Governor Hotham made two slick moves in response to the burning of Bentley’s Hotel. He empowered a Select Committee to investigate the matter, taking evidence from any person who wished to speak up. At the same time, he ordered the extra companies of the 12th and 40th regiments to fill the Camp with redcoats.
It seemed a cunning plan. Give the people the chance to vent, while establishing a very obvious military presence.
Not everyone was convinced, however, that Hotham had Ballarat’s best interests at heart. We ask for bread and we get a stone, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser. We demand some attention be paid to our miserable conditions and get sent an army.
The Committee took evidence at Bath’s Hotel from 2 November to 10 November. The weather was oppressively hot during this week, and hundreds of diggers took the opportunity to sit for a while in the lounge bar and tell the commissioners what they thought was wrong. Women gave evidence too, although their testimony didn’t make it into the published report that was tabled in Parliament on 21 November.
The commissioners’ job was to establish two things. First, was there any reason to think that the magistrates who found James Bentley innocent of Scobie’s murder were influenced by improper motives? And second, had the officers of the Camp generally conducted themselves so as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population?
When the enquiry was completed, the answers were NO and YES. Not popular news. But at least James and Catherine Bentley were to be retried before a proper judge in Melbourne—Justice Redmond Barry, no less. As another sop to the offended diggers, John D’Ewes and Milne, the unpopular policeman who had arrested Frank Carey, were relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of Ballarat, who thought James Johnston, Robert Rede and Gordon Evans should have copped a punishment as well.
The second half of Hotham’s plan was about as effective as the first. The arrival of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little sardines into an already overpacked tin.
Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses now poured in on us, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser, the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence. Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.
The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas’s new plan of defence, meant that soldiers and police were on 24-hour patrols: overworked and losing sleep. From the outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.
REDMOND BARRY
THE MAN IN A WIG
A LOVER OF LIBRARIES BUT NOT OUTLAWS
BORN Cork, Ireland, 1813
DIED Melbourne, 1880
ARRIVED NSW 1837
AGE AT EUREKA 41
CHILDREN Never married but had four kids with his lover Louisa Barrow.
FAQ One of twelve siblings in establishment Irish Protestant family. Appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in 1852. Established the Melbourne Public Library (now SLV). Famously sentenced Ned Kelly to death in 1880. Barry died twelve days later.
On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military. The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the whole thing had been hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the Ballarat Times. He complained of the conditions endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. His detachment was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily. They were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding as if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers. With the inadequate remuneration of only two shillings a day, the soldier is unjustly dealt with, complained the man.
But who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers’ cause? The military leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might extend some brotherly love? Or his fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion of their own?