Céleste reflected on the success of her memoirs and was encouraged to continue writing in her diary about the boat trip and life in Australia.1 But fermenting in her fertile, ambitious and creative mind late in 1854 were the ideas for a novel. Her fervent dislike for the Australian environment and some of the people there was a driving force. And she didn’t have to look or read far to find riveting material. Emerging now in her thoughts was Alexandre Dumas’s advice to try fiction; to note everything around her and to sketch mini-biographies on any real characters she came across. Dumas had made her realise that the people who revolted her most, the individuals she had no intention of wasting her intellectual energy on, were the ones she should definitely write about. It was the despised types, even more than the ones she admired, that would draw out the real writer in her.
With this in mind she organised Lionel to take her on an official French Consulate tour of Ballarat, the goldmining district seventy miles north-west of Melbourne. But instead of hiring a carriage the adventurous Chabrillans, wishing to save on costs, decided to go on horseback over two days, stopping first near a Chinese tent village. At first the inhabitants were hostile to them.
‘They were exasperated after being treated like animals by the British,’ Céleste wrote. Through an interpreter, the couple made it clear that they were French and had sympathy with them. A Chinese senior then presented Céleste with ‘some very pretty handcrafts’.
The next day they trotted on to Ballarat, population 20,000, which frightened Céleste on first sighting.
‘It was like a huge cemetery,’ she noted, ‘where each person digs their own grave.’
The miner representatives gave them a respectful reception, assuming, correctly, that anyone representing the French would not necessarily be supportive of the British-run Victorian Government’s policies. There was simmering dislike for the colonial administrators, now headed by Governor Charles Hotham. He had arrived a few months earlier in June, to the alarming news that his coffers were almost bare from the cost of policing and running the goldfields. Miners had to pay a pound a month, or twelve pounds a year, for a licence. This was a heavy imposition for most of them, and many avoided paying the licence fee. Hotham ordered the police to redouble their efforts to collect the fees, and this was when tensions—colonial masters versus miners—began to increase.
The Chabrillans picked up on this sensitivity. Lionel, representing several hundred Frenchmen in the area, listened to their grievances; Céleste, not understanding much of the discussions, learned by watching the miners’ agitated faces and body language.
After the initial political chat, Céleste was asked if she would care to go down a mine shaft. She had no wish to go, but in front of her husband and so many eager watchers, she relented and switched to ‘show time’ in an instant. Céleste looked her ravishing best in long dress, bonnet and with a colourful parasol. She smiled her regal smile, waved to two photographers present and stepped with fashion-model elegance into the mine trolley to the applause of a hundred onlookers. She was given a lantern and lowered carefully into the pit.
‘I am plunged about eighty feet,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and arrive at the bottom feeling very apprehensive.’
A miner showed her around the cramped underground passage. He gave her a pick and invited her to dig. Céleste scratched around, and with the miner’s help ‘discovered’ a few small grains of gold, which had been secretly placed at her feet.
Lionel embraced her on her return to the surface, where she was cheered again.2
Dumas’s comment about revulsion being a spur for characters and incident in fiction and non-fiction was tested when, much against her instincts, Céleste decided to attend the trial of an alleged serial killer in the Melbourne Supreme Court. The man accused was John Hughes. There was a wealth of evidence that said he had slain at least fifteen people, and perhaps double that number. Hughes was already branded as Australia’s worst mass murderer. The courtroom was crowded. A mob of hundreds more waited for the verdict outside. Chances were that in the small colony, there were many who knew someone who had been killed by this alleged monster.
Céleste better understood Dumas’s advice. She found the insouciant Hughes an ‘interesting’ character, mainly because of his behaviour at the trial, which began on 19 September. On day three the jury broke to deliberate for an hour. When the trial resumed Hughes said to the judge, ‘You’re in too much of a hurry to find me guilty.’
The judge glared but said nothing. This only encouraged the accused to add, ‘It’s six o’clock. You’re thinking of the dinner that’s waiting for you.’ Some in the audience giggled nervously at the outburst. ‘Come on, hurry up, or the pudding will get cold.’
It seemed as if Hughes may have been correct. A minute later the judge read the sentence to him, ‘The accused has been found guilty and is condemned to death by hanging, in three days.’
Hughes, now sounding on the verge of hysteria, gesticulated at the judge and repeated the sentence. ‘I wish you bon appétit! Drink my health with a glass of sherry before I die!’
Over the next two day gallows scaffolding was erected in the forecourt of the courthouse. On 22 September a big crowd gathered on high ground in Victoria Parade to witness the event. Céleste had been intrigued by the trial. Now she wished to follow it through to a conclusion by viewing the actual execution. A doctor friend offered her a place at a window in his house, which looked over Victoria Parade. It was a scene reminiscent of the glory days of the guillotine in Paris only a few decades earlier, but without women knitting. There was a similar bloodlust and desire to see a humiliating state-determined end to a human being.
‘I accepted despite my repugnance for this kind of spectacle,’ Céleste said, but she was thinking of Dumas’s advice to experience such incidents so she could write about them later with the authority of a first-hand witness. ‘I want to familiarise myself with all life’s atrocities,’ she added. ‘It will make me philosophical.’ Seeing such a grotesque demise, she felt, would focus her mind on the more important issues in life and help her ‘rise above the petty afflictions that beset me constantly’.
This was at odds with others, who wanted revenge for the many people slaughtered by Hughes, and still others who were there for the thrill.
The condemned man arrived, shackled and flanked by four burly policemen.
‘The crowd is suddenly full of movement like an ants’ nest that has just been run over by a carriage wheel,’ Céleste observed in her diary. Hughes looked scornfully at the inquisitive throng, ‘all riveted and open-mouthed’. He put on a bold front as he was escorted up the steps to the platform. Once there, he bent his head forward towards the executioner, ‘smiling as if he were only going to try on a cravat’.
Hughes’s careless, almost carefree attitude incensed many onlookers. They wanted him to suffer indignity, fear and pain, but he was denying them that pleasure. Hughes, hands tied behind his back, was not allowed the right to say some last words, usually a chance to repent. But knowing he would never do this, the executioner steadied him in position over a trap door, stepped to one side and pulled a metre-long lever. The trap door fell open, sending Hughes into space and eternity. There were gasps as his body twisted and his neck muscles fought a losing battle against strangulation.
‘His eyes become bloodshot,’ Céleste noted with a writer’s eye for detail and drama, ‘the veins on his forehead and temple swell fit to burst. His mouth gapes open, showing his swollen, distended tongue, as big as an ox’s. Soon all that can be seen is a featureless purple, round mass.’
Lionel was alert to the unrest at Ballarat. He had direct involvement with French miners there and it was a talking point every night at dinner. Deep unrest was sparked on 7 October 1854 when Scottish miner James Scobie was murdered at the Eureka Hotel, Ballarat. The proprietor, James Bentley, was charged with murder but acquitted on 17 October. Several thousand miners gathered at the hotel to protest, and this forced Bentley and his wife to flee the area. The miners rioted and burned down the hotel, despite the efforts to stop them by a small contingent of soldiers. Two miners were arrested and charged for lighting the fire. This provoked 4000 miners to hold a meeting, and they resolved to establish a Diggers’ Rights Society. Seven more miners were arrested over the hotel fire, which led to a second meeting of miners at Bakery Hill. A third meeting on 11 November saw about 10,000 miners attend and the Ballarat Reform League was created with John Humffray as chairman. He had been in the Chartist Movement in England, which fought for political reforms such as the vote for all males. He and other former Chartists were turning miner unrest over licence fees into a more fundamental force for change. This was all in defiance of the goldfields commissioner, Robert Rede, the British son of a naval officer. Rede had lost control of the situation and swore revenge against the miners.
Lionel was forced to return to Ballarat, where he met with the French miners again and warned them not to get involved in the movement. The count knew from his contacts in the colonial government that there would be swift and tough action if matters in Ballarat looked to be getting out of hand. He warned his compatriots they could expect immediate deportation if they were found to be active in any serious protest against the British colonial rulers.
The Reform League put forward a resolution, based on the UK Chartist Movement, which said, ‘That it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making laws he is called on to obey; that taxation without representation is tyranny.’ This was compelling enough for most miners, but it was a further resolution that excited many of the French miners: ‘The League will secede from the United Kingdom if the current situation does not improve.’
Lionel warned his compatriots that this would not happen and to not take part in any resultant action. He went further and published a proclamation to all French expatriates residing in Victoria, advising them to dissociate themselves from the agitation at the Ballarat goldfields.3
Céleste observed that the governor, Sir Charles Hotham, whom she described ‘as a man of the highest breeding and most amiable’, was caught in a dilemma. He needed to police the area and he would lose his job if there was a serious move to secede by part of the colony. He was trying the middle ground by courting the miners, but they saw weakness and pushed harder for their additional demands as well as dropping the licence fee. Hotham became more authoritarian. At the same time, he declared his support for ‘democratic principles’ in spite of objections from the propertied and official classes who formed the Executive Council that ran the colony. Hotham took the time-honoured stalling route of appointing a Royal Commission on goldfield problems and grievances.
But Rede was the man in charge of operations on the goldfields. Backed by military reinforcements, he stepped up the hunt for miners who hadn’t paid their licence fees, resulting in more confrontation with the miners, despite Hotham directing that he proceed cautiously and legally. More soldiers sent from Melbourne on 28 November were attacked by an angry mob of miners. There were injuries but no deaths, although there were rumours that a drummer boy had died.4 The next day 12,000 miners met and the Reform League delegation reported it had failed in negotiations with the authorities, dominated by Rede, with Hotham in contact by cypher (a forerunner to the telegraph). The miners resolved to burn their licences.
On 30 November, Rede responded by ordering police to conduct a licence search. Eight ‘burners’ or licence defaulters were arrested. In turn, the miners rioted again. Soldiers had to extricate police before a possible lynching. This provided Rede with his excuse for his tough methods, which he believed were further justified when the miners, led by Peter Lalor, held a provocative meeting. At this meeting, a white-and-blue Australian Flag of Independence, bearing only the Southern Cross and no British symbols, was consecrated. Miners swore an oath to it: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’
A crude Eureka Stockade was built from timber and overturned carts. Armed miners took up the barricades. In response at mid-afternoon on 3 December, a contingent of 276 police and soldiers approached the Stockade. A battle ensued and the miners were routed in ten minutes. Twenty-two Irishmen (fourteen at the time, and eight dying later) were killed, and another twelve were injured. Six soldiers and police were killed in the battle. Martial law was imposed and the miner resistance collapsed much faster than it had formed.
Lionel had opened an office in Collins Street, in Melbourne, to cope better with the crisis, and he feared an international incident. He hurried to Ballarat and was relieved to find that no French miner had been involved in the Stockade battle. His compatriot miners had been in sympathy with the rebels, but obeyed Lionel’s proclamation that they should stay out of the confrontation.