Just before dawn on the morning of 3 December 1854, 296 soldiers and police descended on the sleeping inhabitants of a stockade, which had been roughly thrown together by the miners on the Ballarat goldfields. The soldiers had anticipated an attack. The troops gathering at the government camp were spoiling for action, but no one expected it to come on the Sabbath, and the stockaders were caught off-guard. Within fifteen minutes, about 30 men were dead or dying, and the only rebellion to take place on Victorian soil had been quashed.
The issues that drove the miners to erect the stockade were not unique to Ballarat. They had been brewing since the announcement of the first genuine find of gold was made on 16 July 1851, the day after the colony of Victoria was born. At the heart of the matter was the disdain with which the government regarded the gold seekers, even though it had been responsible for encouraging the gold rush in the first place. Worried that the economy of the new colony would suffer if there was a sudden loss of population to New South Wales, where gold had already been found, a group of businessmen, at the instigation of the governor, had put forward a prize of 200 guineas, sparking a frenzy of gold searching across Victoria.
Unfortunately, the government had not anticipated that the first finds would be replicated all over the colony, or that some goldfields would be so rich that almost the entire male population would be tempted to take up their picks and panning dishes, and tramp into the country to seek their fortunes. Nobody wanted to stay working for wages on the pastoral stations or in the towns. In trying to protect the colony, the government had brought it close to ruin, but rather than adapt to the altered situation, it attempted to drive the men back to their jobs by treating them as an unruly rabble.
They were anything but. They were, in fact, quite orderly, particularly in the early days. Among those who joined in the search for the precious metal were professional men who had never before held a pick or shovel. They took their place beside tradesmen, labourers, and shepherds who had the advantage of knowing the Victorian bush better than anyone else. There were also a few ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, which came to be known as Tasmania in 1856. Admittedly few, if any, had asked the permission of their employers before heading to the goldfields, but they were hardly lawless. The early goldfields were remarkable for their lack of crime. When disputes arose, usually over the territory each man had claimed for himself, they came together as a group and sorted the matter out. These mass meetings became a feature of the goldfields, much to the concern of the administration because of the way in which they were conducted. They were democratic. Every digger, as all who joined the search for gold were known, had the right to voice his opinion and to vote on the issues which concerned him, a right which the British Government did not believe was an entitlement of men without property or respectability. Democracy, like republicanism, had no place in the British Empire.
According to British Law all precious metals on or below the ground belonged to the Crown; the diggers were not only trespassing, they were stealing as well. In New South Wales, this problem had been overcome by the introduction of a licence, costing 30 shillings, which gave the miners the right to extract gold from a small patch of land 2.45 metres square for 30 days. An identical licence was introduced into Victoria on 1 September 1851, not so much for the revenue it would raise, though that was sorely needed, but in the hope that the cost would dampen the diggers’ enthusiasm for goldmining.
By then, news had begun to circulate about Poverty Point, a stretch of land 800 metres long and 200 metres wide at Ballarat. It had once been a bend in a fast flowing river, and it was strewn with gold nuggets. Renamed Golden Point, it was to yield much more gold once men with Californian experience had arrived to unearth the pipe clay that lay 3 to 12 metres below the surface. It was so rich that over two days in early September, two brothers brought 27 kilograms of gold out of a shallow shaft. The diggers were prepared to suffer any conditions—wind, rain, mud and the flimsiest of shelter at night—to get their hands on similar amounts of gold, especially as the selling price was £3 an ounce, more than a working man could expect to earn in a week.
To see that the licence was taken up, gold commissioners had to be appointed to every major goldfield and they had to be supported by police who could arrest defiant diggers. The problem was most of the police in the colony had taken off to the goldfields themselves so the native police were called into action. Formed in 1842 when Victoria was still the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, their role had been to assist in the pacification of Aborigines in the pastoral districts. They relished the opportunity to exert their authority over white diggers and were given ample encouragement by their commanding officer, Captain Dana. They arrived in Ballarat on 19 September along with Commissioner Francis Doveton.
He brought with him a bundle of freshly printed licences, but not nearly enough for the 5000 diggers he found on the goldfield. Thousands more licences had to be hastily handwritten so they could be introduced immediately, even though he had been instructed to wait until the beginning of the next month. The diggers were immediately upset. They vowed to resist, especially as the possession of a licence gave them no guarantee that their gold would be safely transported to banks in Melbourne or Geelong. Captain Dana’s police were too busy to provide an escort, unless it was to protect the gold of the diggers who had paid for their licences.
Few of the diggers wanted to leave the Ballarat field while it continued to yield such an amazing quantity of gold. One by one they capitulated and bought a half licence at 15 shillings to tide them over for the rest of September. Those who persisted in their belief that the licence cost was too high, and an injustice, risked being subjected to some very rough treatment by the native police. As there was no accommodation for prisoners at the government camp, they could find themselves chained to a log until the commissioner or the police magistrate dealt with the charges against them. A fine of £10 was the usual result, although the diggers could be sent to gaol in Melbourne or Geelong, or had to forfeit their claims.
The antagonism between the government camp and the diggers was further inflamed by the announcement early in December 1851 that the licence fee would be double in the New Year. It would also be extended to everyone on the goldfields who made a living either directly or indirectly from gold. This included those enterprising souls who had set up shop in their tents, providing food, grog and everything else the diggers needed.
The rationale for this provocative action was the financial crisis which had resulted from the shortage of labour. The cost of even the most basic of commodities had spiralled out of control, and the government was afraid that the situation would worsen once word of the gold discoveries reached England. There was a fear that it would create such a rush of immigrants that the colony would be overwhelmed, particularly if the gold petered out before the ships carrying them had arrived in Melbourne or Geelong. Even if the gold lasted, food shortages could cripple the colony and possibly lead to famine, which invariably brought disease and death.
Opposition to the increase in the licence fee was immediate across the goldfields and had the potential to become violent, but on Ballarat there were hardly any diggers left to make an impact. Most had left for fresh fields along the Lodden River and at Mount Alexander. Here ‘monster’ meetings were held with thousands of diggers denouncing the licence as an unjust tax. They were in the process of getting up a deputation to bring their grievances to Melbourne when the increase was revoked, but the damage had been done. The diggers knew they could not trust the government.
Once the initial excitement was over, some diggers drifted back to Ballarat where they found, to their surprise, that a town had been properly laid out by the surveyor William Urquhart. It was not at Golden Point, where they had been working, but on the plateau, with the Yarrowee River creating a division between the town dwellers and the diggers. As the eastern side of the river had not been surveyed, no land could be sold. Nor could businesses be established, though this regulation was ignored as stores and workshops flourished among the diggings to the annoyance of the businesspeople in the town who had had to buy the land on which their businesses stood. Initially there was a lack of water, and then too much of it flooded Golden Point, driving the diggers to higher ground at the base of a spur of the great Dividing Range called Brown Hill. Here on this new development on the Ballarat goldfields, which would become known the world over as Eureka, they discovered that the layers of mud, clay and gravel they found at the bottom of their shafts hid a river which had been formed by water cutting its way through the rocky underbelly of the land many thousands of years ago. Wherever the river changed course or met an obstacle it deposited some of the minerals it had gathered along the way. The volcanic activity that had created Mount Buninyong to the south, Warrenheip to the north, and the plateau on which the town sat had caused it to dam and spread out. In time, all its tributaries had become covered by silt, mud, clay and other debris. New water courses containing fragments of gold developed on top of this accumulation. The Wathaurang, an indigenous clan who came to occupy the region some time in the last 40,000 years, took no interest in the shining flecks they must have seen. Nor did the shepherds employed to tend the sheep of the young Scottish entrepreneurs who, in 1837, had taken up the region under generous pastoral leases, which cost them £10 a year. But the diggers, who had already extracted the gold caught up in the pipe clay layer, knew that there was much more to be found if they could follow the ancient riverbed. It was not long before other buried rivers, or deep leads, were discovered along the stretch of land, which lay below the basalt plateau.
Finding these deep leads presented many problems. It could not be assumed that they had followed the same course as the current streams or even the pipe clay layer. It was a case of trial and error, which could not be done by one man working on his own. By pooling their resources and their claims, four or five men could work together sharing the labour and the rewards. Each person still had to have a current licence, even though it sometimes took up to six months to sink a productive shaft. Some men could support themselves on the gold they had already found, but for others the going was tough, especially as they were constantly being made to produce their licences for inspection by the goldfields police.
Late in 1852, there were only about 2000 diggers at Ballarat, the hard work of sinking shafts keeping all but the most industrious at the numerous shallow goldfields where gold could still be found with a panning dish and a shovel. It was not until the beginning of the following year that the flood of immigrants began to make their presence felt and the population of Ballarat grew rapidly. As they had paid their own passage and expected to re turn home once they had made their fortunes, they did not consider themselves immigrants. The majority were from Britain, many of them middle class or better, as the poor could not afford the passage price. Men from Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland as well as from North America joined them. The Chinese were not numerous on the goldfields until after the Eureka rebellion was over.
To a remarkable extent, these diggers lived and worked together in national groups. People who came from the same city in England, Ireland or Europe, or were of the same nationality, would be found working side by side, and would often indicate their presence as a group by flying a flag to denote their origin. Although they were not the first or the only ones to stake claims there, the Eureka Lead took on a distinctly Irish appearance. So much so Father Matthew Downing arrived in Ballarat in November 1852 to become the first resident priest on the goldfields, establishing the first Catholic Chapel in a tent at Brown Hill. He later moved it to higher ground on the Melbourne Road, but it was still close enough to his Irish congregation.
As all involved in deep lead mining resigned themselves to remaining in Ballarat for some time, they began to erect more substantial dwellings; many brought their families to live with them. They petitioned for land on which they could grow produce and raise some livestock but this, they were told, was not possible as no subdivision of land could take place until surveys had been completed. In the meantime, the diggers had to make do with a diet of mutton, damper, pickles and black tea all purchased at exorbitant prices from the shopkeepers, who had, in turn, paid dearly for the supplies they sold in their shops. The failure of the government to send surveyors out so that the diggers could legally occupy the land on which their dwellings stood became another one of their grievances.
They also could not get a drink because the government was of the opinion that the sale of alcohol would increase the incidence of crime and disorder on the goldfields. But the drinking of ale and spirits was a tradition, particularly among the working class, in the countries from which most of the diggers came; they resented the prohibition. The more enterprising of the shopkeepers circumvented this by selling sly grog, often from thinly disguised lemonade tents.
In some places, the goldfields commissioners and their police were prepared to turn a blind eye to the sale of alcohol provided sufficient money changed hands in the right direction. In other areas, the authorities smashed kegs and arrested the operators and drinkers alike. By early 1854, the governor had to concede that prohibition had created more ills than it had prevented, and it was replaced by a system of licences for the legal dispensing of alcohol. As the goldfields administration was given the responsibility of issuing these new licences, the corruption which had accompanied sly grog selling was simply transferred to the hoteliers. Those who were prepared to offer considerations to the commissioners and the magistrates on the goldfields were the most likely to receive licences, and be given favoured treatment by the police. They could use the police to put their opposition out of business. Because of their relationship with the government camp, many of the new hoteliers were unpopular with the diggers who continued to frequent the sly grog sellers.
One such hotelier was James Bentley, owner of the Eureka Hotel, whose actions together with those of the police magistrate became the catalyst that galvanised the diggers in Ballarat during the last months of 1854. They were no longer prepared to put up with a corrupt administration, and they wanted other grievances addressed. Most of all, they wanted the rights and privileges which were enjoyed by other citizens of the colony. They wanted the right to vote and to select their own members of parliament who would represent their interests. Nothing less would do. They demanded democracy and were prepared to rebel against the authority of the goldfields and the Crown to gain it. Their rebellion culminated in the brief battle at the Eureka stockade.