So it came to pass that the Ballarat diggings ground to an eerie halt on the first day of summer, 1854. If men were machines you would say that that a screw had shaken itself loose and the whole steely apparatus needed urgent maintenance. But human beings are made of flesh and bone and heart and mind, and on Friday 1 December the people of Ballarat stopped work of their own conscious accord. Miners downed tools. Storekeepers closed their doors. Families regrouped. Mates gathered in furtive clumps, like cows under a shade tree. Blacksmiths began fashioning pikes, the traditional weapon of peasant rebellion. Teams of diggers swept through the city, first requesting, then insisting, that the occupants hand over their guns and ammunition. (All requisitioned arms, it was promised, would be returned when they were no longer needed.) The hotels and shanties were humming with rumour, but there was a surprising lack of drunkenness.1 Battening down the hatches was a serious business. An uneasy hush fell over the festive season, as a community held its collective breath.
That night at the Adelphi Theatre, Sarah Hanmer held a benefit performance. It was a tribute to herself, under the patronage of Resident Commissioner Robert Rede and American Consul James Tarleton. The piece she chose to perform was Money—an irreverent poke at the very foible that had led all these feverish lambs to the slaughter.2 The Adelphi Players were in fine form. Mrs Hanmer as Lady Franklyn, Miss Julia Hanmer as Clara, and Miss Stevens as Georgiana, sustained their well merited reputation, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER. During the evening, Mrs Hanmer was presented with a gold watch and chain, as a mark of respect for her private worth and public character.3 The watch was purchased from funds raised from the benefit Mrs Hanmer had previously held to free the alleged sly grogger Frank Carey. Carey had refused the money after his reprieve by Hotham. Owing to the circumstances, neither Tarleton nor Rede was present on this balmy night to see Mrs Hanmer receive her gift.
Had they been there, they might have wondered what sort of game this formidable woman was playing. Earlier that evening, the Americans had held a meeting at the Adelphi to determine what their position would be in the looming crisis. The atmosphere was considerably charged. Charles Ferguson was at the meeting. Tarleton had warned his countrymen to stay out of any impending conflict, but others complained that we were doing nothing, while it was a matter of as much interest to us as to them, and began to accuse us of cowardice.
Publicly, the Americans voted to desist. They would not be seen as instigators. We regarded ourselves as foreigners, recounted Ferguson, and had no right to be foremost in an open outbreak against the government. Privately, it was obvious that many Americans, notably Mrs Hanmer’s friend Captain McGill, were taking pole position. The diggers could count on their support. Like other foreign nationals who were joining the drilling corps at the Stockade, they believed their actions were essentially defensive; a collective stand against a government that had proved at the Gravel Pits that it had no hesitation in firing on the people.
Sarah Hanmer was directing the proceeds of all her benefits to the Diggers Defence Fund. She was the war chest’s principal contributor. Yet the shrewd theatre manager was still able to court the patronage of Ballarat’s highest official and the honorary consul of the most influential immigrant group in the colony. Rede and Tarleton sponsored a benefit in her honour, despite the fact that within two days her theatre would be used to host the Ballarat Reform League’s most important meeting yet. Why would these men flatter her with their sponsorship, legitimate her prestige? Did they think this leading lady, who commanded the respect and affection of the American diggers, would use her influence to act as a go-between? Her prima donna Miss Stevens had, after all, solicited signatures from 1700 people to aid Frank Carey’s liberation. Did Commissioner Rede court Sarah Hanmer’s power, hoping it would be used to his benefit? Or fearing it would be used against him?
Peacemaker or firebrand? Sarah Hanmer kept everyone guessing. Sometimes it pays to have one foot in both camps, adroitly straddling the line.
On Saturday morning, the people of Ballarat woke to a stiff southerly breeze. The cool change did nothing to ease tempers. Business is entirely suspended, wrote Charles Evans, but one topic of conversation engrosses the attention of diggers and storekeepers. Twenty-three-year-old Evans thanked his stars that, unlike so many of his fellow immigrants, he had not shacked up with a lass and planted his seed on Australian soil. Those whose means enable them are sending their families away, he wrote,
while others whom poverty compels to keep their wives and families amidst the scene of threatening danger are awaiting the approach of events which feeling bachelors may bless their happy fortune in not being troubled with.
For months—in some cases years—shamefaced men had been struggling to put food in the mouths of their children, watching their women labour under a hot sun or wash clothes in the driving rain to keep their families from the (purely figurative) poorhouse. Now these same men had to worry about how to protect their loved ones from an army that would scatter bullets among anonymous tents.
They knew they could do nothing to stop a storm at sea or a baby taken by merciful Providence but, lord knew, a man could stand up to another man. As the BALLARAT TIMES said, who was to blame? The Camp was legally in the right, but the licence hunt on the Gravel Pits, argued the BALLARAT TIMES, was a deliberate plan to transform indignation into open riot…an embryo rebellion.4 Could a man retreat from such wanton provocation?
There were at least 1500 people crammed into the Stockade by Saturday afternoon. Some had spent the previous night there, but most had slept in their own tents. The purpose of the Stockade, after all, was to prevent, by force if necessary, the arrest of unlicensed diggers. There had never been a licence hunt at night. But throughout the day on Saturday, more diggers kept rolling up, many coming from other goldfields, eager to add weight to the moral majority of resistance. The numbers were swelled by women who brought food into the Stockade, and at least one female sly-grog seller, who knew a captive market when she saw one and set up shop on the fringe of the palisade.5 We were of all nations and colours, wrote Raffaello Carboni. Great works! was the shout. Great Work. Magnum Opus. The alchemic principle of forging base matter into gold. A process that involves three stages: Putrefactio, corruption, darkness. Albedo, purification, whitening, the moon: female. Citrinitus, yellowing, enlightenment, the sun: male. The Great Work is said to be the uniting of opposites. Great Work requires conflagration to forge a bond.
But the fire in the bellies of the stockade’s inmates was hardly transcendental. A very mutinous and excited spirit was prevalent, wrote Alexander Dick, who had only arrived in Ballarat on 22 November. He could immediately see that his chosen destination was rife [sic] for an explosion. Peter Lalor, whose tent was inside the Stockade, could read the mood too. He needed to corral the energy, lest a purportedly disciplined ‘army’ disintegrate into a violent mob, as at Bentley’s Hotel. Already there had been reports that there were gangs roaming the Flat demanding cash, firearms and provisions from frightened diggers and their wives. These thugs were not under his authority, but mere looters taking advantage of the situation.
Martha Clendinning was one of their victims. Martha was in her store on Saturday 2 December, a date to be long remembered. A group of eight miners marched up in military fashion. The leader claimed to be a representative of the diggers’ Minister of War. He demanded any firearms she possessed. She said she had none, but was disbelieved. The leader moved to search her tent.
I did not like the idea of such a visitation so I said, ‘If you do not believe me, perhaps you would believe the Doctor if I called him to speak to you’. ‘Yes, yes’ he said at once, ‘call him out’ and he appeared much relieved at having a man to interview instead of a woman!
Martha escaped harm or loss of her goods, but knew that Saturday was a black day of wanton robbery and pillaging. She fetched her brother to stay with her that night when Dr Clendinning was called away.
On Saturday afternoon, Lalor once again stepped forward to take command. Emerging from the committee room of Diamond’s store, he mounted an old log and gave a stump oration. Alexander Dick was there to hear it. Lalor held a double-barrelled gun in his hand which he fingered in a nervous manner. His message was simple: We must make this a country we can live in. He had personal reason to project a future that included basic human and political rights for all its citizens, rich or poor, landed or roving. Peter Lalor was waiting to be married. Two days earlier, Lalor had written a letter to his fiancée, Alicia Dunne. In it, he explained his motives for putting up his hand to lead the rebel movement. This is what he wrote: I would be unworthy of being called a man. I would be unworthy of myself, and, above all, I would be unworthy of you and your love, were I base enough to desert my companions in danger. He urged Alicia to shed but a single tear should his efforts fail, for he would have died in the cause of honour and liberty.6 Lalor wanted to hold his head high as his young Irish bride walked towards him in the chapel of St Mary’s, Geelong in July the following year.
The central committee of the reform league must have been grateful for the timing of events. So far, there had been no grand plan. No strategy for gaining the upper hand. Every action had been responsive, protective, rearguard. The Stockade had been thrown up at random. The flames did not devour the Eureka Hotel, admitted Carboni, with the same impetuosity as we got up our stockade. The majority of the miners and storekeepers on the diggings were not overtly rebellious, nor prepared to take up arms. We of the peace portion of the residents, is how Martha Clendinning identified herself, though she was sympathetic to the miners’ land hunger and tax grievances. Henry Mundy counted himself in that portion. All reasonable people, he wrote, were willing to wait til the Commission had finished its labours and report. Such people still had faith that Hotham would do the right thing by them.
But even the activists were divided. Some of the members of the Ballarat Reform League had sworn the oath of allegiance at Bakery Hill, but not all. Humffray refused to enter the Stockade. Henry Harris and Charles ‘Ikey’ Dyte similarly clung to the hope of a constitutional resolution. Some were for a republic; others, like Lalor, claimed that the diggers’ resistance was purely defensive, designed to protect each other and protest against the misrule of Ballarat’s officials. Vern, cranky that Lalor had stepped so blithely into the leadership, was holding his own meetings down at the Star Hotel. Lalor had been a late starter, not part of the original reform league elite. Not everyone trusted his motives.
Tomorrow was Sunday. By custom, the Sabbath was observed as a day of rest on the goldfields. There would be no digger hunts. It would be a time to step off the rollercoaster of November’s events. Time to take stock. For some, time to pray. Father Smyth had personally entered the stockade and pleaded for those of his flock to be at mass in the morning. The meeting of the reform league was scheduled for 2pm at the Adelphi. At that meeting, the leadership would be able to discuss their policies and tactics. The majority of the 1500 people who were in the stockade to hear Lalor’s afternoon oration felt free to leave. People began to relax. Saturday afternoon was regarded as a half-holiday. No one recollected a licence check on a Saturday afternoon. They could go back to their own tents, back to their families, back to the hotels and refreshment tents. As H. R. Nicholls later wrote, the desire to turn out in good trim on Sunday had an effect which probably changed the fortune of war. One after another, the diggers left the stockade to get a clean shirt or to prepare in some way for Sunday. A government spy dutifully reported the unexpected exodus from behind the barricades.
Nicholls himself went to one of the many shanties on the fringe of the stockade. There he and his mates had drinks ourselves and conversed with a young lady, decidedly good-looking, who presided over the grog. Nicholls stayed until midnight then returned to the stockade. Jane Cuming’s husband Stephen also left the stockade that night on account of all the carousing and singing. He had urged Lalor to close the grog shops because if they were allowed to remain open, I concluded that it would mean absolute ruin. Stephen went home to Jane and Martineau and did not return.7
Swimming upstream was a contingent of Americans, led by James McGill. His Independent Californian Rangers had decided to defy Tarleton’s pleas. They came now to the stockade, offering service. Many of McGill’s troops had seen combat in the Mexican–American War. They bore arms like feathers in a cap. McGill himself carried a handsome sword, a gift of Sarah Hanmer—a precious heirloom, brought across the seas. In a dramatic flourish, McGill headed his troop of men with this sword drawn. All of the Adelphi Theatre’s props—pistols, revolvers, sabres—had been distributed to the Californian Rangers. The actors themselves had swapped the stage for the Stockade. Was it as Carboni said—that the Stockade was nothing more than our infatuation, a higgledy-piggledy barricade containing a dozen family tents and sly-grog shops, defended by a handful of men brandishing theatre props?
By nightfall, about 1500 people remained in the Stockade, mostly those diggers and storekeepers like the Diamonds and the Shanahans, who lived in the captive tents; out-of-towners; and the sentries, chiefly Americans, posted to keep friends in and foes out.
There is another reason why so many of the men inside the Stockade on Saturday night might have gone home. There was a full moon. According to the principles of lunar menstrual synchrony, women are designed to ovulate on the full moon.8 Female humans’ biological blueprint is to release eggs when there is the most light in the night sky. Bleeding time thus corresponds to the new moon, a time of inward focus and self-nourishing.
The invention of electricity has changed this pre-modern prototype for human behaviour: now, not only do women menstruate at different times in the lunar cycle, but at different times from each other. However, most women are aware that when they live in close proximity to other women, their menstrual cycles start to coincide. With only candles and campfires for nightly illumination in the tents of Ballarat in 1854, women’s menstrual cycles would very probably have synchronised. And they would have fallen into step with the phases of the moon.
When H. R. Nicholls rode in to Ballarat at the end of November and felt that the whole place was electric, could he have been reading the hormonal magnetism of the goldfield’s five thousand women, a community in heat? The record is silent. Martha Clendinning was far too polite to discuss her bodily functions. Hobart Town Poll, who might have been relied on to call a cunt a cunt, didn’t write her memoirs.
From the Camp, some two kilometres as the crow flies from Eureka, the Stockade site was a picture of abstract commotion. A dark ring in the centre, ragged lines of brown hats and blue shirts marching one way, then the other, then back again. A sea of white calico and canvas dots quivering in the breeze. A huge flag of blue and white rising from the ochre earth. The windlasses were still, the creeks and shafts abandoned. Distant figures darted in and out of tents. A moving canvas of conspicuous endeavour.
The details—faces, words, numbers—were a blur, but one thing was certain. Mining operations, domestic work, entertainment and commerce had ceased a day early. There were none of the usual Sunday pastimes: music, card games, bowling, shooting at targets, children playing quoits, women promenading in their finest clothes. Where was everybody? Only one person had been to the Camp to purchase a licence today—and that was a woman. Elizabeth Rowlands marched up to the commissioner’s tent, clutching her baby Mary Ann, and bought herself a licence for £3. Then she took the licence back to her tent at Eureka and her husband burned it.
Was she a spy, checking the lie of the enemy’s land? Perhaps the miners thought a new mother would get past the Camp’s sentries. If so, they were right. This peculiar act, this unusual weekend limbo, must be a warning. A calm before the storm. An attack was surely imminent. Not if. No longer if. It was only a matter of when. The Camp was ready to fend off any assault. The territory was well and truly fortified. Sandbags, bales of hay, sacks of flour and wheat—all piled high around the most important buildings and along the front fence facing the diggings. Commissioner Rede had announced a curfew: no lights in neighbouring tents after 8pm, punishable by summary fire from the sentries.
The Camp was now under the jurisdiction of the military, which, according to civil servant G. H. Mann, was rather awkward sometimes. But still the troops kept piling in. Today, a contingent from the Castlemaine Camp. More backup—six hundred soldiers, plus munitions and cannon—were on their way from Melbourne, under the charge of the old warhorse Major-General Sir Robert Nickle, commander-in-chief of the forces in Victoria. Many of the soldiers at Ballarat had already been on twenty-four-hour sentry duty for days. They had passed several nights without a wink of sleep, hadn’t washed or changed out of rain-soaked clothes. Over 540 edgy young men jostled for a place to lay their weary heads. But constant deliberate false alarms were given at night by Captain Thomas to keep the soldiers on their toes.
Huyghue described these men as striplings…half weaned cubs of the Lion Mother, newly arrived in Australia and disoriented by their long passage. Several of these boys—footsore, exhausted, unable to retaliate—had been violently ambushed as they entered Ballarat only two days earlier.
At the Camp, there were no longer any mother lions to give succour. Most wives and female servants, who helped with provisioning, had been sent away. Corporal John Neill’s wife Ellen and their baby Fanny were an exception; they stayed put despite the privations and fear of attack. Rations were basic. All of the stores had been removed from the commissariat building and dumped outside, so as to vacate the space for shielding any remaining women and children, or the sick and infirm. Food was covered in grit, spoiled by damp. Water was in short supply, as the contracted carrier had not filled the week’s order. Tradesmen either feared crossing the insurgents or were supporting them with an embargo on the Camp. The whole length of Lydiard Street was an unbroken row of horses, tied to pickets, obliviously munching their fodder.
Samuel Huyghue was in the Camp on Saturday night. An ominous and oppressive silence brooded over the deserted workings, he later wrote. The full moon rose high in the cloudless sky. The breeze was gentle, still warm after the heat of the day. At 2.30am, Captain Thomas called on his troops to fall in. This time it was no false alarm. One hundred mounted and 175 foot soldiers assembled at the rear of the Camp, joined by a contingent of officers, police and civil commissioners. Police Inspector Gordon Evans handed around bottles of brandy to his men. They were told it was for the benefit of all.9 The remaining 384 soldiers would stay to defend the Camp. At 3am, those chosen to fight slipped silently down the hill.
Military historian Gregory Blake has written a 240-page book about what happened next. The book offers a forensic dissection of the fifteen-minute gun battle to take the stockade. What follows here is a more impressionist account.
Corporal Neill, like most of his regiment, had slept in his clothes. He quietly fell in behind his sergeant, leaving Ellen and baby Fanny behind in bed. Captain Thomas, an old India man, led the troops the back way, down Mair Street, across Black Hill, past the Melbourne Road to the Free Trade Hotel. From here, detachments of the 12th and 40th regiments extended in skirmishing order. Part of the mounted force of military and police moved around the flank and rear of the slumbering Stockade. The idea was to get as close as possible without being seen. It was 4am on Sunday. No one was watching.
Of course, the question of who fired the first shot has been hotly contested for over 150 years. Both sides of the Stockade wished to claim the strategic immunity of self-defence. The moral economy of armed conflict requires an aggressor. Captain Thomas later reported to Hotham that when the troops were 150 metres from the barricade, he detected rather sharp and well-directed fire from the insurgents…then, and not until then, I ordered commence firing. Lalor wrote in a letter to the AGE on 9 April 1855 that, without warning or provocation, almost immediately, the military poured in one or two volleys of musketry, which was a plain intimation that we must sell our lives as dearly as we could. Blake reasons that on evidence and by logic ‘there may have been several “first shots” within seconds of each other’. But from his extensive research and ballistic reconstruction, he is certain that the first shot came from within the Stockade.
Does it matter? The scene tells its own story. A sentry realises the Stockade is suddenly surrounded. Like mercury, in the magical hour of darkness between the full and waxing moon, the noose of the law has slipped around the stronghold.10 A shot rings out, followed by deafening volleys. The sleeping residents of the Stockade jerk to attention at the sound of gunfire. Men scamper to get dressed, falling out of their tents with one leg in their pants. Women lie flat to the ground, folding their bodies around children and babies. Twenty-six-year-old Scotswoman Mary Faulds is in labour with her first child; her anguished cries cannot be distinguished from the frantic shouting around her. Bridget Shanahan hears the firing before her husband Timothy, who has not long gone to bed. She pulls him out of his cot, thrusts his gun in his hand, and tells him to go out. Timothy leaves the tent, but goes and hides in an outhouse. Bridget stays in the tent with their three children. Elizabeth Wilson, who keeps a store just outside the Stockade perimeter, loads rifles for her husband Richard. They have not bothered to change into nightclothes and are ready for action. Bridget Callinan distracts the soldiers while her wounded brothers Michael, Patrick and Thomas are helped away. (What did she do to divert the redcoats’ attention? History does not record the nature of the distraction but a flash of thigh or breast might have done the trick.11)
The exchange of fire went on for no more than fifteen minutes, until soldiers from the 40th Regiment strode over a low section of the barricade and the miners knew the jig was up. It was now a hand-to-hand fight between trained members of the British army and an undermanned team of zealous amateurs, their ardent wives and screaming children. The entrenchment was then carried, reported Captain Thomas, and taken by the point of bayonet, the insurgents retreating. I ordered the firing to cease.12
It’s what happened after the surrender that really matters. It’s what happened after the firing ceased that made contemporary observers call the Eureka clash a massacre, not a battle.
With the barricade breached and adrenaline surging, the lid was finally lifted off the simmering cauldron of military and police discipline. What bubbled over was a lethal stew of hunger, discomfort, exhaustion, boredom, insult, exasperation, sexual depravity, braggadocio, spite, homesickness, terror and relief. Charles Schulze, who operated a bakery on Bakery Hill and was an eyewitness to the violent outpouring of rancour that followed the rebels’ surrender, could see what the weeks of Joe-ing had produced. Jaded, tired, not allowed to return the insult, he wrote, you can imagine. That when the time came, they revenged themselves to the fullest extent.13
It was the bayonets not the bullets that did the damage. Mayhem and carnage reigned, as the crazed soldiers and police thrust their blades into dead, dying and wounded miners. Gold lust gave way to blood lust as the Eureka line became a killing field. It was a trooper that did it, Anne Diamond later testified. I know that my husband got three hurts from a sword on the back; he fell on his face and he got three cuts of a sword and a stab of a bayonet.14 Anne and her husband were fleeing from the Stockade when Martin was shot. They treated the dead bodies very badly, Anne reported twenty-two days after Martin’s death. The woman that laid him out could prove that.
Some soldiers hacked at the bodies of those strewn on the ground. Others surrounded tents and sliced and jabbed at the bullet-riddled canvas. Ostensibly, they were on the hunt for prisoners; no insurgent should be allowed to escape. In effect, as the GEELONG ADVERTISER railed on 5 December, those perfectly innocent of rebellious notions were murdered, fired at and horribly mangled by the troopers. Outnumbered and trapped, many insurgents were literally butchered. One eyewitness later reported that:
every body had a plurality of mortal wounds: the corpses of the slain had been hacked by the mounted troopers out of sheer brutality…It was a needless massacre. Not even at the siege of Sebastopol did British soldiers kill enemies who lay wounded and defenceless.15
The residents of the Stockade could not believe their eyes.
Those who were able began to run towards Brown Hill, at the rear of the Stockade where the palisade did not quite join. The scrub was thick and the ground broken, impeding the troopers’ mounts. Brown Hill would shelter outlaws for weeks to come. Others jumped down mine shafts, heedless of deep water. Their bloated bodies were fished out days later. Some fled into neighbouring tents, where they clambered up sod chimneys or shimmied under cots. Some of the wounded within the Stockade found themselves cloaked by the shuddering bodies of women, pretending to mourn their dead in order that the soldiers would pass without further recrimination. Bridget Hynes threw herself over an injured man and cried, He is dead! He is dead! so that the troopers would not run him through. Bridget was two months pregnant with her first child, a honeymoon conception under a happier full moon. Peter Lalor, who had been shot in the shoulder, was dragged under a ledge and safely concealed. Henry Ross, mortally wounded, was not so lucky. At least he was spared the pain of seeing the chaste flag that he had sired dragged down from its mast by Constable John King and paraded before his fellow policemen as a trophy of war.
Officers remained silent as boy soldiers taunted and assaulted bystanders. The bodies of the dead were heaped together face up: mouths gaping, eyes fixed. Several of them were still heaving, an eyewitness reported to the GEELONG ADVERTISER, and at every rise of their breasts, the blood spouted out of their wounds, or just bubbled out and trickled away.16 The victims of the frantic attack were not only the deceased. Standing by, tragically alive to the moment, were poor women crying for absent husbands and children frightened into quietness. Other women had bolted from their tents, leaving their husbands behind. Mary Curtain rushed out of her store in her nightgown with fifteen-month-old Mary Agnes in tow. Mary was eight months pregnant. Such was the terror and hurry with which my family fled, husband Patrick Curtain later claimed, that they left behind them even their every day dress.17 Another man woke on hearing the shots. He went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers. Seeing what was happening, he shouted at a trooper For God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children. He was shot dead on his own threshold.18
What more humiliating way to surrender? A dawn raid. On a Sunday. The miners caught with their pants down on their own doorsteps. Who would be swaggering now?
If the soldiers and police were perturbed by the presence of families in their frenzied midst, most did not show it. A poor woman and her children, reported a stunned GEELONG ADVERTISER correspondent,
were standing outside a tent. She said that the troopers had surrounded the tent, and pierced it with their swords. She, her husband, and her children were ordered out by the troopers, and were inspected in their night clothes outside, while the troopers searched the tent.19
Some troopers demonstrated more compunction. Charles Ferguson, one of McGill’s Californian Rangers, saw a woman come running out of her tent in her nightdress. She ran over to some soldiers who had captured her husband. She begged them to release him but she was only pushed around roughly by the soldiers, when at last the commanding officer rode up and ordered them to deliver to the woman her husband. Ferguson had the highest praise for this chivalrous fellow: That was a manly officer.
Not so fortunate was Rebecca Noonan. Thirty-two-year-old Rebecca ran a store one hundred yards from the stockade. Her husband Michael was a miner. The couple, natives of County Clare, had five children. As the family was attempting to escape from their burning tent, Michael was stopped by police and arrested. Michael pleaded that he was a peaceable and loyal subject of Her Majesty and [his] Excellency’s Government, but was taken into custody regardless. Rebecca remonstrated. She was then brutally assaulted by the foot police and her life threatened.20 Rebecca was four months pregnant.
Mary Faulds’ predicament was extreme. When soldiers burst into her tent in the stockade she was lying on the ground, wedged between two cots with a blanket covering her, labouring to bring her baby into this mad world. The soldiers turned around and left her to her fear and anguish. Mary’s baby Adeliza was born later that day.21 Other women performed feats of remarkable courage. Richard Wilson fled his shop, leaving his wife Elizabeth behind. A miner raced up to her and said, Look Ma’am, where can I hide? She replied, Right where you stand. And with that she lifted her dress, pushed the man to the floor, stepped over him and swathed him in her hoop skirts.22
Women’s clothing was in high demand. Frederick Vern, who had not been in the Stockade at the time of the attack, escaped Ballarat disguised as a woman. Captain James McGill also parted with his sex for a short season. He fled into the bush, where he was later met by Sarah Hanmer, who provided him with dress, shawl and bonnet—either her own or costumes from the theatre—and food for his journey into hiding.23
Other women risked their own safety to aid the wounded and dying. A defenceless man was cut and slashed on his body and head near the tent of Dr Leman, close to the stockade. Mrs Leman heard the man’s cries and left the cover of her tent to assist him. The cruel sight drew an expression of horror from her, reported an onlooker, which reaching the ears of one of the butchers he turned around and deliberately fired at her.24 The shot missed and the soldier fired again as Emma Leman fled back into her tent.
The man Mrs Leman risked her life to help was twenty-three-year-old English miner Henry Powell. He had come from Creswick the previous day to visit William Cox, who lived with his wife Eliza on the Eureka, only a short distance from the stockade. Eliza was forty-four years old, the same age as Ellen Young, and had only been in the colony eight months. She had five children and Powell was keen on the eldest daughter, twenty-four-year-old Fanny. If Henry had come to ask for Fanny’s hand, his timing was fatal. When he emerged from the Coxes’ tent on Sunday morning, he was confronted by Arthur Akehurst, clerk of the police court, who promptly dashed the innocent Powell over the head with his sword and told him he was a prisoner. As Powell lay dazed and bleeding on the ground, Akehurst cut him several more times and fired at him, then mounted troopers arrived and trampled him with their horses. William Cox was arrested. He asked for a moment to put on his clothes but, according to Eliza who stood by, they said no you bugger come along.25
William Cox was corralled with the other 114 prisoners taken to the Camp. One of those arrested was Raffaello Carboni, who had been asleep in his tent at the time of the attack. Carboni was dragged out, and hobbled to a dozen more prisoners outside, and we were marched to the Camp. Another was Timothy Hayes, who was also at home with his family when the stockade was taken. He was making his way to the stockade to assist the wounded when he was arrested. On seeing the mounted troops leading her handcuffed husband back to the Camp, Anastasia rushed headlong between the horses and bawled out Timothy’s captors. If I had been a man, she spat, I wouldn’t have been taken by so few as these.26 It’s hard to know at whom the insult was directed.
The shameful fact was that the stockade was a shambles. It was a piece of theatre that broke loose from its script of cat-and-mouse local politics—the persecutors and the persecuted, hunters and the hunted—and spilled human blood. The weapons were real and the stakes were high: no less than manly honour and duty were on the line. Peter Lalor himself had admitted that he would be unworthy of being called a man…were I base enough to desert my companions in danger. But the very men who had been goaded into resistance, rendered impotent by a legal system that denied them rights and a taxation system that made them paupers, disappointed by a land that promised reward for honest toil but delivered instead disease, death and penury, hacking away at barren rock while their womenfolk found fertile ground for their skills and labour—these men could not even defend their wives and families from danger, let alone their companions, when push came to deadly shove. It was the final indignity.
The Ballarat miners had come to Victoria to be independent and free men, proud and virtuous colonists. Modern Argonauts. Young Hercules, as guidebook author Samuel Mossman had promised. Most had failed to feed, clothe or adequately house the families they brought with them or those they quickly started. And, finally, there was nothing heroic about watching your women be assaulted while standing in the dawn light in your drawers.
Not satisfied with the show of potency occasioned by the thrust of bayonets, the order was given to burn to the ground all of the tents in the Stockade and vicinity. The Camp had failed to stop a conflagration at Bentley’s Hotel, and now it would generate its own apocalyptic ruins. Tactically speaking, fire would root out any insurgent hiding in civilian enclosures. In terms of theatre, nothing instils fear like fire. So, using a pot of burning tar, the troopers and soldiers set about torching every tent on the ground. There was no system to regulate our search, one police officer later testified. Another admitted that the police had no idea whether the occupants were in the tents before they fired them.27 From the Camp, Samuel Huyghue listened to the deep reverberations of musketry telling us that there was a real collision at last, then ghostly silence. In a trice, he could see only sheets of smoke and flame.
In the Stockade, some of the blazing tents contained the bodies of the wounded or dead. Two men who burned to death in their tent had either passed out or were still asleep. The sight of their charred remains was so sickening that even the soldiers had to turn away. Patrick Curtain had managed to escape the Stockade without injury. He found Mary and little Mary Agnes, and delivered them to friends. On my return after leaving my family in safety at a distance, he later wrote in an unsuccessful claim for compensation, I found my store all in flames without a chance of saving anything.28
There was a knock at Bridget Shanahan’s door. Timothy had not returned. He may still have been hiding in the outhouse. A trooper and a foot soldier barged in. Shoot that woman, ordered the trooper. The soldier begged, Spare the woman. The trooper hesitated. Well, get out of this place, he finally said, the place is going to be burnt woman. The men set fire to the tent, but Bridget managed to put it out before much was destroyed.29
The ring of fire extended out in cataclysmic ripples. Most of the surrounding tents were diggers’ homes, stores and small grog shops. Some of these, marvelled Huyghue, were actually defended by their occupants while burning, and several contained women and children who were with difficulty rescued from the flames. John Sheehan’s wife and children were huddled inside their tent when it was set alight.30 And did not get out in time. The Curtains and Shanahans, being inside the Stockade, perhaps expected some retribution. But the Sheehans’ tent was outside the barricade and being strictly honest sober and industrious and having no part directly or indirectly in the uprising, they did not anticipate the troops’ vengeance. Other people had not even been in the neighbourhood on that Sunday morning, but similarly all lost their belongings in the wholesale torching. James Bourke and his wife and family had left their tent, unfortunately positioned next to the Stockade, on Friday night. When James returned on Sunday afternoon, I found my said Tent and all my property therein consumed.31 Like the many other families who were completely dispossessed of their tents, stores, clothes, furniture, cash and personal items, the Bourkes received no compensation.
According to Huyghue, Lalor owed his escape to the fact that the soldier who saw him fall was fully engrossed…in rescuing an old Scotchwoman and her family of children from her burning tent, a task of considerable difficulty which evoked an expression of fervid gratitude from the relieved parent. The woman quickly snatched a piece of paper from the smouldering wreck of her home and asked her rescuer to write his name so she could remember to whom she owed what doubtless seemed to her an act of remarkable generosity.
As the moonlit night was gently displaced by iridescent morning, the reality of the situation became clear. It was not a bad dream. There was no silver lining. Stragglers from the neighborhood of the stockade, wrote eyewitness John Fraser, some of them in a state of the greatest terror and excitement, came hurrying along close to the tents. An Irishman approached Fraser for a drink of water. He had his wife and three little children with him.
The poor woman, crying bitterly, presented, to our mind, a picture of distress, as, nursing her infant in her arms, she bewailed in heartrending tones the loss of their little possessions—tent, clothes, everything—burnt and destroyed by the troopers.32
William Adams, who ran a store near the stockade, was shot three times while trying to flee his burning tent with his wife and child. After he emerged from a week in the Camp hospital, he estimated the loss of his family’s worldly goods to be £937 10s. He had £4 10s in his pocket when he was taken to the hospital; the loose change was missing from his blood-splattered pants when he was released. As for the Eureka Flag, an anonymous eyewitness sent his account to the GEELONG ADVERTISER:
The diggers standard was carried by in triumph to the Camp, waved about in the air, then pitched from one another, thrown down and trampled upon.33
Those participating in the victory dance then proceeded to cut off little pieces of the flag and tuck them away as souvenirs. Small patches of Prussian blue wool have been turning up in public collections ever since, roosting like pigeons scattered on the breeze.34
Commanding officers turned a blind eye to the brutal, petty and wilful misdeeds of their junior charges. As far as Hotham was concerned, it was simply a case of boys being boys.35 But apart from arson, murder and pillage, what other spoils of war might these unbridled young men have seized? There are subtle intimations of still more ‘unmanly acts’ perpetrated amid the chaos and terror, acts that Victorian sensibilities preferred to consign to the reader’s imagination. Thomas Pierson alludes to hundreds of other cruel deeds done by these fiends that would strike any civilised person with horror. Dan Calwell the young American, who, with his brother Davis, appears to have remained part of the peaceful faction, wrote home to his parents and sister reporting on the Stockade clash. The victors, reported Dan, committed all the brutalities of the darker ages. H. R. Nicholls recounted that a few nights after the Stockade, he visited the grog shop of the young and pretty girl, who attracted much attention. Her tent was close to the Stockade, but was inexplicably not burned down. The girl told him that on the morning of the attack her tent was full of fugitives—some lying on the ground, some under tables, and all afraid that they would be discovered. She stood outside the tent. Some troopers approached her. She told them she was alone and hoped that they would not hurt her. One excited soldier ran his bayonet through her dress, but his companions called him away and he didn’t enter the tent. The Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry later found that the scenes connected with this outbreak…as stated to the Commission, and as currently rumoured, exhibit some of those disgraceful inhumanities that are the customary feature of a social outbreak. The commissioners acknowledged that the mounted police, in particular, had committed the sort of acts of indiscriminate violence displayed in moments of ungovernable excitement but declined to elaborate this subject further.
Anthropologist Roland Littlewood argues, in one of the few expositions of military rape, that sexual violence in warfare has occurred from Hebrew times through to the twentieth-century atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia. Incidents, however, are rarely reported. Sexual assault by soldiers ‘reflects badly’ not only on the perpetrators but also ‘on the victim, for an explicit justification frequently made by the soldiers who rape women is that it is to degrade and humiliate them’. Littlewood’s research shows that most military rapes occur in house-to-house searches and reprisal attacks; sexual gratification is often rationalised on the grounds that the assaulted women were housing enemies of the state.
Here is the politics of sexuality inextricably linked to the sexuality of politics. Perpetrating male violence on the female body aims to do symbolic violence to the body politic. Just as the flag was symbolically trampled and souvenired, so Ballarat’s women may well have been taken as a trophy of battle. As we have seen, women in Ballarat played an inordinately prominent role in mobilising and validating the social and political grievances of their community. If some soldiers did penetrate the sexual strongholds of Eureka’s women, it made for a far more abject surrender than Eureka’s men were prepared to concede openly.
It was all over by the time the sun scaled Mt Warrenheip.
For the troops and police returning to Camp at daybreak, the taste of victory was intoxicating. Still, they were given more rum—a reward, perhaps, or a timeless anaesthetic for the soul. When the soldiers were finally dismissed from duty, Huyghue tells us, they rushed cheering and capering like school boys to their tents. In his report to Governor Hotham the following day, Captain Thomas was pleased to advise that the behaviour of the troops and police, both officers and men, was very good.
Meanwhile, the people of Ballarat woke to the smell of burning canvas and the eerie sounds of mourning. Slowly people descended on the Stockade in silent fascination and horror. Lifeless and disfigured bodies had been laid out in neat rows, their clothes saturated with blood from those horrible bayonet wounds, with military guards standing over them lest they rise from the dead and scamper off.
During the next few hours, grieving relatives and friends retrieved the bodies, taking them home to be nursed or shrouded. Some diggers were dragged to nearby hotels turned into makeshift hospitals. Henry Powell was removed to the Albion Hotel, where the landlady Mrs O’Kell had only four months earlier brandished her gun at the murderous American Robert Clarke, peeved over a card game. She had by now passed the licence to Albert Goldstein. What was that Californian maxim about women and Jews? In Victoria, it was neither Shylock nor the shrew that blighted the limitless frontier; the British army took care of all that.
Thomas Pierson was not in the Stockade for the battle, but like most of Ballarat’s residents, he either visited or knew those who had. The treatment of the prisoners and wounded was, in his opinion, characteristic of English warfare. Most heathenish, bloodthirsty, disgraceful and cruel. In nine years’ time America would begin its own civil war, a conflict that would last four years and claim the lives of at least 650,000 soldiers and an unquantifiable number of civilians.
Charles Evans, too, was filled with disgust when he walked down to the Stockade on Sunday afternoon. That night he bared his troubled soul to his diary. The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, he wrote, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men. The young Shropshire lad’s world had been turned upside down. I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such savage use and cowardly use of their power as unhappily proved to be the case, he scribbled, his hand trembling with fury and pity. Newly made widows recognising the bloody remains of a slaughtered husband, Evans went on, unable to stem the flow of his rueful outpourings. Children screaming and crying round a dead father… cowardly and monstrous cruelties…It is a dark indelible stain on a British Government.
Ballarat was in a state of shock. Instead of the noisy mirth which usually characterises Sunday here, Evans concluded his entry for 3 December, an uncomfortable stillness prevails and many seem to think it is the lull before the tempest. In fact, the storm had passed.
Now there was the clean-up.
All the unclaimed dead and wounded were brought to the Camp in carts that afternoon—three dray-loads full of maimed and lifeless bodies. Huyghue saw the mangled remains in the Camp hospital. The dead rebels’ faces were ghastly and passionately distorted. Half-clothed, surprised from sleep, they remained frozen in a burlesque of battle. The nameless dead were unceremoniously buried at the cemetery on Monday. Regimental and civilian surgeons attempted to patch up the shattered limbs and ragged gashes of the wounded.
Four soldiers were dead: Privates William Webb (nineteen years) and Felix Boyle (thirty-two years) of the 12th Regiment and Michael Roney (twenty-two years) and Joseph Wall of the 40th (twenty years). At least nine more soldiers and police were wounded.
Captain Henry Wise, a twenty-five-year-old commissioned officer and the most popular soldier in the division, died of a gunshot wound to his leg on 21 December. He had only been in the country four weeks before he sustained his mortal injury leading the first line of troops into the Stockade. Before he died, Wise gamely announced that his dancing was spoiled. Henry Wise left a wife, Jane, to dance alone. Did she have a friend to comfort her at the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, so forlorn, so far from home? Perhaps not; a Mrs Wise sailed for London in February 1855.
It is impossible to say exactly how many civilians died at the Stockade, in the surrounding tents or in the bush and the mine shafts where the dazed and wounded fled. There were many body counts that circulated in the following days and weeks. Peter Lalor famously published a list of the Eureka martyrs, in which he named twenty-two. Timothy Shanahan also counted twenty-two. Samuel Huyghue estimated thirty to forty. Dan Calwell reported to his American relatives a figure of thirty killed. In his diary entry for 6 December, Thomas Pierson noted twenty-five deaths. But some time later he scrawled in the margin, time has proved that near 60 have died of the diggers in all. Captain Thomas wrote in his official report that the casualties of the military action had been great but there was no means of ascertaining correctly. He estimated at least thirty killed on the spot, and many more died of their wounds subsequently. The numbers of injuries and fatalities, reported the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 8 December, were more numerous than originally supposed.
Among the known dead were Martin Diamond, Anne’s husband; John Hynes, cousin to Bridget Hynes’ husband; Patrick Gittens, who had been the best man at Bridget’s wedding; Prussian Jew Teddy Thonen, the ‘lemonade seller’; Llewellyn Rowlands, who was shot in the chest by troopers outside his tent, half a mile from the Stockade. He wasn’t Elizabeth Rowlands’ husband, but maybe the troopers thought he was and deliberately sought him out for his wife’s presumed treachery the previous morning. So many people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, collateral damage of bitterly unfriendly fire. G. H. Mann simply recorded that an onerous number of funerals were frequently passing to the cemetery for many days.
Of these funeral corteges, Charles Evans described only one—the one that began our story. This is the coffin trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowful group. This is the coffin containing a dead woman, whose body was claimed but not named. This is the woman mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. We don’t know whether he was spared—whether she took the bullet or the bayonet for him. We don’t know whether she left motherless children behind. We don’t know how many other women may have been among the numbers of dead that could not be ascertained correctly. This is the woman who was slipped quietly into the earth by her weeping friends and loved ones, then slipped just as silently out of history.
The seismic front had passed, but there was one fatal aftershock. Directly after the riots, as the government would now refer to the storming of the Stockade, Ballarat was placed under martial law by order of Governor Hotham. There could be no light in any tent after 8pm. Reprisals were expected; the Camp was still jumpy as a cut snake. On Monday night, one trigger-happy sentry thought he heard gunfire coming from a tent close to the Camp. He opened fire. Among the victims of last night’s unpardonable recklessness, wrote Charles Evans in his diary on Tuesday, were a woman and her infant. The same ball which murdered the mother (for that’s the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms. He also recorded that another young woman had a miraculous escape.
Hearing the reports of musketry and the dread whiz of bullets around her, she ran out of her tent to seek shelter. She had just got outside when a ball whistled immediately before her eyes passing through both sides of her bonnet.
This is the Woman of ’54, the one who would write to the papers in 1884 to tell of the night she almost lost her life, a tale she related as an antidote to the noticeably chauvinistic thirtieth anniversary commemorations. This is the woman who called Humffray a coward. Closer to the action, Charles Evans had no trouble attesting to monstrous acts like these polluting the soil with the innocent blood of men women and children.
One woman’s terror was another’s opportunity. In the midst of the chaos of renewed firing, screaming and panic on that Monday night, a lone figure stole out from the Camp. Clouds obscured the moon, waning now, and the person chose the moment to run down the hill, keeping close to the picket fence to avoid holes and tent ropes. In an instant, recalled Samuel Huyghue, a dozen rifles were pointed at the moving object when a ray of moonlight befriended her (for it proved to be a woman) and she got off scatheless. The soldiers were more discerning now than they had been the previous morning. As soon as her garments revealed her sex the deadly weapons were lowered, wrote Huyghue. It was a close shave but perhaps she never realised to the full the danger she escaped.
It’s more likely this woman was fully aware of the risks of stealing into the Camp to see her husband, who was one of the prisoners. But Anastasia Hayes was nothing if not a risk-taker. She had five children and a newborn baby, but still she found the nerve to broker a secret communication with Timothy through the connivance of the lockup keeper, who was subsequently arrested for his perfidy. Huyghue’s own suspicion was that Anastasia was working as a spy for the reform league and that part of her plan was to rescue the prisoners by creating a diversion.
Paranoia had gripped the Camp by now. For good measure, the prisoners were transferred from the ‘logs’ to the zinc-lined commissariat store. This means the women who had stayed at the Camp during the previous terrifying days, including Ellen Neill and baby Fanny, must have been moved out. Maggie Johnston recorded the week’s bizarre arrangements in her diary.
December 3 Sunday
The awful day of the attack made at the Eureka at 5 in the morning.
December 4 Monday
All day long funerals passing.
December 5 Tuesday
Somewhat similar.
December 6 Wednesday
Mrs Lane staying with me for a week.
By the end of that train wreck of a month, the bulk of the funerals were over, the shops were once again open, mining operations were in full steam and the rattle of the windlass chimed in syncopated rhythm with squeezeboxes, street bands, shrieking children and barking dogs.
Peter Lalor, with the connivance of Stephen and Jane Cuming, was in hiding in Geelong, under the care of Alicia Dunne. Along with Lalor, Frederick Vern, George Black and James McGill also had a price on their heads. Thirteen men—including Timothy Hayes, Raffaello Carboni and the nigger rebel, African-American John Joseph—were on their way to Melbourne to be tried for treason. Henry Seekamp had been arrested in his home, with Clara and her children looking on, and would contest a charge of sedition.
The rest of the prisoners were released to the ruins of their burnt-out tents, grief-stricken kin and uncertain futures. Robert Rede’s report for the last week of December noted a population increase of 855 women and 1955 children, and a decrease of 4130 men. A better state of order is returning, he wrote, and the miners are resuming work…little gold has been raised.36
Eureka Wright, whose parents Thomas and Mary Wright were in their tent inside the stockade when it was stormed, celebrated her first birthday.
Dear Jamie and I spent a quiet day all alone, wrote Maggie Johnston. Our first Christmas after our marriage. Her baby quickened.
A year earlier, Thomas Pierson had wondered what fate would befall him, Frances and Mason by the next Christmas. Now, he joined with thousands of other drunk and sunburnt people thronging the long Main Road that ran through the Flat to rejoice at the birth of Christ and other small miracles. It was a hundred degrees; the flies were as thick as Connecticut snow, and Thomas reckoned he would never grow accustomed to this strange country. Yuletide tells a story of birth, hope and promise in a spiritual sanctum, but for Thomas and Frances, after all they had seen, the exiles dream of home is past.