November. There is no turning back the clock of 1854. Whatever aspirations you might have had for this bright year either have been happily realised or are about to become history in the headlong rush towards Yuletide. It’s still hard to fathom that your Christmas dinner will be consumed under the blaze of the southern sun, with these desiccated trees shedding their lizard-skin bark and the green of mistletoe replaced by dung-brown grasses that spit and fizz if they catch a wayward ember. You know bushfire is a steadfast threat. An inferno sped through this time last year, leaving its wake of black char here. And then, just like that, so soon, new green shoots like a graveyard of insolent asparagus. There are clouds of dust in place of the snowy blanket that enveloped your childhood Christmases.
Perhaps, like young Scotsman Alexander Dick, you have just travelled the road to Ballarat and arrived at this place, with its electric crackle of anticipation and agitation. A very mutinous and excited spirit prevalent, wrote Alexander in his diary after walking from Geelong and pitching his tent on the Eureka Lead, ripe for an explosion. It makes you tingle with a delicious shiver of hope and dread.
Or perhaps you thought you’d be long gone by now, sailed back over the seas, back home, transformed, triumphant. It would make you cry, then, to think of another long year of fruitless toil and bottomless yearning, earning not even enough for a ticket home. Or perhaps you are one of the many who found a mate this spring and got spliced; the new year will bring your first child.
One thing is certain. The time has passed to wait submissively, to wait and see whether the intimations and pleas and petitions and letters and now, since Bentley’s, the explosive grass fires of public protest will nudge a mulish government over the line of reform. The time has come to take command of events. The time has come to harness the energies of an agitated and anxious multitude and steer them towards an early resolution.
In a poem called ‘The Wise Resolve’ that Ellen Young published in the BALLARAT TIMES, she put words in the mouth of a hypothetically redeemed Governor Hotham:
Those lubberly boys—vagabond diggers—
Toil all day, like so many niggers;
Like niggers I’ll drive them, and force them to do
Whatever I choose, or have mind to do…[But]
As there’s among them doctors and tailors,
Parsons and clerks, there’s sure to be sailors
Tell them to pipe hands and choose their own crew,
Their rights to protect, as freemen should do.1
Time to choose your own crew. Time for the Pollywogs to take over the ship. Time to cross the line.
If you’re going to draw a line the question will inevitably arise: which side are you on?
Sarah Hanmer was among the first of Ballarat’s prominent citizens to nail her colours to the mast. After the arrests of Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher for the burning of the Bentleys’ hotel, a ‘monster meeting’ was called for 22 October. Over ten thousand people gathered at Bakery Hill to hear thirty-year-old John Basson Humffray, twenty-four-year-old Henry Holyoake and twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Kennedy—all men with Chartist connections—deliver rousing speeches about the infringement of rights daily occurring at Ballarat. We are worse off than either Russian serf or American slave!! was how the BALLARAT TIMES framed the problem. Nothing short of the removal of the Camp officials who so flagrantly abused their offices would resolve the matter. The speakers called on the government to muck out their own stables before the people of Ballarat were forced to make a clean sweep themselves.
The ashes of the Eureka Hotel fire lay as unadorned proof of the might of the people if justice was denied them. But still, at this stage, the TIMES predicted that the collective angst would settle down into a quiet constitutional agitation, argued with moral not physical force, and fought on the twin issues of taxation and representation.2 A Diggers Rights Society was thereby established to keep the Camp honest, and Holyoake called for subscriptions to help pay for the legal defence of McIntyre and Fletcher.
It was behind this cause, the Diggers Defence Fund, that Sarah Hanmer threw her considerable energies. She announced a benefit to be held at the Adelphi Theatre on 26 October. At the end of the monster meeting three cheers were raised for the recently defunct GOLD DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE to be re-established; three groans were given for the turncoat ARGUS; and three cheers and one more for the kindness of Mrs Hanmer for her benefit at the Adelphi.3 Sarah’s theatre had earned the status of the Fifth Estate. The printing presses at Clara Seekamp’s home might be giving voice to the people, but Sarah Hanmer’s business was providing the stage for action as well as filling the war chest.
Apart from natural justice, there was another reason to give financial succour to those arbitrarily fingered for the Eureka Hotel fire. McIntyre’s twenty-six-year-old wife, Christina, was heavily pregnant with their second child. This fact has never before been revealed, yet it is an important piece of evidence in that McIntyre’s family situation would have been germane to the communal outrage over his arrest. It was common practice—almost a point of honour—for diggers to rally around the impoverished wife of a fellow miner after he was gaoled for being unlicensed.
Andrew McIntyre and Christina (née Winton) arrived in Victoria from their native Scotland on the Success in 1852. Their first child, James, was born at sea. By October 1854, Christina was seven months pregnant with their son Thomas, who would be born on 15 February. With her twenty-five-year-old husband committed for trial on 6 November in Geelong, Christina was left alone with her troubles. To add insult to injury, many people believed Andrew McIntyre was one of the few present at the riot who was actually trying to save the hotel property and its inhabitants. Even Assistant Commissioner Amos, who was stationed at Eureka and knew its diggers better than anyone, testified in McIntyre’s defence.
Thomas Kennedy, who spoke at the monster meeting, was himself married with four children. And John ‘Yorkey’ Westoby, tried along with McIntyre and Fletcher, would be married to his sweetheart Margaret Stewart in 1855. Thomas Fletcher, twenty-five, was a single man, but he was intimately connected with the social and commercial world of Ballarat. By late 1854, Fletcher had, with Charles and George Evans, established the Criterion Printing Office located opposite the Adelphi Theatre. As well as printing all Sarah Hanmer’s playbills, the Criterion was also responsible for producing the posters for the monster meetings on Bakery Hill. Significantly, these posters rallied together the diggers, storekeepers and inhabitants of Ballarat generally. We, the people.
Fletcher, wrote Charles Evans in his diary, is about the last man I should have thought likely to take part in such a proceeding and besides this I knew from several circumstances that he was like myself nothing more than a passive spectator. The arbitrary nature of the arrests left the thousands of bystanders with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god shudder.
The Eureka population was starting to coalesce around its sense of grievance and Sarah Hanmer had the capital, resources and heart to mobilise the community. Christina McIntyre reaped the advantage of this unwritten social contract in a way that Catherine Bentley, who was also pregnant with a toddler, and now homeless to boot, would not. Catherine had, according to popular assumption, crossed the line to the dark side: to bureaucratic corruption and its attendent privileges. In the moral economy of gold seeking, this would not do. It was acceptable to get rich through hard work and luck, but not through graft and influence.
At the Adelphi, Sarah hung out her star-spangled flag for the disenfranchised miners. Her benefit for the Diggers Defence Fund was a corker. The event was of literally great benefit to the fund, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER, Mrs Hanmer’s liberality and characteristic style of acting in the piece of the evening (The Stranger) which she had made her own, were fully appreciated.4 On a hot and sultry night, the same night that reinforcements from the 40th Regiment rolled into town, Sarah and her troupe played to a respectable and crowded house. Charles Evans was present and noted the animating effect the event had on the community. Mrs Hanmer, Charles wrote,
gave up her theatre for their benefit and The Stranger was performed to a crowded house, and in fact throughout the diggings there seemed to be but one feeling, a warm sympathy for Fletcher & McIntyre and deep indignation at the conduct of the Authorities.
Sarah’s benefit raised over £70. The success of the event, and no doubt the amount of press it garnered, prompted other theatre managers—Mr Hetherington at the Royal and Mr Clarke at the Queen’s—to quickly follow suit. Sarah Hanmer held several more benefits for the diggers’ cause during November. By the time it was all over, she had contributed more money to the popular rights movement than any other citizen.
If the crew up at the Camp had been on their game instead of worrying over the cut of their trousers, they would have been keeping a close eye on the Adelphi and its high-flying prima donna. Back in August, a seemingly routine event occurred that would have a lasting effect on the future of Ballarat’s power dynamics. Frank Carey, a twenty-four-year-old boarding-house keeper from Orange County, New York, was arrested on a sly-grog charge. Carey was tried at the Ballarat Petty Sessions court on 25 August for selling spirituous liquors without a licence at his Excelsior Boarding House, and fined £50. Nothing unusual there. Then Carey was charged again on 18 September. Rumour had it that Carey had been framed by the roundly detested Police Sergeant Major Robert Milne. For his second offence, Carey received a sentence of six months in the vermin-infested Ballarat lockup.
Now there was outrage. Seventeen hundred people signed a petition praying for executive clemency in the case, on the grounds that there had been no violation in the second instance. The petition was signed by all of the ten boarders at the Excelsior, including Henry Holyoake, Robert Burnett and A. W. Arnold. The petitioners claimed that Carey was an upstanding, law-abiding fellow whose house had never been the scene of any disorderly or riotous conduct whatsoever.5 Why, the only thing out of the ordinary at Mr Carey’s house was his nigger cook. And even that wasn’t so exceptional. Charles and George Evans also employed a white-haired old Aboriginal fellow to prepare their meals
What is noteworthy about the petition, apart from the huge number of signatories, is the fact that it was almost certainly written by a woman—Mary Stevens. Again, this is information that has never before come to light, though it’s not difficult to deduce, since Mary’s careful handwriting tops the list of signatures. But who was Mary Stevens? Both she and A. W. Arnold were employed at the Adelphi Theatre: they were actors, noted for their fine performances in Sarah Hanmer’s productions. Arnold was also a witness to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel, and Robert Burnett, a fellow American working as a barber, has been credited as the man who fired the first shot in the ‘Ballarat War’.6 It’s unclear whether Mary Stevens and the incarcerated Frank Carey were in a romantic relationship when Mary took it upon herself to orchestrate his liberation. If they were, it didn’t last. Frank Carey married nineteen-year-old German-born immigrant Dorette Hahn in 1855. Their only child, Francis, was born in September 1856, by which stage Carey was a fully licensed hotelkeeper.
Any government spy worth his salt would have realised that the Adelphi Hotel had become the primary nucleus of radicalism over the winter of 1854. Digger activists could gripe and moan and rally and plot and plan in the open air, around their shafts or the campfire at night, but rabble-rousing was warmer, drier and less susceptible to pricked ears within the confines of a spacious tent-cum-theatre guarded by a trustworthy collaborator. The Adelphi was a safe house, presided over by Mrs Hanmer, a respectable widow and acclaimed theatrical manager. She provided a refuge for the disaffected, with whose cause she clearly sympathised. After Carey was arrested the second time, Mrs Hanmer gave a benefit to raise funds for his release. While the Jews of Ballarat kvetched and prayed at the Clarendon Hotel (it was there they formed a minyan prior to the erection of the first synagogue in 1861), the Germans drank and caroused at the Wiesenhavern Brothers’ Prince Albert Hotel on Bakery Hill and the Irish centred their activities at Father Smyth’s St Alipius tent church, Mrs Hanmer presented the Americans with a velvet-curtained front. Another of Sarah’s actors, Frank D’Amari, later attested that most of the principal players in bringing justice to Bentley were Americans.7 It was the Americans, he said, who called for Bentley’s lynching.
But here was the crucial rub. The American community of Victoria formed a large and prosperous class of merchants and entrepreneurs. In January 1854, Freeman Cobb, John Murray Peck, John Lamber and James Swanton established the American Telegraph Line of Coaches, later to be known as Cobb and Co. The company ran coaches that linked all the major goldfields with Melbourne and with each other. This transport network was crucial to pastoral and commercial expansion in Victoria. In Melbourne, George Francis Train, Henry Nicholls and others were presiding over prosperous mercantile businesses with links to large international financiers. Train was the major backer of Cobb and Co. as well as the Australian correspondent to the BOSTON GLOBE. A goldfields fracas involving an American citizen, then, was a tricky affair: a delicate balancing act of diplomacy between local affairs and the bigger picture of American influence. And it was for this reason that twenty-one-year-old Mary Stevens’ petition, with its lengthy trail of signatures, went straight to the top of the government’s in-tray.
Chief Commissioner McMahon wrote to Robert Rede on 3 October, enclosing a copy of the petition and requesting immediate clarification from the magistrates as to whether any grounds existed for His Excellency’s clemency. This was definitely not standard operating procedure. Matters became still more peculiar when the American consul in Melbourne, James Tarleton, made representations to Governor Hotham on behalf of the Ballarat boarding-house keeper Carey. He vouched that the Americans at Ballarat were law loving and law abiding citizens.8 On 29 October, Frank Carey’s sentence was remitted. Mrs Hanmer’s players: take a bow. Your encore is yet to come.
Governor Hotham made two deft moves in response to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. With the right hand, he empowered a select committee to investigate the matter, taking evidence from any person who wished to speak up. E. P. S. Sturt was to head it up, fresh from presiding over Catherine McLister’s sexual harassment hearing. With the left hand, Hotham ordered the extra companies of the 12th and 40th regiments to fill the Camp with redcoats. It seemed an ingenious plan. Give the people the chance to vent their collective spleen while making it obvious that Ballarat was now awash with a military presence. Not everyone was convinced, however, that Hotham had Ballarat’s best interests at heart. We ask for bread and we get a stone, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER. We demand some attention be paid to our miserable conditions and get sent an army.9
The committee took evidence at Bath’s Hotel from 2 November to 10 November. The weather was oppressively hot during this week, and hundreds of diggers availed themselves of the opportunity to sit for a while in the lounge bar and tell the commissioners about what ailed them. Women gave evidence too, including Mrs Joanna Bath, though their testimony didn’t make it into the published report that was tabled in parliament on 21 November. The commissioners’ job was to establish whether there were any grounds for supposing that improper motives influenced the magistrates in their exoneration of James Bentley for Scobie’s murder, and also whether the conduct of the officers of the Camp generally had been such as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population. When the enquiry was completed, the answers were no and yes. This would not be popular news.
But there was a concession. Both James and Catherine Bentley, along with their servants Hance and Farrell, had been rearrested in the middle of October and sent to Melbourne for trial. And now, as another sop to the offended diggers, John D’Ewes and Robert Milne were relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of Ballarat. Many believed the wrong men had copped it. This affair will make Ballarat too hot for Mr Johnstone in a short time, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER; the sooner he is shifted the better.10 James Johnston continued to receive threats to his life and liberty after the commission cleared him. (Maggie’s diary reveals nothing of the pressure-cooker tensions of November.) Robert Rede and Gordon Evans were also absolved of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, John D’Ewes refused to go quietly. He protested his honesty and integrity until the last, all the while claiming that every other senior official in the Camp was nothing more than a money-grubbing land speculator tricked out in brass buttons and government-issue bayonets.
At least D’Ewes no longer had to fret about his accommodation. That was left to those remaining in Camp. The second half of Hotham’s plan was about as efficacious as the first. The arrival of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little fish into an already overpacked tin. Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses now poured in on us, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER, the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence. Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.11 The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas’s new plan of defence, meant that soldiers and police were on twenty-four-hour patrols. From the outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.
On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military. Without this skirmish, the BALLARAT TIMES reported facetiously, we should have little to talk about. The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the affair had been quickly hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES. He complained of the conditions endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. (This means the letter’s author arrived with either the 40th Regiment on 24 October or the 12th on 28 October.) His detachment was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily. They were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding as if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers. With the inadequate remuneration of only two shillings a day, the soldier is unjustly dealt with, complained the man.12 Who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers’ cause? The military leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might extend some brotherly love? His fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion of their own?
While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised. A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together, noted the GEELONG ADVERTISER of the particular mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat. On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would be the attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers. Around the speakers platform were placed English, Scots, Irish, French and United States national flags. A German band played. Henry Holyoake, Thomas Kennedy and George Black spoke for over four hours. The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn. American consul James Tarleton was in town, at the behest of Ballarat’s American community, who put on an American dinner in his honour at the Adelphi. Tarleton asked to address the meeting about the Carey affair. This odd gesture was, perhaps, a pre-emptive move to ward off a growing insinuation of favouritism towards the Americans, especially after charges of arson were dropped against young Yankee digger Albert Hurd, who had also been arrested after the Eureka Hotel fire. It was rumoured that Hurd’s release was influenced by back-room deals that were half American, half Masonic.13
The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for the events that would now tumble like dominoes towards their catastrophic resolution.
On 11 November 1854, a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier Alpheus Boynton was there and noted in his diary the talented men who put down picks and pans and took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men. The Ballarat Reform League united the proto-societies that had been popping up over the previous weeks, an Irish union here, a German bund there.
The reform league elected its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of the Catholic teacher Anastasia, was appointed as chairman. Humffray, Kennedy and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting. They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that committed to ink the chief grievances and goals of the league. A manifesto of democratic principles, its primary tenets were: free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of parliament; and fixed parliamentary terms. Thus the aim of moral rights for the disenfranchised goldfields population (dignity, equity, justice) was codified into a standard template of Chartist-inspired political rights.
The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely touted as the first formal step on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter’ was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant historical documents. Yet oddly enough, the BALLARAT TIMES makes only brief—if bombastic—mention of this monster meeting. It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country, wrote Henry Seekamp, that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus of Australian Independence. A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.
The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the league that day were not, of course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat’s only newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:
However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the free subjects of a great nation.
Not ‘request’. Not ‘humbly pray’. Demand. And it is not Kennedy, not Black, not Holyoake, Humffray, nor Vern who committed their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous, but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity. Others had publicly spoken of cleaning out but none had gone so far as lopping off. The irony of the gender inversion was not lost on Ellen herself. Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist on the above demands? she provoked. And if refused, let us demand them of England.
Ellen’s indictment of masculine courage and foresight was printed on 18 November, the first edition of the TIMES to be published after the Bakery Hill monster meeting. It is likely that this edition was in fact edited and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her editorial influence to propel Ellen’s equally radical departure from feminine rectitude into the public eye. When Clara’s common-law husband was subsequently tried for sedition, the editions in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and 2 December. Henry Seekamp argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management of the paper at that time. Later scholars have speculated that John Manning, a teacher who worked at St Alipius with Anastasia Hayes, or George Dunmore Lang, the embezzling bank manager, may have been the true authors of the seditious articles. It is more probable that the highly literate and intelligent Clara had her finger on the pulse and the pen of the newspaper that was issued from her house. As we shall see, it was widely acknowledged that she took over editing the paper following Henry Seekamp’s arrest in early December.
Clara and Ellen may have had good reason to feel hostile towards their fellow freedom fighters. The Ballarat Reform League was constituted as a membership organisation, with a one-shilling entrance fee and a sixpence per week subscription. Significantly, the membership was to be gender exclusive. It’s not clear exactly who wrote the association’s rules, but the effect was to turn Ellen’s people into Boynton’s men. This is in line with the trajectory of British Chartism that saw the early goals of political equality sacrificed to a trade union model based on a male head of household supporting a dependent wife. It was a retrograde move that the unbiddable women of Ballarat strenuously resisted.
Raffaello Carboni alerts us to this drama playing out in the wings of Bakery Hill’s centre stage in one of his typically obtuse asides: Bakery reformers leagued together on its hill [No admission for the ladies at present]. Why would Carboni specifically, if parenthetically, note the omission of women from the Ballarat Reform League’s membership? In 1854, would we not assume that women were to be excluded from the formal body politic? And what to make of the qualifying phrase at present? So for now women cannot get a 2s ticket to the league, but, Carboni seems to imply, it is not out of the question that they will be eligible in the future.
Is this because certain women were requesting, maybe even demanding, inclusion? Was it only a matter of time before women would wear down the formalities of political convention and find themselves on an equal footing with their male co-conspirators? They were, after all, writing op-eds, topping subscription lists, starting businesses, buying property, financially supporting families, working beside their husbands on the fields, owning shares in mining ventures, speaking their minds freely, making ample use of the judicial system to assert their sovereign rights, throwing off the mantle of restrictive clothing, drinking, fornicating and otherwise behaving like perfect men.
It is the line of Latin that directly follows Carboni’s reference to ‘the ladies’ that gives the crucial clue: Durum sed levius fit patientia. The reference is from Horace, Odes 1.24. The entire line is: Durum: Sed levius fit patientia/Quicquid corrigere est nefas. ‘It is hard: but whatever is impossible to set right, becomes lighter by endurance.’14
Which ladies fought for, lost and were forced to ‘endure’ their struggle for political inclusion? Ellen Young? Anastasia Hayes, who later took on the Catholic Church over the issue of fair wages? Mrs Rowlands, who attended the monster meetings? Sarah Hanmer, who was contributing more coin to the Diggers Defence Fund than anyone else in Ballarat? Jane Cuming, who named her daughter Martineau after the renowned liberal philosopher and feminist? Thomas Kennedy’s wife? Christina McIntyre, whose wrongfully accused husband was up on charges of arson? Fanny Smith, who in 1856 would agitate for universal municipal representation on behalf of myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat?15 Dorette Welge and Ellen Flemming, who in 1855 would marry Adolph Wiesenhavern and William McCrae, proprietors of the Prince Albert and Star hotels, where members of the reform league held their meetings? The wives of other nonconformist British and European radicals who had, in partnership with their husbands, travelled to Victoria to seek political refuge from the sort of conservative atavism that that would see the French revolutionary universality of liberté, égalité, fraternité reduced to the chauvinist dogma of the Paris Commune?16
It is clear that something more than manhood suffrage was envisioned by at least a vocal minority of goldfields possum-stirrers. During the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion of August 1853, William Dexter took the stage to argue for women having votes as well as men. It was William’s wife, Caroline, who would bring her bloomer costume and lectures on women’s rights to Australia in January 1855. William Howitt, who witnessed William Dexter’s inflammatory speech, dismissed the French-educated man’s cosmopolitan doctrines as the peculiarly revolting cant of ultra-republicans, those maniacs of revolution.17 But Dexter was no raving lunatic. He would stand for the Victorian Parliament on a platform of universal suffrage in the elections of 1856, with his wife in campaign mode.
So too would a young man named Thomas Loader, who stood against John Basson Humffray in the 1856 elections for the seat of North Grant, covering East Ballarat and the Eureka Lead. Loader styled himself as a Liberal Australian Reformer and pledged, if elected, to introduce such reforms as are peculiarly requisite in Australia, arranged upon liberal and progressive principles. Loader’s policies included rights of women but he hedged his bets about suffrage.18 He was trounced anyway.
But such concerted public action by women, or on behalf of women by sympathetic men, constituted what the historian June Philipp has called ‘both a plea and a threat’. Raising the spectre of women’s political enfranchisement—their constitutional entitlement to civic rights, their elevation in status from moral compass to helmsman—cast doubt on the power and status of deeply entrenched norms of social and political behaviour. This was truly revolutionary, and the Australian people would have to wait another forty-eight years before the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902 made their nation the most democratic in the world. The internationally unprecedented legislation gave (white) women full political equality with men: the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament. America would not pass the constitutional amendment that ensured these liberties until 1920 and British women would not enjoy such rights until 1928. Aboriginal women (and men) would not be fully enfranchised until the 1960s.
Catherine Bentley was one woman who was definitely not clamouring for membership of the Ballarat Reform League in mid-November. The only acceptance she needed was from a jury of her peers. On 19 October, Catherine had been arrested after her former employee, Thomas Mooney, turned Queen’s evidence and claimed the reward of £300 for information leading to a conviction in the Scobie murder. On 1 November Catherine was transported to Melbourne, where her husband had been apprehended.
Not everyone was thrilled by this development. There were those who, like Ellen Young, believed that the Bentleys were being unduly scapegoated for wider feelings of envy, hatred and malice towards the corrupt Camp officials and those they winked at. Certain merchants, storekeepers, diggers and residents of Ballarat and Melbourne got up petitions to proclaim James Bentley’s good character and innocence of any crime. One of the jurors at the original inquest signed a petition to the effect that there has been heaped on Bentley’s head a greater amount of odium than he at all deserves.19
But none of this could avert a show trial to demonstrate the Crown’s impartiality. Catherine would have to take her starring role in the cast. Even so, a journalist for the ARGUS reported with alarm that when Catherine was conveyed by steamer from Geelong Prison to Melbourne to stand her trial, she was handcuffed all the way. Her keeper, Detective Cummings, refused even to allow her to get dinner regardless of the fact that she was by now seven months pregnant with her second child. Mrs Bentley has been moving in a respectable line of life, chided the journalist. She is not convicted of any offence, and it is not likely that she will be. The only cause to justify such harsh treatment and cowardly brutality, argued the journalist, was the supposition that it was in accordance with the public feeling to heap insults on a defenceless woman. Cummings’ behaviour was an insult to the community, especially as the public sentiment aroused by the case evinced not so much a virulent hatred of the alleged offenders as a mark that the people of the colony will not stand for the abuse of power and privilege by judicial authorities.20 Others similarly came forward to declare that ‘the Bentley affair’ was simply the last straw in a long line of baleful examples of disregard for the rule of law by the Ballarat authorities.
It was Justice Redmond Barry who would preside over this morality play. On 20 November there was a solar eclipse. Commentators attributed the freakishly mercurial weather—hot one minute, storms the next—to this astrological phenomenon. The packed public gallery at the Supreme Court didn’t need to look into the sun to be dazzled by the strange alignment of events. Only two days before, Ann Quin had been arrested in Melbourne in connection with the Bank of Victoria robbery, Eliza Smith was brought in for all those stolen notes stuffed into her stockings and now here was another of Ballarat’s daughters in the dock. And that night, another Irish Protestant Catherine, the internationally acclaimed chanteuse Catherine Hayes, would make her final appearance at the Queen’s Theatre just down the road from the courts. The lady was as rapturously encored as ever, reported the ARGUS, greeted with a shower of bouquets and with volleys of cheers and other manifestations of delight from the audience.21 Catherine Hayes was reputed to have cleared over £10,000 from her two-month tour of Sydney, Melbourne and the diggings. The only volley Catherine Bentley would receive was of jeers as she entered the court.
Three hundred diggers came to Melbourne for the Bentleys’ trial, but it proved anti-climactic. The most scintillating drama occurred when Catherine was given a chair during her cross-examination in order to rest her swollen body. Dr Carr, who was there to give evidence, assessed the exhausted woman’s condition and Justice Barry called an adjournment for Catherine to have proper attention from the doctor. (No newspaper reported that she was pregnant.) Apart from that, there were no shocks, scandals or bombshells to entertain the crowds. The circumstantial evidence was piled up against the Bentleys. The best Richard Ireland could do for the defence was to ask Mary Ann Welch whether she had any ill feeling towards Mrs Bentley that might have motivated her testimony. No, said Mary Ann. In the end, Ireland could only plead that his clients had already suffered enough in losing all their property and being held up to public execration. And he subtly pointed out that, if anything, the bulk of the evidence was ranged against Catherine Bentley. If found guilty of this most serious charge, Ireland told the jury, they must expiate this accidental calamity by death, involving too the life of a woman.
Would Catherine Bentley be the first woman to hang in Victoria? Attorney General Stawell had no qualms about such an outcome. Though the reasonable man might be unwilling to believe that a woman had gone out to commit murder, Stawell thundered, the jury should lay aside all such considerations…She also seems to have rejoiced as much as anyone at the way in which the men were got rid of.22
Justice Barry addressed the jury for over an hour. The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes. At 9pm on Saturday evening, as Catherine Hayes was singing her last aria, the foreman delivered the verdict. James Bentley, Farrell and Hance, guilty of manslaughter. Catherine Bentley, not guilty. (Scot free was how Carboni put it.) On Monday, as the sun slipped behind the moon, the men were sentenced to three years’ hard labour on the roads. Catherine was released to her own version of the retributive wilderness. She would not swing, but in February she would give birth alone, to her baby Louisa. Catherine was a mother of two with no lawful means of support, and by Christmas 1855, she would be brought up on charges of illegally selling alcohol from her Maryborough refreshment tent. What a spectacular fall: from licensed victualler and owner of the largest building on the most prosperous goldfield in the world to sly grogger at an outlying diggings. The Bentley family’s brief flirtation with the world of chandeliers and champagne would never be reprised. It was all downhill from here.
It was a busy week for Redmond Barry and Richard Ireland. On the same day that Bentley and his co-convicted were sentenced, Thomas Fletcher, Andrew McIntyre and John Westoby had their hour upon the stage. It was another show trial of sorts. The government desperately needed to save face after the Eureka Hotel riot. In the mind of the diggers’ leadership, the conviction of James Bentley justified the incendiary action of the mob. The grievances at Ballarat had quickly gone from begging letters about poverty and iniquitous taxation to calls for self-government and even secession from the Crown. The ARGUS had reported Thomas Kennedy as saying in his Bakery Hill address that if the diggers did not get justice, they would Go to the Queen of England, a simple-minded mother, far away from these her children, and ask if the child suck too long it will not injure both one and the other.23 (Kennedy knew what an over-sucked mother looked like: he had four small children and an enervated wife in his own tent.)
Hotham did not want to be responsible for any premature weaning of the infant colony. But neither could he close the nursery door on the screaming baby. The howls of protest were now coming from all quarters. Even that doyenne of imperial respectability, Caroline Chisholm, was weighing in on political affairs. Mrs Chisholm had toured the diggings in November. On her return to Melbourne she made a lengthy speech to a large crowd on 17 November, the eve of the Bentley trial. She represented the miners as a fine body of men, the vast majority of whom emphatically possessed heads on their shoulders, not just hands for digging. Echoing Ellen Young, Mrs Chisholm advocated unlocking the lands to encourage more wives and families to the goldfields, and warned: If something is not done to remove the difficulties under which these men are placed, the consequences will be terribly felt.24 Her lengthy speech was reprinted verbatim in the Melbourne papers.
Hotham was now eager to claw back some control of the good ship Victoria, which was veering dangerously off course. Added to the public pressure was the fact that the military reinforcement of Ballarat was costing him a fortune, precisely when London was looking for him to balance the budget: Cobb and Co. and George Francis Train alone had charged thousands of pounds to transport the extra troops to Ballarat.
In the trial of McIntyre, Fletcher and Westoby, the jury deliberated for over five hours. A defence of provocation had been mounted, citing the wrongful conduct of the Ballarat officials; Mr Justice Barry rejected it. Was it really any surprise when all three accused were found guilty of assembling together unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously? But the jury added a rider to the verdict: if the government at Ballarat had done its duty properly, the jury would never have had to perform the painful duty it had just been called upon to execute. The hushed courtroom exploded in cheering. But Barry was unmoved. He expressed particular disgust with respect to the horses that had been incinerated in the hotel blaze and sentenced Andrew McIntyre to three months in Melbourne Gaol, Fletcher to four and Westoby to six. Richard Ireland had seen six clients incarcerated in the space of two days. He would get the chance to redeem himself sooner than he knew.
When news reached the diggings that the Ballarat Three had been convicted, the executive of the reform league met to decide how to respond. Black and Kennedy were dispatched to Melbourne, where they met up with Humffray and made an appointment to see the governor himself. This delegation would present the concerns of the Ballarat diggers directly, including a copy of the Diggers Charter. It is a measure of the small-town intimacy of the colony, despite its recent population explosion, that the men could get an audience with His Excellency, the colonial secretary and the attorney general on Monday 27 November. (Whether Lady Hotham was party to the discussions the notaries did not record.) It was the same familiarity that had inspired Ellen Young to write to Hotham back in September, offering him her detailed ideas for an alternative licensing system.25 It was also the source of her resentment when Hotham reneged on his promise to listen to the people. Ellen’s fury is not a sign of womanly temper but a reaction to the tantalising proximity of colonial power: it was personal.
Nor did Black, Kennedy and Humffray come to the great man shaking at the knees; in fact, Hotham might have been a darned sight more amenable if they had fawned a little more. Instead, the reform league’s representatives followed Ellen Young’s lead and presented Hotham with their demands. Black demanded that Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby be released. Hotham bristled. He reminded the delegation that the Americans of Ballarat had successfully petitioned him for executive clemency in Carey’s case. Then: I must take my stand on the word ‘demand’, said a defensive Hotham. I am sorry for it, but that is the position you place me in.
The delegation did not apologise, but tried another tack. Kennedy implored Hotham to act on the diggers’ grievances before blood was spilt. Black played to one of Hotham’s pet concerns: bringing women to the diggings. I am desired by the married men of Ballarat to make a request of your Excellency, Black began.
It is this—that every possible facility may be afforded by your Excellency to enable them to settle and have their wives and families there. They are all anxious to settle upon the land, but at present the difficulties of their so doing are too great, and I am requested to bring that subject especially before your Excellency’s notice.
Hotham softened. That is a point which presses very much, he conceded. But he could not give an answer to take back to the married men of Ballarat, except to say that he agreed in the necessity of some provisions being made.
Ten days earlier Hotham had announced a commission of enquiry into the administration of the goldfields. It was to this decree that he now returned.
Tell the Diggers from me and tell them carefully that this Commission will enquire into everything and every body, high and low, rich and poor, and you have only to come forward and state your grievances, and, in what relates to me they shall be redressed. I can say no more, we are all in a false position altogether.26
As the delegates left with pockets full of empty promises, how could they fail to notice that Hotham was in a false position in a mansion in leafy Toorak, while they returned to threadbare tents on a dusty goldfield.
The road to and from Ballarat was taking a beating in those last weeks of November. There were all the witnesses summoned to the two trials: Mary Ann and Barnard Welch, Dr Carr, the turncoat Mooney, Agnes Sinclair the nursemaid, and a slew of police happy for a night or two away from the gloom and tension at the Camp. There was the reform league’s deputation, Diggers Charter in hand. There were the five hundred men and five hundred women and children still arriving each week to try their luck on the Ballarat goldfields. There was another batch of one hundred and fifty military reinforcements from the 40th Regiment sent to the Camp on 27 November, the same day Hotham took tea with the delegates.
And there were the Camp’s wives and families, on the move again. Back in October, after the hotel riot, the women had been sent from Camp for their own safety. After Captain Thomas’s defence plan, they returned. Following the conviction of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby, it was deemed prudent they leave again.
Maggie Johnston chose this occasion to resume her diary entries.
November 22 Wednesday
Went to Buninyong to the Allens. Mrs Lane and I—our first flight from camp.
November 23 Thursday
Spent an anxious day. Nothing happened to our beloveds.
November 24 Friday
Passed much in the same way. Still anxious. Had a letter from dear Jamie.
November 25 Saturday
My dearie came for us and we got safely back. Found everything alright.
November 26 Sunday
Was poorly, in bed. Dear Jamie went to church alone.
November 27 Monday to December 2 Saturday
Every day this week most anxious as the diggers threatened all sorts of horrid things. All the ladies out of camp—out myself.
Elizabeth Massey was at the Queen’s Theatre to see Catherine Hayes’ final performance. She concurs that the singer was indeed showered with nuggets, sovereigns and bouquets; it was said Hayes took £800 that night. But the festivities were rudely interrupted.
Our gaieties were rather suddenly put a stop to by our friends’ anxiety to return home in consequence of the frightful and exaggerated reports which were daily arriving in rapid succession from the country, of an outbreak at Ballarat.
That night, a rumour spread that the Camp had been burnt down. Another report said the whole 40th Regiment was going up. The gossip was exaggerated, but a deployment was certainly on the move. They would first sail to Geelong, gather reinforcements and head up to Ballarat from there. Mrs Massey and her friends went to see off the troops. At the docks, she expected to find doleful faces, but was flabbergasted at the celebratory atmosphere.
I think I never saw a more joyous party. They reminded me of happy schoolboys bound for some party of pleasure, yet kept in unwilling restraint by the eye of the master…many were bestriding the guns, and otherwise testifying their satisfaction at the prospect of a fight.
Happy schoolboys. Unwilling restraint. The prospect of a fight.
Arriving at the barracks, Mrs Massey found an altogether different scene.
The women and children, who had turned out to see the departure of their husbands and fathers, were weeping and bewailing their sad lot in not being allowed to follow them, and kind people were doing their best to console, seemingly to no purpose, these disconsolate ones.
The only solace, surmised Mrs Massey, was that the regimental wives didn’t have poverty to bear as well as loneliness. But for some in the embrace of Her Majesty’s service, there would never be compensation for the eternal grief about to descend.
Thursday 28 November was Thanksgiving. Turkey Day. Always keen to celebrate their nation’s holidays, the American community on the diggings prepared to feast. Expat Yankees drank bourbon and sang patriotic songs, in each other’s tents or at a grand ball. A lavish dinner was staged at Brandt and Hirschler’s Victoria Hotel at Red Hill. The proprietors had gone the whole hog, providing a perfect legion of delicacies for the seventy men who dined from 8pm to 2am.27 A band played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘La Marseillaise’. James Tarleton accepted an invitation to attend. So did Robert Rede, who welcomed the occasion to cement good relations with Ballarat’s most prominent Americans.
Popular discontent was at its apex. In every quarter—the pub, the field, the store, the campfire, the theatre, the church—people stopped to discuss the theory of political relationships, as the GEELONG ADVERTISER put it. Thomas Pierson was more specific. At the daily stump meetings being held, people speak openly in unmeasured terms against that old scamp the Governor and nearly all in office. [They] urge people to declare Independence. One speaker Pierson heard said if all the people would just assert their rights and claim a Republican Government, then we could stand here as Proud as any of the sons of America. The agitators, noted Pierson, seem determined to make Australia free.
To Rede and his fellow upholders of Australia’s peculiar ancien régime of squattocracy and imperial monarchy, such talk did not come cheap. Another monster meeting at Bakery Hill had been placarded for tomorrow, the 29th, and it was rumoured that a formal declaration of independence would be made. On the goldfields, Yankee-style freedom signalled frontier lawlessness: Lynch Law, the law of the bowie knife.
A recent incident in Ballarat had confirmed what a Yankee justice system might look like. In August, American digger Robert Clarke was playing cards at the Albion Hotel with three cronies. They were playing for ‘nobblers’ (shots of spirits). Clarke refused to follow suit in one trick, causing a dispute with a digger called Van Winkler, who accused Clarke of cheating. Clarke backed down, but in the following hand threatened to blow out the brains of any man who disrupted the play. Van Winkler told Clarke that a man that sat down to play on his friends and could not play without cheating was no man at all. Clarke pulled out his pistol and fired. The bullet missed Van Winkler, whistled through a canvas wall and killed Kosman Berand, who was asleep in a cot. Mrs O’Kell, the landlady, whipped out her own pistol, while the diggers and musicians in the hotel wrestled Clarke to the ground.
On 28 October, Clarke was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years on the road.28 If it had happened on the American frontier, Clarke would have wiped the blood from the cards and continued his hand as the musicians picked up the tune and Berand was dragged out to the pigs. The American frontier was Robert Rede’s idea of hell.
Lone ranger vigilance committees were one thing, but republican yearnings were quite another. There had always been a concern among some British bystanders at how quickly Victoria was becoming Americanized. It was a love–hate relationship. In George Francis Train’s assessment, the colonial government admired the indomitable energy, entrepreneurial ingenuity, can-do spirit and brash confidence of the American immigrants, but was less comfortable with the fact that Americans had no truck with ‘the word’. The American disrespect for constituted authority seemed to be rubbing off on the digging body as a whole, especially as the authorities did nothing to win back the people’s regard. After the Eureka Hotel blaze, George Francis Train wrote in his BOSTON GLOBE column, Give the colonists their own way, and they will remain loyal—cross their path and they will have a flag of their own.
George Francis Train predicted an inexorable flourishing of republican sentiment in the months ahead, a colonial rite of passage that he expressed in particularly gendered terms:
Grant all the diggers ask, and they will not be satisfied. Abolish the licence fee, unlock the lands, give them universal suffrage, retrench government expenses, and it will not save the ultimate independence of the colony…Victoria’s history is quickly written. The girl is hardly marriageable, yet her freedom is close at hand.
Witnesses revealed that there had been speakers at the Eureka Hotel riot urging the people to drive off all the Government officers, send the Government home and to declare their Independence, as Thomas Pierson recorded after he left the fracas. W. H. Foster, a civil servant on the diggings and a cousin of Charles La Trobe, wrote home in a letter to his parents in December 1854 that the licence tax issue was simply a convenient smokescreen for the Americans who were here in great numbers…with a view to institute independence.29 Hotham himself admitted to Sir George Grey that Victoria possesses wealth, strength and competency to hold its position unaided by the Mother Country.30 Are we to run the risk of the colony walking alone? he asked. Fewer than eighty years had passed since the American Revolution. In collective memory, the thought of colonists defeating redcoats was anything but ancient history.
Rede knew that his attendance at the Americans’ Thanksgiving dinner was politic to say the least. He needed to curtail, not strengthen, the influence of the Americans over Ballarat’s public culture. But he also needed to be respectful of Yankee traditions and of their consul, James Tarleton. James and his wife had lived with George Francis and Winnie Davis Train when they first arrived in Melbourne. Train was Melbourne’s leading merchant and transport magnate, and a foreign correspondent. It required an adroit act of diplomacy to negotiate this thorny terrain.
Rede’s first act—although obeisance was not his favourite pastime—was to bow graciously to Tarleton, who was, after all, the guest of honour. Tarleton, for his part, used the occasion to proclaim the loyalty of the Americans to the laws of their adopted land. He urged his countrymen to refrain from entering into the present agitations. Such entreaties were heartily welcomed by the crowd, who represented the upper echelons of Ballarat society, men like Dr Charles Kenworthy and Dr William Otway, who both ran successful medical practices in town and on the diggings. Following Hotham’s instructions, Rede had sent government spies onto the diggings. One spy had delivered him a long list of names of people who had pledged themselves to attack the camp and drive the officials off the Gold Field.31 One of the spies was said to be Dr Kenworthy.32 There was a reason this dinner was being held at Brandt and Hirschler’s, and not at the Adelphi.
If Rede and Kenworthy were planning a little reconnoitre over whiskey and rye, their liaison was cut short. During the toasts, Rede was suddenly called away. There had been a skirmish on the Melbourne Road and troops from the Camp were being dispatched to respond.
A company of the 12th Regiment was marching into town, part of Hotham’s next wave of fortification for the Camp. This particular small contingent was essentially a guard detail for several wagons full of ammunition and baggage: the real manpower would come later that night, with the arrival of the regimental units waved off by Mrs Massey. By the first day of summer, there would be a total of 546 officers and soldiers stationed at Ballarat, almost five times more than had been on the ground over winter.
As the ammunition-bearing battalion crossed Eureka, it was ambushed by a group of diggers lurking in the shadows. Incoming soldiers had become used to hostile welcoming committees of men, women and children hooting, jeering and throwing stones at them as they hup-two’d their way to the Camp. But this time a violent scuffle broke out in which the wagons were overturned, a drummer boy was shot in the thigh, an old American carrier was severely injured and several horses were wounded. Onlookers predicted fatalities. Resident Commissioner Robert Rede never got the chance to make his toast to the Queen. He left the Americans to their yankee doodle dandying, not quite convinced that Tarleton’s righteous words would be mirrored in noble action.
While the Americans gave thanks and Rede tried to unpick the tangled web of Ballarat’s allegiances, preparations were being made on the Flat for another monster meeting. Relations between the Camp and the diggers had broken down completely after the reform league’s unsuccessful attempt to intercede on behalf of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby. Some diggers had started to burn their licences as a symbolic protest against the constituted authorities. Tent and store robberies were now occurring nightly. Horse stealing had become so common that horses without stabling were considered useless. A fierce dog was worth a king’s ransom. Security measures were directed exclusively towards the Camp, and the police were now vastly outnumbered by the military, further eroding any skerrick of prestige they may have enjoyed with the community.
Scandalous anecdotes were flying every which way, gossip spinning out after every new or imagined bunfight or scuffle. The second Ballarat revolution is in everyone’s mouth, wrote the ARGUS on the morning on 29 November. Rumour with her many tongues is blabbing all sorts of stories. The gold commissioner had been taken hostage. The Camp was burned to the ground. The fifteen-year-old drummer boy had been killed in the ambush of the 12th Regiment. Fletcher had thoroughly broken down and was a risk of suicide. James Johnston had purchased five town allotments at the Ballarat land sales that week. (This one was true.)
And yet…most miners remained buried down their holes, trapped in the daily rigour of digging. There had been some handsome finds on Eureka and the Gravel Pits these past weeks. There was not a single salary man outside the Camp, but thousands of little mouths to feed. All was work.
Bakery Hill would once again be the venue for the next monster meeting, placarded for 29 November at midday. (Bakery Hill is obtaining creditable notoriety as the rallying ground for Australian freedom, wrote the TIMES.33) Ten thousand people downed tools, shut up stores, gathered up children and headed towards Bakery Hill. It was a hot day, with clouds of dust swirling in the gusty wind. In Victoria, you know when a change is about to come. The low clouds build. The air temperature can roast chickens. You take the washing off the line before the sou’westerly front rips through. You arrive at your destination with one eye on the main game, one hand on your hat and an ear out for the roar of wildfire.
The meeting brought the usual catalogue of goldfields public protest: lengthy speeches, heartfelt resolutions—one of which was that the reform league would meet at the Adelphi Theatre at 2pm on Sunday 3 December to elect a central committee—fiery threats, troopers circling on horseback and the steady sale of sly grog on the fringes of the crowd. But three wholly new things happened on 29 November.
The first was that the next morning’s papers referred to those present as the rebels.34
The second was that the diggers lined up to throw their licences upon a bonfire—an act of communal defiance of the law. The Ballarat Reform League had voted by a majority of three that its members should burn their mining and storekeeping licences. When committing their licences to the flames, the diggers swore to defend any unlicensed digger from arrest, with armed force if necessary. Those miners who did not become members of the reform league could not expect the same protection. Thus the Ballarat diggings became a closed shop.
The third was that a flag was hoisted. Not a national flag, but a purpose-made flag, a flag the GEELONG ADVERTISER dubbed the Australian flag.35 This was the only flag hoisted that day.
This is the flag that we now know as the Eureka Flag. But on 29 November it was briefly raised not at Eureka but above the crowd at Bakery Hill. Its purpose was to attract attention: like the band that roamed the diggings playing ‘La Marseillaise’, it was an attempt to charm democratic tempers away from their toil, rallying them on a cloud of righteous anger towards Bakery Hill.36
The flag they called the Australian Flag took its design inspiration from the one thing that united each and every resident of Ballarat: the constellation of the Southern Cross. Those five bright stars in the shape of a kite were the first thing that had alerted immigrants to the existential transformation that occurred when they crossed the line into the southern hemisphere. Those five stars connected the paths of travellers from other antipodean colonies long before a constitution federated their political bodies. Those stars were the only firmament for currency lads and lasses, who knew no other heaven. Five shimmering white stars against a clear blue field, hoisted, as Frederick Vern put it, under Australia’s matchless sky.
Raffaello Carboni gave his tribute to the idea behind the flag when he took the stage before fifteen thousand people at Bakery Hill that morning. I called on all my fellow-diggers, he later recalled, irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the ‘Southern Cross’ as the refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth. Carboni was well satisfied with the crowd’s response: The applause was universal. The Ballarat Flat now had a single ensign to rival the huge Union Jack fluttering above the Camp.
Henry Seekamp was also on the spot to witness the hoisting of the new flag on its eighty-foot flagstaff at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 29th. In the issue of the TIMES printed on Sunday 3 December, he (or perhaps Clara, as this is one of the ‘seditious’ editions for which he disclaimed responsibility) wrote:
Its maiden appearance was a fascinating object to behold. There is no flag in Europe, or in the civilised world, half so beautiful and Bakery Hill as being the first place where the Australian ensign was first hoisted will be recorded in the deathless and indelible pages of history. The flag is silk, blue ground with a large silver cross; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural.
Thomas Pierson saw the flag too. He sketched a little replica in his diary, labelling it the flag of the southern hemisphere…made of silk and quite neat. Indeed the design was very different from the flag commercial artist and republican William Dexter designed for the Bendigo miners during the Red Ribbon Rebellion in August 1853. Dexter’s ensign showed a pick, shovel and cradle to represent labour, scales to signal justice, the fasces (a Roman bundle of sticks) to suggest union, and a kangaroo and emu to emote Australia. To Dexter’s mind, this smorgasbord of iconography was the ultimate liberation narrative. On raising it at a Bendigo rally, he made an onslaught on the British flag. ‘What had it done for liberty?’37 Ballarat’s rebel flag, by contrast, was remarkably pure. It said simply, ‘We are here’.
There has always been controversy about the provenance of the ‘Eureka’ flag. The current orthodoxy is that it was designed by Canadian miner Henry (sometimes called Charles) Ross, who then recruited three diggers’ wives to sew a standard measuring 3400 millimetres by 2580 millimetres. Ross was friendly with fellow Canadian Charles Alphonse Doudiet, who has left the clearest pictorial representation of the flag that was unfurled on Bakery Hill that day. Some have speculated that the blue flag with its white cross takes its design lead from the official ensign of Quebec (from where Doudiet, not Ross, hailed). But there is no evidence that Ross designed the flag. There is a clue, however, as to how the Chinese whisper might have started. The original cover of Raffaello Carboni’s 1855 account of the Eureka Stockade bears a sketch of the flag above the words, When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross the bearer was Toronto’s Captain Ross. Elsewhere in the book, Carboni refers to Ross as the bridegroom of the flag, a reference that is probably more literal than is sometimes supposed. Ross was the standard-bearer; he hoisted it up the flagpole.
There is also speculation about who made the flag. The most overt documentary clue is provided by Frederick Vern, who described the flag as a banner made and wrought by English ladies. Carboni later confirmed this version in his 1855 account, quoting Vern directly. Was Vern referring to Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke, the three women now generally credited by oral tradition as the clandestine seamstresses? It is certainly possible, though historian Anne Beggs-Sunter has suggested that the prominence of these names is simply ‘an example of the way oral history becomes fact’ when secondary accounts take descendants’ theories as gospel.38
Beggs-Sunter gives equal weight to what she terms the ‘men’s flag story’, first told by J. W. Wilson in 1885. Wilson quoted a reliable eye-witness, who told him in 1893 that Henry Ross gave the order for the insurgents’ flag to a local tent-and tarpaulin-making firm, Darton and Walker. According to Wilson’s version, Ross gave his order at 11pm on Thursday 23th and the flag was first raised thirty-nine hours later, at 2pm on Saturday the 25th. This flag was made of bunting.
There is another possible explanation of the flag’s genesis, one that draws on many plausible strands of evidence. We know from the report in the ARGUS on 9 November that bills had been posted around the diggings for a meeting of Ballarat’s Irish; the purpose was to raise a subscription for a monster national banner to fly over the once disputed ground of the Eureka. The impetus was apparently the insult directed at Father Smyth in arresting his servant. But by 24 November—the next time a new flag was reported in the papers—the BALLARAT TIMES was advertising fervidly a meeting to be held on Wednesday 29 November at which the Australian Flag shall triumphantly wave, a symbol of Liberty. Forward! People! Forward! There is no suggestion that the Irish flag was ever stitched. But clearly the Seekamps knew that an important standard was being raised.
A Eugene von Guérard sketch, made on the spot in January 1854, gives us a strong intimation of where that flag might have been constructed. Katholisch Kapelle aus den Gravel Pit Lunis 3u Ballarat Januav 1854 is von Guérard’s rendering of Father Smyth’s Catholic church, St Alipius. It shows a large tent, timber-lined with a canvas roof, and beside it the small school hut where Anastasia Hayes was the teacher. Soaring high above the church is a flag. The sepia tones of the sketch don’t show the flag’s colours, but the graphic is clear: a cross on a solid background. The conventional Christian chaplain’s flag is a dark blue flag with a white Latin cross. It is still used today by the chaplain corps in army units around the world. In Ballarat in 1854, Father Smyth would hoist his flag half an hour before mass commenced, to alert his largely Irish Catholic flock to put aside their worldly activities and come together in ritual communion. The flag was taken down when mass commenced.39
Eliza Darcy was a member of that congregation, as was Patrick Howard. They would marry at St Alipius in August 1855. Eliza and Patrick’s twelfth and last child, Alicia, born in 1879, would later tell her granddaughter, Ella Hancock, that it was Patrick who designed the Eureka Flag and that Eliza helped to sew it. Did Patrick Howard, a member of the Ballarat Reform League and a proud Irishman, look up at the mass flag, then cast his gaze further to the sky above—to a constellation that united not only his offended Catholic brethren but the whole aggrieved digging community? Did he simply affix the stars of the Crux Australis to the Latin cross?40
Then there is the question of who really did craft the flag, and how. As the press pre-emptively observed, the diggers’ flag was a monster. Kristin Phillips, the Eureka Flag’s most recent conservator (and the one with the highest level of professional qualification), has argued that it was the construction of the flag that dictated its size. She believes that the seamstresses were not working to a plan; rather the size of the available fabric determined its dimensions. For it was not bunting but ordinary ‘clothing fabric bought off the roll’ and cut ‘economically’ that was used to make the flag: a full piece width, selvedge to selvedge, used in the centre with a half width affixed to the top and the bottom.41 A dark blue ground of plain-weave cotton warp and wool weft. A cream cross of twill-weave cotton warp and wool weft. And five cream-coloured, one hundred per cent wool stars.
Phillips disavows the popular theory that the stars were made out of women’s petticoats. Nineteenth-century petticoats, she assures us, were rarely made of wool. Furthermore, the stars are cut from clean pieces of fabric, without visible seams; grain changes in the stars suggest they were cut, ‘economically’ again, from a single piece of fabric. From a technical point of view, Phillips finds it implausible that such large stars could be taken from a single petticoat. It’s a myth that might have added a touch of sexual allure to the Eureka story, but not one that the material evidence bears out.
Yet size does matter. Where to construct surreptitiously a huge rebel flag on a camping ground like the diggings? There were few places in which a four-metre roll of fabric could be unfurled on the ground, with room around it for a team of seamstresses. The Adelphi Theatre would have been big enough, but Sarah Hanmer was sheltering the activities of the American community, not the Irish. Was the flag sewn in the Catholic church where Anastasia Hayes, the doyenne of the Catholic community, was employed? It was certainly one of the few tents large enough to lay out such an expanse of fabric. And it was already common knowledge that the Irish were making themselves a protest flag.
There is little doubt that it was women who sewed the flag. Kristin Phillips has confirmed that the flag was made using traditional women’s sewing skills: flat felled seams done by hand.42 Val D’Angri, the Ballarat craftswoman employed in 1973 to restore the flag for presentation at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, found original pins in the seams that were a common component of a mid-nineteenth-century woman’s sewing kit. The ‘men’s flag story’, as relayed by J. W. Wilson, is crucially undermined by two factors: the flag is not made of bunting, and it could not have been made in less than forty-eight hours. Kristin Phillips reckons that it would have taken many hands, gathered around the perimeter of the flag, to construct the flag with any haste. (It took Val D’Angri seventy-five hours to hand sew a reproduction flag.)
Anastasia and her compatriots were probably the English ladies that the German Frederick Vern refers to. Vern certainly had no political motivation to attribute the Australian Flag’s origin to women. Yet whether the seamstresses were English is debatable. Did the Hanoverian consider that white women from the British Isles all looked the same? Anastasia Hayes, as we know, was Irish, born in Kilkenny and reared through a famine, although she and Timothy had lived in England prior to emigrating. Their daughter Anastasia was baptised in Stafford in 1850. As the wife of the chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Anastasia Sr was certainly close to the action. Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke, heavily pregnant with her first child in the summer of 1854, was also Irish, but she had arrived in Victoria with her family when she was four years old and her accent may have receded. Anastasia Withers, née Splain, was the only ethnic Englishwoman among the group widely accepted as the flag’s makers. Born in Bristol in 1825, she was transported to Tasmania for the theft of five shawls in 1843. There she married Samuel Withers in 1849 and had two children. The couple was one of the earliest arrivals on the Victorian goldfields. By the time they were digging at Ballarat in November 1854, Anastasia Withers had three children under five and another on the way. There is every reason to think that Eliza Darcy was also part of the team of workers, as her ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter, Ella Hancock, will tell you today.
Between the women who probably came together under cover of darkness to sew the rebel flag, there were at least nine children and two pregnancies. There is no faulting their dedication. Or maybe, if you are going to be up half the night with sleepless infants, you might as well do something that will be recorded in the pages of history.
On the evening of 29 November, Captain Pasley, one of the military commanders now stationed at Ballarat, wrote to Hotham. The meeting at Bakery Hill had passed off very quietly, he reported, with speeches less inflammatory than previous public demonstrations. It is therefore, I think, clearly necessary, Pasley wrote,
that some steps should be taken to bring the matter to a crisis, and to teach those persons (forming, no doubt, the great majority of the mining population) who are not seditiously disposed, that it is in their interest to give practical proofs of their allegiance.43
Such persons, he hoped, would not only discourage the rebellious portion of the community but also actively interfere to prevent their further activities. With the appearance of the Australian Flag, community unrest had suddenly been branded seditious.
It was somewhat disingenuous for Pasley to suggest that the rebels were in the minority. Up to fifteen thousand people had assembled at Bakery Hill that day. By the end of November there were 32,000 people at Ballarat: 23,000 men, 4200 women and 4300 children. Almost half of the total population was prepared to walk off the job and attend a protest meeting. Just imagine if that sort of percentage of citizens—say half of Melbourne’s current population of five million—turned up to any public meeting on climate change, maternity leave, nuclear disarmament, Aboriginal land rights, bank fees, the trains not running on time—anything. It would be political chaos.
Faced with this sort of numerical opposition, the authorities of Ballarat were now itching for the simplicity of a violent collision in order to assert their supremacy. Their power and legitimacy were being questioned daily by everyone from Ellen Young, the BALLARAT TIMES and the conscientiously objecting unlicensed diggers on the outside, to Catherine McLister and the grumbling foot police on the inside. A rebellion would sort the loyal wheat from the mutinous chaff, and the Camp would be the omnipotent threshing machine. The line would be nothing more or less than the law. Which side are you on?
Each man felt something would happen before the day was over. So wrote Alexander Dick on the morning of Thursday 30 November, as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gravel Pits. The heat was intense; the day overcast, windy, foul. The young Scotsman looked down on the usual comings and goings of a busy working goldfield. The noise and clamour. The shouts from holes and the creak of turning windlasses. Tents and flags flapping, children darting about. Shops trading. The workplace and the home fused in a perfect pre-industrial spectacle of manual labour.
And then, a torrent of foot and mounted police suddenly descended from the Camp to the Gravel Pits. A massive licence hunt began, led by James Johnston, on the very morning after so many diggers had burned their licences in the flames of communal resistance. It was a test of the rebellious miners’ pledge to defend the unlicensed among them. It was a demonstration of strength from the Camp to put to rights the power inversion that had followed the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. It was an arm-wrestle to see who, when push came to shove, would gain the upper hand; a mighty rout of deliberately unlicensed diggers by an unprecedented show of force.
There was a tremendous uproar. All the inhabitants of the Gravel Pits scattered among the mounds of earth and tents. Joe! Joe! Joe! The cry went down the line. It was mayhem, as the mounted police began to gallop among the tents. The soldiers made a sweep of the flat, with cavalry on both flanks and in the centre, clearing off all the occupants of claims to the high road beyond the lead, below Bakery Hill. Police fired shots into a crowded area, among tents where women and children were congregated in large numbers.44
The confused crowd scattered like tumbleweeds in the hot wind, seeking shelter in the lee of neighbouring tents. Troopers were dragged down from their horses like mere stuffed effigies of men. Police were pelted with mud, stones and broken bottles. Robert Rede stampeded in and hurriedly mouthed the Riot Act. He had been criticised for not taking such action at the Eureka Hotel riot. Now he read the Act so quickly—with telegraphic speed—that in one journalist’s opinion the consequent proceedings were illegal.45
Elizabeth Rowlands looked on. I was present, she later wrote, when the proclamation was read when the soldiers dropped on their knee and presented guns at us and told the crowd to disperse and my word they did disperse.46 Miners jumped down holes. Women and children melted into tents. A bugle sounded. The military marched down the hill, forming a line on the grass under the southward plateau of the Camp. A very picturesque array, thought Samuel Huyghue, the line of cavalry in their bright red uniforms, their brass buttons flashing in the sunlight, set against the verdure of the grass which had not yet lost its winter hue. Eight men were arrested for riotous behaviour but there were no serious injuries. First honours to the Camp.
No one at the Gravel Pits went back to work that day. As news of the chaos and random firing on the crowd, including turning weapons on women and children, spread to other parts of the field, sympathetic diggers downed tools to seek information and digest rumours. Work is knocked off, wrote one official to Hotham,
and the whole population is talking over events of the morning…The opinions of most disinterested persons here is [the actions of the Camp] are alike unwise and indicative of a wish on the part of the authorities here to hurry on a collision.47
Even upright Martha Clendinning, a self-appointed member of the peace portion of the residents, thought that ordering licence hunts after the Bakery Hill meeting was an incredible act of folly. If James Johnston was going to step up digger hunts, which had already become an almost daily humiliation, and diggers were continuing to burn their licences in solidarity with the cause of freedom from the oppressive goldfields regime, then what were the interested persons to do?
From all directions on the diggings, people started in the direction of Bakery Hill. The Australian Flag was once again flying there. The people turned their eyes to the five shimmering stars, guiding their footsteps towards a just course. This would be an unplacarded meeting—no notice, no agenda, no stage, no prepared speeches. Whatever grievances had caused those assembled to lose faith in the government—hunger, grief, shame, disappointment, harassment, indignity, humiliation, powerlessness—the object now was self-defence. The leaders of Ballarat had shown they would fire upon a civilian crowd. If the people’s call was sticks and stones, the Camp’s response would be lead and steel. This was not a tune to which Australia’s home-grown sons and daughters, or its ambitious immigrants, had ever expected to dance. This was the way masters treated servants, dogs and blacks—not free-born Britons and self-governing Yankees.
Gathered now at Bakery Hill, under the starry banner, the people looked for direction. Who would guide this exodus, deliver them from tyranny, lead them out of slavery? From the crowd stepped a twenty-seven-year-old Irishman. Peter Lalor was raised in a political family. His eldest brother had fought in the Young Irish movement in that fiery year of 1848. The Lalors had known the oppression and hypocrisy of the Union Jack. They believed in home rule. As landed gentry, the family had used its political nous to stand up for the rights of Irish peasants. Patrick Lalor, Peter’s father, was an MP representing Queens County. Trained as a civil engineer and excited by the prospect of a golden frontier, Peter Lalor came to Victoria with his brother Richard, sister-in-law Margaret and sister Maria in 1852. At Ballarat, he became Timothy Hayes’ mining partner. With his fiancée Alicia Dunne working as a teacher in Geelong, Lalor looked to Anastasia Hayes and her brood of children for his de facto domestic life.
On 30 November this tall, charismatic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man stepped out of the crowd and said one word. He said it with feeling. Liberty! Mrs Ann Shann, twenty-four-year-old wife of digger John Shann, was there. She later vividly remembered the moment when Lalor was chosen leader of the diggers, and it was decided to drill and oppose the police and military by force.48 Mrs Shann joined with other diggers, their wives and children as the assembled group of a thousand marched en masse from Bakery Hill to Eureka. The Eureka was further from the Camp, and, as a flat, not a rise, more protected. They took the flag with them.
At Eureka, the self-appointed leadership of the young solidarity movement met in the home-cum-store of Anne and Martin Diamond. A veritable United Nations of malcontents: Lalor, Carboni (who was needed to translate orders to the non-English-speaking rebels), Irishmen Patrick Curtain, John Manning, Patrick Howard and Timothy Hayes, Englishman George Black, Scotsman Thomas Kennedy, Frederick Vern the Hanoverian, Canadian Henry Ross, American James McGill, who was a close friend of Sarah Hanmer, and Edward Thonen, a thirty-year-old Jewish ‘lemonade seller’ from Prussia. John Basson Humffray abstained from the group, citing his infinite preference for moral force over physical force, and watched his former shipmates, Anne and Martin, give shelter to the rebels. Charles Evans sided with Humffray, the man with whom he’d walked to Ballarat, over Hayes, the man with whom he’d sailed to Victoria. By temperament, Evans was a cautious observer. Kennedy, by contrast, had told a cheering crowd at Bakery Hill monster meeting that mere persuasion is all a humbug; nothing succeeds like a lick in the lug.49
The new group who met at the Diamonds’ store constituted themselves as a ‘council of war for the defence’, though there was, at present, no territory to defend. Lalor was elected ‘commander-in-chief ’ and began to organise drilling squads to protect the unlicensed diggers. For here was the root of the problem: the thousands of miners who had burned their licences in the fires of protest were now, technically, unauthorised to be on the diggings and could be fined or arrested for breach of the law. The Gravel Pits incident that morning had shown that the government would pursue its prerogative without mercy. Lalor concluded that the miners must resist force by force. But how to symbolise that resistance? A flag was one thing. It could stir hearts, but it could not shelter bodies.
When French revolutionaries proclaimed their democratic rights, they blockaded the streets of Paris. They set up rough barriers, cordoned off territory: drew a line. Men and women stationed themselves behind those barricades in a show of communal militancy. ‘The barricade’, writes historian David Barry, ‘emerged on a large scale as a weapon of rebellion…in July 1830, creating a new mode of defensive neighbourhood action in which women, with their strong involvement in community networks, could profitably participate.’
French revolutionaries carried pikes, waved banners and shouted slogans. Their activities were confrontational and highly visible, like a frilled-neck lizard throwing out a collar of spines to shock enemies with its potency: an animal act of defensiveness. But it was a primal knee-jerk with a very human twist. As Barry tells us, men of Paris welcomed women behind the barricades because ‘their presence was seen as a means of deterring the authorities from reacting with force’. There might not be safety in numbers, the freedom fighters reasoned, but there was surely safety in the company of women. No civilised government would deliberately fire on civilian women and children.
In the Diamonds’ store that afternoon, the war chiefs decided to throw up a hasty barricade. There needed to be a neighbourhood refuge, an unassailable place of shelter, to defend and protect from arrest those diggers who had burned their licences—but how to cordon off such a zone? There were no European-style streets to speak of on the diggings, only rough transport thoroughfares lined by tent dwellings, stores and shanties. The streets were porous. A crowd (or an army) could leak out into the gaps between the canvas shelters. There was no physical structure to contain them, no wall of buildings. This being Australia, and the frontier, there was simply too much space. So the barricade would have to be self-contained, would have to close in on itself. The line would have to be a circle.
Thus an area around the Diamonds’ store was immediately barricaded. It was all hands on deck, with any form of timber serving to construct a crude fortification: overturned carts, empty barrels and crates, felled trees, the thick slabs used to line shafts. Made in haste and with scavenged resources, the barrier was brutally uneven, only waist high in some sections, over six feet in others. Some sections were held together with ropes, some fixed into the ground; some slabs were given picket-like points, other links in the chain were the mounds of earth disgorged from a deep sinking.
The territory it marked was at the southern end of the Eureka line, on a gentle slope running up to the Melbourne Road, only a few hundred yards from the charred remains of Bentley’s Hotel. The ground in this area was studded with tents and sinking holes. In all, about an acre of ground was enclosed. The barricade surrounded at least ten tents, the Diamonds’ immediate neighbours. These tents were the homes and businesses of diggers and their families; men and women randomly, fatally, thrust centre stage. As Anne Diamond would later testify, her tent was half in and half out of the ramshackle cordon.50 The ring was not even closed. It was a broken circle from the start, more of a wobbly parallelogram really, with its rear wall comprising the scrub of Brown Hill. At the heart of the enclosed turf, a flagpole was erected and the Australian Flag hoisted to stake the claim. The Eureka Stockade, as it would come to be known, made a mighty fine amphitheatre but a lousy bulwark.51 The cornered lizard bared its frills.
With teams of diggers drilling on the flat ground beside their new stringybark citadel, Lalor led his war council back up to Bakery Hill. The Southern Cross was once more unfurled. Though the new stronghold at Eureka could be glimpsed from the Camp, this rise was more prominent. It would attract the attention of potential recruits as well as the wide-eyed glare of the Camp. A division of Americans, calling themselves the Independent Californian Rangers, fell in behind Captain Ross. Vern rallied a troop of continental freedom fighters. There is no evidence of any Chinese being recruited into the stoush, but it is not impossible that someone like John Aloo, who ran a popular restaurant on the diggings, acted as an interpreter, just as Carboni did for the Italians, French and Prussians. Local Indigenous inhabitants were present at the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion, public meetings; they may have been at Bakery Hill too.
This was the pointy end of a momentous day, and those still standing beneath the flag that was flapping wildly in the hot late afternoon wind were here to pledge allegiance to a cause that had turned abruptly. What had started as a lawful outpouring of communal grievance was now a calculated show of armed resistance. The stage was set, a director appointed, the actors assembled, and now the players must speak. Lalor kneeled. He removed his hat and raised his hand towards the flag: We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.52 A chorus of five hundred true believers chanted Amen.
The curtain now falls on Bakery Hill, and the players move back down to Eureka. They bring the flag with them. This time, it will not return.
As the storm clouds built on that afternoon of Thursday 30 November, Police Constable Henry Goodenough, a government spy, relayed a rumour that the Camp would be attacked at 4am. Henry’s twenty-six-year-old wife Elizabeth and their six-month-old baby Mary Anne had no doubt been sent away from the Camp with Maggie Johnston and the other government wives as part of Captain Thomas’s defence plan. Goodenough prowled the diggers’ meetings dressed in miners garb, shouting oaths and pretending to be drunk. Either he was a bad actor or he really was intoxicated. At one gathering Raffaello Carboni gave the blathering oaf a sturdy kick in the privates to silence him. When Judas Iscariot Goodenough, as Carboni later called him, planted the story of the Camp’s imminent attack, there was every reason to storm the citadel. The eight men arrested at the Gravel Pits that morning were considered political prisoners, just as Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby had been. We shall be ready to receive them, wrote Captain Pasley. I am more convinced than ever that…sedition must be put down by force…before many days have passed, it will be necessary for us to sweep the whole goldfield.53 Had somebody instructed Goodenough to orchestrate a crisis, if none truly existed?
That evening the barometric pressure finally plummeted. A violent thunderstorm shook the night sky. It rained for three hours solid, great lashings of fat summer rain. During the whole night, the police troopers were exposed to the downpour, waiting beside their horses, saddled and ready for action. Fortifications had been made to the mess house, Dr David Williams’ house, the Camp hospital, Rede and Johnston’s quarters (a particularly exposed locality) and the military barracks. It was the job of the police to guard these vulnerable targets. So the exhausted and no doubt frightened young men lay wrapped in their cloaks on the saturated ground or crouching under their horses for shelter. To kill time, recounted Samuel Huyghue, the lads sat spinning yarns of former service in the field. For some, there would have been an element of truth to their tales. For most, the one-upmanship was pure bravado.
Meanwhile, Robert Rede, dry and fortified in his quarters, scratched out a letter to Melbourne by candlelight. The absolute necessity of putting down all meetings Public/Private I think should now be apparent, he wrote, for the abolition of the Licence Fee is merely a watchword. Rede had a plan—that the whole of the goldfield be put under martial law and Hotham issue a proclamation to the effect that he would stop the agitation at all costs—but the former medical student showed less bluster than the boy soldiers. Like the diggers being magnetically drawn to Bakery Hill, Rede turned to Hotham for leadership. It would have cost his pride to write, I must also earnestly require some instructions for my future guidance.54
Lalor gave Rede an out. Late that night, with the dust settled by hours of soaking rain, Lalor decided to send a deputation to speak to Rede in a gentlemanly manner. The go-betweens would negotiate for the release of the prisoners. He chose George Black, who so recently had been on a similar mission to see Hotham, Raffaello Carboni, and the Catholic priest Father Smyth. When the trio reached the Yarrowee River below the Camp, the police stopped them. Only Smyth was allowed to proceed. He was taken directly to Rede. Flanked by his deputies, Rede accompanied Smyth back to where Black and Carboni waited in the company of the police.
Black immediately repeated the mistake he had made with Hotham. He demanded the release of the prisoners, and for good measure added his opinion that the soldiers were bullies and that Britons would not stand for such brutal treatment. The situation was hopeless. Rede expected the obedience and submission with which his office vested him. Black represented diggers who would no longer submit to tyranny; men who were desperate to assert their legitimacy after months of humiliation. The new codes smacked up against the old like waves against a cliff face.
Rede knew the licensing system was a scourge and must be replaced by something more prudent and acceptable to the people. He himself had written to Hotham on 7 November, suggesting alternative methods of raising revenue and stating baldly: I look at all direct taxation now as impolitic.55 He must also have known that ordering a full-scale licence hunt on the morning after the impulsive burning of licences at Bakery Hill was sure to exacerbate the already inflamed passions of the movement’s vanguard. But he was not prepared to appear anything but complete master of his senses and his forces.
Black now offered him a perfect bridge over the troubled waters that raged between them. Stop the licence hunts until the people had had the opportunity to put their case against the licensing system before Hotham once more. In return for such consideration, the people would lay down their weapons and pick up their shovels. They would cease their armed resistance if assured that they would not need to defend themselves and their families against actions such as the morning’s digger hunt.
But Rede smelled a rat, or at least the acrid stench of his own reputation going up in smoke. Was this a trick? He already believed that the protest against the licence tax was merely the thin end of a deeper revolutionary wedge. Nothing short of self-government would appease the leaders of this agitation. Was he to be the man who rolled out the red carpet for their entrance to Spring Street?
No, he could not afford to be the one who stepped cautiously back from the brink. He would have to stand firm. Dig his heels in, keep from wavering and eventually emerge triumphant. He could not promise that there would be no more digger hunts, he told the deputation. Then he dismissed them.
I can only say that things look as bad as they almost possibly can, lamented the GEELONG ADVERTISER after the deputation’s second failed attempt to broker a truce. Is there no peacemaker? 56 Martha Clendinning, alone in her store, her sister having fled back to Melbourne, wondered the same thing. Things must come to a violent ending, she predicted, and that very soon.