THOSE PEOPLE IN THE COLONY OF VICTORIA to whom the cause of the men of Eureka was just praised the victory won with the release of the State prisoners. Mediocre verses were immediately composed, two of which were entitled ‘A Song of Deliverance’ and ‘The People’s Victory’. They expressed no republican sentiments, but a good deal about right overcoming wrong, oppressors being defeated, ‘England—mother of the brave’, ‘our holy cause’ and the fight to guard liberty. Bishop Goold’s episcopal sentiments found outlet in a Lenten pastoral in which he deplored the fact that some had not accepted ‘the wisdom of ecclesiastical counsel’, but were ‘deceived by able intriguers against peace and order’.1 Others there were, in and about Ballarat, who continued to grieve. The wounds of that Sunday morning were not healed, either in the body or in the spirit, for there were those who would never again lighten the hearts of their loved ones. Meanwhile, however, life had to go on and it was for time to heal, and also to reveal whether the struggle of Eureka was worthy in its fruits.
The Gold Fields’ Commission of Enquiry appointed by Hotham in mid-December 1854, under Westgarth’s chairmanship and consisting mainly of persons sympathetic to the diggers, had spent a solid three weeks at work, during which they visited Ballarat, Creswick, Castlemaine and Bendigo. After three months their report was ready. They were scarcely unique in deciding that unrest stemmed from the licence fee, the practical impossibility of buying further land and the lack of political rights. They recommended the abolition of the fee and its replacement with an export duty on gold at 2s 6d an ounce. The diggers would pay an annual fee of £1, called a Miner’s Right, which would also qualify them for the franchise. The Commission advised that land near the fields should be surveyed and offered for sale as soon as possible, and that there should be eight elected and four nominated members for the gold-digging community in the Legislative Council. Further, they deplored the events that had led to Eureka, the general uselessness of the Gold Commission—the abolition of which they recommended—and the paucity of public services offered on the fields. Their conclusion was a prudent and moderate statement: ‘The tendencies to serious outbreak amongst masses of population are usually a signal that the government is at fault as well as the people’. Nonetheless, they condemned ‘the resort to arms’ which injured the popular cause by making it subject to despots. Apparently it did not occur to them that, without the response of Eureka, it was well-nigh certain that the despotism which had prevailed on the fields for three years would have continued unabated.2
When Peter Lalor heard of this he wrote in restrained anger to the Age. Although he was sure that the government would now take steps to carry reform measures into effect, he felt entitled to ask why nothing had been done to rectify matters ‘before this bloody tragedy took place’. All the long-sustained bitterness of Ireland welled up in him with the words, ‘Is it to prove to us that a British Government can never bring forth a measure of reform without having first prepared a font of human blood in which to baptise that offspring of their generous love?’ He concluded with sentiments that Humffray and all the decent, law-abiding, moral-force chartists, and others of similar convictions, agreed with totally. ‘Or is it to convince the world that, where a large standing army exists, the Demon of Despotism will have frequently offered at his shrine the mangled bodies of murdered men?’ These were harsh words from Lalor, but they put in clear light the history of officialdom’s relations with the diggers. Others, in the manner of Hotham, could whine and cant about Eureka having achieved nothing. They could point out that, if only the diggers had been patient and forbearing, all the reforms would have been granted, that the New Constitution, giving representation, was on its way and that government had set up the Commission precisely to further reform. Lalor’s answer, like posterity’s, is clear. For years all the talk and agitation had met with strong resistance, with even more stringent application of the law and with an almost offhand attitude to legitimate grievances. Eureka, coupled with the trials, had changed all that, and now even Hotham had not merely to listen, but to act. It was not unfair of Lalor, at his first election speech in November, to point out that King John had granted Magna Carta to the barons with arms in their hands, and not in response to a petition of the people.3
Within a few days of receiving the report, action on all the major matters was undertaken. Hotham wrote on 2 April 1855 to the Secretary of State. He was loath to be critical of individual commissioners on the goldfields, but admitted that the system itself was ‘unsuitable’ and that, at times, the manners of young officers may have angered diggers, often ‘as high born as themselves’. That statement begged the question of the mass of diggers who made no pretension to high birth, but who rightly demanded that they be treated as befitted the dignity of human beings. He did acknowledge that the government had provoked severe criticism by the huge sums it spent on the administration of the fields—a situation which could, in no way, be laid at his door because he found that system existing on his arrival. The system demanded outright abolition as the only complete remedy. On the very next day a summary of Hotham’s governorship was published in the Age which contained the essence of general opinion about him. ‘In the short period of seven or eight months he has managed to alienate the sympathies of every class in the colony ... earned a character for contemptible official treachery and evasion, and has brought the good faith of the Government into disrepute by a systematic breach of contract ... and a disgraceful system of espionage’. They were harsh words to use of a man who had done his best according to his principles, but they were true and merely gave point to the opinion of Goold and O’Shannassy that the blunt, undiplomatic and inflexible sailor was an ill choice as a governor. Ironically the British authorities, unaware of Eureka, had already appointed him Vice-Admiral, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the Colony of Victoria. At this time there was much discussion in the same colony of getting up a petition for his recall. It was recognized, however, that unless his removal served some political interest in London he would be regarded there as eminently worthy of esteem, precisely because the Home government had appointed him in the first instance.4
The initiation of the export duty and the Miner’s Right, together with the introduction of twelve new members into the Legislative Council, were sources of considerable consolation on the goldfields.5 The latter piece of legislation was of especial importance to Lalor. A great deal of sympathy had been expressed in his regard, and his friends had raised enough money for him to buy a portion of land near Ballarat. Even before the reward for his apprehension was revoked in March, he had been seen moving about and had even bid publicly for his land. He stood unopposed to represent Ballarat in the Legislative Council in November 1855, and was again elected when the new Constitution came into force in 1856. The years saw a moderation of his views, but as early as 1857 he denied that he was ever a democrat in the sense of being either a chartist, a republican or a communist—which left a narrow definition indeed. True to Bakery Hill, however, he proclaimed that ‘if democracy means opposition to a tyrannical press, a tyrannical people or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been. I still am, and will ever remain a Democrat’. The doubts expressed at the time by the old mates of former days, which caused him to switch to the electorate of South Grant, were confirmed in the early 1870s when he became a director of mining companies. Nonetheless, he was a staunch supporter of Graham Berry and fought for radical reforms. In 1880 he was appointed Speaker of the Assembly. He died in 1889. In his role as Speaker the citizens of Ballarat, at a later day, chose to remember him by placing his statue in their main thoroughfare, named after Captain Sturt in the earliest golden age. To others who knew him in the struggle at Eureka, he remained the inspirational figure of their struggle for justice and their revered Commander-in-Chief. They did not come along to see him unveiled ‘in the mere glorification’ of a Speaker, but rather preferred the memories of former days.6
It was scarcely surprising that John Basson Humffray was the other representative from Ballarat, likewise elected unopposed. He had not suffered any diminution in his commitment to reform, although his newly founded movement, the Victorian Reform League, did not achieve much, given the rapidity with which Hotham put into effect the recommendations of the Gold Fields’ Commission of Enquiry. From the very hour of Eureka until the final release of the prisoners Humffray was to the forefront in the struggle to see justice done to all who took part. No recrimination came his way because even those who had taken a stand in the Stockade had to respect his moral-force principles. After a career of some distinction, both in and out of parliament, he died in 1891. Close to those with whom he had not stood as they died in the Stockade, Humffray lies in the Ballarat Old Cemetery. He asked to be buried near them because, in life, in the things that mattered, he had been as one with the diggers in their cause.7
On 12 June 1855 the Gold Fields Act was passed. It contained the important provision that, henceforth, local courts would undertake the majority of the work formerly done by the old ‘gold lace’ commission, the members of which, at long last, had to earn their keep in other and perhaps more demanding ways. The very act of removing that source of constant irritation from their midst, and the knowledge that the days of Rede and his ilk were gone forever, gave great satisfaction to the diggers throughout the fields. They realized that local courts were the ‘offspring’ of Eureka’s struggle which brought them the rights and dignity of citizenship, but they lamented that these were ‘blood-bought rights’. The Act gave them the right to elect the members of their courts and the powers of the courts were wide, covering the regulation of conditions on the fields.8 On 14 July, a Saturday, Carboni was elected unanimously on Bakery Hill to the Ballarat local court, and took his place with eight others. He was embittered by the loss of his money and personal belongings during his incarceration, but he delighted in his election and made much of his new position. Staying in Australia only long enough to see his book on Eureka launched at the end of 1855, he departed for Calcutta and spent some time in India and Palestine. He took part in Garibaldi’s campaign for the unification of Italy and served the cause of his native land with some distinction. A failed playwright, he was restless to the end—which came in Rome on 24 October 1875. His legacy remains that of a chronicle of the events of Eureka. Never impartial, always flamboyant and inclined to the personal and idiosyncratic, his account stands as the unique and precious contribution of an Italian gold digger to the history of the land of the Southern Cross.9
Charles Hotham spent the rest of 1855 worrying about unemployment, the parlous state of colonial finances, the number of Chinese said to be flooding into Victoria and the rebukes he was receiving from London for his inept handling of affairs. By November he had been induced to forward his resignation to the Colonial Office, but to the end he stuck to his guns. He remained convinced that only military force could restrain a population as inclined to unrest as the one to which he had been sent, unwillingly, to govern, and he said so to London. Presumably with the conviction intact, he died on 31 December, and even in death he was a source of divided opinion.
John Pascoe Fawkner moved in the Legislative Council that a sum of £1,000 be expended on a monument to Hotham’s memory. Lalor, with his folded left sleeve a reminder of the events of Eureka, stood in his place to disagree. He affirmed that he had no wish to offend the living or cast a slur on the dead, but he reminded his hearers that Sir Charles had a sufficient monument in the graves of those slain at Ballarat. The Council passed the amount, nonetheless, and no more was heard of Hotham who, had he been left close to what he knew and loved best—the sea—would have bequeathed a cleaner memory to posterity. Withers, the historian of Ballarat, spoke his finest epitaph: ‘He fell a courageous and devoted victim to duty and to political errors, as before him had fallen the equally brave diggers and soldiers at the Eureka Stockade’.10 Perhaps another word needs also to be spoken, for Hotham has his monument in a legend that surpasses the man. Hotham, not Rede, Foster, Lalor or any other actor, was the chief architect of Eureka, for without his obdurance, obstinacy and blindness it need not have occurred.
On Ballarat, which had settled into calm, the diggers also thought of their own monument. A meeting was held at the Eureka site on 22 November and another on 3 December 1855 at which Carboni sold copies of his book, but nothing was done. In January 1856 a further meeting discussed a monument and even McGill was present. The proposal caused little reaction, except from the Argus which regarded it as a reopening of old wounds. The second anniversary in 1856 saw a more representative gathering with Lynch, Hayes, Seekamp, Nicholls and others present. Afterwards they marched, 300 strong, to the cemetery. There they commemorated 3 December 1854 as the ‘dawn of a new and hopeful era’, spoke of oppression, tyranny and martyrdom and called on others to be true to the traditions of their dead. By this time a monument had been erected that spoke without reserve of’the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian Government’ which the fallen diggers had resisted. A short distance from them, the Scot Jimmy Scobie lies as a link between the diggers and the soldiers, for with his death it had all started. Withers wrote the epitaph for the soldiers’ monument, erected in 1879, which looks back beyond Scobie to the diggers and to Humffray. It speaks gently of ‘manhood suffrage and constitutional government’ which allows the reader to interpret the chain of cause and effect forged at Eureka. Thirty years later the citizens of Ballarat erected another monument at the Stockade, by which time memories were dulled as to where exactly it had stood. Consequently the place they marked is not exact, but their intentions were good. Lalor and Humffray had given respectability to Eureka by their parliamentary careers, and no one appears to have regarded it as incongruous to place four 64-pounder guns on a monument which recognizes sacrifice in the cause of social harmony.11
Over the years the others passed from the scene, and the newspapers never failed to report the death of those who had fought, or who claimed to have fought, in the Stockade. Robert Rede long remained a trusted member of Victorian officialdom, holding down various positions in the colony until his retirement in 1889. He died in 1904 with membership of the Ballarat and Melbourne Clubs to attest to his worthiness of character. Father Smyth lived briefly, stricken by consumption, and died aged 41 in obscurity in Sydney, distrusted by many of those whom he had tried to counsel wisely. It was not until 1981 that Austin McCallum honoured his memory in the Eureka Commemoration Address which revealed him as, above all, a man devoted to peace. There was one actor in that drama whose life spanned the two legends of Victorian colonial history in the stories of Eureka and Ned Kelly. Redmond Barry, a man of great urbanity and wide vision, treated with gentleness and respect the diggers who came before him in 1855. Kelly’s appearance before his court was another matter. Redmond followed Ned closely to the grave.12
If what happened at Ballarat was soon reduced to a faint murmur from a turbulent past, the deeper meaning of the events equally quickly became a legend which, as legends do, transcended the facts. There were those who resisted its growth, as Hotham had done in his day. To them it became the symbol of the outcast, the Irish and the foreigner. They were not able to read the letter Hotham received, a few days after the event, from a young man in Ballarat. He told the Governor that resentment was so high among the people that very few, including the English, would have refrained from participation had the matter gone on a few days longer.13 To others, the diggers’ struggle became something derisive and dirty—a mean rising of petty capitalists and anxious businessmen bent on their own economic survival. Others took it merely as an event in itself, an unsuccessful and impetuous act of defiant men who were doomed to be crushed by a superior force. They were forgetful of the long struggle on the fields for an amelioration of conditions. It was a struggle which went well beyond the confines of Ballarat and involved many thousands, far from all of whom were hotheads. Finally there were those who did not want to be reminded of Eureka. Many of those of the Gael beyond the seas remembered the long and unhappy history of Irish rebellions and needed no retelling of 3 December 1854 to illustrate their outcome. Others felt ashamed that they had harboured in their midst, and even associated with, men who had flown an alien flag and turned against their Queen. Above all there were those whose hands had been sullied by that whole affair. They wanted to forget that they had assisted or acquiesced, whether as agents of the Crown or mere civilians who had stood by and let it all go on, in the defilement of their fellow man.
Some of the men of Eureka were also among the forgetters. To them it was pretentious to claim that their struggle had been one for democracy because, when it all came to a point, the upholding of their human dignity was at the heart of their struggle. Less than a year later Peter Lalor said that he was ‘free to confess that it was a rash act’ in which he had participated at Eureka. But Mr Commissioner Rede knew that it was a short step between the claim to be treated justly and the claim to have a responsible role in the formulation of one’s own destiny which was at the heart of democracy. It was not idly, or by chance, that he accused the diggers of using their grievances as a cloak for democratic agitation. He was sincere when he argued that it had to be crushed immediately, and it was precisely Lalor’s ‘rash act’ which, whether by design or good fortune, he was able to use to stamp out the movement. When Lalor went on to admit that any honourable man could well have acted as he did if placed in the same circumstances, he cast no reflection on John Humffray who was in his audience. All he meant was that, by the last week of November 1854, the time had come to call enough, and to make it plain that a government which long continued to impose unjust measures by force of arms had, in the end, to be met by arms.14
Legends, once they have flown from the nests of their creation, take on their own wings. They are capable of more powerful interpretation than the events which nurtured them, otherwise they would remain the idle stuff of history and lie dormant through successive ages. On those rare occasions when, in their origins, they blend strands of heroism, a striving for a new order and a rejection of the old, a flamboyance of gesture and word, a sacrifice which entails defeat and an attempt at their suppression, they are ensured of some degree of permanence. If, to all these elements, a symbol can be added, especially if it is one that encapsulates their passion, then the legends know no bounds. Eureka blended all the factors that go to make a legend. Captain Ross, bridegroom of the symbol, knew little of its potency as he lay dying beneath the Southern Cross. Perhaps John King, the constable who hauled down the flag, and the soldiers and police who danced around it at the Camp that night, inflamed with joy and drink, had a greater understanding for, to them, the Southern Cross was the symbol of an attempt to end despotism and subservience. Indeed it was the case that the day of despotism in the form of any sustained effort to enforce law and order by the bayonet, together with the presence of a standing army among civilians, was over.
So it was that Eureka and its meaning went out from Ballarat to be carried onto other goldfields and thence to movements and men and women and children at other towns and places. The earliest diggers on the fields, that old nomad tribe who wandered from rush to rush, carried with them a heritage from a convict past. It was a legend of mateship, egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, improvisation—a legend of disinterest in politics, as well as in the land except to walk in freedom upon it. It had, too, its darker hue, for it was a legend which embraced only the white man. It was carried by the tribe to all parts of the continent until, when the golden days were gone, they turned back to the task of their ancestors. They became shearers rather than shepherds, and took on a new form of mateship called trade unionism. At Barcaldine in 1891 the shearers flew the Southern Cross as a symbol of their unity with the men of Eureka. The descendants of the stockaders who had remained on the old goldfields became bearers of a new legend. They formed an urban workforce who built homes, reared children, constructed Mechanics’ Institutes and made cities called Ballarat, Bendigo and Ararat, and all those other towns that survived the gold. Above all they carried in their conscience the legend of Eureka forged by their forebears, and, in the struggles of the 1890s which gave birth to the Labor Party, the two legends of the pastoral and the golden past met and blended.
In prose and poetry the legend was carried on through the decades. Henry Lawson, Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, Henry Handel Richardson, Jack Lindsay, Leonard Mann, Mary Gilmore and Victor Daley all helped to keep it green. Lawson in ‘An Old Mate of Your Father’s’ summed up the ethos in a few lines. Two old men would whisper together and refuse to answer questions, ‘But how it was they talked low, and their eyes brightened up, and they didn’t look at each other, but away over the sunset, and had to get up and walk about, and take a stroll in the cool of the evening when they talked about Eureka’.15 Unlike the legend of Kelly, Eureka was not sung in ballads because it was made by, and became the possession of, those who had a stake in the land through education, work or material possessions. They could read and write about their legend, and their vision of a new Australia was a different expression from that of the boy from Greta who spoke the language of the outlaw. Yet in the end the legends scarcely differed for they both proclaimed that, in this new land, the right to stand up against tyranny, to be treated with the respect befitting a human person and to hope in, and work for, a better future, is inalienable.
Bakery Hill, the Camp and Eureka itself are all places of commerce or residence now, and the Yarrowee can hardly be seen as it flows through the valley. The Southern Cross flies proudly again at that ‘old spot’ where, on 11 November 1854, it had its origins. In the cemetery, where the dead lie mute, there is a sameness. At that place it is not hard to accept that Eureka was only a beginning. The dead make no claims about democracy, freedom or republicanism. To the extent that the diggers fought for those things, they did so for ideals that are always born and reborn, that are ever in the making and never achieved. Others will fly their flag, others will formulate and strive for their vision. Their distinction is to be the standard bearers of a legend, fleshed out through the years and on into the future wherever the name Eureka is spoken.