigners
could have been responsible for
such outrageous acts. No one was fooled, particularly when Hotham then declared an
amnesty for any Americans involved in the affray. The Americans had been the only
ones who, perhaps, truly did foresee a republican future. After all,
they had already
had one successful shot at armed insurrection against redcoats.