It was William Withers who first generated the myth of the Australian goldfields as an exclusively masculine domain. In his popular History of Ballarat, first published in 1870, Withers made arresting statements like this: the diggers were young and wifeless for the most part, to see a woman was an absolute phenomenon, the diggings were womanless fields. But Withers’ unequivocal descriptions referred to the earliest days of the gold rush, that is, late 1851 and early 1852. It is a historical nicety conveniently overlooked by subsequent historians, eager to romanticise the digging life as one of unparalleled freedom and independence.
Such writers—there are many but we can finger Henry Lawson and practically anyone else coming out of the Bulletin and Lone Hand school of radical nationalism—sought to contrast the humdrum existence of their staid metropolitan lives with the bravery, adventurousness and risk-taking of the pioneers, symbolised by the classless (and womanless) diggers. In a lecture to the Australian Natives Association in 1889, John Francis Deegan, who had arrived at Ballarat as a nine-year-old boy in 1854, spoke of the diggers as bearing a free and manly gait, and an aspect of self-reliance, begotten of their untrammelled life and independent habits.1 It was a muscular heritage that the inhabitants of an imperial metropolis on the verge of a depression longed to claim.
But is it still socially relevant to maintain the false premise of masculine independence and autonomy, particularly when the voices of women who were actually there can readily drown out the likes of Withers? A mature nation, surely, can continually resift, reconsider and reflect upon the implications of its creation stories.
There is a great body of international literature demonstrating the prevalence of women at the forefront of agitation for social and political change: in the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, the 1848 uprisings across Europe, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution and recent Latin American protest movements. Such works have charted the ways that traditional bounds of female and civic identity are transformed in times of upheaval and conflict.
Eureka, by contrast, has dovetailed with other Australian legends (Gallipoli, the bush, the 1890s shearers’ and maritime strikes) with supposedly all-male casts and symbols of national potency to create an impermeable veneer of masculine dominion. Geoffrey Blainey was right to conclude that ‘Eureka is like a great neon sign with messages that flick on and off with different messages for different people on different occasions’.2 Yet the Eureka beacon has never before been used to illuminate issues of gender bias in our collective bedtime stories.
By examining the lives of women on both sides of the Stockade, we can begin to build an intricate portrait of the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. Instead of a rough and ready outpost of bachelors out for a quick buck, we find a heterogeneous and largely orderly community of ‘working families’ intent on building a new life of freedom and independence. Ultimately, as we’ll see, it was the intimate, ambitious matrix of expectations, associations, disappointments and frustrations that culminated in the brief but bloody moment that aired miners’ grievances and elicited official reprisals. Women’s presence does not just add colour to the picture; it changes its very outline.
There is a vast scholarly literature on the gold rush era generally, and the Eureka Stockade specifically. I am indebted to the many fine historians who have worked over this terrain before me: Weston Bate, David Goodman, John Molony, the Geoffreys Serle and Blainey. You’ll find the best of their work in the bibliography here included. I am also grateful for the pioneering archival work of local historians Dorothy Wickham, Laurel Johnson and Anne Beggs-Sunter, whose exhumation of information on Ballarat’s early gold rush history, and especially its women, has been heroic.
I’ve tried, within narrative reason, to exclude from this book what you can readily locate in any bookshop or library. I have included, sometimes in great detail, that which you won’t find anywhere else. In particular chapters focusing on women’s participation in the social, economic and cultural life of the goldfields provide important data, not previously revealed.
Who knew that stores on the diggings sold breast pumps to ease the pain of lactation? Or that dances and balls provided paid childcare so that babies didn’t need to be left in tents when their mothers went out for the night? This book is not simply a new inflection of an old story; it offers up a fresh body of scholarship for future dissection and, I hope, rampant expansion.
My aim is not to enter the usual interpretive controversies that have raged about Eureka for over 150 years: which side was to blame for the violence and bloodshed; whether the rebellion was a parochial tax revolt by small business or a republican insurrection; or whether Eureka even deserves the press it gets as a key landmark in Australia’s democratic traditions. Nor am I looking to settle old empiricist scores: who fired the first shot; who amputated Lalor’s shattered arm (historian Robyn Annear has called the rebel leader an octopus, given how many people claim their ancestor lopped off his limb); the exact topographic location of the Stockade site; whether Scobie was murdered by a blow to the head with a shovel or an axe; even who sewed the flag.
In this book, Eurekaphiles will discover previously unearthed factual details about key protagonists and events in the affair. And Eurekaphobes might reconsider their antipathy to a left-leaning legend once a more humane landscape re-emerges from the flames of political polarisation.
For Eureka is a story that is already so familiar and so emotive to Australians that successive political giants have seen fit either to make triumphant speeches on its anniversary or pointedly to scorn its relevance. On 3 December 1954, Victorian Premier John Cain Sr addressed the seventy thousand people who had flocked to Ballarat for the three-day centenary celebrations. From Eureka came the crusading spirit against injustice, he bellowed to the delirious crowd.3
On 3 December 1973, unveiling the newly restored Eureka Flag in Ballarat, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam hitched the spirit of Eureka to his own progressive agenda. The kind of nationalism that every country needs, intoned Whitlam, is a benign and constructive nationalism [that] has to do with self-confidence, with maturity, with originality, with independence of mind.4 In 2004, national sesquicentenary events were incommoded by then Prime Minister John Howard’s steadfast refusal to fly the Eureka Flag at Canberra’s Parliament House.
It is neither my intention to undermine the centrality of the Eureka story in Australia’s collective imagination, nor to elevate it beyond the ideological rubric of historical authenticity. But following women such as Catherine Bentley and Anastasia Hayes to their Eurekas has forced me to ask questions that will have wide-ranging repercussions, reaching beyond the picturesque frame of the Eureka narrative into the cultural and political heartland of Australian national identity. For the values and attributes that the Eureka Stockade has come to represent—independence, sacrifice, collectivism, unity, autonomy, dignity, dissent, resistance, self-government, the pursuit of democratic rights and freedoms in the face of oppression and humiliation—have largely been considered exclusively masculine aspirations and have been represented accordingly in our public culture.
But times have changed. Public accountability to a diverse Australian community requires socially inclusive models of institutional and popular representation. Knowledge about women’s intrinsic role in the Eureka story will, from a concrete point of view, require our cultural and educational institutions to admit, respect and regard the political legacy of Australian women.
Beside the Eureka Obelisk, in the Eureka Stockade Memorial Park in the heart of Ballarat, a plaque is dedicated to the honoured memory of the heroic pioneers who fought and fell on this sacred spot in the cause of liberty and the soldiers who fell at duty’s call. The names of twenty-eight white men follow.
Today, more than 150 years after the Eureka rebels raised their voices to demand justice and equality for the disenfranchised miner, there is a new plaque in Ballarat, at the entrance to the Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka. Its language, thanks in part to discussions arising from the research for this book, is more inclusive:
We honour the memory of all those who died during or because of the events at the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854—the men known to us, who are recalled below, as well as the other men and women whose names are unrecorded.
There is progress. But still we have to keep reminding the cultural gatekeepers that women were there too, and that their stories are just as vital, just as valid and just as vibrant as the stories of the men. This is not an ‘either…or’ predicament. It is a ‘not only…but also’ situation. We don’t have to choose. We just have to respect the historical record.
Is it possible to imagine a nationalism that is not racist, sexist and otherwise xenophobic?
I do, and one of the reasons I can is because I have a picture in my head—indelibly inked there through my research—of men and women from many lands standing together beneath a new flag. The flag bore the symbol of the constellation that located and united them in their new home—the Southern Cross. That flag was almost certainly sewn by women of Ballarat. Under that flag the men of the Ballarat Reform League swore an oath to stand truly by each other and fight to defend their rights and liberties. Women were at that meeting too. At the time, they called that flag ‘the Australian Flag’.
And not only men but also at least one woman died beneath that flag in defence of some basic democratic principles: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.
My goal, as I have said, is not to undermine the potency of the Eureka story in Australia’s collective imagination. I have no desire to scoff at its centrality to our national mythology, or to deride those who have devoted themselves to the task of building a legend. Rather, I want to reinvigorate the story: to bring it with renewed relevance to a modern, diverse community for whom talk of ‘democracy and freedom’ should automatically raise questions of gender equity.
The great gift of Eureka—its beauty and, in a sense, its terror—is that the story of women’s effort, influence and sacrifice is both politically correct and historically true.