Main characters
Martha Clendinning remained a keystone of the Ballarat establishment during her husband’s long tenure as Ballarat’s district coroner. When their only child, Margaret, married Ballarat’s former resident commissioner, Robert Rede, in 1873, the wedding arrangements filled the social pages of the local papers. Dr George Clendinning, sixteen years his wife’s senior, died in 1876. Martha moved to Toorak, where she wrote her memoirs, and lived until 1908. She was eighty-six years old. She was buried in Ballarat, not far from the place where she ran her first store.
Soon after Eureka, Robert Rede was transferred from his position as resident gold commissioner of Ballarat to sheriff of Geelong. In 1859, when Rede was forty-four years old, he married nineteen-year-old Isabella Strachan, the daughter of a member of the Legislative Council. They had a son, Robert, in 1861. The following year Isabella died of liver and kidney disease. In 1868, the widowed Rede returned to Ballarat as the town’s sheriff. Four years later he fell madly in love with Margaret Clendinning, thirty-three years his junior. He wrote passionate love letters to Margaret and sent her pressed flowers in tiny envelopes, revealing another side of a man who had become renowned for his cold-hearted treatment of the Ballarat miners. They were married in January 1873. Robert Rede died at his home in Toorak in 1904, one year shy of his ninetieth birthday. Fairlie Rede, the youngest of Robert and Margaret Rede’s six children, died in 1968. She has a hybrid tea rose named after her.
After appointing herself the Ballarat poetess in 1854, Ellen Young retired from public life to support her husband Frederick’s career. Frederick gave up gold mining and returned to his profession as a chemist, becoming the first mayor for East Ballarat in 1862. Ellen appeared in print only one more time. In 1864 she wrote to the BALLARAT STAR to defend herself against insinuations made by Charles Dyte, who was also elected to the East Ballarat Council. Ten years after Eureka, Ellen reminded readers that she had pleaded the cause of the oppressed from lawless law and by doing so had won the general acknowledged esteem of this community. Frederick died in 1868, aged fifty-six, of apoplexy. Ellen died in 1872, aged sixty-two, of diarrhoea. They are buried in the Church of England section of the Ballarat Cemetery.
Peter Lalor remained in hiding until a general amnesty towards all Eureka participants was declared following the unsuccessful state trials in May and June 1855. He married Alicia Dunne on 10 July 1855 at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Geelong. They had three children, the eldest of whom, Ann, was born in 1856. As an elected member of the Legislative Assembly, Lalor became known as a turncoat conservative and capitalist mine owner. Daughter Ann died of pulmonary phthisis in 1885 in the family’s East Melbourne mansion and Alicia died in 1887. Peter followed two years later.
The marriage of Anastasia and Timothy Hayes did not survive the cauldron of the Eureka years. Perhaps his fiery wife’s jibe, used in evidence against Timothy in his treason trial, was the last straw. Timothy abandoned his family and travelled to South America and the United States. Anastasia, left alone to raise their six children, continued working at St Alipius School but fell out with the Catholic Church after agitating for fair pay and a living allowance. According to Anne Hall, Anastasia’s family was brought up to believe their father was a coward; subsequent generations inherited Anastasia’s bitterness at being deserted by her husband and exploited by her church. Sharp of mind and tongue to the last, Anastasia Hayes died in Ballarat in 1892, aged seventy-four.
Brave Catherine McLister dared to expose the intimate underbelly of the Government Camp but she had a weak physical constitution and died in childbirth on 4 March 1858 at the age of thirty-two. The official cause of death was phthisis, more commonly known as consumption. Her baby son, James, lived for ten days, dying of debility in the Geelong home of his father, Robert McLister, whose profession was by then listed as gold digger.
The man who shew too much, Police Inspector Gordon Evans, was transferred from Ballarat to Carlsruhe soon after Eureka. In May 1855, he married Lucy Ann Govett, a squatter’s daughter from Van Diemen’s Land, ten years his junior. They had eleven children. Evans died of a stroke in South Melbourne in 1885, aged fifty-nine. His death certificate lists his occupation as share-broker.
Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke gave birth to her first child, John, on the road between Ballarat and Bendigo, ten days after the storming of the Eureka Stockade. She and her husband George had eleven more children, most born in Woodend, where the family settled into a life of farming and breeding. Anne died in 1914, aged seventy-six. Her husband died four years later. Their youngest child, Annie, lived until 1948, only six years shy of witnessing the centenary of the Eureka Stockade.
James and Margaret Johnston left the Ballarat Government Camp on 4 March 1855. Their first child, Sophia, was born on 30 April, six weeks premature. On Sophia’s birth certificate, former Assistant Gold Commissioner James Johnston is listed as a farmer. The couple went on to have fourteen more children, the youngest twin boys. In the 1890s, their eldest son, James, murdered his wife and children and attempted to kill himself. He was tried and hanged for his crime. Margaret Brown Howden Johnston died on 13 July 1888 at Buninyong, aged fifty-five. The cause of death was exhaustion. The eldest of her children was thirty-three, the twins thirteen. An 1855 dictionary of medical terms defines exhaustion as loss of strength, occasioned by excessive evacuations, great fatigue, privation of food or by disease. Giving birth to fifteen children in twenty years may well count as the excessive evacuation of human bodies. Margaret was buried in the Ballarat Cemetery with Presbyterian rites.
Frances and Thomas Pierson did not return to America. Nor did they have any more children in Victoria. Frances died in 1865, aged forty-five. The following year, her son Mason married Elizabeth Markham at Buninyong. They had four daughters: Frances Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Mary and Elizabeth. When Mason’s wife died, he married her sister Annie Markham, with whom he had another daughter, Frances May. Thomas Pierson died in 1881, aged sixty-eight, and Mason died in 1910, aged seventy-three.
Lady Jane Sarah Hotham returned to England on 20 January 1856. From the Hood family’s home at Cricket St Thomas, she personally oversaw the design and construction of the memorial tomb to her husband, Sir Charles Hotham, which stands tall in the Melbourne General Cemetery. She spared no expense on the monument, using her own funds to supplement the controversial £1500 pledged by the Victorian Legislative Council to defray funeral and burial expenses. Jane wanted the sculptural decoration of the monument to closely resemble the native foliage of Australia, suggesting an affinity with the land that transcended the tragedy of her time in the colony. The monument was not fully installed until September 1858.
On 30 August 1860, at the age of forty-three, Jane married William Armytage, a captain of the Royal Navy. Together they went on the Atlantic Telegraph Expedition in 1866, and travelled extensively abroad, including a time in Malta in 1871. Jane continued to be known as Lady Hotham after her marriage to Captain Armytage, and kept up her court appearances. She divided her time between London and Devon. Armytage died in 1881. Lady Jane Sarah Hood Holbech Hotham Armytage died on 28 April 1907, aged ninety. She outlived three husbands, her sovereign Queen Victoria and the colonial rule of Australia.
Eliza Darcy married Patrick Howard at Ballarat’s St Alipius Church in August 1855. Their first child, Mary Ann, was born in 1856 and died six months later. Over the next twenty-four years, the couple had eleven more children. The Howard family remained closely aligned with the Darcy family, farming in the Birregurra area. Eliza Darcy died in Geelong in 1920, aged eighty-four. Leo Howard, who died in 2010 aged ninety-three, was the son of Eliza and Patrick’s second-youngest child, Daniel, born in 1880—and the father of famed Australian musicians Shane, Marcia and Damian Howard. Ella Hancock, Eliza and Patrick’s granddaughter from their youngest child Alicia, is the oldest living Eureka descendant, aged ninety-seven in 2013.
Merchant and journalist George Francis Train, who dubbed the Eureka Stockade Australia’s Bunker Hill, returned to the United States in November 1855. Here he was reunited with his wife, Willie Davis, and met their baby daughter. Willie had returned to New York in 1854 while pregnant, as George wanted his first child to be born in America so that he was eligible to become president. Train became a global transport magnate and himself ran for President of the United States as an independent candidate in 1872. He and Willie separated the same year. Train was the major financier of THE REVOLUTION, a newspaper published by women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He died, eccentric and alone, in New York City in 1904, aged seventy-five. Train is reputed to have been the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.
Stephen and Jane Cuming, who sheltered Peter Lalor after his escape from the stockade, remained in Ballarat for the rest of their lives. They built a house on the site of their original house on Pennyweight Hill, where they mined and later grew fruit and vegetables. Jane and Stephen’s daughter Martineau, who was six years old at Eureka, married Simon Andrew and later lived in Clunes at the time of the mining riots against the use of Chinese scab labour by the Lothair Mine, part-owned by Peter Lalor. Stephen Cuming died at the age of seventy-eight in 1898. Jane survived him by thirteen years, long enough to be present at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka. She died at the age of eighty-eight, telling her great-granddaughter that for all the difficulties of life on the goldfields, she felt freer than in Cornwall. Martineau died in the Pennyweight Hill house in 1930.
Thomas and Bridget Hynes (née Nolan), who were married at St Alipius just two months before Eureka, had their first child, Kate, in 1855. After profits from shallow alluvial mining bottomed out in Ballarat, the family settled at Cardigan, where they farmed and ran a dairy. They had ten more children, all of whom lived to adulthood, before migrating overland to Terrick Terrick near Gunbower Island. Bridget’s younger brother, Michael Nolan, gave up mining for shearing and later selected land in South Gippsland. He is remembered as a pioneer of Leongatha. Five of Bridget and Tom’s sons and one of their daughters also settled in the Leongatha–Tarwin Valley district. Tom Hynes died in 1897 and Bridget in 1910, aged seventy-seven. Both are buried in the Leongatha Cemetery.
Charles Evans and his brother George established Evans Brothers Printers, Stationers and Booksellers, carving out a longstanding place in the commercial and cultural life of Ballarat. In 1859, Evans Brothers made the highly symbolic move from the flats of Main Road, East Ballarat, to the elevated Lydiard Street in the township. In 1858, twenty-eight-year-old Charles married a seventeen-year-old Scottish girl, Catherine McCallum. They had twelve children together. In the 1870s, Evans Brothers expanded its operations to a Melbourne office. Charles Evans died in 1881 in Emerald Hill (later called South Melbourne), just two months after the birth of his youngest child. He was fifty-four years old. George Evans had died two years earlier, of excessive drinking, also in his fifty-fourth year.
After selling the Adelphi Theatre in early 1855, Sarah Hanmer moved between the goldfields and Melbourne, with her daughter Julia in tow, playing to delighted audiences in headlining performances. Sarah was issued a publicans licence for the Ballarat Races of 4 December 1856. She prospered financially and owned properties in Ballarat, for which she collected rents through a broker. In November 1858, Sarah was sued by her rent collector, Mr Baker, in a libel case that kept Ballarat entertained for weeks. In court Sarah was variously described as an actress who had made money and an actress who dealt in mining transactions. The court found in Baker’s favour, but only awarded him forty shillings (he had claimed £500). By 1864, Sarah had moved to Brisbane and started a new Adelphi Company. On New Year’s Eve that year, she gave a benefit concert under the patronage of the governor, Sir G. F. Bowen. Sarah Ann Hanmer, widow of Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer, Surgeon (sic), died in Adelaide of fungus on 9 August 1867, aged forty-six.
Julia Hanmer married William Henry Surplice in Ballarat on 8 December 1856. She was sixteen years old. William, the government surveyor, was thirty-two. On her marriage certificate, Julia is identified as Julia Ford and names her father as Frederick Ford, accountant. Her mother, Sarah, was present at the wedding in the Church of England schoolhouse. The business of Surplice and Sons, run by William Sr and Alfred Surplice, sold provisions to the military at the Government Camp in January 1855. Julia and William Henry had seven children, the first six of whom were born in Ballarat and the last in Sydney after the family moved to New South Wales in the mid-1870s. Julia and William lived in Suva, Fiji, for many years. Julia died in 1920, aged eighty, and is buried in the Waverley Cemetery.
Catherine Bentley may have been Eureka’s longest-term victim. Her second child, Louisa, was born in February 1855, while James Bentley was incarcerated for murder. By late 1855, now raising two young children alone, Catherine had been brought up on sly-grogging charges in Maryborough. She repeatedly petitioned parliament for compensation for the loss of her hotel and land in Ballarat but to no avail. James was released three years into his sentence and bonded to remain in the Darebin Creek area of what was then outer Melbourne. Their daughter Matilda was born in March 1857.
By early 1859, when daughter Christina was born, the family were living in Newbridge, where Catherine was running a store. At the age of fifteen months, Christina ran out onto the street in front of the store and was hit by a horse and cart, her brains dashed out on the ground. She died in Catherine’s arms. Four months later, baby Albert was born in Kingarra, only to die thirteen months later of diphtheria. The Bentleys’ sixth child, Ada, was born in 1863. James Bentley committed suicide by laudanum poisoning in Ballarat Street, Carlton, in April 1873. At his inquest, Catherine testified that my husband has never been quite right since he lost his property at the Ballarat Riots, he has never recovered from the effects of it, for the last two years he has never ceased to talk about it. He has been low spirited with despondency about his family—over their prospects. Certainly the Bentleys never returned to the position of affluence and influence they held in 1854.
The effects of inter-generational trauma continued: Louisa Bentley had two children out of wedlock by the time she was twenty; Matilda Bentley had seven children before her death at the age of thirty-one; Ada died in 1934 in a mental asylum. Catherine Bentley remarried, to a farmer named Andrew Mayo, and moved to Neerim South. Catherine Sherwin Bentley Mayo died of apoplexy on 14 December 1906 at the age of seventy-five. She is buried in the Church of England section of the Neerim Cemetery.
Corporal John Neill of the 40th Regiment and his wife, Ellen Neill, remained in the Ballarat district for the rest of their trauma-scarred lives. John was discharged as medically unfit on 31 January 1856, after a previous court martial and demotion for drunkenness. On 19 March 1857, three-year-old Fanny Neill died. Three weeks later, her sixteen-month-old sister Agnes followed. John and Ellen’s daughters are buried in the Ballarat Old Cemetery. Their gravestone enshrined John Neill as Corporal in Her Majesty’s 40th Regiment, despite his recent discharge. Ellen Neill died in 1894, one year prior to her husband, at their home in Creswick. Her obituary in the CRESWICK ADVERTISER remembered Ellen thus: Although favoured with a classical education she was in no way pretentious, and was respected by all who knew her.
It was Elizabeth Rowland’s first child, born in 1854, who she took to the Camp when she bought herself a licence on 2 December. She and husband Thomas had eight more, the last born in 1876, when Elizabeth was forty-nine years old. The family lived out their days at Ballarat. Elizabeth died in 1914, aged eighty-seven.
After her husband was released from prison in June 1855, Clara Seekamp stepped down from her role as publisher of the BALLARAT TIMES. Clara’s petition for Henry’s early release had been successful but, following the trials and tribulations of 1854–5, culminating in cradling the crumbling head of a victim of the Main Street fire, he was fragile and unwell. In July 1856, following the courtroom dramas with Lola Montez, Henry Seekamp was successfully sued for libel by Lola’s solicitor. Seekamp had called Mr Lewis a dirty, pettifogging Jew informer. Henry was ordered to pay Lewis £100. In October 1856, the Seekamps sold the BALLARAT TIMES due to Henry’s shattered health. Business had also been affected when the government widened the Melbourne Road, removing five of the Seekamps’ six houses and creating a twelve-foot-high cutting outside the TIMES office.
In 1857, Clara was reunited with her seven-year-old daughter, Clara Maria Du Val, who had sailed from Ireland to join her twin brother, Francis, and older brother, Oliver, in the Seekamps’ Bakery Hill home. After Clara’s years of petitioning the government, in October 1861 a select committee finally awarded her £500 compensation for loss of business income, property value and amenity associated with the road widening. She had wanted £3000. Asked by the select committee why her husband wasn’t fronting the case, Clara replied that while her husband believed in writing letters, she preferred direct action. She summed up her circumstances like this: We looked on the loss of business as the greatest grievance of all, and though we thought we could turn the ground into money, we were deprived of doing so.
By 1862, Henry had moved to Brisbane, where he was offering French lessons as Mons. Henri Seekamp, formerly Professor in the Institut Chatelain, Paris. He died on the Clermont diggings in Queensland of Natural causes accelerated by Intemperance in January 1864, aged thirty-five. Clara moved to Melbourne with her children. In 1873, she wrote to the Victorian Press Association requesting pecuniary assistance. In 1868, eighteen-year-old Clara Maria died of diphtheria at their home in St Kilda. Son Oliver died in 1884 of lead poisoning, aged forty-two. Clara Maria Lodge Du Val Seekamp lived to the age of eighty-nine, and died of senile debility and heart failure in the Pascoe Vale home of her son Francis. Clara’s death certificate describes her profession as housewife.
3 December 1855, the first anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, was a day of torrential rain and flooding. The downpour came after three days of burning north winds. Most establishments on Main Road were flooded; the concert hall at the Star Hotel was swept away. These weather conditions inaugurated a tradition of the heavens opening over Victoria on 3 December. Inclement weather also marred celebrations on 3 December 1884, 1904 and 1954.
Other characters
Caroline Chisholm continued to be an outspoken advocate of democratic reform, championing the twin causes of unlocking the lands and universal suffrage. In 1866 she returned to England, where she died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1877.
Bridget Callinan, who distracted the troopers while her injured brothers escaped the stockade, died in 1897 from pneumonia, aged seventy-two. She lived in the Ballarat district her whole life and is buried in the Old Ballarat Cemetery. She never married.
Mary Ann Welch who, along with her son Barnard, testified against Catherine and James Bentley, died of a lung abscess at Ballarat on 11 November 1860. She was forty-five years old. In the eight short years after Mary Ann sailed from England, she had cared for her seven children while her husband went to the goldfields, lost her only daughter soon after arrival, moved the remaining six children to Ballarat where her husband had established a storekeeping business, witnessed a murder, watched her home burn down in mass riots, acted as star witness at a notorious show trial in Melbourne, given birth to two more children and watched those children die before their first birthdays. Nine months after the death of their last baby brother, Mary Ann’s remaining six sons were motherless.
Dr Alfred Carr, who performed the autopsy on James Scobie in the Eureka Hotel on 7 October 1854 and assisted the wounded after the stockade, returned to England to be reunited with his wife Louisa and two sons in March 1855. He was thirty-four. There he became medically depressed after the death of his mother. He returned to Melbourne in 1857, petitioned the government for compensation for medical services rendered at Eureka, and was committed to the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum on the grounds of monomania: what we would now call paranoia. As a patient, Carr campaigned against the brutal treatment of patients at Yarra Bend. He wrote home to Louisa, Keep up your spirits and do not despair. Once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum again. After years in and out of institutions, he was interred at the Ararat Asylum in 1887. His entry record notes that Carr was full of delusional ideas as to identity, power and position. Carr died as an inmate at Ararat in 1894.
Assistant Commissioner Amos and his family perished on the steamship London when it sank in the Bay of Biscay on its way to Melbourne in 1866. Two hundred and twenty lives were lost.
Fanny Davis, the exquisite chronicler of life on board the Conway, married miner George Jones in 1862, four years after her arrival in Melbourne. They were married at the Wesleyan Church in Ballarat. Fanny had six children in nine years, all born in Buninyong. All survived infancy. Fanny died in 1882 in East Ballarat, aged fifty-two.
Jane Swan’s family settled in Collingwood, where her father, Edward, worked in his trade as a painter and glazier. Her mother, Isabella, had two more children in Victoria: Ernest in 1857 and Isabella in 1859. Jane married William Davison the same year. Jane had three children: Isabella in 1860, Jane in 1861 and Charles in 1862. She died in childbirth with Charles. She was twenty-three. Jane’s mother, Isabella, died in 1909 at the age of ninety-two.
Louisa Timewell and her young family disembarked in Melbourne in October 1852. Shortly after their arrival, Louisa contracted colonial fever and died. Her baby Kate was too young to grieve. Louisa’s ship diary was sent back ‘home’. The ship on which it was conveyed was wrecked. Some of the ship’s mail was recovered from the wreck, and the sodden diary was returned to one of Louisa’s sisters. Eventually, it found its way to Kate, who had married in 1869 and, by 1887, had eleven children of her own. The first seven were boys; the eighth a girl, Louisa. All eleven of the children survived childhood. Kate’s elder sister Mary Louisa was not so lucky: six of her eight children died before their first birthdays.
Sarah Ann Raws stayed on in Victoria when the rest of her family returned to Lancashire in 1858. Twenty-year-old Sarah had married John Tomlinson, who she’d met while her family was at the diggings. The couple operated a butcher shop at Nuggety, near Maldon, where they had eight children. Later they took up land at Thyra, where they grew cereal crops and had two more children. When Sarah died she was remembered for her nobility of character, justice and goodness.
Solomon and Ada Belinfante bore twelve children, six of whom predeceased them. Their first three children—Rebecca, Raphael and Anna—all died before 1875, while Annie and Septimus both died in 1875, the year the last Belinfante child, Philip, was born. He died the following year. Solomon began his life in Melbourne as a garment trader, but by the time of Philip’s birth he was a prosperous commercial broker. The family lived in Victoria Street, Collingwood. Solomon died in 1884 and Ada died in 1917. Two of their children died in 1954, the centenary of Eureka: Louis, aged ninety-four, and Amy, who never married, aged eighty-nine.
Eliza and John Perrin were eventually reunited. They operated a butchers shop together in Bungaree. Eliza’s cousin never came to Australia.
Charles Dyte married Evelina Nathan sometime between his arrival in Victoria in 1853 and the birth of their first son, David, in 1854. Their marriage is not registered in the official Victorian births, deaths and marriage records, but it is likely they married in the Melbourne or Ballarat synagogue. Evelina gave birth to twins, Miriam and Teresa, in 1858, and two more daughters, whose births were not registered. Neither of the twin girls ever married. They died in Ballarat: Miriam, eighty-five years old, in 1943 and Theresa, eighty-one years old, in 1939. Charles Dyte died in 1893 aged seventy-six and Eve in 1899, also aged seventy-six.
Annie Hollander died in Ballarat in 1898, aged forty-one, after bearing sixteen children. She is buried in the Jewish section of the Old Ballarat Cemetery, along with her son Morris (died 1875, five hours old) and daughters Fanny (died 1874, three days old), Jane (died 1875, sixteen years) and Eva (died 1884, ten years).
Mary Faulds, whose baby Adeliza was born inside the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854, would have six more children with her husband, Matthew. They lived the rest of their days in Ballarat and Buninyong. Mary died in 1897.
Rebecca Noonan, who was assaulted by police on 3 December while pregnant, gave birth to baby Rebecca on 1 April 1855. Rebecca was born with a scar on her neck that corresponded with the bayonet wound on her mother’s neck, inflicted during the stockade attack. On 26 December, and again on 19 February 1855, her husband, Michael Noonan, petitioned the government for compensation for the loss of his tent, store and all belongings on the grounds of the dire disaster which he has encountered [which] has been all but ruinous to him…a married man with a family of five children, totally dependent on his industrious and unceasing industry. His petition was put away.