Eureka Rebellion
The Eureka Stockade was a miners' revolt in 1854 in Victoria, Australia against the officials supervising the gold-mining region of Ballarat due to many reasons, including heavily priced mining items and the expense of a digging license. It is often regarded as being an event of equal significance to Australian history as the storming of the Bastille was to French history, but almost equally often dismissed as an event of little long-term consequence. Although the revolt failed, it was a watershed event in Australian politics, and is often described controversially as the "Birth of Australian Democracy".
Background
The Australian colony of Victoria, a peaceful and sparsely populated region of farmers and graziers, was declared separate from New South Wales on 1 July, 1851. This tranquility was irrevocably disrupted that same year with the discovery of substantial gold fields all across the colony. The result was a rapid and massive influx of fortune-hunting immigrants.
The roots of the Eureka Stockade uprising lay in the inability of a fledgling colonial government to cope with the new demographics of the colony. From being the administrative body of the "squattocracy" the government suddenly found itself unprepared to take charge of a large and unruly population of itinerants. Its response was to impose an unofficial martial law, enforced by the hurriedly assembled and quasi-military "Gold Commission." That many of the newly-arrived miners regarded the Victorian authorities as close associates of the "English" authorities was the first portent of conflict.
Within a short time, the easy surface gold had been exhausted, and gold could be found only by digging for the deep lead — the veins of gold buried beneath metres of clay and rock. By 1854, the fields of Ballarat were occupied by 25,000 or more miners, mostly from Ireland, but also from the United Kingdom, other parts of Europe, China and North America (many had come to Australia from the California gold rush). The hills for miles around were soon entirely denuded of trees in order to provide timber for the deep shafts being dug — an environmental disaster from which the area has never fully recovered.
Authority in the camps was held by the Resident Gold Commissioner, Robert Rede, and enforced by a military garrison. The main mechanism of government revenue was the "Miner's Licence," a short term lease of a "claim," a 3.6 square metre plot of land. The monthly fee for this licence was 30 shillings — a huge fee for the time — and was payable whether or not any gold had actually been found. This raised the ire of the miners, as did the weekly "licence hunts" where the military police searched for and arrested anyone lacking proof of a licence.
In September 1854, prompted primarily by budget shortfalls resulting chiefly from the cost of maintaining a private army, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, ordered the frequency of the licence hunts increased to twice weekly. With dissent simmering, this and two further events drove the miners to violence:
- The first incident was the arbitrary arrest of a crippled, non-English speaking Armenian (Johannes Gregorious), wrongfully charged with assaulting an officer. This angered the miners for two reasons. First it was seen as racial victimisation (though not expressed in such 21st-century terms). This alone would probably not have been enough to motivate the miners (not renowned for their racial tolerance), but they did identify with the Armenian as a fellow "digger," a term used by the miners to describe their lack of privilege. More importantly, the man arrested was also the servant of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Smyth, and this was interpreted as a religious affront by the large Irish Catholic component of the miner population, who already held deep resentments against the British for religious and economic oppression.
- The second incident was the acquittal of inn owner James Bentley, who had been charged with the murder of a miner, James Scobie. In early October, an angry mob, interpreting the acquittal as unjust, burnt Bentley's hotel to the ground.
Protests, Chartism and the Ballarat Reform League
Civil and non-violent protests began to grow as a result of these perceived injustices:
- Tuesday, 17 October, 1854: At the spot where James Scobie was killed 5,000-10,000 diggers gathered to protest the acquittal of the prime suspect, James Bentley, the owner of the Eureka Hotel. Bentley fled for his life as the hotel was burnt down.
- Sunday, 22 October, 1854: Ballarat Catholics met to protest the treatment of Father Smyth's servant.
- Monday, 23 October, 1854: A mass meeting to protest the selective arrest of McIntyre and Fletcher for burning down Bentley's Eureka Hotel attracted 10,000 miners and supporters. It was decided to form a Digger's Right Society, to maintain their rights.
- Tuesday, 1 November, 1854: 3000 diggers met once again at Bakery Hill. They were addressed by Kennedy, Holyoake, Black and Ross. The diggers were further incensed by the arrest of another seven of their number, for the burning down of the Eureka Hotel.
- Saturday, 11 November, 1854: A crowd estimated at more than 10,000 miners gathered at Bakery Hill, directly opposite the government encampment. At this meeting the "Ballarat Reform League" was created, under the chairmanship of Chartist John Basson Humffray. Several other Reform League leaders including Thomas Kennedy and Henry Holyoake had been involved with the Chartist movement in England. Many of the miners had past involvement in the Chartist movement and social upheavals in England, Ireland and Europe during the 1840s.
The Ballarat Reform League used the British Chartist movement's principles to set their goals. The meeting passed a resolution "that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny". The meeting also decided to secede from the United Kingdom if the situation did not improve.
The demands of the Ballarat Reform League encompassed:
- Manhood suffrage (the right for all men to vote)
- Abolition of the property qualifications for members of parliament
- Payment of members of parliament
- Voting by secret ballot
- Short term parliaments
- Equal electoral districts
- Abolition of diggers and storekeepers licenses
- Reform of administration of the gold fields
- Revision of laws relating to Crown land.
Throughout the following weeks, the League sought to negotiate with Commissioner Rede and Governor Hotham, both on the specific matters relating to Bentley and the men being tried for the burning of the Eureka Hotel, and on the broader issues of abolition of the licence, universal suffrage and democratic representation of the gold fields, and disbanding of the Gold Commission.
Commissioner Rede's response to these disputes was perhaps an ill-judged one, but stemmed from his military background and has been attributed by many historians (most notably Manning Clark) to his belief in his right to exert authority over the "rabble." Rather than hear the grievances, Rede increased the police presence in the gold fields and summoned reinforcements from Melbourne.
On Monday November 27 1854 a delegation from the Ballarat Reform League: John Humffray, George Black and Thomas Kennedy; met with Governor Hotham. They attempted to negotiate the release of the miners arrested after the attack on Eureka Hotel, and presented the demands for universal suffrage as well as abolition of the miners and storekeepers licenses. The only concession Hotham was willing to make was one digger's representative elected to the Legislative Council. The delegation rejected this, and returned to Ballarat empty handed.
Escalation
On 28 November, the reinforcements marching from Melbourne were attacked by a mob of miners. A number were injured and a drummer boy was allegedly killed. The rumour of the death of the drummer boy was perpetuated, even with a memorial erected to him in Ballarat Cemetery for many years, although historical research has shown that the boy, John Egan, continued military service until dying in 1860.[1]
At a meeting the following day (29 November) of about 12,000 'diggers', the Reform League delegation relayed to the miners its failure to achieve any success in negotiations with the authorities. The miners resolved to openly resist the authorities and burn the hated licences. A confrontation appeared unavoidable.
Most notably the Eureka Flag, a blue flag designed by a Canadian miner, "Captain" Henry Ross, and bearing nothing but the Southern Cross, was flown for the first (recorded) time. As a gesture of defiance, it deliberately excluded the British Union Flag, which appears on the official flag of Australia. The original Eureka flag is now housed at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery.
At the meeting on Bakery Hill miners swore an oath of allegiance:
- "We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties"
Rede responded by ordering a large contingent of police to conduct a licence search on 30 November. Although eight defaulters were arrested, most of the military resources available had to be summoned to extricate the arresting officers from the angry mob that had assembled.
This raid prompted a change in the leadership of the Reform League, to people who argued in favour of 'physical force' rather than the 'moral force' championed by Humffray and the old leadership.[2] In the rising tide of anger and resentment amongst the miners a more militant leader, Peter Lalor, took control. In swift fashion a military structure was assembled. Brigades were formed and captains were appointed. Licences were burned, the rebel "Eureka" flag was unfurled and an oath of allegiance was sworn. An encampment at the Eureka Flat was set up and by Friday, 1 December, a stockade had been hastily constructed from timber and overturned carts. The miners vowed to defend themselves from licence hunts and harassment by the authorities.
During Saturday December 2 some 1500 men trained in and around the stockade. A further two hundred Americans, the Independent Californian Rangers, under the leadership of James McGill, arrived about 4pm. The Americans were armed with revolvers and Mexican knives and possessed horses. In a fateful decision, McGill decided to take most of the Californian Rangers away from the stockade to intercept rumoured British reinforcements coming from Melbourne. Rede's spies observed these actions. That night many of the miners went back to their own tents after the traditional Saturday night carousing, with the assumption that the Queen's military forces would not be sent to attack on the sabbath, Sunday. A small contingent of about 150 miners remained at the stockade overnight, which the spies reported to Rede.
Battle
Rede's inaction thus far did not reflect his true intent, and at 3 am on Sunday, 3 December, 1854, a party of 276 police and military personnel under the command of Captain J.W. Thomas approached the Eureka Stockade and a battle ensued.
There is no agreement as to which side fired first, but what was clear was that the battle was fierce, brief, and terribly one-sided. The ramshackle army of miners was hopelessly outclassed by a military regiment and was quickly routed in about 15 minutes. During the height of the battle Lalor was shot in his right arm, took refuge under some timber and was smuggled out of the stockade and hidden. His arm was later amputated.
According to accounts of that morning, after the initial battle had ended, mounted police and foot police carried out what some have described as a massacre, in which no quarter was given, for about two hours. Killing was indiscriminate, bodies mutilated, tents set on fire, the burning and pillaging of nearby stores occurred. (Store owners and others later received compensation for this destruction). The rampage by the police not only occurred in the Eureka Stockade but innocent people were attacked up to several hundred metres from the stockade. Stories tell how women ran forward and threw themselves over the injured to prevent further indiscriminate killing. The Commission of Inquiry would later say it was "a needless as well as a ruthless sacrifice of human life indiscriminate of innocent or guilty, and after all resistance had disappeared".
According to Lalor's report, fourteen miners (mostly Irish) died inside the stockade and an additional eight died later from injuries they sustained. A further dozen were wounded but recovered. Three months after the Eureka Stockade, Peter Lalor wrote: "As the inhuman brutalities practised by the troops are so well known, it is unnecessary for me to repeat them. There were 34 digger casualties at which 22 died. The unusual proportion of the killed to the wounded, is owing to the butchery of the military and troopers after the surrender."
By 7am Captain Pasley, the second in command of the British forces, sickened by the carnage, saved a group of prisoners from being bayoneted and threatened to shoot any police or soldiers who continued with the slaughter. One hundred and fourteen diggers, some wounded, were marched off to the Government camp about 2 kilometres away, where they were kept in an overcrowded lockup, before being moved to a more spacious barn on Monday morning.
Among the soldiers and military police, records indicate six were killed, including one Captain Wise. Martial law was imposed, and all armed resistance collapsed. News of the massacre spread quickly to Melbourne and other goldfield regions, turning a perceived Government military victory in repressing a minor insurrection into a public relations disaster with widespread condemnation of the Government's action, and support for the diggers requested reforms.
Aftermath
For a few weeks it appeared that the status quo had been restored, and Rede ruled the camps with an iron fist. However, in Melbourne and much of rural Victoria, and to a lesser extent the other Australian colonies, there was tremendous public outcry over the military actions. Newspapers characterised it as a brutal overuse of force in a situation brought about by the actions of government officials in the first place, and public condemnation became insurmountable.
Trials for Sedition and High Treason
The first trial relating to the rebellion was a charge of sedition against Henry Seekamp of the Ballarat Times. Seekamp was arrested in his newspaper office on 4 December 1854, for a series of articles that appeared in the Ballarat Times. Many of these articles were written by George Lang, the son of the prominent republican and Presbyterian Minister of Sydney - the Reverend John Dunmore Lang. The Chief Justice, Sir William à Beckett, effectively told the jury that it must find Seekamp guilty. He was tried and convicted of seditious libel by a Melbourne jury on 23 January 1855 and, after a series of appeals, sentenced to six months imprisonment on 23 March. He was released from prison on 28 June 1855, precisely three months early.
Of the 120 odd 'diggers' detained after the rebellion, thirteen were brought to trial. They included:
- Timothy Hayes, Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League,
- James McFie Campbell a black man from Kingston Jamaica
- Raffaello Carboni, an Italian and trusted lieutenant in charge of the diggers who spoke European languages
- Jacob Sorenson, a Jew
- John Manning, a Ballarat Times journalist, from Ireland
- John Phelan, a friend and business partner of Peter Lalor, from Ireland
- Thomas Dignum, born in Sydney,
- John Joseph, a black American from New York
- James Beattie, from Ireland
- William Molloy, from Ireland
- Jan Vannick, from Holland,
- Michael Tuohy, from Ireland
- Henry Reid
The first trial started on 22 February 1855 with John Joseph brought before the court on charges of high treason. Joseph was one of three Americans arrested at the stockade, with the US Consul intervening for the release of the two Americans of caucasion complexion. The prosecution was handled by Attorney General William Stawell representing the Crown before Chief Justice William à Beckett. After hearing the evidence, the jury quickly returned a Not Guilty verdict with the court erupting in wild cheering. John Joseph was carried around the streets of Melbourne in a chair in triumph by over 10,000 people.
Under the auspices of Victorian Chief Justice Redmond Barry, all subsequent trials were rapidly acquitted to great public acclaim. Rede himself was quietly removed from the camps and reassigned to an insignificant position in rural Victoria.
Commission of Enquiry
A Commission of Enquiry into the affair was organised, and was scathing in its assessment of all aspects of the administration of the gold fields, and particularly the Eureka Stockade affair. The gold licences were abolished, and replaced by an inexpensive annual miner's licence and an export fee based on the value of the gold. Mining wardens replaced the gold commissioners, and police numbers were cut drastically. The Legislative Council was expanded to allow representation to the major goldfields and Peter Lalor and John Basson Humffray were elected for Ballarat. After 12 months all but one of the demands of the Ballarat Reform League had been granted. Lalor and Humffray both led distinguished careers as politicians, with Lalor later elected as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria.
Commemoration
Over the next thirty years, press interest in the events which took place at the Eureka Stockade dwindled, but Eureka was kept alive at the campfires and in the pubs, and in memorial events in Ballarat. In addition, key figures such as Lalor and Humfray were still around and in the public eye. Eureka had not been forgotten - it was readily remembered and a flag similar to the Eureka flag was flown above the Barcaldine shearers strike camp in the 1891 Australian shearers' strike and in the poetry of Henry Lawson, such as Flag of the Southern Cross (1887), Eureka (A Fragment) (1889), The Fight at Eureka Stockade (1890), and Freedom on the Wallaby (1891),
In 1889 Melbourne businessmen employed renowned American cyclorama artist Thaddeus Welch who teamed up with local artist Izett Watson to paint 1000 square feet (90 m²) of canvas of the Eureka Stockade that was wrapped around a wooden structure. When it opened in Melbourne it was an instant hit. The Age reported in 1891 "it afforded a very good opportunity for people to see what it might have been like at Eureka". The Australasian claimed "that many person´s familiar with the incidents depicted, were able to testify to the fidelity of the painted scene". The people of Melbourne flocked to the cyclorama, paid up and had their picture taken before it. It was eventually dismantled and disappeared from sight.
The writer Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, visited the Victorian Goldfields in 1895. Following his visit he said of the Eureka Stockade:
- "By and by there was a result, and I think it may be called the finest thing in Australian history. It was a revolution - small in size, but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against oppression....It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honourable page to history: the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka stockade."
Because the materials used to build the stockade were rapidly removed to be used for the mines and the entire area itself was so extensively worked that the original landscape was unrecognisable, the exact location of the stockade was quickly lost track of. However the event itself returned to the national consciousness and became a rallying cry as the call for federation and nationhood gained momentum in the 1890s.
Eureka Today
The Eureka Stockade (or more accurately, the driving force of public opinion that followed) has been characterised as the "Birth of Democracy" within Australia. Its actual significance is uncertain; it has been variously mythologised by particular interest groups as a revolt of free men against imperial tyranny, of independent free enterprise against burdensome taxation, of labour against a privileged ruling class, or as an expression of multicultural republicanism, and so on. The affair continues to raise echoes in Australian politics to the present day, and from time to time one group or another calls for the existing Australian flag to be replaced by the Eureka Flag.
The Eureka Stockade was certainly the most prominent rebellion in Australia's history and, depending on how one defines rebellion, can be regarded as the only such event. (But see also Rum Rebellion, and more recently the New Guard.) The significance of the rebellion, however, remains debatable. Some historians believe that the undoubted prominence of the event in the public record has come about because Australian history does not include a major armed rebellion phase equivalent to the French Revolution, the English Civil War, or the American War of Independence: in consequence (according to this view) the Eureka story tends to be inflated well beyond its real significance. Others, however, maintain that Eureka was a seminal event and that it marked a major change in the course of Australian history. The debate remains active and may remain so as long as Eureka is remembered.
See also
- Flag of Australia
- Eureka Flag
- History of Victoria
- Victorian gold rush
- Butler Cole Aspinall, one of the defence counsel.
References
- The Eureka Encyclopaedia, Justin Corfield, Dorothy Wickham, Clare Gervasani, Ballarat Heritage Services, (2004), ISBN 1876478616
- Massacre at Eureka - The Untold Story, Bob O'Brien, ISBN 0909874190
- Eureka, John Molony, ISBN 0522849628
- The Eureka Stockade by Raffaello Carboni, (1855). Title from Project Gutenberg
- State Library of Victoria - The Eureka Stockade
- Eureka on Trial
- Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
- Reclaiming the Radical Spirit of the Eureka Rebellion in 1854
- Life on the Goldfields: Eureka Stockade
- 150th Anniversary of the Eureka Stockade
- The Australian Gold Rush
- Eureka Stockade
- "Time to reclaim this legend as our driving force" by Macgregor Duncan, Andrew Leigh, David Madden, Peter Tynan, Sydney Morning Herald, November 29, 2004, retrieved May 7, 2006
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