Saturday morning.
Business is entirely suspended, wrote Charles Evans, but one topic of conversation engrosses the attention of diggers and storekeepers. Those who could afford it were sending their families away while others whom poverty compels to keep their wives and families amidst the scene of threatening danger were filled with dread. Evans thanked his lucky stars he was a single man.
For months—in some cases years—shamefaced men had been struggling to put food in the mouths of their children. Now these same men had to worry about how to protect their loved ones from an army that would fire bullets among anonymous tents.
They had faced the deaths of people they loved at sea or in childbirth. There was nothing anyone could do about that. But, lord knew, a man could stand up to another man.
Peter Lalor wrote as much to his fiancée, Alicia Dunne, two days earlier. I would be unworthy of being called a man. I would be unworthy of myself, and, above all, I would be unworthy of you and your love, were I base enough to desert my companions in danger.
Some people had spent Friday night in the Stockade but most had slept in their own tents. The purpose of the Stockade, after all, was to prevent the arrest of unlicensed diggers. There had never been a licence hunt at night.
But throughout Saturday more diggers kept rolling up, many coming from other goldfields, eager to help the resistance. The numbers were swelled by women who brought food into the Stockade and at least one female sly-grog seller, who knew a captive market when she saw one and set up shop on the fringe of the palisade.
Alexander Dick had only been in Ballarat for two weeks but he could immediately see that the place was rife [his word] for an explosion. Peter Lalor, whose tent was inside the Stockade, could read the mood too. He needed to corral the energy or his ‘army’ would disintegrate into a violent mob, as had happened at Bentley’s Hotel.
Already there had been reports that looters were taking advantage of the situation, roaming the Flat demanding cash, firearms and provisions from frightened diggers and their wives. Martha Clendinning was alone in her store that day when a group of eight miners marched up in military fashion and demanded any firearms she possessed. She escaped harm, but fetched her brother to stay with her that night when Dr Clendinning was called away.
On Saturday afternoon, Lalor once again stepped forward to take command. Emerging from the committee room of Diamond’s store, he climbed onto an old log and delivered a simple message: We must make this a country we can live in.
So far, there had been no grand plan. No strategy for gaining the upper hand. Every action had been responsive—protective. The Stockade had been thrown up at random. The flames did not devour the Eureka Hotel, admitted Carboni, with the same impetuosity as we got up our stockade.
The majority of the miners and storekeepers on the diggings were not overtly rebellious, nor were they prepared to take up arms. We of the peace portion of the residents, is how Martha Clendinning identified herself, though she was sympathetic to the miners’ grievances. As Henry Mundy put it, All reasonable people were willing to wait til the Commission had finished its labours and report. Such people still had faith that Hotham would do the right thing by them.
And even the militants were divided. Some of the members of the Ballarat Reform League had sworn the oath of allegiance at Bakery Hill, but not all. J. B. Humffray refused to enter the Stockade, and others also clung to the hope of a constitutional resolution. Some were for a republic. Others, including Lalor, claimed that the diggers’ resistance was purely to defend themselves against the misrule of Ballarat’s officials. Frederick Vern, cranky at the new boy, Lalor, stepping straight into the leadership, was holding his own meetings down at the Star Hotel.
Tomorrow was Sunday, a day of rest on the goldfields. There would be no digger hunts. Who ever dreams in England that there is even the semblance of religion in the gold fields? asked Mrs Massey, and yet amongst rough men, supposed to be the very scum of the earth, we found the Sunday more rigidly kept than in many far more civilised places.
Sunday was a sacred day, the day to worship but also to wash. On Sundays, scores of men could be seen in front of their tents with tin dish or bucket washing their weekly shirt and flannel, recalled Henry Mundy. It was also a day consecrated to cookery. Families went on picnics in the bush.
People began to relax, and the majority of the 1500 who were in the Stockade to hear Lalor’s Saturday afternoon oration felt free to leave. One after another the diggers left the Stockade, H. R. Nicholls later wrote, to get a clean shirt or to prepare in some way for Sunday. A government spy dutifully reported the unexpected exodus from behind the barricades.
At the same time, headed into the Stockade were James McGill’s Americans, his Independent Californian Rangers, many of them veterans of the Mexican–American War. They had decided to defy Tarleton’s pleas, and came now to the Stockade, offering service. McGill himself carried a handsome sword—a precious heirloom, brought across the seas. It was a gift from Sarah Hanmer. In fact all of the Adelphi Theatre’s props—pistols, revolvers, sabres—had been distributed to the Californian Rangers. The actors themselves had swapped the stage for the Stockade.
By nightfall, about 150 people remained in the Stockade, mostly those diggers and storekeepers, like the Diamonds and the Shanahans, who lived in the captive tents; out-of-towners; and the sentries, chiefly Americans, posted to keep friends in and foes out.