While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised. A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together, noted the Geelong Advertiser: it was a mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat.
On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would be the attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers. A German band played. Diggers gave speeches for over four hours.
The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn.
The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for events that would now tumble like dominoes towards a catastrophic resolution.
On 11 November 1854, a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier Alpheus Boynton was there. He noted in his diary the talented men who put down picks and pans and took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men.
The Ballarat Reform League united the smaller groups that had been popping up over the previous weeks: an Irish union here, a German bund there. The Reform League elected its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of Anastasia, was appointed as chairman. Humffray and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting. They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that put in writing the chief grievances and goals of the League.
A manifesto of democratic principles, the Charter’s primary tenets were:
free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of Parliament; fixed parliamentary terms.
These were the moral rights the diggers cried out for—dignity, fairness and justice—translated into political demands.
The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely seen as the first formal step on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter’ was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant historical documents. Yet oddly enough, the Ballarat Times makes only brief mention of this monster meeting in its edition of 18 November.
CHARTISM
In 1854, Ballarat was awash with budding political radicals and religious nonconformists. Chief among these idealists were the Chartists.
Chartism was a British-based political reform movement that existed from the late 1830s to the 1850s. The movement organised huge mass demonstrations and petitions attracting millions of signatures that lobbied the government to make the British political system more democratic. The People’s Charter of 1838 called for voting rights for working men and the abolition of property qualifications for the franchise. It is considered one of the most significant political manifestos of the nineteenth century.
Originally, Chartists included voting rights for women in their wishlist of reforms. By the 1850s, however, the platform of sex equality had been dumped. The Chartists wanted to focus on universal manhood suffrage, which was perceived as a more achievable goal.
Some female Chartists—such as Ellen Young—brought their thwarted dreams of liberty and justice with them to Victoria. Here, they hoped, it might be possible to make universal participatory democracy a reality.
It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country, wrote Henry Seekamp, that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus of Australian Independence.
A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.
(It is possible that this edition of the Ballarat Times may in fact have been edited and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her influence to propel Ellen’s unfeminine outspokenness into the public eye. When Henry later faced trial for sedition, the editions of the newspaper in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and 2 December. Henry argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management of the paper at that time.)
The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the League that day were not, of course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat’s only newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:
However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the free subjects of a great nation.
Not ‘request’. Not ‘humbly pray’. Demand. Others had publicly spoken of cleaning out but none had gone so far as lopping off. And it is not Black, not Hayes, Humffray or Vern, who commit their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous, but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity.
The novelty was apparent to Ellen herself. Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist on the above demands?