It’s what happened after the surrender that really matters. It’s what happened after the firing ceased that caused people at the time to call the events of 3 December the Ballarat Massacre.
The barricade was breached. The adrenaline was surging. The lid was finally lifted off the steaming cauldron of military and police discipline.
What bubbled over was a lethal stew of hunger, discomfort, exhaustion, boredom, insult, exasperation, sexual depravity, bravado, spite, homesickness, terror and relief. Charles Schulze, who operated a bakery on Bakery Hill, was an eyewitness to the violent outpouring that followed the rebels’ surrender. He could see what the weeks of tension had produced. Jaded, tired, not allowed to return the insult, he wrote, you can imagine. That when the time came, they revenged themselves to the fullest extent.
It was the bayonets, not the bullets, that did the damage. Mayhem and carnage reigned as the crazed soldiers and police thrust their blades into dead, dying and wounded miners. Gold lust gave way to blood lust and the Eureka line became a killing field.
It was a trooper that did it, Anne Diamond later testified. I know that my husband got three hurts from a sword on the back; he fell on his face and he got three cuts of a sword and a stab of a bayonet. Anne and her husband were fleeing from the Stockade when Martin was shot. They treated the dead bodies very badly, Anne reported 22 days after Martin’s death. The woman that laid him out could prove that.
Some soldiers hacked at the bodies lying on the ground. Others surrounded tents and sliced and jabbed at the bullet-riddled canvas. Supposedly, they were on the hunt for prisoners, trying to ensure that no insurgent was allowed to escape. In effect, as the Geelong Advertiser thundered on 5 December, those perfectly innocent of rebellious notions were murdered, fired at and horribly mangled by the troopers. Outnumbered and trapped, many insurgents were literally butchered. One eyewitness later reported: the corpses of the slain had been hacked by the mounted troopers out of sheer brutality…It was a needless massacre. Not even at the siege of Sebastopol did British soldiers kill enemies who lay wounded and defenceless.
The residents of the Stockade could not believe their eyes.
Those who were able began to run towards Brown Hill, at the rear of the Stockade where the barricade did not quite join up. The scrub was thick and the broken ground held up the troopers’ horses; Brown Hill would shelter outlaws for weeks to come. There is some evidence that Wathaurung people looked after the children of fugitive miners.
Others jumped down flooded mine shafts, too terrified to worry about deep water. Their bloated bodies were fished out days later. Some fled into neighbouring tents, where they clambered up sod chimneys or squeezed under camp beds.
Some of the wounded within the Stockade found themselves shielded by the shuddering bodies of women, who pretended they were mourning their dead and prayed that the soldiers would pass without further investigation. Bridget Hynes threw herself over an injured man and cried, He is dead! He is dead! so that the troopers would not bayonet him. Bridget was two months pregnant with her first child.
BRIDGET HYNES (NEE NOLAN)
BORN Monivae, Galway, 1831
DIED Leongatha, 1910
ARRIVED June 1852
AGE AT EUREKA 23
CHILDREN Pregnant at Eureka with the first of eleven children.
FAQ Irish Catholic from poor farming family. Immigrated as single woman with her brother. Thomas Hynes and Patrick Gittens were on her ship. Went to Ballarat. Married Thomas Hynes October 1854. John Hynes (cousin) and Paddy Gittens were killed at Eureka. Hid her husband’s pike and pants so he could not fight.
Peter Lalor had been shot in the shoulder; he was dragged under a ledge and safely concealed.
Henry Ross, fatally wounded, was not so lucky. At least he was spared the pain of seeing the beloved Southern Cross flag dragged down from its mast by Constable John King and paraded before his fellow policemen as a trophy of war.
The army officers remained silent as boy soldiers taunted and assaulted bystanders. The bodies of the dead were heaped together face up: mouths gaping, eyes fixed. Several of them were still heaving, reported an eyewitness to the Geelong Advertiser, and at every rise of their breasts, the blood spouted out of their wounds, or just bubbled out and trickled away.
They were not the only victims of the frantic attack. Standing by, tragically alive to the moment, were poor women crying for absent husbands and children frightened into quietness. Other women had bolted from their tents, leaving their husbands behind.
Mary Curtain rushed out of her store in her nightgown with fifteen-month-old Mary Agnes in tow. Mary was eight months pregnant. Such was the terror and hurry with which my family fled, her husband Patrick Curtain later claimed, that they left behind them even their every day dress.
Another man woke on hearing the shots. He went out of his tent in his shirt and long underwear. Seeing what was happening he shouted at a trooper, For God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children, and was shot dead on his own threshold.
Could there be a more humiliating way to surrender? A dawn raid. On a Sunday. The miners caught with their pants down on their own doorsteps. Who would be swaggering now?