It’s Monday morning, 4 December 1854. The tent city of Ballarat has woken to a strange dawn.
A Monday morning on the richest goldfield in the world would usually be humming: a busy start to an energetic week. There are 32,000 people on the Ballarat diggings, and normally they would be hard at it.
Miners from every continent on the globe working their claims. Cartloads of goods arriving from Melbourne and Geelong to fill the stores with food and merchandise. To be sure, in 1854 most of the businesses are still not buildings at all, just simple canvas structures of every size imaginable. But they serve their purpose. Restaurants are dishing up food, grog shops are selling illicit booze; there are even theatres getting ready for the evening’s performance.
Normally, there would be newcomers putting up their tents and unloading their drays in wide-eyed fascination. There’d be children dodging and weaving through the tents, campfires and washing lines. Everywhere the sights and sounds of a colonial frontier society going about its daily business. And the noise would be ferocious.
But this Monday morning is silent.
An inferno has just torn through the dark hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning, shattering the rhythms of work and home.
It was a true Australian night, one miner later recalled, not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the stringy-bark trees…the whole air was full of that fine haze…which slightly veils but does not conceal, lending a ghostly yet beautiful appearance to all around.
What happened next has been taught to Australian schoolchildren for generations. At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and Victorian police stormed the rough barricades that had just been erected by a mob of armed miners.
A few days earlier, the diggers had burnt their mining licences as a form of protest against the way local authorities bullied and harassed them. They were sick of being pushed around. And they were sick of the government charging them a licence fee but never listening to their complaints. The diggers pledged, in the words of their brand new leader Peter Lalor, to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
PETER LALOR
THE ONE-ARMED BANDIT
STUCK HIS NECK OUT AND HAD HIS ARM BLOWN OFF
BORN Tenakill, Ireland, 1827
DIED Melbourne, 1889
ARRIVED October 1852
AGE AT EUREKA 27
CHILDREN Unmarried at Eureka; later, father of two children.
FAQ Son of an Irish Catholic landowner and politician. Youngest of eleven sons. Engaged to schoolteacher Alicia Dunne at time of Eureka. Elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in November 1855.
Then they hurriedly built the Stockade, which was really just a pile of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts. It was intended as a bolt hole: a hiding place for any newly unlicensed miner threatened with arrest.
When the military attacked in the early hours of Sunday, the armed conflict lasted no more than 20 minutes. At least four soldiers and 27 civilians were killed. The rebel stronghold was taken, and the rebel flag of blue and white—bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross—was hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle, authorities continued to hound people close to the barricades, in case more renegades were hiding in the surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down with swords, and hundreds were arrested. It was called the Ballarat massacre.
This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.