Preparing for trial

Anxiety was especially expressed about whether the uprising was caused by ‘foreigners’. It is never specified how or why these foreigners stirred up unrest, but it widely believed that they had been involved. Hotham was happy to subscribe to this; deflecting blame is always a useful strategy when under pressure. This may explain why Hotham made great effort to point out the number of Irish and other ‘foreign’ nationals in his despatches. Commissioner Robert Rede had expressed his concerns in late November 1854:

 

…if I can believe the information I have received they are in a most insidious manner urging on the mob without shewing themselves and I can only suppose it is with the view of Americanising this Colony. [1]

 

Despite the assertion of James Tarleton, the American Consul that no Americans were involved, three of the prisoners were his fellow countrymen. [2] Although John Joseph an African-American was charged with High Treason, Captain James McGill and Charles Ferguson, both participants in the Eureka Stockade, were freed within two days of their arrest. [3] Ferguson maintained that he had been forcibly seized by the rebels and that his participation had been involuntary. [4] This led to the suggestion that Hotham connived to give them immunity but decided that a ‘man of colour’ among those charged with High Treason would strengthen the Crown’s case that foreigners not the British were behind the rebellion. [5]

 

Between Thursday 7 and Saturday 9 December, Police Magistrate E. P. S. Sturt began to sift through the evidence on the 114 prisoners detained at Ballarat to see whether there was sufficient to support the charge of treason. [6] The depositions taken, largely from troopers and police involved in the attack and from some eyewitnesses, attempted to identify each prisoner’s level of involvement as they were brought into custody. These signed statements and other documents were then forwarded to the courts and formed the basis of the prosecutor’s brief. [7] Although over 100 men had been arrested, the cases against all but 13 were dismissed for lack of evidence. Those charged with High Treason were James Beattie, James Campbell, Raffaelo Carboni, Thomas Dignum, Timothy Hayes, John Joseph, John Manning, William Molloy, John Phelan, Henry Reid, Jacob Sorenson, Michael Tuohy and Jan Vennick (John Fenwick). The choice of which diggers were charged appeared to be arbitrary. Carboni and Hayes were not within the Stockade during the attack and of the thirteen eventually committed for trial, Carboni said had never seen seven before.

 

In addition to the diggers, Henry Seekamp, the editor of the Ballarat Times was arrested on 4 December 1854 and charged with seditious libel. [8] Although he had written critically of the government on several occasions, it was the article written on 2 December that proved crucial.

 

Instead therefore of the diggers looking for remedies where none can be found let them strike deep at the root of rottenness and reform the Chief Government…The voice of the people must be raised for a free and British constitution and their wishes enforced by the strongest means…To allay the present tumult the rights of the diggers then their demands must be satisfied to the fullest extent. They are neither preposterous nor unEnglish. They are just and right. If they are not satisfied the gathering clouds of popular indignation will burst like a whirlwind over guilty and unsuspecting heads and sweep the length and breadth of the land.[9]

 

On 23 January 1855, before Chief-Justice, Sir William a’Beckett he was found guilty of publishing seditious articles prior to the attack and was jailed to await sentence. [10] Nonetheless, there was a strong recommendation for mercy because it had not been proved that he had been the writer or that the articles had been published with his knowledge or consent. [11] When he appeared for sentence, Seekamp expressed regret that the articles had been written. His counsel read affidavits from John Dunmore Lang and John Manning, stating that they had written the seditious articles without Seekamp’s knowledge or consent when he was absent in Melbourne. The Chief-Justice said he wanted to give Seekamp the opportunity to state all the facts on affidavit and would reserve the judgment of the court until late March. He made clear that despite the Manning and Lang affidavits, the Court needed clear evidence of two things. Had Seekamp done all in his power to prevent the appearance of the articles in question and also had he taken steps to counteract their effect after they appeared. Seekamp was then released on bail. [12] However, when he failed to repudiate the articles, the Chief-Justice said he had ‘clothed himself with sedition so long as it paid, so long as he found it warm and comfortable; but when he found the garment intolerably hot, he dropped it’. On 26 March, a’Beckett, his patience exhausted by the legal delays, told him that no sane mind could doubt the ‘grossly seditious character’ of the libels and that it was a reasonable legal doctrine that the editor of a newspaper should be responsible for its contents.[13] Seekamp was then sentenced to six months in jail but was released on 28 June 1855, precisely three months early. [14] This case proved to be the only success in the government’s campaign against the diggers.

---

[1] Rede to Wright, 30 November 1854, PROV, VPRS 1189/P Unit 92, J54/14459.

[2] Tarleton to Hotham, 4 December 1854, PROV, VPRS 4066/P Unit 1, December 1854 no. 17.

[3] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, p. 178.

[4] Ferguson, Charles, Experiences of a Forty-niner in Australia and New Zealand, (Williams Publishing Company), 1888, reprinted, (Kessinger Publishing), 2004, pp. 275-301.

[5] See, ‘The Governor and the Foreigners, To the Editor of the Argus’, Argus, 22 January 1855, p. 5, and ‘Amnesty to Americans’, Argus, 23 January 1855, p. 4, was highly critical of what it termed as ‘favouritism towards American citizens…displayed by Sir Charles Hotham’.

[6] ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 9 December 1864, p. 5, reported activities in Sturt’s court on 6 December; ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 12 December 1854, p. 5, for 7 December. Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, pp. 176-192, and Serle, pp. 172-176, consider the trials and the process leading up to them. Fricke, G. L., ‘The Eureka Trials’, Australian Law Journal, Vol. 71 (1), (1997), pp. 59-69, and Lynch, Philip, ‘Juries as communities of resistance: Eureka and the power of the rabble’, Alternative Law Journal, Vol. 27 (2), (2002), pp. 83-86.

[7] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, pp. 118-119, gives an account of this process.

[8] Brief for the prosecution: PROV, VPRS 30/P Unit 40, Case no.23, Criminal Sessions M includes extracts from his so-called ‘seditious writings’.

[9] Ballarat Times, 2 December 1854.

[10] Coppel, E. G., ‘Sir William a’Beckett (1806-1869)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 10-11. Bennett, J. M., Sir William a’Beckett, (Federation Press), 2001, pp. 60-72, considers the Eureka trials.

[11] ‘Supreme Court, Criminal Sessions, Tuesday 23 January 1855, p.4, ‘Domestic Intelligence’, Argus , 26 January 1855, p. 5.

[12] ‘The Ballaarat Riots’, Argus, 6 February 1855, p. 5.

[13] ‘The State Trials’, Argus, 24 March 1855, p. 6.

[14] Kirkpatrick, Rod, ‘Eureka and the editor: A reappraisal 150 years on’, Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 26, (2), (2004), pp. 31-42.

Trial without Retribution

The attack on the Eureka Stockade marked the dénouement of digger protests that began with the first protest meeting at Buninyong on 25 August 1851 when news arrived of a license fee being levied on all miners. The Geelong Advertiser’s reporter Alfred Clarke who attended the meeting wrote:

 

…there has not been a more gross attempt at injustice since the days of Wat Tyler…It is a solemn protest of labour against oppression, an outburst of light, reason and right against the infliction of an effete objectionable Royal claim…It is taxation without representation. Tonight for the first time since Australia rose from the bosom of the ocean, were men strong in their sense of right, lifting up a protest against an impending wrong, and protesting against the Government. Let the Government beware! [1]

 

This early agitation was followed by a number of protest movements, beginning with the formation of a Miners’ Association at Mount Alexander (Castlemaine) in December 1851. There were protests at the Ovens and at Bendigo, a Colonial Reform Association was formed in Melbourne in 1853 and in Bendigo the Red Ribbon agitation was led by the Anti-Gold License Association. The Bendigo petition was couched in Chartist terms. Protest meetings were held at Ballarat and a Chartist newspaper, the Diggers Advocate, was founded in Melbourne in October 1853 by Henry Holyoake and George Black, with H. R. Nicholls as an assistant editor.[2] Its editorials called the Victorian government ‘an arbitrary despotism…which denied the right to assist in making the laws under which they [the diggers] lived’. [3] On 3 November 1853, the Argus reported the formation of a Gold Diggers’ Association. The volatility of the goldfields made it difficult to organise the diggers and these political movements were short-lived.

 

The arrival of Sir Charles Hotham in July 1854 saw the popular movement re-emerge in Ballarat. Initially admired, he soon ordered that the diggers must pay their licenses and that his police and military should conduct regular inspections, if necessary, at the point of a bayonet. The political climate in Victoria changed dramatically. A growing sense of injustice at the failure of the courts to deliver fair verdicts and the persistent cancer of the gold license led to the formation of the Ballarat Reform League in early November. The failure of the local goldfield administration to defuse the situation and growing digger militancy led to a direct attack on the authority of the Crown with the construction of the Stockade at Eureka and the swearing of an oath before the Southern Cross. The authorities acted swiftly and with brutality on 3 December 1854 but the initial euphoria at their success quickly evaporated once the tragic scale of the ‘massacre’ became known. Charles Evans commented:

 

It is a dark indelible strain on a British Government – a deed which can be fitly placed side by side with the treacheries and cold blooded cruelties of Austria & Russia. [4]

 

With over 100 diggers in custody, the question was what would Hotham do next?

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Eureka Stockade, public opinion was divided. Hotham’s initial call for support in maintaining law and order was well received and was supported by the Legislative Council, the city of Melbourne and its councillors and by bankers, merchants and landowners. On 7 December, the ‘squatting community’ pledged their support for any measure Hotham decided would further ‘the maintenance of law and the preservation of the community from social disorganisation’. [5] However, the government’s response to Eureka and its subsequent actions led to growing opposition. The Argus was concerned by a ‘most formidable spirit of disaffection’ with the government and the open assertion of ‘republican principles’ among the people. [6] Resolutions passed at a public meeting in Melbourne on 6 December, while they did not directly support the diggers, expressed concerns about the government’s use of excessive military force at Ballarat. [7] Its first resolution stated:

 

That the constitutional agitation at Ballaarat has assumed its present form in consequence of the coercion of a military force, professedly imported for the defence of the colony against foreign aggression; and that matters would not have been precipitated to their present issue, but for the harsh and imprudent recemmencement of digger-hunting during a period of excitement.

 

While the second made further criticisms of the government:

 

That the citizens of Melbourne, while disapproving of the physical resistance offered by the diggers to the Government, cannot, without betraying the interests of liberty, lend their support to the measures of the Government till they have a guarantee that steps will at once be taken to place the colony in general and the goldfields in particular on such a footing that a military despotism will no longer be required.

 

Instead of attempting to defuse the situation and despite the recommendation of the Gold Fields Commission on 10 January 1855, Hotham exacerbated matters by refusing an amnesty for those involved in the rebellion, while granting it to officials. Digger disillusion with the government’s behaviour over Eureka and specifically with the decision to try men for treason was evident across the goldfields.

---

[1] Argus, 30 August 1851, p. 4, cit, Stackpoole, Harry, Gold at Ballarat: The Ballarat East goldfield, its discovery and development, (Lowden), 1971, p. 17.

[2] Clark, C. M. H., History of Australia, Vol. 4, (Melbourne University Press), 1978, p. 105, Pickering, Paul A., ‘“Glimpses of Eternal Truth”: Chartism, Poetry and the Young H. R. Nicholls’, Labour History, No. 70, (May 1996), pp. 53-70.

[3] Diggers Advocate, 1 April 1854.

[4] SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 3 December 1854, p. 138.

[5] ‘The Legislative Council’, Argus, 8 December 1854, pp. 4-5.

[6] ‘State of Feeling in Victoria’, Argus, 6 January 1855, p. 5.

[7] ‘Meeting for the Protection of Constitutional Liberty’, Argus, 7 December 1854, p. 5.

Three Rebellions…a second edition

There have been important change in the Rebellion Trilogy, a series of books that were written between 2004 and 2010 and published in 2010, 2011 and 2013.  The series will become a Quartet with the addition of a fourth volume entitled Ireland, Revolution and Diaspora 1882-1923. This was, in part, the result of a comment from a colleague who suggested that I’d looked at the aperitif and starter but hadn’t really got on to the main course. This echoed my own feeling about the Irish dimension in the series. I had started to tell the story but it had yet to reach the ‘freedom’ in my Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1840-1882.

 

The first volume in the series is Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia that considers the context, causes and consequences of three major popular disturbances in the British Empire during the early years of Queen Victoria’s long reign. In the Canadas during 1837 and 1838, at Newport in South Wales in 1839 and at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria in Australia in 1854 thousands of largely working people took up arms against the forces of colonial rule and oppression. What linked these three events was a popular form of constitutionalism, linked to British radicalism and especially to Chartism that sought constitutional and democratic change but which was denied by colonial oligarchies that sought to retain political power in their own hands. The rebellions each failed when faced by the overwhelming force of the colonial state but, although they were defeated militarily, each played a significant role in the emergence of more responsive and responsible government. Today, the losers are better remembered than those who defeated them in 1837-1838, 1839 and 1854.

The first edition of Three Rebellions was completed in 2008 and finally published in early 2010. In the intervening years I have continued to grapple with the issues raised in the original volume publishing more detailed discussion of the rebellions in Britain, Canada and Australia.The major difference between the first and second editions is that I have significantly reduced the length of the work by taking out the foreword, relevant in 2009 but not today, and the chapters that dealt with the links between the three rebellions and how the rebellions have been remembered and commemorated. My reason for doing this—other than making the work tighter—is that I have included revised versions of these chapters in my Chartism: A Global History and other essays, published earlier this year.

Women on the goldfields

As early as 1851, there were women who worked with their husbands searching for gold. There were about twenty women, for instance, at the Mount Alexander diggings in early November 1851.[1] By May 1852, a visitor to the diggings was ‘struck by the number of women and children about’. [2] Some women even worked independently as diggers, but unlike their male counterparts, were not required to purchase a license. By 1854, 208 women were in paid employment in Ballarat. The majority were domestic servants, 8 per cent were storekeepers and others were needlewomen, dressmakers, milliners and shoe-binders. William Kelly was unimpressed with Ballarat women:

 

I was on the point of writing the softer sex, but that would be a misnomer, for the most callous specimens of the male creation I ever encountered were mere green pulp in comparison with some of the granite-grained viragoes I had the honour of meeting. [3]

 

Charles Evans also commented about Ballarat that ‘even women feeling themselves relieved from the salutary checks which society in civilized life lays on them fall into a vice bad enough in men, but disgusting and repulsive beyond expression in women’, and later:

 

A butcher who had picked up one of those delightful specimens of female vixenism which to the warning of bachelors are plentifully met with in this country - had a noisy brawl with his loving helpmate. – The wife’s face & hands smeared with blood from the man’s brutality & the course language of both was most disgusting. [4]

 

However, this was far from the universal view. More positive male perceptions of entrepreneurial abilities of women on the goldfields were also evident:

 

Sir - I removed to the Caledonian Lead a few months since, and located in the vicinity of the Brown Hill Hotel. In a few days after being installed in my new quarters, my attention was attracted by the strokes of an axe, plied incessantly from morning until night. On observation, much to my surprise, I perceived the indefatigable wood-chopper to be a woman…may further add, that the time of this girl, (I have been told that she is single), is not undivided. With the assistance of another female, her partner, she keeps a milk dairy, a lot of poultry, and a herd of pigs. I am unable to give the name of either of the parties, but any enquiries made in reference to the above, in the vicinity of 70 or 80 Caledonian Lead, would be successful. Her reputation has become quite a prodigy in these parts…[5]

 

By the end of the 1850s in Castlemaine, women were working in a number of traditional male occupations: there were female printers, cattle dealers, quarry men, brick makers, and blacksmiths.[6] There were so many women on the diggings that Charles Hotham confidently proclaimed in a despatch to London that the increase in the fairer sex would surely see an improvement in the behaviour and demeanour of the male miners. One of these presumed ‘civilising agents’ was Nancy Kinnane, who taught at the National School tent, positioned on the Eureka lead and later confined within the Stockade. Nancy had 40 children enrolled and reportedly sheltered them during the battle. Another story placed her as an assistant in the covert amputation of the arm of miners’ leader, Peter Lalor. In the aftermath of the rebellion, Nancy and her husband sought compensation for losses incurred at the hands of the military and received £80. She went on to become the proprietor of the Camp Hotel, Ballarat.

 

Within the socially fluid circumstances on the goldfields, many women were able to gain a greater degree of economic independence and assume social roles that broke the strict confines of tradition and Victorian morality. Many women continued to be wives and housekeepers but:

 

If women weren’t rocking the baby’s cradle, they would be out on the diggings rocking the gold cradle…Women of all classes were often active in their partner’s business and economic affairs.[7]

 

One woman who ran a successful store on the Ballarat goldfields was Martha Clendinning. [8] Her husband, George, was a doctor who brought his wife to Victoria from England in 1852. He travelled to the goldfields with his brother-in-law to look for gold, leaving Martha with her sister in Melbourne. However, Martha and her sister decided to follow their husbands and walk the ninety-five miles to Ballarat. They brought with them bedsteads, mattresses, blankets, chairs and cooking utensils on a bullock dray and planned to set up a store on the diggings. This idea was met with ridicule from their husbands as it was not considered normal behaviour for respectable women of the time to operate businesses. Despite the men’s objections, the sisters opened a store in the front of their tent selling tea, coffee, sugar, candles, tobacco, jam, bottled fruit, cheese, dress materials and baby clothes but unlike many others on the diggings, did not sell sly grog. They were required to pay £40 a year for a storekeeper’s license. After her sister returned to Melbourne, Martha continued to run the store on her own until 1855 when growing competition from larger businesses and the cost of the storekeeper’s license made it less profitable. Also, Martha’s husband could now support the family and social attitudes towards middle-class women were quickly changing as Ballarat became a more settled, conservative community. Middle-class women were expected to be wives and mothers, not businesswomen. [9]

 

For a number of reasons the story of Eureka has not been told from the perspective of its female protagonists in the overwhelmingly ‘male’ narrative of mining and rebellion in Victoria’s goldfields. [10] Looking at the ways that men and women have historically shared certain spaces rather than competing for dominance over them, opens possibilities for understanding how women participated in critical events and social spaces, forging their own female or indeed collective responses to circumstances. They did not just participate on the domestic fringes of male revolutionary fervour. Clare Wright states that the women on the Ballarat goldfield ‘were witnesses to the historic events; they were agents too, intimately connected to the critical affairs and emotions unfolding in Ballarat in 1854’. Women attended protest meetings, petitioned the governor and were inside the Stockade. Such women included Anastasia Hayes, a ‘quick tempered Irish woman from Kilkenny…known as a ‘firebrand’ (who) complained openly about the harsh treatment of the miners’. She worked alongside Anastasia Withers and Anne Duke to sew the Eureka Flag that was unfurled on Bakery Hill as a symbol of united resistance and to provide material support, shelter and medical aid in the lead-up to and aftermath of the uprising. Women sold the illicit alcohol that inflamed passions and quelled discomfort. They also provided the meals and accommodation in the many goldfields hotels where meetings were held, strategies planned and grievances aired by miners and military men alike. Women were formally excluded from the political spoils that disenfranchised white men won after the uprising but did the women of Ballarat view manhood suffrage as a loss to their own dignity and self-worth?

 

A gender analysis of Eureka reveals that women could indeed be included in wider colonial narratives. Contrary to prevailing notions of women as the inevitable victims of ‘gold fever’, many women showed an aptitude for entrepreneurialism and opportunism. [11] As theatre managers, actresses, shopkeepers, liquor sellers and, of course, as prostitutes, women were able to take advantage of avenues for economic independence offered in the new country, far from the rigid moral and class restraints of England. Many popular songs of the day stress the resourcefulness and autonomy of women on the goldfields.[12] Women generally played a more active part in public life and made a significant contribution to the social struggles on the goldfields. Examining the women at Eureka brings renewed relevance to a diverse community for whom talk of ‘democracy and freedom’ automatically raised questions of gender equity.

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[1] ‘Mount Alexander Diggings’, Argus, 8 November 1851, p. 2.

[2] ‘A Sailor’s Trip from Melbourne to Mount Alexander’, Argus, 20 May 1852, p. 6.

[3] Ibid, Kelly, William, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853 and Victoria in 1858, p. 154.

[4] SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans Diary, 23 November 1853, pp. 64-65, 5 December 1853, p. 71.

[5] ‘What a Woman On Ballarat Can Do’, Ballarat Weekly Times, 25 December 1857.

[6] Grimshaw, Patricia, and Fahey, Charles, ‘Family and community in Castlemaine’, in Grimshaw, Patricia, McConville, Chris, and McEwen, Ellen, (eds.), Families in colonial Australia, (Allen & Unwin), 1985, p. 90.

[7] Johnson, Laurel, The Women of Eureka, (Historic Montrose Cottage and Eureka Museum), 1994.

[8] On Martha Clendinning, see Asher, Louise, ‘Martha Clendinning: a woman’s life on the goldfields’, in Lake, Marilyn, and Farley, Kelly, (eds.), Double time: women in Victoria-150 years, (Penguin Books), 1985, pp. 52-60; Anderson, Margaret, ‘Mrs Charles Clacy, Lola Montez and Poll the Grogseller: glimpses of women on the early Victorian goldfields’, in ibid, McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander, and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold, pp. 239, 242-243.

[9] Martha’s reminiscences (‘Recollections of Ballarat: A Lady’s Life at the Diggings Fifty Years Ago’, State Library of Victoria, Manuscript Collection: MS 10102/1) describe life on the Ballarat diggings together with a detailed description of the first Church of England in Ballarat and an account of the Eureka uprising. Her daughter Margaret married Robert Rede, Goldfields Commissioner at Ballarat during the rebellion.

[10] Kruss, S, Calico Ceilings: The Women of Eureka, (Five Islands Press), 2004; Wicham, Dorothy, Women of the Diggings: Ballarat 1854, (Ballarat Heritage Services), 2009, Wright, Clare, ‘Labour Pains: towards a female perspective on the birth of Australian democracy’, in ibid, Mayne, Alan, (ed.), Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, pp. 124-142, and ‘‘New Brooms They Say Sweep Clean’: Women’s Political Activism on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 39, (2008), pp. 305-321.

[11] Duyker, E., (ed.), A Woman on the Goldfields: Recollections of Emily Skinner 1854-1878, (Melbourne University Press), 1995, and Thompson, P., (ed.), A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings in Australia in 1852-1853, 1853, (Lansdowne Press), 1963, pp. 84-91, on Mrs Charles Clacy, gives two examples of women’s experience on the goldfields.

[12] Thatcher, Charles R., The Victorian Songster: Containing Various New & Original Colonial Songs Together with a Choice Selection of the Most Popular Songs of the Day, (Charlwood & Son), 1855, 2nd ed., (G. H. Egremont-Gee), 1860; Thatcher, Charles R., Thatcher’s colonial songs: forming a complete comic history of the early diggings, (Charlwood), 1864; Hoskins, Robert, Goldfield balladeer: the Life and times of the celebrated Charles R. Thatcher, (Collins, Auckland), 1977, Arnold, Denis, (ed.), The New Oxford Companion of Music, (Oxford University Press), 1983, p. 119, and Anderson, Hugh, The colonial minstrel, (F.W. Cheshire), 1960.

Women and Eureka

By the 1850s, immigration to Canada was a far more attractive in the eyes of respectable women than to Australia that was still haunted by its convict origins. [1] Women were outnumbered by roughly six to one in the convict settlements until the increase in free female immigration in the 1830s. [2] Historians such as Lloyd Robson, Alan Shaw and Robert Hughes have largely accepted the judgements of contemporary officials of female convicts generally as ‘damned whores’, possessed of neither ‘Virtue nor Honesty’. [3] Michael Sturma pointed out that middle- and upper-class commentators tended to see working-class women as prostitutes simply because their behaviour transgressed their class-based notions of feminine modesty and morality. For instance, long-term relationships were a common and accepted part of early-nineteenth century working-class culture, but from the perspective of the middle- or upper-class observer, these women were prostituting themselves, albeit to ‘one man only’.[4] Early feminist historians such as Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson have ironically reinforced this picture of wholesale whoredom by incorporating the stereotype as a key element in explaining Australian women’s current low status in relation to Australian men. [5] Women were compelled into prostitution by State policy and structural factors rather than their own personal ‘vice’. Portia Robinson presented an alternate view of the women of Botany Bay as good wives, good mothers and good citizens. If they were prostitutes, she says, it was as a result of the criminal environment in Britain rather than conditions in Australia that offered women the opportunity of redemption. [6]

Gender balance was, for instance, a defining characteristic of Irish migration to Australia throughout the nineteenth century and Irish women made a major contribution to Australian society. [7] About a third of convict women were Irish. For instance, on 20 January 1849, Lord Auckland arrived at Hobart from Dublin with 211 female convicts. More than 1,000 young women came to Sydney and Hobart in the 1830s from Foundling Hospitals in Dublin and Cork. Approximately 19,000 Irish bounty and government assisted migrants arrived in Melbourne and Sydney between 1839 and 1842 of whom about half were female. In 1855-1856 over 4,000 single Irish women arrived in Adelaide. Such infusions of Irish female blood had a powerful influence on the development of colonial society. The ‘Earl Grey’ female orphans sit within that tradition. The difference is that these ‘orphans’ stand as symbolic refugees from Famine and came from among the genuinely destitute sections of Irish society.

Although the young girls from the workhouses were sent out to take up domestic service, very few had any experience of the work. This did not please existing settlers: they had been led to believe they were getting proficient labour cheaply, not realising that the profession ascribed to each girl was what the guardians considered her fit for, and not for any previously acquired skill. This led to problems and the Irish orphan ‘girls’ were soon maligned in the Australian metropolitan press as immoral dregs of the workhouse, ignorant of the skills required of domestic servants. Although all the workhouse girls from the first three ships to arrive in Australia had been hired almost as soon as they came ashore, a report to the Children’s Apprenticeship Board claimed that in Adelaide in 1849 ‘there are 21 of the Irish Orphans upon the Streets’ and ‘indeed there appears to be a greater number of orphans than any other class of females’. [8] While some of the ‘girls’ were neither as young nor as innocent as was inferred, it was also the case that many of the employers came from humble backgrounds themselves and often had no idea of how to treat or train a servant. Nor did the training the girls received in the workhouse prove useful in a domestic setting. When an immigrant girl failed to provide the level of service expected, she was frequently returned to the depot, or turned out of doors and left to her own devices. Having no other means of support, some of the discarded servants turned to prostitution. As protests grew more vocal, and as the Famine in Ireland appeared to have abated, the British Government agreed to end the scheme. The final group of Irish workhouse orphans left for Australia in April 1850. Altogether, 4,175 girls were sent overseas during this period; 2,253 to Sydney, 1,255 to Port Phillip, 606 to Adelaide and the remaining 61 to the Cape of Good Hope.

When gold was discovered, the majority of women remained in the towns with their families:

Women are the only scarce people that is here, in a city of some 10,000 Inhabitants, you will not see more than twelve or twenty women in a day there are only about 300 in the whole city.[9]

But it was not long before some began arriving on the goldfields. By 1854, there were 4,000 women on the Ballarat goldfields, compared to nearly 13,000 men. Only 5 per cent of all women were single and there were between 3,000 and 4,000 children. William Withers referred to the lack of females on the goldfields: ‘There were no hospitals or asylums in that early day, and a woman was an absolute phenomenon’. [10] Based on the census returns for March 1857, the total population on the goldfields in Victoria was 383,668 ‘exclusive of the residents in the Chinese encampments, and the roving aboriginals’. There were 237,743 males and 145,925 females but that:

...the numbers of the two sexes on the goldfields who, in March, 1857, had arrived at a marriageable age, but who were unmarried, stand thus in round numbers: males, 48,000; females, 2,700; or nearly eighteen males to one female. These figures at once bring before us, in a most startling form, the great sexual inequality of the goldfields’ population. [11]

However, the 1861 Victorian census showed that the population of the Ballarat goldfields had grown to 12,726 men, 9,135 women and 7,838 children, and the city was now beginning to settle into a more normal ratio of men to women. At that time, 136 women in Ballarat listed their occupation as gold mining, compared to nearly 8,000 men.

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[1] Elder, Catriona, Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, (Allen & Unwin), 2007, pp. 40-93, contrasts the notion that the working man is everywhere with the invisible woman.

[2] Carmichael, G., ‘So Many Children: Colonial and Post-Colonial Demographic Patterns’, in Saunders, K., & Evans, R., (eds.), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, (Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich), 1992, p. 103.

[3] Robson, L. L., The Convict Settlers of Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1976, Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and The Colonies, (Faber & Faber), 1966, and Hughes, R., The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1788-1868, (Collins), 1987.

[4] Sturma, M., ‘“Eye of the Beholder’: The Stereotype of Women Convicts, 1788-1850, Labour History, Vol. 34, (1978), pp. 3-10.

[5] Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, (Penguin), 1975, and Dixson, Miriam, The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia, 1788 to 1975, (Penguin), 1975.

[6] Robinson, P., The Women of Botany Bay: a reinterpretation of the role of women in the origins of Australian society, (North Ryde), 1988, p. 236.

[7] See, McClaughlin, Trevor, (ed.), Irish Women in Colonial Australia, (Allen & Unwin), 1998.

[8] Cit, Report to the children’s apprenticeship board, Poor Law Commission Office, Dublin, 27 November 1850.

[9] Ulster American Folk Park, serial no: 9701190, copyright John McCleery, Belfast.

[10] Ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, p. 55.

[11] ‘Inequality of the Sexes on the Gold Fields’, Ballarat Star, 5 July 1859.

Defending the Stockade

Heavy and continuous fire between the rebels and soldiers lasted for about ten minutes during which the men of the 40th wavered. At this point several of the men held in reserve, who appeared to think the attack had stalled, rushed forward and managed to get into the Stockade although they were promptly chased out by rebels armed with pikes and retired to their own lines. Blake’s explanation for this is that either the soldiers acted on their own initiative or that an unnamed officer in the reserve decided to take matters into his own hands and ordered some soldiers from his own regiment to rush the Stockade.[1]

 

Peter Lalor

The rebels were well protected by their fortifications but the volume of fire on the Stockade increased. The group of about 40 assault troops from the 40th Regiment, under the command of Captain Wise, attacking the Stockade from the north side, gradually edged forward. In addition, the soldiers on Stockyard Hill and at the Free Trade Hotel also brought fire to bear on the rebels. About 70 mounted troops from the 40th approached from the northeast, 112 foot soldiers from the 12th and 40th Regiments from the west and 70 mounted police rode from the south-west. The Stockade was now flanked and within ten minutes of the initial attack, it had been breached on its northern and western flanks. [2] The Argus commented:

Had the diggers fired longer the losses to the military would have been immense, and they, as it was, acted with a precision and regularity admired even by the officers of the military. [3]

Peter Lalor attempted to bring order to the confusion but soon recognised that the rebels had lost any tactical advantage they had and that their position was tactically untenable but that they no option but to fight. Lalor’s emphasis on the paucity of weapons and ammunition is contradicted by the military reports that spoke of the level and regularity of fire from the rebels:

There were about 70 men possessing guns, 20 with pikes, and 30 with pistols, but many of those firearms had no more than one or two rounds of ammunition.

If they attempted to surrender, they would have been cut down by the withering fire that was directed at them. As the soldiers fixed bayonets, charged and clambered into the Stockade, many rebels fled. Although Lalor’s account is suspect in many respects, he later wrote:

About three o’clock am on Sunday morning the alarm was given that ‘the enemy’ was advancing…on discovering the smallness of our numbers we would have retreated, but it was then too late, as almost immediately, the military poured in one or two volleys of musketry, which was a plain intimation that we must sell our lives as dearly as we could.

 



Beryl Ireland, Eureka Stockade, 1891

 

Lalor then jumped up on a mound and ordered the diggers to stop firing, and save their ammunition until the soldiers and police were within range. He ordered the pikemen forward, but it was only a few minutes before he was shot in the shoulder and ordered his men to save themselves as he was hidden under some wood:

About ten minutes after the beginning of the fight, and while standing on the top of a hole, calling on the pikemen to come forward, I received a musket ball (together with two other smaller bullets) in the left shoulder, which shattered my arm, and from the loss of blood I was rendered incapable of further action. Soon after, I was assisted by a volunteer out of the enclosure and placed in a pile of slabs out of view of the military & police. While in this position, the latter passed several times within feet of me. I remained there about an hour, when, thanks to the assistance of some friends I was able to leave… On the approach of night I returned to the diggings, and through the kindness of a friend, procured the assistance of surgeons, who next day amputated my arm. [4]

Ross, whose company of rebels defended the northern part of the Stockade, fell soon after. About 30 pikemen, under the leadership of Patrick Curtain tried to hold the advance long enough to allow many of the diggers to flee the stockade but at a dreadful cost and only a handful survived:

After several volleys had been fired on both sides, the barrier of ropes, slabs and overturned carts was crossed, and the defenders driven out, or into the shallow holes with which the place was spotted, and in which many were put to death in the first heat of the conflict, either by bullets or by bayonet thrusts. The foot police were first over the barricade, and one, climbing the flagstaff under a heavy fire, secured the rebel flag. [5]

The remaining 20 or 30 Californian Rangers under the leadership of Charles Ferguson had left the Stockade at around 1.00 am to look for a cache of arms. Fearing that they had been lured out of the Stockade, Ferguson returned with his men just before the Stockade was attacked by the government forces. [6] By now, many of the diggers lay wounded:

When Captain Wise fell the men cheered, and were over the Stockade in a second, and then bayonet and pike went to work. The diggers fought well and fierce, not a word spoken on either side until all was over. The blacksmith who made the pikes was killed by Lieut. Richards, 40th Regiment. Honour to his name, he fought well and died gloriously. It was rumoured that at this time the police were cruel to the wounded and prisoners. No such thing. The police did nothing but their duty, and they did it well for men that were not accustomed to scenes of blood or violence. To my knowledge there was only one wounded man despatched, and he kept swinging his pike about his head as he sat on the ground. His two legs were broken, and he had a musket ball in his body. He could not live, and it was best to despatch him. His name was O’Neill, a native of Kilkenny, Ireland. [7]

Those who tried to escape were run down by the cavalry that had now surrounded the Stockade. Within 15 to 20 minutes of the first shot been fired, the back of the rebellion had been broken, the troops and police were in complete control of the Stockade. What had been a gallant defence now became a rout as rebels fled for their lives.

‘It was not in the Stockade that they killed the majority of diggers, but in the running away’

A lot of diggers commenced to run away, and after the shooting was done I saw Ned Flynn run into an old chimney, and a soldier ran up to him and stuck him in the neck with a bayonet. Everyone they caught they slaughtered. It was not in the Stockade that they killed the majority of diggers, but in the running away.[8]

Charles Evans wrote in the immediate aftermath of the attack:

Cowardly and monstrous cruelties such as these made up the bloody tragedy of this morning. It is a dark indelible strain on a British Government – a deed which can be fitly placed side by side with the treacheries and cold blooded cruelties of Austria & Russia.[9]

The correspondent of the Argus reported:

When the soldiers had once tasted blood they became violent, and had not the officers used every exertion the prisoners would have been murdered on the spot. [10]

Peter Lalor wrote three months after the massacre:

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. [11]

This was repeated in following years by other Eureka rebels who insisted that most of the killing took place outside the Stockade after all resistance had ceased. It is only recently that Eureka has been described as a massacre. Although the atrocities were widely reported in the Australian press, this element of the attack had been neglected. [12] This is surprising since contemporary reactions to the massacre resulted in the authorities’ use of armed force diminishing not enhancing their authority. The problem, Blake argues, is that this means accepting ‘at face value so-called eyewitness accounts of a massacre.’ [13] There is no dispute about the carnage caused after the soldiers fought their way in the Stockade when man-to-man contests and the bayonet replaced the more anonymous nature of volley fire. This was conflict at its most personal and bloody and was not unusual in the heat of battle. It was recognised by contemporaries such as Huyghue who wrote that ‘that men when generally let loose upon an enemy are not angels’ and by John Molony who correctly argued that men ‘in the fury of battle, commits atrocities which the so called logic of war renders inevitable’.

Between 5.00 am when the diggers’ defence crumbled until 7.00 am, the killing continued. [14] The police were at the forefront of the atrocities burning everything within the Stockade and shooting at whatever moved. Even the Irish priest Father Smyth was denied access to the wounded, some of whom were Catholics and was forced out of the Stockade at pistol point. The killing went on for over an hour after the diggers had surrendered and occurred up to half a mile from the Stockade. People were killed who were not involved in the protest and had not taken up arms against the colonial authorities. Bodies were mutilated; one digger’s corpse had 16 bayonet wounds. Henry Powell a digger from Creswick, whose tent was well outside the Stockade, was surrounded by around 20 mounted police. He was struck on the head with a sword by Arthur Akehurst, the Clerk of the Peace who had enlisted as a special constable and then shot several times by the police, who then rode their horses over his body. [15] However, Powell survived long enough to make a statement before he died on 9 December.[16] An inquest’s verdict concluded that Akehurst had killed him, something he denied. Akehurst was charged with murder but the case was dismissed when Powell’s dying deposition was ruled inadmissible. [17]

There was however, no evidence to connect Akehurst to the murder except the dying statement of the deceased; but before this statement could be received and admitted as evidence, it be shewn that the deceased believed he was in a dying state, and should be taken before magistrate, and ought to be, if possible, taken in the presence of the accused.; and His honor would have to decide as to the propriety of admitting this statement. The Solicitor-General himself felt doubts as to the admissibility of this evidence, and would call the attention of the court to it without knowing what the feelings of the accused might be in the matter, or calling on counsel on the opposite side to make an objection. [18] Raffaelo Carboni was among those who believed Akehurst got off on a technicality.

It was reported that three soldiers jumped a digger after he had been shot through the legs, one knelt on his chest, one tried to choke him while the third went through his pockets looking for gold. ‘Foreigners’ bore the brunt of the attack. Two Italian diggers, who had not taken part in the rebellion, were killed. One who had his tent a quarter of a mile from the Stockade was killed by mounted police and troopers. The other whose tent was in the Stockade was shot through the thigh and as he lay wounded, told the troopers that he would give them his gold if they left him alone. After taking his gold, they bayoneted him through the chest. One of the most unlikely targets in the early hours of Sunday morning was Frank Hasleham, a reporter for the Melbourne Morning Herald, a newspaper that had consistently supported the government in its fight against the diggers. A quarter of a mile from the Stockade he was met by mounted police who shot him through the chest. As he lay wounded, he hoped the ‘diggers would desist from their madness’. [19]

At 7.00 am, it was decided to round up all the diggers left inside and outside the stockade. Captain Pasley, sickened by the carnage, saved a group of prisoners from being bayoneted and threatened to shoot any police or soldiers who continued the indiscriminate slaughter. 114 diggers, some wounded were rounded up, marched to the Camp where they were firmly convinced they would be summarily hanged but were herded into a space that was normally used for six. Even so the authorities were concerned about people’s reaction if large numbers of rebels died in custody and at 2.00 am on Monday morning Rede moved the prisoners to the camp storehouse. His problem was that it was no longer possible to distinguish between those who had been taken in or about the Stockade and those who had been apprehended in the vicinity. The Melbourne Herald gave a graphic account of the scene after the battle:

I was attracted by the smoke of the tents burnt by the soldiers, and there a most appalling site presented itself. Many more are said to have been killed and wounded, but I myself saw eleven dead bodies of diggers lying within a very small space of ground, and the earth was besprinkled with blood, and covered with the smoking mass of tents recently occupied. Could the Government but have seen the awful sight presented at Ballarat on this Sabbath morning- the women in tears, mourning over their dead relations, and the blood-bespattered countenances of many men in the diggers’ camp, it might have occurred to His Excellency that ‘prevention is better than cure’. [20]

The battle had been decisive but the ‘massacre’, whatever its military explanation, once know so revolted the community of Victoria that any return to the old ways was impossible. [21]

Many of the leaders in the Stockade fled though Timothy Hayes and John Manning were arrested and Carboni who was not in the Stockade at the time of the attack remained to help tend to the wounded until he too was arrested around 8.30 am. Kennedy and Black, in disguise, made for Geelong but apparently got lost, Kennedy ending up as a bullock driver whilst Black eventually reached Melbourne. Esmond, whose original discovery of gold started the rush, was among those in the Stockade, and he too made for Geelong. There were many accounts of Lalor’s escape but the account by Stephen Cummings, a close friend is the fullest:

After the soldiers and police retired, Lalor was put on Father Smyth’s horse, and he rode into the ranges and got shelter in a tent near Warrenheip…I suggested that his arm would have to come off and that Father Smyth’s house would be safer…The next thing was to get a doctor, and I went for Doctor Doyle of Golden Point, who said it was a case of amputation. ‘All right’ said Lalor, ‘let’s know the worst’. He was a very brave man, with all his defects. Dr Gibson and Dr Stewart and I were there while Doyle performed the operation…A few days after that a messenger came to me from Lalor. I went and found him in a bed in a small tent on Black Hill Flat, where there was only just room for a man to lie down. We got him shifted to a nice large tent belonging to Michael Hayes at the foot of Black Hill. He stayed there until he got a carrier named Carroll and little Tommy Marks to take him to Geelong. [22]

How many rebels died or were wounded in the initial battle and subsequent carnage is far from clear. [23] As at Newport, some of the wounded managed to find their way home to die later. Lalor’s estimate was fourteen killed, eight wounded and twelve wounded but recovered. [24] However, as he admitted, he did not include Powell and Rowlands who were killed near their own tents and who played no part in the movement. [25] The list of those killed at Eureka and registered on 20 June 1855 by Ballarat’s Registrar, William Poole, numbered twenty-seven. Information about casualties among the military is more precise. Three privates lay dead or dying, Michael Rooney, Joseph Wall and William Webb, twelve more were wounded and Captain Wise was also wounded and subsequently died. Unlike the military, the actual location of the burials of diggers killed at the Eureka Stockade was not precisely recorded in documentation that has survived. One of the officers later informed Withers:

The number of insurgents killed is estimated as from thirty-five to forty, and many of those brought in wounded afterwards died…The bodies of the insurgents, placed in rough coffins made hurriedly, were laid in a separate grave, the burial service being performed by the clergyman to whose congregation they belonged.[26]

John Molony states, ‘The diggers were initially put to rest near the spot where Scobie fell, while the soldiers were interred at the cemetery near Yuille’s Swamp off the Creswick Road’. [27] Some of those wounded in the Stockade lingered on, Frederick Coxhead, for example did not succumb until May 1856. [28] In 1857, Captain Ross, James Brown, Edward Thonen, the lemonade seller and the blacksmith were re-interred with the other bodies of those killed at Eureka. [29]

---

[1] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 156-157.

[2] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 164-172, considers events in the Stockade once the troops breached its defences.

[3] ‘Fatal Collision at Ballaarat’, Argus, 4 December 1854, p. 5.

[4] Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, p. 11.

[5] Letter from Government Officer printed in ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, p. 106.

[6] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 144-150, examines the significant contribution of the Californians to the defence of the Stockade and why this was air-brushed out of subsequent accounts of the action.

[7] ‘With regard to the Attack on the Stockade, the author has a letter signed ‘John Neill, late of the 40th Regiment’, and dated from Devil’s Gully on 7 February, 1870, printed in ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, pp. 123-124.

[8] Evidence of Shanahan, a storekeeper in the Stockade printed in ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, p. 117.

[9] Evans gives a graphic account of the aftermath of the attack on the Stockade. Other than what he assumed was a dream of the sound of volley fire, he appears to have slept through the whole assault. SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 3 December 1854, pp. 131-138, at p. 137.

[10] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 4.

[11] Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 11-12.

[12] Ibid, O’Brien, Bob, Massacre at Eureka, includes a previously unpublished eyewitness account by Samuel Douglas Smyth Huyghue.

[13] Cit, ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, p. 187.

[14] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 4, give a succinct account of the ‘massacre’. Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 186-203, considers the ‘massacre’.

[15] Dunstan, David, ‘Arthur Purssell Akehurst (1836-1902)’, ADB, Supplementary Volume, pp. 6-7. SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 11 December 1854, p. 153, discusses Powell’s inquest.

[16] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, pp. 107-108, prints Powell’s deposition; see also, ‘Ballaarat’, Argus 15 December 1854, pp. 4-5, for a further attack on the behaviour of troopers: ‘the tyrannical and arbitrary treatment to which the people have been subjected to by the troopers.’.

[17] Akehurst was the only Ballarat official brought to trial as a result of the massacre. The inquest into the death of Henry Powell occurred on 11 December and, because of the unsworn statement made by Powell, Akehurst was brought to trial on a charge of manslaughter. On 18 January 1855, he was found not guilty.

[18] Argus, 19 January 1855, p. 3.

[19] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, pp. 109-110, prints Hasleham’s deposition.

[20] Melbourne Herald, 5 December 1854.

[21] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, p. 165.

[22] Argus, 1 July 1899.

[23] Wickham, Dorothy, Deaths at Eureka, (Ballarat Heritage Services), 1996.

[24] Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, pp. 12-13.

[25] Ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, p. 11.

[26] ‘Letter from Government Officer’, printed in ibid, Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, pp. 106-107.

[27] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, p. 166.

[28] Melbourne Herald, 12 May 1856.

[29] Melbourne Herald, 2 December 1857.

Deploying the troops

Around 2.30 am, Rede mobilised nearly 300 police and soldiers, more than double the number of miners left in the Stockade. There were 77 men of the 40th under Captain Wise and 65 men of the 12th Regiment under Captain William Meade. Lieutenant Charles Hall led 30 men of the 40th Regiment’s mounted company accompanied by 24 police on foot and 70 police mounted commanded by Sub-Inspector Taylor. [1] Thomas commanded the force and Pasley acted as his aide-de-camp. The remaining 200 men were left in the camp under Captain Atkinson in case reinforcements were needed and to guard against surprise attack from the rebels not in the Stockade. They were armed with 1842 muskets, with an average rate of fire of two rounds a minute but notoriously inaccurate and carried around sixty rounds of ammunition. The 17 officers were armed with British Pattern 1845 infantry swords and did not carry firearms in the battle. The weapons at the disposable of the military and police may not have been superior to the diggers’ rifles and crudely manufactured pikes but they were in the hands of professionals. [2]

The precise route of Thomas’ march has been unclear since the event. [3] The Government Camp was about two miles from the Eureka Stockade and the troops fell into their ranks between the Camp and Soldiers’ Hill. They remained there in complete silence until 3.10 am when they began silently marching southeast, hiding behind Black Hill before striking out towards the Stockade. They halted near the Free Trade Hotel about 250 yards from their objective and then advanced from behind the hotel towards the Stockade. By this time dawn was breaking, Captain Thomas and Charles Hackett and their men marched towards the Stockade on their horses. When they were around 150 yards from the Stockade, firing began. There has been much controversy about who fired the first shot. [4] Lalor was always adamant that ‘The military fired the first volley, which one company of the insurgents returned much sooner than I wished…’ [5] Ferguson later wrote:

The Fortieth regiment was advancing, but had not as yet discharged a shot. We could now see plainly the officer and hear his orders, when one of our men, Captain Burnette, stepped a little in front, elevated his rifle, took aim and fired. The officer fell. Captain Wise was his name. This was the first shot in the Ballarat war. It was said by many that the soldiers fired the first shot, but that is not true, as is well known to many. [6]

Charles Hackett, who according to Carboni, was the only government official at Ballarat not detested by the diggers testified that ‘No shots were fired by the military or the police, previous to shots being fired from the stockade’.[7] According to Withers, one of the Eureka leaders later stated ‘The first shot was fired from our party’. [8] Desmond O’Grady claims that it was a sentry, Harry de Longville, who noticed the troops and police and fired the first shot around 4.20 am, although possibly he may be referring here to a warning shot to rouse the diggers left in the Stockade. [9] Indeed, a letter from a soldier at Eureka, John Neill of the 40th Regiment, said:

The party had not advanced three hundred yards before we were seen by the rebel sentry, who fired, not at our party, but to warn his party in the Stockade. He was on Black Hill. Captain Thomas turned his head in the direction of the shot, and said ‘We are seen. Forward, and steady men! Don’t fire; let the insurgents fire first. You must wait for the sound of the bugle’. [10]

It seems probable that the first shot, fired either as a warning or directly at the advancing troops came from the Stockade. This was followed by a volley fired by the diggers as the soldiers and police advanced. At this point Captain Thomas gave the order to commence firing and the police and military moved forward rapidly in an attempt to maximise the confusion among the miners caused by the surprise attack:

…At about 150 yards we were received by a rather sharp and well directed fire from the rebels, without word or challenge on their part. Then, and not till then, I ordered the bugle to sound the ‘Commence Firing’. For about ten minutes a heavy fire was kept up by the troops advancing, which was replied to by the rebels. During this time, I brought up the infantry supports and foot police. The entrenchment was then carried, and I ordered the firing to cease. [11]

The attack on the Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, drawn December 1854; Source: from the map by S. D. S. Huyghue in Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, 2nd ed., Ballarat. 1887.

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[1] The 12th Foot East Suffolk Regiment served in Australia between 1854 and 1867 and the 40th Foot (2nd Somerset) Regiment between 1823 and 1829 and 1852 and 1860.
[2] Ibid, Smith, Neil C., Soldiers Bleed Too, is a valuable corrective on events.
[3] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 113-121.
[4] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 127-134, considers the evidence.
[5] Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, p. 12.
[6] Ferguson, Charles D., The Experiences of a Forty-Niner in Australia and New Zealand, (Gaston Renard), 1979, p. 60.
[7] Currey, C. H., The Irish at Eureka, (Angus and Robertson), 1954, pp. 68-69.
[8] Ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, p. 109.
[9] Ibid, O’Grady, Desmond, Raffaelo! Raffaelo, p. 159.
[10] Ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, pp. 123-124.

[11] First Report from the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Ballarat Outbreak Petition, 1856, Appendix A: Claims for Compensation, pp. ix-x, evidence taken, 6 July 1855, printed in Anderson, Hugh, (ed.), Eureka: Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Votes and Proceedings 1854-1867, (Hill of Content), 1969.

Planning the attack

The attack on the Eureka Stockade in the early hours of Sunday 3 December 1854 demonstrated the superiority of regular military forces against rebels. [1] By early December, there were 450 men in the Government Camp including 150 mounted men and their horses. Conditions were increasingly difficult. Contractors were reluctant to supply fresh water and food and the need to keep a constant vigil against attack meant that sleep was at a premium and troops slept on the ground next to their horses. A plan for defending the Camp had been developed in late October that included burning down adjacent building that could be used for cover by attacking rebels and turning the stone-built Bank of Victoria into a fortified outpost garrisoned by armed civilians.

 

On Saturday, the decision was finally made to assault the Stockade at a meeting between Robert Rede, Captain J. W. Thomas of the 40th Regiment, Captain Pasley and District Commissioner Amos. Amos, who had briefly been detained by the diggers and ‘robbed of his horse’, played a crucial role because of his intimate knowledge of the Eureka diggings and the Stockade. The construction of the Stockade with its implied threat to the Camp and to communications with Melbourne and the knowledge of the planned meeting of the Reform League on 3 December at which it was possible that the miners’ militant wing might emerge dominant increased the need for the authorities to suppress the rebellion quickly. Rede’s report of the attack suggested that Amos’ detention ‘decided us at once to put a stop to this state of anarchy and confusion’. [2] Once the military option had been decided, Rede had no further control over events. Captain Thomas assumed overall authority for suppressing the rebellion.

 

 

Thomas’ plan was deceptively simple. He would march his men under the cover of darkness across the diggings and surprise the rebels at dawn. The critical issue was how to get to the Stockade without rousing every miner in the area. This precluded a direct approach down the Melbourne Road but using Amos’ intimate knowledge of the diggings Thomas decided on an indirect approach that would keep any observers guessing as to the intention of the force. He would halt his forces behind Stockyard Hill to the north of the Stockade and would then advance against its north-western defences. It was also important for Thomas to reduce the number of defenders within the Stockade and he was able to exploit the rebels’ uncertainty about when Nickle’s column would arrive from Melbourne. The previous night two divisions of rebels had left the Stockade to confront the anticipated reinforcements. The Camp had made widespread use of spies and there is evidence that a false warning about Nickle’s column was delivered to the rebels. [3] Whether this was the reason why McGill left the Stockade with over a hundred of the best-armed rebels or whether McGill had other incentives to do so is unclear, but the outcome was the same, a depleted rebel force at Eureka.

 

Although Thomas advanced knowing that his men might have to fight, this was not inevitable. Police Magistrates Charles Hackett and George Webster were part of the force that marched out of the Camp suggesting that Thomas did not plan an unprovoked attack and considered that only police action might be needed. Hackett wrote immediately after the attack that he ‘had no opportunity of calling upon the people to disperse’. [4] Neither did Thomas order his men to fix bayonets when they deployed to advance; this did not occur until they closed with the rebels some ten minutes after the initial firing took place. Whatever Thomas’ intentions once hostilities broke out, what might have been a police action was transformed into a full-scale military engagement.

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[1] See, ‘Fatal Collision at Ballaarat’, Argus, 4 December 1854, p. 5, ‘Further Particulars of the Ballaarat Affray’, Argus, 5 December 1854, pp. 4-5.

[2] Rede to Chief Gold Commissioner Wright, 3 December 1854: PROV, 1085/P Duplicate 162, Enclosure no. 9.

[3] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 105-107, examines the somewhat tenuous evidence for Thomas’ ruse.

[4] Charles Hackett to Charles MacMahon, 3 December 1854, PROV, 1085/P Unit 8, Duplicate 162, Enclosure no. 9.