Spring.
verb move rapidly or suddenly from a constrained position.
noun 1 the season after winter and before summer, in which vegetation begins to appear, in the northern hemisphere from March to May and in the southern hemisphere from September to November.
2 a resilient device, typically a helical metal coil, that can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released, used chiefly to exert constant tension or absorb movement.
They didn’t call this Bentley’s Hill for nothing. Catherine Bentley had a commanding view of the Ballarat diggings from the second-storey bedroom of her hotel. To the south, the vast sea of honeycombed earth stretching towards Red Hill and the Canadian Lead. To the northwest, the tent hamlet of Bakery Hill, where Clara Seekamp and her husband were churning out their newspaper. Stretched out along the Yarrowee River to the north, the golden gutters of the Gravel Pits Lead, and over the river, the old alluvial flats of Black Hill. To the east loomed Mt Warrenheip: grave, solid, like a conscience. To the southwest, she could see Golden Point. In one of those tents over there sat Ellen Young, scribbling the letters and poems that kept appearing in the TIMES.
This vast landscape of endeavour was now dry and thirsty. Spring had only just arrived and already the ground looked parched. A month ago, Catherine’s lad Thomas was chipping ice from the water pail in the morning; now she would have to chase him to put his bonnet on. Come summer, she would have a new baby to shelter from Ballarat’s inscrutable climate. A week of rain would put a stop to digging—a busy week at the bar—then a week of hot winds would blow up clouds of dust. What a country, where things could turn around so just like that.
Beyond Bakery Hill, Catherine could see clear through to the Camp. The government men still did their drinking at Bath’s Hotel, but by September 1854 she and James were raking in so much (£350 on their first night alone) that the toffs could go to hell anyway. She didn’t need them in her front bar; they’d only scare off the locals. In any case, she and James would be in demand to attend to the next Subscription Ball; all the leading townsfolk were invited, especially if they had deep pockets. Even men like the Jews—auctioneer Henry Harris and his mate Charles Dyte—were always on the subscription list.1 And now Harris and Ikey Dyte were storing their goods at her hotel. The merchant George Smith also entrusted over £300 worth of his wares to her care, including two dozen black satin neckties, five dozen fine linen shirts, three double-barrelled Dean and Adams revolvers, fifty-three gold signet rings, forty-four gold pencil cases and four dozen electroplated dessert spoons and forks. Smith even asked them to guard his Masonic certificate and apron.2 Jacques Paltzer had been quick to sign up his band as the regular entertainment at Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, especially since the band members could live upstairs. They were the most sought-after concert band on the goldfields and would no doubt be asked to play at the next ball. People might talk in envious whispers about what went on inside the big red house on the hill, but they wanted what the Bentleys had to offer regardless. Not just grog and cash, but the structure itself: the sense of permanence.
Now that the weather had fined up, the last stage of the hotel’s construction could gather pace. The bowling alley was finally operational but there were still seven bedrooms upstairs to be finished and the new concert rooms out the back. And of course there were bills to pay: £230 for paint—white, gold, green and vermillion; 150 squares of glass; cornices, wallpaper and ceiling paper; £320 to five contractors for the stables and concert room; £96 to the sawyer; £190 to Thomas Bath for ten casks of his porter and ten cases of his gin; Rutherford and Tingman, the wine and spirit merchants, would get £596 for twenty-five dozen bottles of champagne, sherry, and port, two thousand cigars, 124 dozen bottles of ale, porter and twenty-two gallons of whisky. Fifty single beds, ten double beds and one hundred pillows also had to be paid for. A massive bill, but it all paled in comparison to the £4540 owed to F. E. Beaver for cartage since May.3 (This was the opportunity cost of building in winter, when the roads turned to something resembling Irish stew.) Some people might call the Eureka Hotel the slaughterhouse, but many believed that James Bentley was a fair dealer, upright, well mannered and in thriving circumstances. They needed no inducement to give him credit.
But the Eureka Hotel was not just a business, it was also home—to Catherine and James and wee Thomas, and the new baby quickening inside her. Just an ex-con and a Sligo girl—she was only twenty-two—but they had built themselves a fine home. Practically a palace. The hotel was also home to Catherine’s sister Mary, and Mary’s husband, Everard Gadd, to Duncan the barman and the nursemaid, Agnes Sinclair. Two other servants as well, Mrs Gill and Mary Haines. Michael Walsh, the waiter. Sam in the stables and George in the bowling alley. Isaac Rigby, the carpenter working on the adjoining concert rooms. Charles Smith, the cook and baker. The musicians: Augustus Neill, Edward West and Jacques Paltzer. And Farrell and Hance, the watchmen and rouseabouts.
Nineteen residents in all. It was quite a compound. Those who lived in a hotel were, by Victorian law, called inmates. So what did that make the hundreds of people who flocked to drink and gamble and bowl and dance there each night? Outsiders? Hardly. It was Catherine and James’s job to make everyone feel welcome: offer hospitality. They did it well.
The change of season brought a flurry of activity, as if a clutch of baby spiders had burst from a taut maternal egg-sac and scattered into the warm spring air. Business of all kinds has looked up amazingly, noted the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE.4 A ball was held on 2 September in the new Lydiard Street Arcade in aid of the Hospital Fund. The sexes were nearly equal in number, noted the correspondent, some of the ladies did complain, but not much, that there was too little variety in the dances. Resident Gold Commissioner Robert Rede, Magistrate John D’Ewes, Police Inspector Gordon Evans and many leading storekeepers were there. Down on the Eureka, the stores that had cleared out over winter were now returning. A glee club started up at Bath’s Hotel. A lending library opened on the diggings, with copies of Dickens, Thackeray and Ida Pfeiffer, the popular writers of the day. Messrs Robinson and Cole opened their chemist at Ballarat Flat. Their inventory included:
Robinson’s Dysentery Mixture, a never-failing remedy; Robinson’s Carmative and Preservative for infants, Robinson’s Patent Groats, Robinson’s Amboyna Tincture for the teeth and gums; and surgical instruments of all kinds, trusses, cupping apparatus, enema apparatus, breast pumps, nipple shields, feeding bottles, puff boxes, etc.5
Ellen Young’s husband, Frederick, was a chemist but lacked Robinson’s entrepreneurial flair.
New enterprises caught the waft of rejuvenation on the clement breeze. It was announced that a bathing house was to be erected near the Gravel Pits, at an investment of £900, offering hot and cold shower baths. By making the luxury of bathing available to all, rich and poor alike, the proprietors will not only invite a large concourse of eager customers but also monopolise the business, heralded the advertorial in the TIMES.6 A time to plant, a time to reap.
Seeds that were furtively sown in the desperate clutch of winter would now begin to swell. Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke discovered she was pregnant with her first child. So was Margaret Johnston. She and James had married in August; theirs was a honeymoon baby, conceived along the road to Maggie’s new home in Ballarat’s Government Camp. Bridget Nolan would also be in her first trimester this Christmas. Realising her situation, Bridget was to marry her travelling companion Thomas Hynes on 2 October at St Alipius Church on the Eureka, with Father Patrick Smyth officiating and old shipmate Paddy Gittens as best man. Eight weeks later the young blacksmith Gittens would be beaten to death by redcoats amid a hail of bullets and the acrid smoke of a hundred fires. A time to be born, a time to die.
On Sundays, diggers washed their clothes. Then, enjoying the blue skies and balmy air, they joined in hunting parties in the bush. Storekeepers continued to inflame the Sabbath Alliance by openly trading, vending and carting on the Lord’s Day. It was the only day that diggers were not mining, so of course they needed to buy and sell, argued the shopkeepers. Members of the alliance trudged through the diggings, remonstrating with the violators of the Pearl of Days. A pulpit-thumping meeting was held at the Wesleyan Tent Chapel in the second week of September, attended by Resident Commissioner Robert Rede, who offered his full support. The DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE, reporting the meeting, referred to Rede as our strutting, swellish, little head commissioner, our little handsome functionary.7 George Evans attended the Wesleyan Chapel but was not much pleased by the tone of the minister. His brother Charles had forsaken religious observance for the time being; he was busy working at the Criterion Printing Office in partnership with a twenty-five-year-old Yorkshire man named Thomas Fletcher.
The Ballarat court held its General Sessions. Most cases pertained to horse theft; the real blame for this deeply rooted crime, wrote the court reporter, should lie with the auctioneers, a commercial gentry who were too liberally licensed. Horses were even stolen from the Government Camp, as if to hold up the vigilance of our guardians to public scorn. (Most of Ballarat’s auctioneers were Jewish but the reporter’s dog whistle largely fell on deaf ears, on this uniquely level playing field.) As the weather became more benign, thefts increased noticeably. Armed gangs and flash mobs skulked around tents, day and night. The chained dogs went ballistic.
Spring, it seemed, unleashed all the passions.
On 23 September, an assault and battery charge was heard in front of Robert Rede. The BALLARAT TIMES reported:
It was proved that John Doyle and John Doyle’s wife threatened to rip open John Bidsil and John Bidsil’s wife, and John Doyle and John Doyle’s wife being unable to prove to the contrary, John Doyle and not John Doyle’s wife was bound to keep the peace towards John Bidsil and John Bidsil’s wife, and all within the realm of Victoria, for the term of six months, himself in the sum of £100 and two sureties of £50 each.8
Slapped with such a ruinous fine, no doubt John Doyle wished he had been party to a recent milestone. On 8 September, a nugget weighing ninety-eight pounds was extracted from the Canadian Lead, the second most valuable lump yet extracted from Victoria’s underbelly. It was named the Lady Hotham Nugget, in honour of Her Excellency’s recent visit. Along with the gold from the washing stuff drawn from the same claim, the shaft produced over two thousand pounds of gold. Most claims around the area, reminded the GEELONG ADVERTISER, won’t pay the cost of sinking.9 But such finds always caused a fresh burst of enthusiasm and a new influx of cocksure diggers.
Down at the Adelphi Theatre, Sheridan Knowles played the Hunchback to rapturous applause. It was the most intellectual treat we have had on the diggings, said the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE reporter. We congratulate Mrs Hanmer on the energy and ability of her management. There was acclaim for fourteen-year-old Julia Hanmer too: To see one so young as Miss Hanmer capable, not only of understanding but appreciating, and finely personating so delicate and difficult part as Julia demands our highest praise.10 Charles Evans was often in the crowd to watch Sarah Hanmer and her remarkable daughter perform. A time to laugh, a time to weep.
In mid-September, a new detachment of the 40th Regiment arrived to relieve the old pensioners who had held the fort through the long winter. The departure scene was one of great amusement, reported the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE: nearly all of them were so drunk as to be scarcely able to stand, much less walk, in their proper order. The publicans will lose their staunch supporters, scoffed the paper. Captain Russell, who had been in charge of the Pensioners, was placed in the Camp hospital. He was so drunk he’d become deranged.11
In the commissioners’ weekly reports to the Melbourne Goldfields Office HQ, new father-to-be James Johnston noted at the end of September that on the diggings the workings are progressing favourably but the want of good water is already felt at Eureka.12 Ballarat’s population would increase by nine thousand people between September and December. As new hopefuls continued to stream in, the tide of nature’s bounty was on its way out.
The weather here is remarkably fine and bids fair to continue, predicted the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE on 16 September. Could the rhythm of life have continued to play out like this, under the clear, blue skies of a wide, brown, gold-laced land? An arrest here. A ball there. A death here. A new restaurant there. A nugget here. A play there. An intermittent changing of the guard. Good news. Bad news. Turn, turn, turn.
Perhaps Ballarat was coiled like a spring, clenched from winter’s deep freeze of disappointment, frustration and grinding poverty. Like the eternal sting of insects, as German digger Frederick Vern put it, the petty tyranny and insolence of the administrators maddened the people.13 Among the traders, victuallers and entertainers, the competition for custom was intense. The people of Ballarat were not ready to thaw; they were ready to pounce. Everybody was ripe for anything, reckoned Vern. Primed. Wired. It only wanted the spark to explode.
The night of 6 October was crowned by a full moon. James Scobie, a young Scottish miner, was encouraged by the bright evening to prolong his drunken revelries. Scobie bumped into his mate, Peter Martin, and the two proceeded to the Eureka Hotel. The day had been hot and the air was even now stagnant, sultry. It was well after midnight, but in Ballarat every businessman had his price. Surely they could get a nightcap from Bentley.
The hotel was shut up when they arrived. Scobie knocked loudly on the door. Catherine and James had retired for the night, but Michael Walsh, the waiter, was still in the bar. He told Scobie and Martin to go away. Scobie continued to make his presence felt, kicking at the door, and smashing a pane of glass. Catherine came downstairs to the bar and told him to go away. Scobie, as Walsh testified at James and Catherine’s subsequent murder trial, called the landlady a whore. William Hance, the watchman who had now joined the posse in the bar, said that was not language to use to any woman. James Bentley now entered the bar in his trousers and shirtsleeves, as did Farrell, and Duncan the barman. Scobie and Martin scampered away towards a cluster of nearby tents, about seventy metres from the hotel.
What happened next has been told and retold in history books, literature, song and dance, an indissoluble amalgam of speculation, hearsay, sworn testimony and myth. The following version is synthesised from the primary sources only. Even then, there are multiple layers to the onion and trying to peel them apart is a fiddly exercise in perseverance, if not tears.
After their property was damaged and Catherine insulted, the Bentleys, Hance and Farrell pursued Scobie. A violent altercation occurred once the party caught up to the drunken, staggering Scobie. Eleven-year-old Barnard Welch was asleep in his family’s tent when he was woken by voices outside. He peeped through a flap to see Mr and Mrs Bentley, and three or four men. One of them picked up a spade from the corner of the Welches’ tent. Barnard couldn’t say, when he was later required to give a sworn testimony, which of the party picked it up. Barnard’s mother Mary Ann also awoke and heard the voices. She thought they might belong to Mr and Mrs Bentley but could not be sure. The party moved on. Barnard heard a scuffle and a blow struck. Peter Martin later testified that he was struck down by a group of men and one woman, but he could not identify them. Scobie received a blow to the head. Martin ran to fetch help. He returned with the local butcher, Archibald Carmichael, and Dr Carr. Carr could detect no signs of life. Carr and Carmichael took the body to the Eureka Hotel. (The Victorian licensing law required that hotels also serve as morgues and sites of coronial enquiries.) According to William Duncan, no one from the hotel left the premises from the time the drunken men tottered off to the time Dr Carr arrived with Scobie’s dead body.
According to Catherine Bentley, in the note she scrawled almost forty years later, the dead body dragged into her hotel that night did not belong to Scobie at all, but another young miner. Scobie, she argued, was transported surreptitiously to Melbourne by another Irish miner, Peter Lalor, and secreted in the Abbotsford Convent. Catherine believed that James Scobie had gone on to marry and live a fruitful life in Dowling Forest. Remarkably, there is no death certificate for James Scobie to prove her wrong.14
It was now past 2am. At the Eureka Hotel, Dr Alfred Carr conducted a post-mortem on the deceased. The stomach, he found, was filled with a large quantity of partially digested food and when opened the odour of spirits was very perceptible. Carr believed the cause of death to be the rupture of one or more vessels within the substance of the brain caused in all probability by a blow. He determined that the state of the stomach from food and spirituous liquor would render a blow more dangerous and more likely to cause a rupture of the blood vessels. His final conclusion was crucial: I think the injury was inflicted by a kick and not by the spade now produced.15
All these details came to the fore at the coronial inquest held the following day, Saturday 7 October. Many more particulars—potential fact and scurrilous fiction—emerged at the subsequent Ballarat and Melbourne trials of the Bentleys and two of their employees.16 That James Bentley was still in his slippers when he left the hotel. That Catherine and James were not really married. That James Bentley boasted he had taken over £200 on the day of the inquest. That Mary Ann Welch heard Mrs Bentley say how dare you break my windows before the fatal blow was struck. That Mrs Bentley was heard laughing in the dining room shortly before Scobie’s body was dragged to her front door. When the waiter asked why the landlady was laughing, the barman said Oh, that fellow has got a clip what was at the door. One witness said Scobie did not call out you whore or use any bad language. Another said he heard Mrs Bentley say that is the sweeps what broke my windows. Yet another witness said he heard a woman say that serves you right after the blow was struck but swore that woman was not Mrs Bentley. The watchman, Thomas Mooney, who turned Crown witness against his former boss, said there was no foul language used by Scobie—but also conceded [I] cannot swear I am in my right mind.
At the coronial inquest on the morning of 7 October, no one mentioned the alleged slur to Mrs Bentley’s good name that became the centrepiece of the subsequent murder trial in Melbourne. Carr’s autopsy conclusion ruled the day: that the death was occasioned by a blow to the head from a scuffle, most likely from a fist or kick, not a spade. But that day was short lived.
Word soon spread that a poor, young Irish miner had been murdered by a rich, well-connected English publican. And not just any publican but the most successful liquor distributor on the diggings. Magistrate John D’Ewes himself later said that Bentley had made the enmity of a large class in the diggings, the sly grog sellers, whose trade had been ruined by the licensed houses, of which Bentley’s was the largest. The fact that Bentley was the president of the Licensed Victuallers Association only added venom to their gall.17 On the 8th, a deputation of miners visited the Camp. On the 9th, Bentley, Farrell and Hance were arrested and bailed (at £200 each), and the case was remanded for three days. During this time, the accused and their supporters, including the numerous residents at the hotel, were able to get their stories straight, a fact that was not lost on the grieving relatives and aggrieved countrymen of Scobie, particularly his older brother George. Bentley was also spotted at the Camp, where it was assumed he was communicating with Police Magistrate John D’Ewes. There had long been a rumour that D’Ewes was financially indebted to Bentley. On Thursday 12 October, an enquiry into Scobie’s murder was held before D’Ewes, Robert Rede and James Johnston.
The decision of the bench that day saw a family’s dreams go up in smoke.
Summer set in in ernest, recorded Thomas Pierson, though it was only early October. North winds. Dust. Oppressive heat. In the three days between Bentley’s arrest and his appearance before the bench, another inflammatory incident occurred. It had nothing to do with James, or Catherine, or the hotel, or even alcohol, but it would start a devastating domino effect on the Bentleys’ future.
On Tuesday 10 October, a crippled Armenian servant named Johannes Gregorius was visiting a sick man in his tent on the Gravel Pits. Gregorius had limped from his residence, a flimsy vestibule attached to the cavernous tent that served as the Catholic church. Gregorius was the servant of Father Patrick Smyth, the young Irish priest who had recently been transferred to minister to Ballarat’s nine thousand (predominantly Irish) Catholics. Gregorius had no reason to fear being spotted at large among the diggers; ministers of religion and their live-in servants were not required to hold a licence. On this day, however, a callow mounted policeman stopped Gregorius and demanded to see his licence. In faltering English, Gregorius attempted to explain his exemption. But the trooper was in no mood to listen. Damn you and your priest, the trooper spat,18 and dismounted to assault the lame man. Horrified onlookers watched as the horse, unrestrained by his master, proceeded to trample Gregorius.
As luck would have it, James Johnston was in the vicinity. The crowd expected their assistant commissioner would discipline the policeman, who was so clearly overstepping the line. Johnston, however, drew his own arbitrary limits: regardless of any alleged assault, there was the assumed issue of the outstanding licence to deal with. Gregorius would have to attend court the following day. Father Smyth arrived on the scene and offered Johnston £5 bail to take his injured servant home.
What began as a tragedy ended as a farce. In court the next day, in front of John D’Ewes with James Johnston as witness, the battered Armenian was fined £5 for being unlicensed, despite his legal exemption. As Smyth had already paid that sum, the slate should have been cleared—however unjustly the offense was accrued. But Johnston decided to up the ante. He charged that it was the cripple Gregorius who had in fact assaulted the mounted policeman. D’Ewes found this new indictment proved and fined Gregorius another £5.
The Catholics of Ballarat were ropable. Autocratic and illogical miscarriages of justice had become commonplace in Ballarat that winter, but the Catholic community took this one as a direct insult to its priest. A petition was raised on behalf of the aggregate Catholic body at Ballarat. The petition, nominally headed up by Timothy Hayes, was undoubtedly the project of his wife Anastasia, who was working as a teacher at the Catholic school. Anastasia, as later events would prove, was a born litigant: quick to assert her rights and defend the rights of those she cared for. In 1854 (though not later) Anastasia Hayes cared most about the Catholics of Ballarat.
The petition wanted the feelings of an offended people recognised, and these people held James Johnston personally responsible for the slight. Johnston had never been popular, but now he was in complete disgrace. The petition called for the immediate removal of Johnston from Ballarat and an enquiry into his ungentlemanly and overbearing character. (Frederick Vern later called Johnston the most insolent and unscrupulous of all the government officers.) As if pre-empting an accusation that the victimised petitioners were but a bunch of Irish ratbags, the petition stated: The Catholics of Ballarat are a large and influential body comprising inhabitants of every recognised country under heaven. This corpus begged leave to observe that the constitutional means taken to obtain a redress of the wrong here complained of evinces our respect for the law.19 Not just Irish. Not a mob either. Constitutional. Lawful. Legitimate.
Governor Hotham, alerted to the sectarian crisis brewing at his most populous goldfield, momentarily considered transferring Johnston to another district, but decided it would be impolitic to do so. Robert Rede made clear his intention to stand by his right-hand man. It would not be in the best interests of the Camp for its leader to undermine his deputy. Johnston stayed. Margaret Brown Howden Johnston bought a cradle for her gestating baby, noting the purchase in her diary. The Irish of Ballarat considered sewing a large flag to make their point; a Monster national banner, reported the ARGUS, to fly over the disputed ground of the Eureka.20
Another turn of the screw. The coil tightens.
The court was crammed to suffocation on the morning of the judicial enquiry into the murder of James Scobie. It was 12 October. James and Catherine Bentley and their servants, Farrell and Hance, were in the dock. D’Ewes, Rede and Johnston presided over an agitated crowd. There was no jury. The BALLARAT TIMES had been fulminating about the case for days. James Bentley was characterised as exhibiting all the wiles and blandishments of a wealthy publican. Scobie’s death was described as melancholy. The newspaper detailed inconsistencies and irregularities of the coronial inquest, and proffered ‘facts’ counter to the ones given at the inquest.
Yet a letter to the BALLARAT TIMES published on 14 October shows that the Bentleys did have the support of certain sections of Ballarat society. The letter was addressed to James and signed by more than a hundred of Ballarat’s storekeepers, diggers and inhabitants. It stated that the signatories
duly appreciating the conduct and manner you have evinced in carrying on the Eureka Hotel, and feeling that you could not either directly or indirectly, in the late lamentable occurrence, have been in any way accessary [sic]…are assured that your urbanity and manly behaviour will still continue to guarantee to so well a conducted house, its full share of public patronage.
A portion of the Ballarat population was confident of the Bentleys’ innocence.
Over two nail-biting days, the witnesses took the stand. All the residents of the hotel testified that Mr and Mrs Bentley had not left that evening, that they remained in their bedroom together until Dr Carr arrived. Mary Gadd, Catherine’s sister, swore that she could hear every thing that passes in [their] room. A butcher residing opposite the hotel swore that Bentley was not one of the men he saw fighting. It was moonlight so he could see clearly and [I] would know him by his general appearance and being lame. Mary Ann Welch and her son Barnard were called last. It was now that Mary Ann testified that she heard Catherine Bentley say ‘How dare you break my window’. The voice, to the best of my belief, was Mrs Bentley’s, said Mary Ann. I live within a few yards at the back of the hotel, and often heard Mrs Bentley’s voice before. Barnard Welch told again what he’d seen through his peephole. The TIMES thought him a very intelligent boy.
The magistrates retired to an adjoining room for half an hour to make their decision. Before a hushed crowed, John D’Ewes declared that after assessing all the evidence, not a shadow of an imputation remained on Mr Bentley’s character. Robert Rede followed suit. James Johnston dissented, unpredictable as ever. The prisoners were free to go.
Thomas Pierson made a tally of the grievances under which Ballarat was now groaning. The governor’s actions didn’t match his promises. Hotham’s hypocrisy had created quite a dislike for him. There was no representation of the miners in the legislature. Digger hunts had increased to five days per week. Sixteen bullies on horseback, their muskets loaded and swords drawn, would descend on the diggings. Fifty foot soldiers with clubs would vomit themselves forth from the Camp. The diggers felt under siege, with no benevolent governor to shield them and no elected leader to represent them. Constitutionally, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
The residents of Ballarat were not the only ones to sense danger in the air that October of 1854. Back in March, Britain had declared war on Russia. The Crimean War, fought by an alliance of the British Empire, France and the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Empire, played like a backbeat against the local pulse of dissonance and discord in Victoria over the winter and spring of that watershed year. The war (so far as any military conflict can be reduced to a sentence) was fought over Russian imperialist expansion into territories in Turkey, the Baltic and the Middle East. There was also a minor naval skirmish in the Far East in September 1854. News from the various fronts, culled from the British press months after the reports were written, flooded the Victorian newspapers. Victoria followed Britain’s lead in observing a day of fasting on 4 August, to commemorate lives lost in the war. Subscriptions were collected to send to the Widows’ Fund in Britain.
Then, in a bizarre twist of reason, the inhabitants of Melbourne managed to convince themselves that their humble port town was under threat from Russian invasion. There was no strategic logic in the panic, only wartime paranoia and, perhaps, projected fear of mutiny from the unruly goldfields. In Geelong, a rifle corps was organised and a weekly half-holiday proclaimed to give citizens time to practise rifle shooting, lest their town come under attack. The holiday was quickly abandoned and the corps reduced to a few gung-ho Germans, but the sense of lingering peril remained.21
Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the French consul to Victoria, Lionel de Chabrillan, was in Melbourne in October 1854 when anxiety about an imminent attack came to a head. Her diary entry:
Cannon fire has again just signalled the arrival of a ship. Tomorrow we shall have news from France. The cannon rumbled all night. All the inhabitants stayed on their feet, either in the streets or at their windows. Since the Crimean War, which is always on their minds, and because there is not a single warship in the Melbourne harbour, they are always imagining that the Russians are going to attempt an invasion to pillage the gold of the whole of Australia. They walk about in large groups, prepared for battle. The governor has been informed and he arrives from Toorack [sic], situated six leagues from Melbourne. They follow him; they run towards the harbour. Lionel does likewise. The sky is red and all the ships in port seem to be on fire. They think they hear cries of distress.
Mrs Massey was at a ball when reports of the invasion struck. Pandemonium! Scottish-born Robert Anderson joined the thousands of people flocking to the harbour in a state of great excitement. Shots were thundering away, rockets, shells and everything else to make the colonials believe the Russians had arrived, Anderson recalled in his memoir. The whole town was roused up, all was uproar, the soldiers called out and armed, all the policemen we could muster.
It was not until daylight that the hoax was revealed. The Battle of Melbourne, as it became known, was an elaborate practical joke played by the captain of the Great Britain, as revenge for having his ship put in quarantine. Hotham, who longed to command a naval battalion in the real war, was not amused. PUNCH had a field day. A farcical play called The Battle of Melbourne was quickly written and performed. The scaremongers and alarmists, as Céleste de Chabrillan called them, were forced to lick their wounded pride. One commentator later noted that Melburnians were prone to lurch from panic to panic.22
The Russians were not coming, but the communal adrenaline had barely subsided when news of a genuine breach of the peace hit the presses.
What is a land of opportunity if not an invitation to opportunism? On 16 October, at 2pm, four felons seized the day. Wearing black crepe veils tied around their faces, cord trousers, blue shirts and sou’westers, the thieves marched into the Ballarat branch of the Bank of Victoria and marched straight back out again bearing £15,000 in gold and cash. It was a clever robbery and well carried out, remembered Charles Ferguson, and had it not been for the extravagant and dashing Madam Quin, it probably would not have been exposed.
Mrs Ann Quin was the wife of one of the thieves, and the Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne newspapers followed her and the other scoundrels’ movements with tremulous interest (not least because of the £500 reward offered for information leading to an arrest). The robbery, reported in the Tasmanian press as a daring escapade, emblematic of the anarchic, ungovernable diggings, was a cause célèbre: a brazen theft of the golden goose and her eggs, carried out virtually under the nose of the sleeping giants at the Camp.
For weeks the robbery was a complete mystery to the police. Police Inspector Gordon Evans reported to his Melbourne superiors that four men had forcibly entered the bank, bound and gagged the manager and clerk and then emptied the safe, leaving behind them their hats, veils and shirts. The criminals had simply melted back into the landscape of uniform canvas tents and rabbit holes as slickly as they had emerged. No identification could be made and there was no clue to the road taken. For two weeks, it looked like the perfect crime. Since the robbery, the police are all alive, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER; the handsome reward had made the force suddenly alert to the slightest innuendo.23
But in Victoria, money didn’t whisper, it roared, and such prodigious booty could not long be muffled. Quin—of the Ballarat grocery firm of Garret, Marriet and Quin—was captured on 18 November at the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel in Flinders Street in the company of Mrs Quin and their three children. Ann Quin had been sighted in Geelong where she was cutting a rather wide swath and spending money left and right. Quin had been caught out buying a £50 diamond ring with the stolen Bank of Victoria notes.
Mrs Quin entered the dock with a babe in arms. The ARGUS reported:
she is a plump, rosy-cheeked, country-looking, young woman, about twenty-two years of age, and certainly does not seem very largely endowed with either intelligence, cunning or daring to mark her as the helpmeet for a first class burglar.24
Ann Quin was refused bail. Marriet was caught the next day in bed with a prostitute in a Spring Street house of ill-fame. Garret was spied on his way to Adelaide but some time later fled to London. His fancy woman (a Ballarat actress) had already left for England on the Calcutta. The Quin family had also booked a passage on the ship prior to their arrest. Mr Quin later turned state approver and peached on his former business associates. He confessed that the robbery had been planned a week prior to its execution, that their guns were loaded with paper, not powder or shot, and that they had made a prior agreement that no violence was to be done.
But what of the fourth man? It was three more weeks before ‘he’ was brought in, and over 150 years before it became readily apparent that the fourth felon was in all likelihood a woman. At the front of the relevant files in the Public Record Office of Victoria, the name Elijah Smith is listed with the others. Yet inside, in the court testimonies themselves, the name Eliza Smith appears repeatedly.25 The fourth robber, Elijah, was in fact Eliza, disguised beneath a veil drawn by gender-blind bureaucrats.
Eliza Smith was arrested at the Turf Hotel on the Eureka Lead. Like Mrs Quin, she was spending freely in local stores and showing off her ample cleavage to every miner who took an interest. Tucked in her bodice was a roll of £10 notes, fresh from the Bank of Victoria. She was also eager to flash another roll of notes secreted in her stockings. Robert Tait, the landlord of the hotel, was witness to one of Eliza’s displays (she called me on one side and pulled a number of notes from her bosom…she stooped down and produced a parcel of notes from her stockings) and called the police. When the traps came to arrest her, along with a man who was also passing stolen notes, Eliza fought like fury. I had great difficulty taking them, said the arresting officer in court,
I had great difficulty with the woman, I asked her what money she had on her person, she produced twenty two pound notes six shillings…she then handed me a roll of notes, which she took from one of her stockings, saying take that you ‘Bugger’.
After she’d unburdened her smalls of their booty, Eliza Smith was found to have been carrying £262 on her person.
Eliza was brought to Melbourne to be tried, and was convicted of receiving: a lesser crime than that for which her companions were sentenced to seven years. It was Eliza who persuaded Quin to turn Queen’s witness, urging him to do so for the sake of [his] wife and children. But not even Eliza’s defence counsel, Adam Loftus Lynn, thought her a saint. He described her to the jury as not being constant as Penelope to her dear lord, of whom she took French leave. The implication was that Eliza was in need of fast money to fund an escape from her husband, a mitigating rationale for her crime.
The BALLARAT TIMES was utterly uninterested in the morals or motives of the offenders. There was only one victim in this crime, and that was the careworn community of Ballarat. In a stinging editorial on 4 November, Henry Seekamp accused the town fathers of sowing the seeds of disaster with their own ineptitude.
Had it been originally the intention of the managers in town to have their property stolen, they could not have selected a site more favourable to the exercise of the distinguished art, or science, of ‘sticking up’.
Seekamp was not the only one to point out that the Bank’s position behind the township, practically in the bush, was not conducive to public faith in the building as a financial institution. Of the bank’s site, the ARGUS said it really almost speaks out, and says, come and rob me, as much as a big nugget lying on the road-side would invite a traveller.26 To add insult, the building was a flimsy box, resembling as much as possible the zinc lining of some packing-case, with a hole knocked through the bottom to serve as a door. It was the people, as usual, who had lost their savings due to the dim-witted authorities.
The Bank of Victoria robbery had demonstrated that gold was not safe as houses, or at least not safe in houses. But nor, it seemed, was it secure in men’s hands. On 3 October, George Dunmore Lang, son of Reverend John Dunmore Lang of Sydney, resigned his position as the manager of the Ballarat branch of the Bank of New South Wales. He was given a farewell dinner by Ballarat’s leading merchants and storekeepers, who presented him with a gold cup and their best wishes. In August, George had written a letter to his mother in Sydney. He proudly reported that the bank was in a most flourishing state. He then confided that he was arranging to start a private bank with five others. The Bank of New South Wales may have been bursting with deposits, but it did not amply reward its employees. But George could dream of opening his own bank only because he had in fact been amply rewarding himself; two months after his resignation George was convicted of embezzling more than £10,000. The press left Lang alone, perhaps out of courtesy for his well-respected father, or perhaps there wasn’t much column space to spare in October.
But it soon became known that under Lang the Bank of New South Wales had allowed James Bentley to overdraw his account by £2000. The bank did not generally trade in loans—only deposits and gold purchases—but made an exception for Bentley because of his flourishing circumstances and superior collateral.27 It was also discovered that Lang had recently purchased a gold-broking business from one James Burchall, who had suddenly fled after his name was raised in relation to the Bank of Victoria robbery. Burchall had also tried to cash promissory notes in favour of John D’Ewes, signed by a local hotel landlord, presumably Bentley. As Eureka historian Ian MacFarlane has written, ‘like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, the murky financial dealing of the Ballarat officials seemed to extend everywhere’.28
Commissioner Rede read the verdict into the Scobie enquiry on Saturday 14 October. The court and its verandah were filled to overflowing. Hot winds from the arid north whipped up clouds of dust. People choked on their own breath, just as they gagged over the greatest miscarriage of justice yet witnessed in a town that thought matters could get no worse. A wealthy and influential man, allowed to walk away scot-free from a crime that he had patently committed. Herculean though the task may appear, roared the TIMES in its edition that evening, we intend to cleanse the Augean Stable of the Ballarat Camp, and purify its fetid atmosphere of those putrescent particles which offend the senses, by a rigid but wholesome exposure before the bar of public opinion. Thomas Pierson feared for the publican’s safety. Such was the hostility towards not only the magistrates and commissioners but Bentley himself that I should not wonder if his whole house was razed to the ground, Pierson wrote in his diary that night.
Bentley’s exoneration was a scandal. A public demonstration was called for the following Tuesday, 17 October. Notices were posted. The grapevine sent out its tendrils of insinuation. The meeting would be held within spitting distance of the Eureka Hotel, on the site of Scobie’s murder. Thomas Pierson was there, and twenty-seven-year-old Catholic woman Elizabeth Rowlands, cradling her six-month-old baby Mary Ann. They were joined by thousands of others.29 Pierson says 10,000 in his diary; a subsequent parliamentary enquiry reckoned 5000.30 A few mounted troopers hung back warily. Speakers came before the crowd to decry the outrage of Bentley’s acquittal and the incompetence—nay, impudence—of the Camp.
The decision was a perversion of justice resulting from entrenched venality. The Eureka Hotel was a safe house for murderers and thieves, connived at by the authorities. Bentley kept his clientele drunk, all the better for pickpockets to rob them. D’Ewes interfered with all aspects of the goldfields management, from licensing to land sales. Johnston had a share in Brandt’s Victoria Hotel. Most of the Camp’s higher officials were nothing more than land speculators. Rede was a puppet, a fool. The bench had no impartiality, no transparency. The Camp was a kind of legal store, where justice was bought and sold. Where was British liberty? Were the diggers slaves or serfs? Why, the Russians treated their people better than the diggers of Ballarat. On the accusations went, constricting the emotional helix of a blustery spring morning.31
At 10am, Police Inspector Gordon Evans sent a garrison of his men to the Eureka Hotel. Led by Maurice Ximines, the men snuck into the hotel, unseen by the crowd. Bentley had asked the police to watch over his property. He had received threats that the people intended to hang him by the lamp post. Bentley also had a pregnant young wife, a toddler and a hotel full of employees and guests, not to mention a mountain of private property, to protect. By this stage, the crowd had begun to bay for his blood. The cries of the mob were for Bentley, Ximines later testified.
At some point, the mood of the crowd changed. The sun was beating down. The wind was gusting strong. A peaceful public assembly began to turn ugly. Symptoms of riot began to show themselves, wrote Thomas Pierson back in his tent that night. He left, and watched the rest of the calamitous proceedings from a safe vantage point at a distance from the crowd. The multitude became a mob, moving with a vicious urgency towards the hotel.
James Bentley, convinced he was going to be lynched, fled on horseback to the Camp. On the way, he passed Charles Evans. I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man’s face, Evans wrote in his diary. Ellen Young saw him too, without hat or coat his white shirt sleeves tucked up, a trooper closely following. Ellen thought it was a race in fun. She turned to her next-door neighbour and said white shirt will win. But this was no game. Was Bentley on a mission to call for more protection? Was he saving his own neck? Or trying to create a diversion, thinking that the mob might change course and follow him, like a swarm of angry bees?
But it was not only the publican’s scalp the crowd wanted: a miner name John Westoby stepped in front of the hotel. I propose that this house belong to the diggers, he proclaimed, to wild cheering.
It’s a telling line. Here was the first instance during this watershed spring when Ballarat’s digging community overtly defined itself as a collective. Now it took Ellen Young’s literary lead: we (the people) demand…The time had come for the body politic of Ballarat to take matters of justice into its own hands.
‘Public punishment’, writes British historian Bernard Capp (in his study of the way that aggrieved communities in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century wielded shaming rituals against perceived enemies), ‘symbolised the community’s collective repudiation of the offence and its reassertion of traditional values’. Jeering, hooting, burning effigies and smashing windows were all activities that could be ritually performed by the whole community, including women and children, as a way to maintain a moral order. This is sometimes called charivari or ‘rough music’: a terrifying dirge tuned to righteous mob indignation, intended to punish transgression. It was all about loss of face in a society predicated on face-to-face contact.
The rough music accompanying James Bentley in his flight to the Camp from his overrun hotel underscores a central paradox in Ballarat’s looming political crisis. Those who immigrated in their thousands to the Victorian goldfields aspired to something different from what they knew, and particularly from the hierarchies of Home. Yet they also expected that the substructure—the traditional values and social assurance of law, order and justice—would stay the same.
Westoby’s proposition tapped directly into one of the chief moral concerns of the diggers: the dignity of providing a permanent and prosperous home for their families. How better to cut a man down to size than to invade his castle? Shame him in front of his wife and child. Show him to be no better than the rest of the dispossessed, disempowered crowd outside his painted door. They would seize the high ground, both morally and literally. Bentley’s Hill would be no more. Let his house belong to the diggers. Not an egalitarian gesture of sharing property, but a cutthroat ritual of exclusion.
The same people who had only moments before decried the arbitrary flouting of due process and the flagrant cruelty of its custodians now turned itself to retributive justice. And so, in the words of Samuel Huyghue, the match was applied to the train of long gathering discontent.
Riots are the kissing cousin of charivari. Add alcohol and soaring temperatures to a public display of disaffection, and it doesn’t take much for things to get perilously out of hand. The mob was a feature of pre-modern societies; authorities held a traditional fear and loathing for irate crowds as riots waiting to happen: embryonic uprisings. ‘Neither mindless nor revolutionary’, writes Bernard Capp, ‘riots were an attempt by the disenfranchised to connect with the political and administrative structures of the state’.
Once the crowd had surrounded the Eureka Hotel and its half-acre of funhouses, stables and storage facilities, Robert Rede was called from the Camp. Rede attempted to quell the mob’s fury. He stood up on a window ledge. He called for order. He was hooted and jeered, pelted with bottles, bricks, stones and eggs. Someone threw a rock at a window. One report says a little girl cast the first stone; another says it was a teenage lad. It is of no consequence. Once the glass shattered, so did the last of the crowd’s equilibrium. That very morning, the final touches to the hotel’s major construction works had been completed. Within minutes, the crowd had set upon the process of disassembling all the Bentleys had taken months to build: ripping at boards, smashing windows, throwing stones at lamps. The edifice of Bentley’s success was demolished.
Imagine Catherine Bentley’s terror. As the hotel rocked with the force of the crowd’s fury, Ximines’ men, holed up inside the hotel, scattered. Catherine and the other residents were left to fend for themselves. Climbing through shattered windows and splintered doors, people began to infiltrate the building. Kegs of liquor were dragged out of storage rooms and eagerly tapped. Furniture was hurled from windows. Someone found Catherine’s bedroom and began throwing her jewellery to the people below, stretching their arms up like a pack of savage bridesmaids.
A cry of Fire! went up. Someone had set light to the canvas of the bowling alley. The wind had been blowing hot all day, recalled Raffaello Carboni, and at this fatal precise hour…[it was] blowing a hurricane. And that was it. The fire in the bowling alley leaped to the main building. Flames consumed the hotel before the glistening, vengeful eyes of the crowd. It burnt like paper, said Robert Rede. A few hours before, said D’Ewes, had stood by far the most extensive building in the diggings, painted and decked out in gay and gaudy colours, with a long row of stables and outhouses, erected at an expense of £30,000, and totally uninsured. Minutes after the blaze was started, Charles Evans arrived. He saw only a black heap of smoking ashes.
Ellen Young could clearly see the rioters and the fire from her vantage point outside her tent at Golden Point. She saw clothes and linen being thrown from upstairs windows. She watched a bonfire made of the contents of the house of every description. As goods rained down from the hotel windows, people tossed them into the inferno. One person threw Catherine Bentley’s jewellery box on the bonfire, quickly fished it out again, studied it, then threw it with great force into the flames. Finally a handsome gig was backed onto the fire, turning status to cinders.
James Bentley, having fled to the Camp on horseback, spent the night in Inspector Gordon Evans’ tent. But what happened to Catherine as her home combusted around her? Emily Eliza Boyce, twelve years old in October 1854, was present at the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. She saw Mrs Bentley and her child landed safely from one of the windows.32 Kenneth McLeod, a wine and spirit merchant, had rushed to the hotel when it was engulfed. He entered the building and found Catherine. With the assistance of a man named Robert McLaren, and at the risk of my own life, he tossed Catherine and little Thomas from the second storey, into the arms of the crowd.33 As in a chivalrous mosh pit, Catherine was caught and released.
Did she join James at the Camp? Ellen Young says the inmates fled in terror. It’s not clear whether Catherine was among them. But Catherine did find someone to take her in. One of her later petitions for compensation for the financial loss of her property states that she was dependent on the kindness of a few friends for her daily bread.34
Perhaps the Bentleys, Catherine and James alike, had been too cocky in parading their success before an increasingly alienated and aggrieved mining community. Not only were they close to the seat of parochial power, but their ostentatious demeanour reflected the growing social cleavages in Ballarat at precisely the time when democratic sentiment was reaching its apex. Martha Clendinning knew that ‘dressing down’ was the key to her business success. Lady Hotham had been praised for her willingness to get hands dirty among the people, crumbling chunks of mullock. Remember one digger’s remark: she hasn’t half the airs of your innkeeper’s and storekeeper’s wives.35
That Catherine Bentley may have ‘had airs’ is alluded to in the evidence of Mary Ann Welch. In testifying that it was definitely Mrs Bentley she had overheard saying ‘how dare you break my window’, Mary Ann stated that Mrs Bentley was a stranger to her; had never spoken to her but had often heard her speak. Given that the Welches’ tent was not ten yards from Bentley’s Hotel, it is odd that Catherine had never made the acquaintance of a neighbour with eight children, including one boy of similar age to Thomas. Perhaps the thirty-nine-year-old miner’s wife was affronted that the twenty-two-year-old publican’s wife had not been more solicitous of her friendship, quarantining her precious child from the rabble. The struggling English mother might also have been less than sympathetic herself towards a bejewelled Irish mother who employed a small army of live-in servants and regularly entertained the cream of the Jewish merchants. After all, Mary Ann was herself high born, the daughter of a barrister. In choosing a farmer’s son she had married down. Envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness was how Ellen Young summed up the burning of Bentley’s Hotel in a letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES on 4 November.36
In late 1854, Catherine would attest to how thoroughly the destruction of her hotel had levelled her circumstances. In one of many petitions to Charles Hotham outlining her situation, the former publican claimed she was blameless in the above lamentable affair and in no way connected with the assault on the deceased. In consequence of being blamed, Catherine had been reduced from comparative affluence to absolute poverty. And in the note penned in 1892, scrawled on the back of a petition written by the citizens of Ballarat attesting to James Bentley’s innocence, Catherine went further. She offered an alternative version of what happened on the night of Scobie’s apparent murder. The man Scoby mentioned in the printed form as killed, was hid in the Abbotsford Convent during the riots, under the influence of Peter Lalor.37 Catherine went to her grave believing that her family had been intentionally robbed of their fortune, reputation and status in the Ballarat community.
Fire is not as discerning as friendship, and the Bentleys were not the only ones to suffer losses that day. Twenty-six people later submitted claims for compensation, either for the material destruction of property or as creditors to the now-bankrupt Bentleys. Alexander West lost all his musical instruments and was thus forced to relinquish his profession. James Waldock had conducted a livery and licensed auctioneer’s business from the stables at the hotel; he lost his large stock of cattle, drays, bridles, saddles, hay and oats to the tune of £2,000 and was reduced to beggary. All of these claims were subsequently denied.
Michael Walsh’s rejected compensation case was the most poignant. Walsh had a tent close to the hotel. It was also consumed by the wayward flames, burning down around the ears of his family. Mrs Walsh was in labour at the time, striving to deliver her first child. Assistant Commissioner Amos assisted in getting Mrs Walsh away from the blazing tent. He carried her to safety. I thought she was dying at the time, Amos later told the select committee, [but] she was in the pains of labour. Mrs Walsh delivered a stillborn baby. In 1857, Michael Walsh considered that his actual pecuniary loss was insubstantial when compared with the long illness of my wife…consequent upon the Great Excitement, the effects of which she nor I have never been able to overcome. The Walshes went on to have eleven children, never registering the death of the first baby on that tempestuous October day.
It was obvious to all that no attempt had been made to control the crowd or protect life and property. One thing is certain, a select committee later determined, the destruction of Bentley’s Hotel was not confined to a few, but thousands of men and women too were engaged in the work of destruction. Why hadn’t Commissioner Rede read the Riot Act, the parliamentary enquiry asked. Rede blamed Police Inspector Gordon Evans, who had authority over the police, for not clearing the crowd or defending the hotel despite the fact that Ximines and his men had occupied the hotel all morning. Rede also claimed he had no power over the military, who were despatched only after the fire began. Other police testified that Evans had lacked determination to stop the rioting. Had his instructions been more direct, the hotel would have been saved. Evans defended himself against the charges of inaction. My hands were completely tied, he said, I must obey my orders. Only the resident commissioner could read the Riot Act. What a shambles. Who exactly was in charge of Ballarat?
It was only after the Eureka Hotel riot that Rede was given a letter of absolute power. He now stood at the apex of a chain of command that included the police and military. But many believed that the damage had been done. The people had carried the day. They had sensed their own power. Samuel Huyghue assessed the disposition of the police and government on the afternoon of the riot. A silent hush had settled over the Camp. Troopers and traps spoke in low mutters in their tents. There was angry humiliation that Rede had tried to make conciliatory speeches rather than take swift action. There had been a loss of prestige. How could it be regained?
A huge downpour came in the night, settling dust and tempers. For now.
There was something in the air that spring. No doubt about it. Back in 1853, James Bonwick had read the mood of the people and predicted that a sudden excitement, a sudden revolution, a sudden political change may take place. But Bonwick feared that a society oddly composed of the ill educated and newly rich might have been democratic but it was also unmistakeably given up to selfishness, and often to impure indulgence. Now, his dystopian vision seemed to be coming true. ‘Excitement’ was the word used by most commentators to describe Ballarat’s heady mix of anxiety, restlessness, disaffection and disregard for authority. It was contagious, and while Bendigo was undoubtedly the locus of unrest in 1853, there was no more exciting place to be in late 1854 than Ballarat.
Henry Seekamp could not contain his sense of a unique destiny rolling, like an electrical storm, towards his adopted town. On 19 October, the Bentleys, Hance and Farrell were rearrested to stand trial in Melbourne for James Scobie’s murder. On 21 October, two miners, twenty-four-year-old Scot Andrew McIntyre and Charles Evans’ business partner Thomas Fletcher, were named arbitrarily out of the thousands of rioters and charged with the arson of the Eureka Hotel (a third, John Westoby, would later be added). Here is Henry Seekamp’s editorial on 21 October:
In all the history of Australia—from its earliest discovery to the present time—from the days the soil first bore the impression of the white man’s foot—during all the different phases of convictism—of commercial failures—of the discovery of the different gold fields—of the agitation for the repeal of that incubus of industry, the miner’s licence—of the feting and rejoicing on the arrival and visiting of a new chum Governor—of the expected invasion of the Russians, never has there been a more eventful period than the present of Ballarat. Public feeling is so great that no rumour, however absurd, but what gains credence—everything is believed and everything is expected. The people have, for once…begun to feel their own strength…the first taste of liberty and self-government.
Seekamp could only view the cascade of October’s events as an inevitable step towards liberty, a child beginning to walk, in a little time the child will be able to stand alone. But twenty-six-year-old Henry had no offspring of his own; he was stepfather to Clara’s children. He may not have been in the best position to wield metaphors of infant development. Children also discover their narcissistic will. Separating from their psychically overbearing parents requires a monstrous act of defiance—something approximating Bonwick’s prophecy of selfishness and indulgence.
Surely some malignant spell, surmised the ARGUS, must blind the Captain, that he cannot see the rocks ahead.38
The fine weather was a boon to government surveillance of the diggings. From late September, licence hunting stepped up with a new vigour now the winter mud was gone. Suddenly, large, armed military forces were sent out from the Camp to patrol the diggings. Foot police carried batons. Soldiers wielded carbines, swords and holster pistols. Some were mounted, parading frisky horses through tents and holes in search of unlicensed miners. A new chum, wrote An Englishman to the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 10 October, might think the show of force was to intimidate criminals against the dog poisoning, horse stealing and tent breaking that had become endemic this spring. But no, it was merely digger hunting, pursued with an unusual degree of severity since Hotham’s visit to the goldfields. The Englishman attributed the new regime to the resident commissioner proving his utility.
Others could see that the new governor had pledged to remedy the colony’s ailing economy and was going about the task with obdurate zeal. The public service was being whittled to a shoestring to reduce expenditure. On the income side of the ledger there were only liquor excises and mining licences to lift the bottom line. The diggers would conveniently drink to their hearts’ content, but showed increasing reluctance to produce a valid licence. What was a governor to do, other than order his minions to carry out more licence hunts? If once a week was not enough to demonstrate that this government meant business, then make it twice. Or every day bar the Sabbath. Is it to be endured, wrote the Englishman, in a possession of the British Crown, that an armed police force may ‘bail up’ and require the production of your badge in all places at all times? Does this happen in London? He finished by calling for some more influential pen to take up the cause of the unrepresented digger. Ellen Young patriotically obliged.
On 4 November, following Scobie’s murder, the Eureka Hotel riot and the fire, the arrests, the trials and the public meetings, Ellen captured the mood of her clan in a long letter to the BALLARAT TIMES.
I can but remark on the sad picture of humanity your last Saturday’s paper presents…Alas for the poor diggers, over whose spoil the whole tribe are squabbling. Alas for the honest of each party that he should be sacrificed to the dishonest. Alas, alas for us all that we cannot get a snap of land to keep a pig live pretty, and grow cabbages on; and three times alas; let it three times be for us (the people) poor dupes… following in high hopes the jack o’ lantern dancing over the land, his false light blinding all.
Here we have the diggers as fools and their governor as the will-o’-the-wisp trickster figure of English folklore who draws innocent travellers down the garden path with devilish false promises. Hotham had betrayed Ellen’s early trust. She would now place her faith in another organ of authority, the fourth estate. Her letter continued: We ought to congratulate ourselves in possessing so admirable a vent as your paper for the spleen. How amiable shall we become in time…I am but a simple dreamer at the foot of the mount.
While Ellen Young waxed lyrical at her literary base camp, a host of nameless sherpas did the grunt work to spread the word of mutiny on the streets. Gossip and rumour, writes Bernard Capp, were ‘a powerful coercive weapon, defining and reasserting the social values of the community’. Traditionally, he says, women have wielded gossip as a form of ‘quasi-public power’. Through informal networks and collective pressure, women were able to play a role as active citizens, turning private grievances into public issues and refashioning themselves as the persecutors rather than the persecuted. Capp argues that this ‘informal political world based on female networks’ was vital in shaping public opinion in pre-industrial communities, particularly in times of crisis. Gossip and rumour could be malicious and judgmental or simply informative about comings and goings central to the community’s wellbeing. Gossip was a powerful tool for otherwise disenfranchised people, but its central importance is not reflected in the public/historical record, for the simple fact that by its very nature rumour is spread discreetly, in whispers—often Chinese whispers—at the marketplace or at work in the fields. Gossip is the backdrop to what survives in hard copy, such as Ellen Young’s letters to the editor.
The public record of Ballarat’s rumour-mongers is surprisingly resilient. Ellen Clacy described the interior of your average shop on the diggings: pork and currants, saddles and frocks, baby linen and tallow, all are heaped indiscriminately together…added to which, there are children bawling, men swearing, store-keeper sulky, and last, not least, women’s tongues going nineteen to the dozen. Raffaello Carboni begins his account of the Catholic servant affair like so: The following story was going the rounds of the Eureka. The TIMES revealed that prior to the destruction of the Eureka Hotel, rumours had been flying thick and fast. Police Magistrate D’Ewes was a partner in the business. Bentley had paid thousands of pounds for exoneration. The licensing bench was bribed. And the paramount tall story: Catherine Bentley was in fact Scobie’s wife!
On 24 October, the AGE reported an eventful week at Ballarat: Monday, the bank robbery; Tuesday, rioting; Wednesday and Thursday taken up guessing at what might be next looked for, including brazen anecdotes that Avoca, Maryborough and Creswick Creek had on the same or following day as ourselves set the authorities at defiance; Friday, arrest of the manager of the Bank of New South Wales; and Sunday, a meeting of the Irish regarding the Father Smyth and Johnston incident. The AGE’s Ballarat correspondent revealed rumours that the Avoca Camp had been burned down, that the Maryborough Camp was under siege by diggers, that the unemployed of Melbourne had risen up at the news of the Ballarat riot, and that the Bank of Victoria was broke. Added to the talk about such matters, wrote the correspondent, was an interminable controversy as to the pros and cons of Bentley’s case. You didn’t need a soapbox to be heard in Ballarat. A person couldn’t blow her nose without drawing around them a crowd of sympathisers.
As the ARGUS correspondent wrote, The growth of revolutionary opinion is predicated on such tittle-tattle.39
When James Bentley fled from the flames of his ruined empire to the protection of the commissioners, an insidious rumour started doing the rounds. The government compound was going to be attacked! The diggers were going to come that night. Vengeful miners were going to prise Bentley from his refuge and drag him back to his smoking lair. Justice would be done, even if Judge Lynch had to do the reckoning.
Spies brought the news from the Flat to the Camp. The garrison was put under arms. No one was allowed to enter or leave. The night, according to Camp resident Samuel Huyghue, passed alert in expectation of an attack. The next day, 18 October, the females were ordered to leave the Camp, as it was considered that at such a time they would be safer anywhere than with us. Families split up. Anxious wives abandoned their husbands to the patent fury of the mob. Did pregnant Margaret Brown Howden Johnston leave? Where did she go? Her diary is mute. Some poor souls, said Huyghue, were ultimately permitted to remain on the plea that they had no home or protectors elsewhere. These women and children took refuge in the commissariat store whenever there was an alarm. The walls of the store were partly bullet proof, being formed of roughly hewn slabs. But you could still insert a finger between them, worried Huyghue.
And rumours could slide under doors like shape-shifting vapours in the night. They could waft between slabs. Seep beneath skin. Penetrate the soundest of minds. Gossip and rumour could fuel a fire as well as any kindling and flame.
Shaken to its core by the power of an idea, the Camp would never recover.