British and justice were the two words on everyone’s lips in the whingey winter of 1854. The words generally had a question mark attached.
This? You call this British justice?
Henry Mundy shuddered every time he saw the soldiers pass by—Lords’ and dukes’ sons, friends of [Governor] La Trobe, mincing around with their gold epaulettes and lace on their coats who knew nothing of the people or the country. The indignity of educated professional men being lorded over by a pack of exiled nincompoops sickened Mundy, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Things will not remain long as they are, he predicted. The British are a loyal law abiding people but they expect, what they have been accustomed to, British justice.
English journalist William Howitt also noticed how incensed the diggers were by the heavy-handed, arrogant treatment handed out by the police. The arbitrary, Russian sort of way in which they were visited by the authorities, he called it. (Britain was at war with Russia, in the Crimea, so it was a fairly weighty criticism.)
Examples of injustice and incivility occurred day after day. Prisoners could be left manacled to tree logs if the tiny lockup was full, or if the jailer didn’t like them. Honest men, too poor to pay their licence fee, were chained together with hardened criminals. Women were locked up with men—nothing but a flimsy partition between them. Other inmates were forced to act as servants, drawing water and chopping wood for the soldiers up at the Government Camp.
Thomas and Frances Pierson went to the Ballarat Magistrates Court one Saturday morning and witnessed several licence cases. One man had borrowed another’s licence. He was jailed for two months in Geelong. A still more heathenish part of the matter, Thomas later reflected in his diary, is that the man had a wife and six children in his tent in Ballarat, and the poor woman had only just given birth to the sixth. The English conduct in governing is a disgrace to any civilised nation, concluded Thomas.
ROBERT REDE
THE BIG KAHUNA
NEEDED TO CALM THE WATERS BUT INSTEAD STIRRED THE POT
BORN Suffolk, 1827
DIED Melbourne, 1904
ARRIVED 1851
AGE AT EUREKA 27
CHILDREN Single at Eureka, later a father of seven.
FAQ English landed gentry, oddjobber before coming to Victoria as a goldseeker. Appointed Resident Commissioner at Ballarat in May 1854. Married Martha Clendinning’s daughter, Margaret, in 1873.
ARCHIVE Clendinning-Rede Papers, SLV 10102
Government oppression and negligence were getting serious—sometimes a matter of life and death. The word tyranny rolled easily off tongues.
To add to the administrative problems, Ballarat was dealing with a new boss, the incoming Resident Commissioner Robert Rede. Trying to make himself look good with his own superiors, he used his reports to give an appearance of peace and order. When a prisoner was rescued from the lockup by his mates, Rede reported the incident but assured HQ the incident arose from drink and not from any ill feeling against the authorities.
Some members of the goldfields administration could see that the discontented rumblings would not be kept down. On 3 July 1854, Magistrate John D’Ewes wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Melbourne to warn about the lack of basic services available to the diggers and townsfolk at Ballarat. He mentioned in particular the non-existence of any hospital or asylum, except the small one belonging to the Camp and restricted to Government servants. The people were taking matters into their own hands, he reported. A meeting at the Ballarat Hotel on 1 July took donations for a new hospital. The well known liberality of the diggers when it came to these public ‘subscriptions’ meant that £270 was donated by 24 people that night. D’Ewes worried that there was a toxic sense of ‘us and them’ creeping in: he thought it would be a bad look if the government was seen to be contributing in some way.
The police were uniformly despised. The Victorian Government paid peanuts and, of course, it got monkeys. The police force was young, ill-trained, inexperienced and frequently drunk. When the ‘traps’ gave Frances Pierson ‘a call’ in her store on St Patrick’s Day (a sure sign she was selling sly grog) her husband Thomas said, a more proud, lazy, ignorant, tyrannical set of vagabonds could not easily be found. Storekeepers who sold grog paid the police to look the other way (and since Frances Pierson didn’t sustain a conviction, she probably did too). The system simply invited corruption.
Punishments for sly grog were severe: a £50 fine or four months’ jail for a first offence; a second offence would get you six to twelve months with hard labour. These were mandatory sentences and local magistrates had no power to soften them: only the Governor could interfere. What’s more, when a police officer recorded a conviction he received a portion of the fine—a situation also set up to encourage fraud.
The cards were stacked in favour of the police. They either pursued known sly-groggers relentlessly or extracted hush money—and no doubt other ‘favours’. Samuel Huyghue, a public servant living at the Government Camp, believed this system of rewards for sly-grog arrests was to blame for the demoralisation of the police force.
Meanwhile, other aspects of law enforcement were a joke. A miner might disappear down a shaft in the black of night never to be seen again, and the police would be useless. Claim jumping was rife, but it was more often sorted out by fists and knives than police intervention. Henry Mundy said that if a digger was killed in a mining accident, assuming a policeman deigned to turn up at all, he would simply say he’s dead right enough, then slip a hand into the dead man’s pocket to help himself to any money or valuables.
If you wanted to safeguard yourself against crime, you kept a dog on a chain or a pistol under your pillow. No one had a shred of confidence in Victoria’s finest.