There was little work done in those last weeks of 1854. The aftermath of what soon became known as the Eureka Stockade—the AGE newspaper gave the bloody event this name on 20 December—took its toll on the usual bustling hive of end-of-year industry. First there were the funerals; then came the removal of incinerated tents, the stocktake of decimated business and the shelter of homeless families. There were preparations for Christmas too. And all under the blazing sun of a summer hot spell.
But there was another matter more pressing than the body count, the burnt-out ground of the Eureka or the baking of mince tarts. There was the matter of the races.
The races are the absorbing topic, noted the Ballarat correspondent of the GEELONG ADVERTISER on 27 December. The inaugural Ballarat Race Meeting had been planned for months. The event was intended to rival the oldest and best regulated courses in this colony and put the fledgling goldfields town on the sporting calendar. A weighing machine had been purchased at great expense, a track cleared some seven miles from the Camp, near Bald Hills, beyond Waldock’s Station, and stewards appointed for the five-day meet, which was slated to commence on 12 December. Prize money had been collected for the Hack Race, the Maiden Plate, the Camp Purse, the Ballarat Town Plate, the Publicans Purse, the Gold Diggings Plate, the Consolation Stakes and the Ladies Purse: a rollcall of Ballarat’s social taxonomy as clear as the blue sky itself.
But, according to the BALLARAT TIMES, the recent disturbances were ill calculated to promote sporting affairs. There was also the considerable complication that two of the stewards—Messrs Rede and Johnston—were more likely to be lynched than listened to should they appear before a drunk and festive public. Johnston, noted the BALLARAT TIMES, always sounded as if he was insulting you, adding generously that perhaps he could not help it. Rede, the paper conceded, was an accomplished scholar and generous donor to charitable causes, but his manner set everyone at odds. For their own safety, both Rede and Johnston had left Ballarat shortly after the Stockade clash.
So the first race day was rescheduled for Boxing Day and new stewards were appointed, neutral men unlikely to incite another riot. But still the fates were cruel to the sport of kings. Four thousand post-Christmas revellers walked the seven miles in scorching heat to the racecourse only to discover that the weighing apparatus had been accidentally damaged and the first race postponed indefinitely. It is too much to expect large assemblages of people to remain patient under a scorching sun, noted the TIMES. Liquids of all kinds were eagerly sought for. Ice sellers did a roaring trade, while pickpocket gangs swarmed from one hard drinking circle to the next. Sarah Hanmer was in attendance but got herself into a difficulty that soon gave rise to a good deal of yabber…too private and intricate to publish. By the time new scales had arrived and Mr Keating’s bay horse had it all his own way in the Hack Race later that evening, the crowd was legless.
On day two, clouds of dust billowed in the arc of a northerly gale. The faces of punters looked as if at a masquerade ball, so besmeared with topsoil and sweat that you couldn’t recognize your most intimate friend. Then the seven-mile stagger back to the diggings, only to repeat the trek the following day. One party, who had hired a horse-drawn conveyance to relieve the slog, had cause to regret their indolence when the buggy overturned, resulting in serious injury to several passengers.
Next the temperature plummeted and a perfect deluge flooded the track. A sudden change of the weather, noted the TIMES, rendered a visit to the course more an act of martyrdom than pleasure. By the end of the stormy third day, when the Ladies Purse (presented by the Ladies of Ballarat and Creswick of not less than 100 sovereigns…1 mile and a half, 11 stone; gentleman riders) was taken out by Mr Waldock’s St Patrick, the people of Ballarat must have wondered whether they were being punished for something.
But their suffering was rewarded. With Old Father Christmas, concluded the TIMES, five days’ good racing, and a race dinner and ball crowded into one week, we ought to have enjoyed ourselves. William Westgarth, who was in Ballarat as a member of the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry established by Governor Hotham to investigate the root cause of miners’ grievances, thought the races a most absorbing spectacle.1
A week-long holiday had scuttled the gold escort (the armed guard transporting gold to Melbourne) but done wonders for the morale of a community beset with trauma, sickened by hope deferred.
New Year’s Day 1855 was ushered in by an even more absorbing sight than thousands of well-oiled race-goers. To our readers, beckoned the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES, A happy new year to you all. Clara Seekamp continued her leader:
That you may have better health, more wealth, and much more justice this year than during the one just past, is the earnest prayer of your fellow labourer—the Editor.
With her husband awaiting trial on charges of sedition, Clara Seekamp took the reins of their family enterprise. She published the list of subscribers to the proposed Miners Hospital: topping the list was Sarah Hanmer with a generous £53 donation. (The second-largest contribution was from Robert Rede.) She published a letter from Jewish auctioneer Henry Harris, beseeching the Ballarat community to come to the financial aid of those unfortunates who have innocently suffered from the late fearful entente on the Eureka [when] women became widows, children fatherless. There is also a letter from ‘Quartz’, encouraging people to write to the enquiry into the late massacre and make suggestions to the Commission on political questions.
There are many remarkable features of the New Year’s Day paper, but the most outstanding is by far the least prominent. Edition 45 of the BALLARAT TIMES, Monday, January 1, 1855, bears a small imprint in the bottom corner of the last column of its final page:
Printed and published by Mrs Seekamp, Ballarat.
These seven little words encapsulate the other insurrection that had occurred in the watershed year of 1854.
When a few hundred polyglot gold miners hastily constructed a rough palisade around fifteen tents on the Eureka Lead, they intended to provide a place of armed refuge for unlicensed diggers against the legally sanctioned licence hunts designed to oppress, entrap and emasculate them. They raised a flag that would fly beside the French, German, American, British, Canadian and other standards that were customarily flown at public meetings. They called it the Australian Flag. Standing below that flag’s simple, geopolitically specific design, they swore an oath to stand by each other to defend their rights and liberties. Those rights, they considered, were nothing more or less than their entitlement as free-born Britons to be treated like men. Not animals, serfs or slaves: men.
The miners were not disloyal to their sovereign, but rather had lost any shred of respect for the minions who served her. They did not want to change the system of government; they wanted to be included in it. At no time did they riot against or launch an assault on authorities. They were not insurgents. They were not revolutionaries. For the most part, they were British subjects denied the basic civilities of British justice. They were ethnic insiders being treated like outsiders. They rebelled against an unpopular and viciously policed poll tax when all peaceful means of protest had been rebuffed. They fought back when attacked by the military in a pre-emptive strike that was intended to restore the authority of a government that taxed but would not listen, a goldfields regime that postulated but would not protect, and an imperialist agenda that had promised so much but delivered precious little.
They sewed a flag and built a fence.
Flailing desperately to conjure a worthy enemy following bloody Sunday, Governor Hotham quickly determined that only foreigners could be responsible for such outrageous acts of perfidy. No one was fooled, least of all when Hotham declared an amnesty for any Americans involved in the affray. The Americans had been the only ones who, perhaps, truly did foresee a republican future and for whom insurrection against redcoats had already proved a successful political strategy. Clara Seekamp certainly was not duped by Hotham’s scapegoating tactic. In her leader on New Year’s Day 1855, she called Hotham to account:
Who are the foreigners? Where are the foreigners? What is it that constitutes a foreigner?…Poor Governor Hotham! Could you not have found some other more truthful excuse for all the illegal and even murderous excesses committed by your soldiery and butchers?…Why did you disregard our memorials and entreaties, our prayers and our cries for justice and protection against your unjust stewards here, until the people, sickened by hope deferred, and maddened by continued and increased acts of oppression, were driven to take up arms in self defence?
That Clara’s action—offering a political analysis of the Eureka Stockade—was genuinely revolutionary is evident in the general response. William Westgarth, opening his copy of the BALLARAT TIMES on New Year’s Day, did not fail to notice the breathtaking hubris of its emancipated editor. The TIMES was at war with the authorities local and general, he surmised before adding smugly, we amused ourselves with the violent style of the ‘leaders’. Tickled by his own sparkling wit, Westgarth made a pun of a woman aspiring to editorial governance. He forgot, perhaps, that with no representation in the legislature, the diggers could only make their voice heard through the press. In Ballarat, the only press was the BALLARAT TIMES, whose usual leader-writer was presently in prison on charges of sedition, with his wife stepping to the breach.
There is no extant copy of edition 46, but Clara was evidently still chafing at the bit. The BALLARAT TIMES contains…a manifesto from Mrs Seekamp, wrote a journalist at the GEELONG ADVERTISER (soon syndicated throughout the country), as startling in its tone, and as energetic in its language, italics, and capitals, and the free use of the words ‘sedition’, ‘liberty’, ‘oppression’ etc as a Russian ukase would be. The reporter had a novel solution to this remarkable situation:
I only hope that Sir William a’Beckett will at once perceive that a lenient sentence upon Mr Seekamp and a quick return to his editorial duties, will relieve, at all events, the gold field of Ballarat from the dangerous influence of a free press petticoat government.
The Ballarat troubles had been caused, in part, by lack of judicial transparency and unchecked miscarriages of justice, yet the (pro-democracy) ADVERTISER’s reporter was prepared to suggest that Attorney General William a’Beckett exercise his discretion to restore the status of the press as a bastion of masculine authority. He was not alone. Charles Thatcher, the famous goldfields balladeer, also had something to say about Clara’s editorial style. In his popular ditty ‘Ballarat Comic Alphabet’, penned in 1855, Thatcher devoted ‘S’ to the imprisoned Seekamp:
S is for Seekamp who I trust will be
Released upon my life
It will but save us from the trash
Inserted by his wife2
The anomaly of Clara’s pre-eminence at the masthead of the TIMES only served to affirm the general state of affairs that Thatcher lamented in other of his verses. The gals that come out to Australia to roam/Have much higher notions than when they’re at home, he sang in ‘London and the Diggings’.3 Having women call the political race was clearly too big a hurdle for most people.
Nonetheless, Clara Seekamp and Ellen Young were not the only women to use the press as a route to the political influence otherwise denied them. On 7 December, Caroline Chisholm wrote a letter to the editor of the ARGUS. Vitriol was not her style. Any thoughtful person who calmly views our present condition, either commercially or politically, she wrote, would see the problem was underutilisation of the rich and beautiful land God has given us. With remarkable prescience, Chisholm concluded that we are a nation of consumers instead of producers. Pre-figuring the mining magnates of over a century later, she counselled Governor Hotham to stop taxing and start ploughing, a plea that echoed one of the miners’ key grievances: unlock the lands!
In the weeks directly following the Stockade clash, miners formed yet another quixotic expectation: that justice would be done. By 15 December, there were calls for the exhumation of the bodies that had been swiftly buried in makeshift graves. The date is important. On 9 December, Henry Powell—the unarmed miner outside the Stockade who had been dreadfully mangled by a policeman despite the protests of Eliza Cox—died of his wounds. The following day, an inquest was held. The finding of the inquest, published on the 13th, was that the mounted police were culpable of firing at and cutting down the unarmed and innocent persons of both sexes. Powell’s was the only coronial investigation of any death that occurred during or after the Eureka clash. Subsequent to his burial, the Ballarat correspondent for the GEELONG ADVERTISER predicted that all the bodies lately buried would be exhumed and inquests held. It is said by those who are learned in law, the ADVERTISER suggested, that all those killed on the 3rd and who had died subsequently of their wounds should have been subject to Coroner’s inquests. Digging up the bodies would require political courage. It would also need a community determined to maintain its rage.
Charles Evans, for one, could not believe that the government would get off lightly. Surely the men who had perpetrated atrocities on blameless victims would be held to account by virtue of both natural and British justice. His diary entries keenly demonstrate his horror and disbelief at how far the British officials had strayed from their national and racial superiority as agents of civility and progress.
There were others eager to bear witness to the moral and jurisprudential implications of the slaughter, afraid that time would veil the unsightly wounds. On 15 December, an anonymous poem was published in the GEELONG ADVERTISER. ‘The Mounted Butchers’ aimed for documentary relevance.
There go the ‘Troopers’ that slaughtered our men,
When all fight and resistance was o’er:…
By firing the tents, and cutting men down:
And mangling and maiming the dead
They barely upheld the old British Crown,
That our fathers had fought for and bled.
Women and children escaped not their fire…
Like demons they rode and vented their ire,
When the ‘Red Coats’ the skirmish had won.
The anonymous poet confirmed publicly what Charles Evans had scribbled privately in his diary: The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men.
Yet ultimately, local indignation could not be sustained.
When the dust settled, Henry Powell’s would be the only inquest. The bodies remained in the ground. Only one man, Powell’s killer, would be brought before the courts. But before that, smelling danger, the red-coated rats abandoned Hotham’s ship in droves. Three soldiers deserted the 12th Regiment in November 1854. Nineteen more followed in December 1854 and January 1855. A further thirteen deserted in the early months of 1855. In total, thirty-five out of sixty-five soldiers of Ballarat’s 12th Regiment deserted. In 1855, 165 soldiers in Victoria threw back the Queen’s shilling, the highest recorded desertion rate in Victoria’s history.4
Diggers and Redcoats alike had fought well and fierce, recorded Corporal John Neill after the stockade fight.5 But some casualties were more equal than others. It was six months before death certificates were issued for miners who lost their lives at Eureka: a bulk lot issued by the Ballarat registrar on 20 June, identifying sixteen men who died of gunshot wound on 3 December 1854. Yet there was a paper trail of evidence and a mother lode of popular memory to inscribe the reality that at least a dozen more people, both women and men, had been the victims of government brutality on that fateful day.
Now fast forward one year to 3 December 1855. The trials of thirteen miners for treason had dissolved in farce, making a laughing stock of the government. No jury would convict their peers of a capital offence for which there was not a shred of evidence, save, perhaps, a mangled blue and white flag pilfered by one of the troopers in the ashes of the Stockade, and later returned to him by the Crown—more as souvenir than state secret.
Only one blow from the prosecution landed, and it was no more than an oblique backhander, intended to strike at the potency of the miners’ worrisome popularity among city dwellers. Timothy Hayes was the butt of the joke: Lieutenant T. Bailey Richards of the 40th Regiment swore on oath that he arrested the Ballarat Reform League leader walking unarmed outside the Stockade after the battle. He then regaled the court with the tale of Anastasia’s insult: His wife came up afterwards and said are you taken, he said yes, she then said to him ‘if I had been a man I would not have been taken by so few as these’.6 Laughter in the court at the Punch and Judy show, the spectacle of an untamed shrew more powerful than her mate.
By the time the courts ejected the last of the prisoners, the goldfields commission had also tabled its report. It ranked the miners’ grievances in this order: the licence fee (or more properly the unseemly violence often necessary for its due collection); the land grievance; and the want of political rights and recognised status rendering the mining population an entirely non-privileged body… without gradations of public rank. The editor of the GEELONG ADVERTISER offered his own summary of events:
Denuded of the rights of citizenship, and tabooed, regarded as inferiors, and forced to submit to insolence, annoyance, direct insult and a long course of petty oppression, without means of address,
the miners had no option but to act. Their treatment had been repugnant to British experience and derogatory to the manly feeling of independence.7
The commission’s recommendations for alleviating these complaints were quickly adopted. The mining royalty was replaced with a miner’s right. For £1 per year, it entitled miners to fossick for minerals, gave them access to a plot of land on which they could make capital improvements, and enfranchised them to vote in and seek representation on both a new local mining court system and the Victorian legislature. Women could purchase a miner’s right, but were excluded from its political spoils. (Victorian women would not win the state franchise for another fifty-three years.)
The commission of enquiry, like the juries, came out on the side of the miners. But this did not get the victims of 3 December any closer to the compensation many had claimed from the government for property losses when the military set the Eureka ablaze. A board of enquiry found in mid-winter 1855 that the destruction of tents on the morning of 3 December was a necessary consequence of the resistance offered to the military. Your Board lament the losses sustained by individuals, read the report, but cannot forget that if the sufferers were not actively engaged in an overt act of Rebellion they displayed no disposition to support authority. Thus Anne Diamond, whose husband was shot inside their store before it was burned to the ground, found her claim for £600 rejected. In this the struggling miner’s wife was no different from Catherine Bentley, the formerly prosperous publican’s wife, whose claim of £30,000 for the loss of her hotel and the forced annexation of land held in her name, was brushed aside. It was a small taste for these new Australians of the bitter pill of dispossession suffered irretrievably by the old Australians.
By December 1855, Henry Seekamp was back at the helm of the TIMES, having served half of his six-month sentence for sedition. A massive petition raised by Clara, and reputed to bear thirty thousand names, had begged successfully for his release. Charles Evans had published and printed his own newspaper, the BALLARAT LEADER, with J. B. Humffray at the helm. It lasted seven editions, folding at the same time that Queen Victoria signed the bill that would give her eponymous Australian colony its first Legislative Assembly.8 When elections were held under the new Victorian Constitution in November 1855, J. B. Humffray and Peter Lalor were elected as Ballarat’s representatives.
By spring, Sarah Hanmer had sold the Adelphi and left Ballarat. After moving around various other goldfields, she and Julia were playing to packed houses at Coppin’s Olympic Theatre in Melbourne. (She appears to have uprooted out of choice rather than necessity; Sarah was re-issued with a Ballarat theatrical licence in January 1855, despite her direct competitor, Stephen Clarke, objecting that he had always been loyal to the Crown which cannot be said of the Adelphi Company under the direction of Mrs Hanmer.9) Sir Charles and Lady Hotham were regular theatregoers, perhaps to distract them from the shadow of incompetence that trailed the governor. They may have occupied a private box to see Sarah and Julia perform a Domestic Tragedy, a Burlesque and a Farce, before Mayor J. T. Smith, and American consul James Tarleton. The Hothams did not know, of course, that tragedy was soon to befall them.
And so by 3 December 1855, after a year in which life-changing events had surged forth with an urgent force of nature, it was time to stop and remember the dead. Raffaello Carboni had published copies of his memoir The Eureka Stockade: The Consequence of Some Pirates Wanting on Quarter Deck a Rebellion. (Its cover price of five shillings put it beyond the reach of many interested in the regrettable events.10) The eccentric Italian spent the day sitting at the Stockade site and reading from his book from sunrise to sunset. There was no formal commemoration of the day. In the morning a group of some hundred mourners walked to the cemetery to pay their respects. If there were eulogies spoken, tears shed, passions rekindled, the newspapers did not report them. For there was another conflagration to upstage the first anniversary of the Stockade and monopolise media attention. Fearful Fire at Ballarat. Great Loss of Life, screamed the headlines.
On 1 December, a fire ripped through the new wooden buildings that lined the street where a year ago tents flapped in the breeze. The locus of the Main Street inferno was the United States Hotel, radiating a glare of light…that has never before been witnessed on Ballarat. The blaze had spread to the Criterion Store, once owned by Charles and George Evans, the Adelphi Theatre, Moody’s Store and several other business and grog shops. Moses and Sons’ zinc-lined store stopped the flames spreading further in the Eureka direction. One male and one female body were pulled from the burning United States Hotel, owned by American Mr Nicholls, a former friend of Sarah Hanmer’s. The bodies were identified. One stump of charred human flesh was Nicholls himself; Dr Clendinning later held a coronial enquiry identifying the victim.
It was Henry Seekamp who ran down from the TIMES office at the first cry of fire. He was too late to save Nicholls but, entering the inferno, he saw a woman with her head lolling to one side. As Seekamp later told Clendinning,
I endeavoured to envelop the head of the female with a silk handkerchief to enable me to lay hold of it, but the head was so burnt that it crumbled into cinder; and I was obliged to leave from the heat.11
(A subsequent post mortem later exposed two testicles complete, revealing the headless woman to be a man.) Mr McGill, who, a year to the day earlier, had brandished Sarah Hanmer’s heirloom rapier at the head of the Californian Rangers, now poured water on the smouldering remains. The capital damage was estimated at £50,000. Two more bodies were found.
Two weeks later, the worst floods on record inundated the town, leading the GEELONG ADVERTISER to conclude: December is a fatal month in Ballarat—last year the sword, this year fire and flood are the agents.
And then, on the last day of the year, Charles Hotham died after a brief but violent illness, with his lady by his side. They had been married just over two years. The only extant passages from Lady Hotham’s diary pertain to the final days of her husband’s life. She read to him, fed him, prayed with him. He asked me to miss him, she wrote,
he put his left arm around my neck, and kissed me many times as if he wished to say good bye, but he did not speak…for a moment before he died his eyes resumed their natural expression, he seemed to be looking at me with intense affection.12
Some said Hotham had caught a chill in the freakish summer weather; other claimed it was a fatal bout of diarrhoea. Those who did not fear speaking ill of the dead swore he was broken in health and spirit through his own foolhardiness, landing here with words of liberty upon his lips, but with the design of a despot. For Lady Jane Sarah Hotham, twice widowed at the age of thirty-eight, there was nothing but grief.
1856 marked a turning point in the sexual politics of Victoria. When Lady Hotham sailed back to England in February of that year, she left behind her a colony struggling to contain the transformative forces it had both encouraged and feared. For if Eureka was a real time and a real place, it also became a metaphor for a moment of sweeping change when old and new regimes, attitudes, structures and aspirations collided head on.
Women had both stirred up and been carried along by that torrent of history. As the technology of gold digging was itself making the transition—from the early days of independent, alluvial mining, where individuals worked for themselves, to syndicated (corporatised) quartz mining, employing waged workers—so the initial phase of relative autonomy and liberation for women began to solidify into familiar structures of dominance and subservience.
The growth of towns, which the miner’s right facilitated, led to the establishment of permanent hospitals, schools and churches: the longed-for feminisation of the frontier. An editorial in the BALLARAT TIMES from 12 June 1856, on the ‘Progress of Ballarat’, articulated the criteria for such improvement. A few years ago, it explained, Ballarat exhibited the universal disorganisation of society. Now, by contrast, [we are] a peaceful, orderly people [showing] the decencies and refinements of civilised life. Martha Clendinning affords a perfect barometer of the changes that such civility was supposed to entail.
By 1856 Martha had decided to shut the store that had given her such satisfaction. Her reason had nothing to do with economic imperative. She was a good businesswoman and did a profitable trade, despite increased competition and diminishing returns. I was satisfied with the result of my work, she declared. As Dr Clendinning had struggled to establish his own practice, she had worked to supplement his income.
After 1855, Ballarat had become a settled township in which men came ‘to stay’ and with their wives and families make their homes there. Once the feverish turmoil of the early diggings subsided, sex roles began to revert to their former ideological inertia. The time had gone by, wrote Martha, when, even on the gold fields, a woman unaccustomed to such work could carry on her business without invidious remarks. Fearful for her husband’s reputation (she worried he might be blamed from allowing me to continue at it) she chose to shut up shop. The good doctor was himself most anxious about how her business activities would be viewed and was greatly pleased when she retired.
Dr Clendinning at once began building her a wooden house on Red Hill. This put an end to all further remarks, Martha conceded, and allowed us to make our home fit for a lady and her doctor husband to occupy, and, in a little time, to add a small garden to their comforts. The picket fence of Martha’s newly constrained life was complete when she began the charity work that is the keystone of civilised life. Martha Clendinning, doctor’s wife, was on the first committee for the Ballarat Female Refuge and a member of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society of Melbourne. Like many former miners who later looked back on the roaring fifties with nostalgia, Martha remembered her years as an autonomous shopkeeper with affection and not a little regret.
Other trailblazers weren’t prepared to go so quietly.
When Lola Montez toured Melbourne and its glistening hinterland in early 1856, she raised eyebrows for her outlandish claims to political influence as much as her saucy spider dancing. As we have seen, her tour was dogged by controversy, none more infamous than when she horsewhipped Henry Seekamp for giving her a bad review in the BALLARAT TIMES. The coward who could beat a woman, ran from a woman, thundered Lola in her curtain speech after thrashing Seekamp. He says he will drive me off the diggings; but I will change the tables, and make Seekamp decamp!13 The stoush spilled from the theatre to the courts when Seekamp sued Lola for assault and Lola counter-sued for slander. PUNCH composed a twenty-seven-verse poem about the incident, facetiously titled ‘The Battle of Ballarat’, a direct allusion to the Eureka Stockade.
Come forth, come forth, thou vap’ring Erle
Thou scribe so rude and rash
And yield thee to the punishment
Of Lola Montes’ lash.14
Imperial anxieties about the state of social flux in the colonies in general, and about the presumptuous, defiant behaviour of women in particular, are summed up in the satirical analogy between women whipping men and the military whipping the miners.
Lola’s public incursions into the structures of power may ultimately have been viewed as a salacious sideshow, but in 1856 there was another struggle taking place between the forces of female aspiration and masculine privilege.
The organised movement for female suffrage in Australia didn’t mobilise until the 1880s, but it is clear that women’s political and legal rights, including suffrage, were part of the liberal democratic agenda of some gold rush visionaries, male and female. In 1856, this agenda butted up against the ‘civilising’ impulse to restore the status quo to Victoria’s sexual politics. A letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES in 1856 provides compelling evidence that there were women on the diggings who interpreted the rhetoric of political and social inclusiveness as an invitation to participate more fully in the decision-making processes that governed their lives.
On 8 September, Fanny Smith wrote this. It is an important enough document to be quoted in full:
My Dear Sir—Will you be good enough to inform me if ladies holding the ‘miner’s right’ are eligible to be elected as members of the Local Court? I have read the Gold Fields Act 18 Vic No 37, and find it silent as to sex. The point has been disputed, and I have thought of asking the opinion of Mr Chairman Daly, but I am told that he has stated he sees no objection to lady members, provided they possess the necessary qualification—are proposed, seconded and elected. Your opinion will be anxiously waited for by myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat.15
Fanny’s letter gives us many vital clues as to the political literacy and vigour of Ballarat’s women. She is versed in the relevant legislation and the critical processes, she is using Chairman Daly’s alleged support as a wedge, and she is letting it be known that she is not a lone voice, but simply the vocal tip of a looming iceberg of female ambition. Indeed, in February 1856, the ARGUS cautioned the leaders of the ‘women’s rights’ movement against their somewhat injudicious proceedings.16
The miner’s right had been the most tangible outcome of the Ballarat troubles. The newly constituted local mining courts, empowered to resolve mining and partnership disputes, were widely seen as a victory for self-rule. The miner’s right was the gateway to participation: the ‘necessary qualification’ for voting or standing for office. Geoffrey Blainey has characterised the miner’s right as ‘probably the high tide of Australian democracy’.17 And Fanny Smith was correct: there was nothing in the legislation to bar women from holding a miner’s right. Indeed many women elected to purchase one to stake a claim on the land or were obliged to purchase one if they mined independently of husbands or ran their own businesses on the diggings, which many did.18 But did the legislature anticipate that possession of the miner’s right would also constitute legal sanction for women’s participation in the other democratic functions promised by the municipal franchise?
Fanny Smith never got a straight answer on the issue of representation in the local courts. But her possum-stirring had an immediate effect. On 12 September 1856, another letter to the editor was published in the BALLARAT TIMES, by someone claiming to be putting herself up as a candidate in the imminent elections for state parliament for the seat of North Grant. Her platform? All the crazy ideas going around, including universal suffrage:
Women’s right: I am for their having the same rights as a man, and to allow them to go into the House and to the Bar; for I am sure there is many an old woman in both positions already.19
The later suffragists would, of course, become familiar with this form of mockery.
The same issue of the BALLARAT TIMES reported that twenty-six-year-old Thomas Loader would contest the seat of North Grant against sitting member J. B. Humffray in the 1856 Victorian Legislative Assembly election. There were clearly enough ambitious ladies in Ballarat to convince a young man to stake his political future on the improvement of their legal status. Although Loader did not expressly advocate the female franchise, his policy on law reform included rights of women and simplification of divorce law…questions I have strong opinions upon the necessity of immediately reforming. No other popular candidate in the 1856 election included such a radical policy as women’s rights in their platform. At the election, however, Humffray won by an overwhelming majority. Thomas Loader may have seen that there were special circumstances in gold rush Victoria that made certain social reforms, including women’s rights, ‘peculiarly requisite’. But even by 1856, he was swimming against the tide.
Small and scattered as they are, these nuggets of evidence that women’s political citizenship was being advocated in Australia as early as 1856 are significant. They place the genesis of women’s rights activism in that gold rush community of adventurers, risk-takers, speculators and freedom fighters who struggled for the more famous civic liberties often said to be at the heart of Australia’s democratic tradition.
For Victoria’s women, the window of golden opportunity that opened during the social flux and political tumult of the mid- to late 1850s was firmly slammed shut by the Electoral Law Consolidation Act of 1865, which finally inserted the word ‘male’ before the word ‘person’ in the voting qualification, thus ensuring that manhood suffrage was just that. By the time ‘universal suffrage’ became a hot political topic in the late 1860s, it was taken for granted that it was the rights and entitlements of property, not gender, that were at stake.
The baton of manhood suffrage—and its attendant values of independence, responsibility and human dignity—thus passed, in legend at least, from Eureka’s miners to the shearers to the union movement to the labour movement to today’s activists and idealists. The dynamic yet still disenfranchised proto-feminist women’s rights movement of the 1850s dropped unceremoniously from public view.
To top it all off, by the time of the Ballarat Christmas Races of 1856, there was no longer a Ladies Purse.
1856 was also a watershed year for Eureka remembrance. On the eve of the second anniversary of the battle/riots/uprising/massacre (for all these terms were by now used interchangeably), a crowd of three hundred miners gathered on the ground and passed a resolution:
that Wednesday 3rd of December, being the anniversary of the massacre of the Ballarat Patriots, be observed as a general holiday, in commemoration of the men who so nobly sacrificed their lives in resisting injustice and tyranny.
At 2pm the following day, a group of five hundred mourners met on the stockade site. Each wore a black gauze scarf tied around the left arm. Miner John Lynch read an oration, exhorting the crowd to: Be true men all you men, like those we celebrate. The mourners then formed a solemn procession to the cemetery. It was here that Dr Hambrook—who had not been anywhere near Ballarat two years prior—delivered his rousing graveside address, the eulogy that opened this book.
Morning dawns upon the land for whose happiness and independence the patriots bled, Hambrook boomed.
Combine together for the common weal—maintain the right—protect the weak—give your determined opposition to injustice in every shape, and let others in future ages have the opportunity of pointing to this colony, and saying—‘The men of Victoria were true to themselves’.
And with that, Eureka drifted into something more like a disturbed dream than an actual historical reality.
By 3 December 1857 there was no half-holiday. No crowds. No black armbands and but one reference in the BALLARAT TIMES to the events of three years hence: happily, those dark and dismal days are past forever.
By 1858: the stockade, with all the strong feelings then called up, is forgotten, save by a few. Five Germans and two newspaper reporters were all who met to do honour to the memory of the men who fell four years ago. One reporter concluded, The thought of races or apathy triumph over sympathy.
So, yes: Geoffrey Blainey was spot-on when he said that Eureka is like a great neon sign with messages that flick on and off, selling different lessons to different customers according to the fashion of the day. It has been that way since 1856, when the second anniversary was used to underscore the colony’s transformation from the wild and delirious nature of the ‘early days’ to the beginnings of a settled society. In the transition from rough to respectable, men’s transgressions were celebrated. Miners became patriots, while women were erased from the frontline of the frontier.
But that’s only part of the story. By 1884, pioneer women had fought back with the declarations that opened this book: the Lady Who Was There and the Female of ’54 wanted that light to shine on them for one brief moment of historical remembrance. And then at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka in 1904, when the old survivors were gathered together in the flash of the photographer’s gaze, Jane Cuming took a front-row seat. The women of Eureka have always been there.
In her firecracker leader of New Year’s Day 1855, Clara Seekamp took the temperature of her community and predicted a patriotic fever that would burn low but would not completely die.
What is this country else but Australia? Is it any more England than it is Ireland or Scotland, France or America, Italy or Germany? Is the population, wealth, intelligence, enterprise and learning wholly and solely English? No, the population of Australia is not English, but Australian. Whoever works towards the development of its resources and its wealth is no longer a foreigner but an Australian, a title fully as good, if not better, than that of any inhabitants of any of the geographical dominions in the world. The latest immigrant is the youngest Australian.
It is one of the mental traps of historical imagination to conjure all people in the past as old. But make no mistake: Eureka was a youth movement. The inhabitants of Ballarat, like the youth of a century later, believed that the times they were a’changing. And like today’s backpackers, the gold rush generation was transient, expansive, adventurous: in search of experience, questing for something more authentic, more precious than they could find at home, something that would transcend the familiar boundaries of custom and caste.
But there is a difference too: where today’s backpackers might search for metaphysical transcendence, the 1850s gold seekers were fortune hunters. They took risks calculated to bring economic prosperity, not personal enrichment. Few had a return ticket or a line of credit. In this, they were more like refugees than tourists. And for them, independence was a political concept as much as a personal goal, quite distinct from the individualism that would drive later youth movements. Yet the conflict at Eureka was inter-generational as much as it was intra-imperial. New expectations for who people could be and what they were worth collided with old structures for measuring value. The currency was liberty and, as with any liberation narrative, those with the prerogative of privilege resisted the incursion of those with a claim to entitlement.
Two months after Clara Seekamp issued her New Year’s missive, Karl Marx, writing in the German-language newspaper NEUE ODER-ZEITUNG, characterised the Eureka Stockade outbreak as being but the symptom of a general revolutionary movement in Victoria. If there was a revolution at Eureka, it was not a political but a sociological one. The mining community of Ballarat did not intend to overthrow the British Crown, any more than it wanted to create an equal distribution of wealth or a global map without colour lines. Any republican feelings were as nascent as the proto-feminist sentiments that were stirred up, but ultimately buried, in the topsy-turvy whirlwind of gold rush flux.
More widespread was the desire to replace static power relations with a fluid, mobile social hierarchy based on merit rather than birth, breeding, rank, marriage or conventional sex roles. In this, the gold rush generation largely succeeded. A study of the life trajectories of gold rush immigrants reveals that most ultimately fulfilled their objective. They mightn’t have struck it rich, but they built businesses, farms, families, towns and, ultimately, a nation. But this was all to come.
Karl Marx might more accurately have observed that the goldfields society was straining under the weight of its own internal contradictions. On the diggings, unsullied egalitarian urges vied with the tried and true reality of ethnic, racial and class schism. The land was vast and ‘empty’, but the places of habitation were cramped and squalid. The practical need for co-operation wrestled with the base drives of competition. Men could not move up and women would not stay down. Idealism and energy collided with brutality and death. And new beginnings ended abruptly in old sufferings. The certainty, as Clara Seekamp correctly foretold, was that these ambiguities and tensions would be Australia’s own story, to tentatively assert or flagrantly deny.
