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.

1066 and Brexit

In a week’s time it will be the 950th anniversary of the one event that most people in Britain know…the Battle of Hastings.  It is no surprise that this totemic event has been linked to the equally totemic decision to leave the EU…the one was when England lost her independence before the Norman onslaught; the latter when the people of Britain took back that independence from the hordes of EU technocrats…a case of one in the eye for Brussels!!! 

The events of the summer and early autumn of 1066 are well known. On 25th September, the combined armies of Earl Tostig, brother of King Harold, and King Harold Hardrada of Norway, were defeated at Stamford Bridge. Upon his return to London, King Harold received the news of Duke William’s landing at Pevensey on 29th September and within a fortnight the battle of Hastings took place. King Harold was killed and with him the greater part of the English nobility. Duke William’s victory, the carnage of the battlefield, and the retrospective significance of the heavenly sign portending victory were at once reported all over Europe.  Britain lay at the heart of the globalisation of northern Europe in the eleventh century with the rapid expansion of the Viking trading empire…yes there was a Norway option even then!!

Many Norman families were of Scandinavian descent and retained memories of their Viking forebears. However, links between Normandy and Scandinavia weakened with time, and there is little evidence that in the period from the 1020s that the dukes of Normandy maintained relations with the Scandinavian realms in the way that they clearly did with the Scandinavian kings of England, Cnut, Harald and Harthacnut. When William became king of England in 1066, however, he was obliged to pay attention to these realms because of the threat represented by Denmark in particular. He had little to fear from Norway, because King Harald Hardrada, together with Earl Tostig, had perished. But King Sweyn Estrithsson of Denmark was a nephew of King Cnut of England; moreover, a sister of his father Ulf, called Gytha, had married Earl Godwine and was the mother of the Harold who died at Hastings. These dynastic links encouraged, in Sweyn Estrithsson and subsequently in his eldest son and successor King Cnut IV the ambition to reunite the kingdoms of Denmark and England. Svein Estrithsson gave active backing to the Anglo-Saxon rebels in England, besides invading England himself in 1069 and 1070. His sons invaded England again in 1075. And yet another invasion was planned in 1085 by Cnut IV in alliance with his father-in-law, the Flemish Count Robert ‘the Frisian’. This never materialised and was the last attempt to oust William from the English throne. 

Three sources are relevant with regard to Scandinavia. The earliest is a poem, which gives us a glimpse of how the Anglo-Danish community felt a decade after the arrival of the Normans. It was written in England in 1076 by Thorkill Skallason, a Danish skald[1] in the service of Earl Waltheof, shortly after his master had been executed by King William for his involvement in the 1075 rebellion. His view of William is understandably bitter[2].

“William crossed the cold channel and reddened the bright swords, and now he has betrayed noble Earl Waltheof. It is true that killing in England will be a long time ending. A braver lord than Waltheof will never be seen on earth.”

The second source is the History of the Archbishops of Bremen, written c. 1080 by Adam of Bremen, a clerk at the archiepiscopal court[3]. His testimony is important because in 1068 or 1069 he visited King Sweyn Estrithsson and may have incorporated some of the king’s views. He justifies a digression on 1066 by reminding his readers that the battle of Hastings was great and memorable and that it had happened in England which of old had been subjected to the Danes. Adam calls Harold Godwinson a ‘vir maleficus’ who usurped the throne of England. He continues by saying that Harold killed not only his brother Tostig, but also King Harold Hardrada and the king of Ireland. Then, relying on hearsay, he says that only eight days later William crossed from France to England and fought a battle against a tired victor. Harold died, together with 100,000 Englishmen. According to Adam, William was God’s avenger in punishing the English, who had sinned against Him. He banished almost all the monks who lived without a monastic rule and brought in Lanfranc to restore divine worship. In a later addition, Adam himself attributes King William’s wealth to his confiscation of 300 ships left behind by King Harald Hardrada plus the gold which Harald had collected while a Varangian in Greece. If this story originated from King Sweyn, which is quite possible, then it reinforces the hypothesis that Sweyn’s attacks on England in the immediate post-conquest period were inspired by a quest for booty as well as land. Although Adam of Bremen openly condemns Harold’s election as king, he justifies William’s invasion and his succession to the throne only in terms of divine retribution. The same attitude can be found in contemporary English sources like the anonymous Vita Edwardi, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The third source that reflects Danish opinion dates from c. 1122, when the Anglo-Saxon exile Aelnoth of Canterbury[4], who lived at Odense, wrote his biography of King Cnut IV, son of King Sweyn Estrithsson, who was killed in 1086. According to Aelnoth, King Cnut planned the abortive invasion of 1085 as revenge for the death of his kinsman, King Harold Godwinson and for the imposition on the English by William the Conqueror of the imperium of the Romans and the French. “In their despair”, he wrote,

“the English, whose dukes, counts, lords, noblemen and other people of high rank had either been killed, or imprisoned, or deprived of their father’s honours, wealth, dignity or inheritance or expelled abroad, or left behind and forced into public slavery, were not able to bear the tyranny of the Romans and the French and declined to seek foreign help.”

King Cnut is pictured as the natural protector of the English people against the aggression of a foreign duke. Even almost a millennium after the Conquest, it seems there were people who still see the British Isles as part of a larger Scandinavian kingdom.

 

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[1] R. Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry: the Dróttkvætt Stanza, Islandica, Vol. 2, (1978) for the nature of scaldic verse; also, R. Frank, ‘Skaldic Poetry’, Old Norse - Icelandic Literature: a Critical Guide, edited C.J. Clover and J. Lindow, Islandica, Vol. 45. (1985), pages 157-196.
[2] Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, translated by L.M. Hollander, London, 1964 is the great twelfth-century synoptic history by Snorri Sturluson. Two sections of this poem have survived in Old Norse as part of the saga of Harold Hardrada: King Harald's Saga: Harold Hardrada of Norway from Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, translated M. Magnusson and H. Palsson, Harmondsworth 1966, pages 157-8; cf. De gestis regum ii, 311: “Siquidem Weldeofus in Eboracensi pugna plures Normannorum solus obtrucavenat, unos per portam egredientes decapitans.” The suggestion of an underlying verse was first launched by F.S. Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria’, Archaelogia Aeliana, (1952), pages 159-213 at page 179.
[3] Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum was written c. 1080. In four books: book I covers activities of missionaries in the north; book II is on 10th and early 11th century archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, including material on reigns of Sweyn Forkbeard and Cnut; book III is on Archbishop Adalbert (1043-72), including material on reign of Edward the Confessor etc. (e.g. pages 124-5, 158-9); book IV is on the islands of the north. Text: Adam von Bremen, Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte, ed. B. Schmeidler, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, 1917. Text and German translation: Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches, ed. W. Trillmich and R. Buchner, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 11, 1978, pages 160-502. English translation: F.J. Tschan, Adam of Bremen: History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, 1959.

[4] Aelnoth, Gesta Svenomagni etc 1047-1104, translated by E. Albrechtsen, Odense 1984.

A sense of deja vue!!!

Although we’ve become somewhat jaded in our attitude to political polls, there was little surprise in JC’s victory over Owen Smith yesterday. He slightly increased his majority from 59 per cent last year to 61.8 this largely because he polled 85 per cent of the post 2015 members while Smith had a majority of those who were members before the 2015 elections.  The problem is that the election solved little…JC’s supporters think that he can walk on water and presumably feed the Liverpool conference with loaves and fishes while the ‘moderates’, the term now sneeringly applied to those MPs and presumably party members who do not subscribe to the Corbyn mantra and who are now faced with the choice of continuing to fight against the Corbyn surge and almost inevitably face deselection, join the crusade, faded into the woodwork and hope not to be noticed or leave the Party.  The scale of the challenge facing the Party was well illustrated in a survey published in the Independent on Friday of attitudes of working-class voters.  

Almost half of unskilled and manual workers believed JC to be ‘out of touch’ and an ‘election loser’.  More than a third thought he was ‘incompetent’ and ‘naive’ with middle-class voters holding slightly more positive views of the Labour leader. The survey also showed that those planning to support him in the future were completely detached from working-class voters and those who voted Labour in the 2015 Election. The polling suggests JC has a huge amount of work to do in convincing voters who once automatically voted Labour that he is the man for them.  Most worrying is the evidence that only 22 per cent of working-class people thought he was ‘in touch with the voters’ while 42 per cent thought him ‘out of touch’ and 36 per cent did not know.  This result is paralleled by responses to his competence: 26 per cent competent, 36 per cent incompetent and 36 per cent did not know.  Across the responses, unsurprisingly, those who support JC had a far more positive view of his capabilities with 65 per cent seeing him as competent, 49 per cent see him as ‘insightful’ with 26 per cent as ‘naive’ and 51 per cent as the ‘best choice for leader’ and 29 per cent ‘not the best choice’--which raises important questions about why people who thought him incompetent, naive and not the best leader were still prepared to support him. 

The problem for the moderates in the Party is that if they dare to criticise JC in any way, then the opprobrium of Momentum and the different sects that now form the radical Left descends from a great height using social media…you’re out of touch with his huge mandate, you’re a closet Tory or even worse a Blairite, you’re being taken in by the anti-Jeremy media rhetoric.  All of this may well be true but, and here is the critical question, in the decades that Jeremy has been a Member of Parliament—and by all accounts he has been an excellent constituency member--what has he actually done that has had any impact on national politics?  In fact, is there any evidence that he has ever had an original radical thought…everything he says appears to have been said before (and often better) by others.  His over-weaning characteristic appears to be ‘anti’ as illustrated by his response to the question ‘what’s your favourite biscuit?’…instead of just saying shortbread he prefaced it with being anti-sugar…yes I know we all should be…but why lay yourself open to ridicule.  You may well say…yes but he’s been consistent in his opinions…well why?  I’m not sure I know anyone whose view of the world and the issues that face us have not radically altered in the last thirty years.  

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.

From victory to defeat

News of the successful attack on the Stockade finally reached Melbourne in the early hours of Monday 4 December but it only partially relieved Hotham’s anxiety. The immediate danger may have been removed but it was possible that Eureka was the beginning of a larger rebellion and his immediate response was to request reinforcements from VDL. He also met a delegation of ‘influential’ citizens asking them to organise a defence of Melbourne as all his troops were in Ballarat and over 1,500 special constables were sworn in as a result. Hotham and his Executive Council proclaimed martial law in and around Ballarat. [1] In an effort to muster support, he presented his case to the Legislative Council on 4 December and to the squatters’ representatives two days later. [2] Both bodies pledged their support ‘to maintain the law and preserve the community from social disorganisation’. [3] Hotham unconvincingly attempted to blame the rebellion on ‘foreigners’ and the Irish. There was widespread contemporary criticism for the lenient ways in which Hotham treated American citizens who had been involved in the rebellion. This action reinforced the erroneous view that Americans did not play as active role. [4] Most of the movement’s leadership were still at large and out of the 114 arrested only eleven were ‘foreigners’ and around thirty Irish. Rewards were offered for the leaders of the insurgents. The authorities were under the impression that Vern was the rebel leader and a reward of £500 was offered for his capture and only £200 for the arrest of Lalor and Black, the ‘minister for war’ who had not been in the Stockade during the attack, for inciting men to arms. None were arrested. [5]

Reactions to the attack on the Eureka Stockade were immediate and led to an extraordinarilyEurer rapid reversal in public opinion. News spread quickly. The Ballarat Times printed a report with black borders on the day of the attack, the Geelong Advertiser the following day and on Tuesday, other major newspapers in the colony prominently displayed accounts. Before long however, disgust at the atrocities quickly turned Victorians against Hotham’s Government especially when it was clear Melbourne was not threatened. Sympathy was now with the defeated diggers and government forces were regarded as murderers and butchers. The Age stated:

There are not a dozen respectable citizens in Melbourne who do not entertain an indignant feeling against it for its weakness, its folly and its last crowning error. They do not sympathise with injustice and coercion. [6]

On 5 December, over 4,000 people attended a loyalist meeting called by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne to consider the defence of the town against a possible outbreak of lawlessness and to give the people of Melbourne an opportunity to show their support for the authorities. [7] Both John Pascoe Fawkner and John O’Shanassy called for moderation but this was followed by a speaker in the audience calling upon the government to resign. The Lord Mayor tried to end the meeting by vacating the chair but, instead of leaving, the audience installed a new chairman. A number of speakers maintained that the Colonial Secretary, John Foster was responsible for the recent disaster. A motion that he should be removed from office received overwhelming support and Doctors Embling and Owens were instructed to convey this to Hotham. By Wednesday 6 December, public meetings were being called across Victoria, condemning the government’s actions and newspapers began to appear attacking Hotham. Around 6,000 Melbourne residents gathered outside St. Paul’s on 6 December and refused to support the government’s action, called for the diggers’ grievances to be addressed but condemned the act of rebellion. [8] Meetings were held calling for the release of the prisoners, public representation and liberty and justice. On 9 December, gatherings of about 600 people in Castlemaine and 2,000 in Bendigo opposed the license and condemned the attack on the Stockade. Within a few days, a comprehensive military victory had become a political defeat.

The turmoil in Melbourne was in stark contrast to the prevailing mood in Ballarat. On Tuesday 5 December, the commander of the colony’s military forces Major-General Sir Robert Nickle, who had been knighted in 1841 for his services during the Canadian rebellion, arrived to take command in Ballarat. [9] He successfully lowered the political temperature and his conciliatory manner helped restore public confidence and the Ballarat diggers quickly resumed their normal work. [10] The Argus commented:

The martial law administered by Sir R. Nickle is about as far superior to the Commissioner’s law, under which we have been so long labouring, as it is possible for anything human to be. Had Sir R. Nickle arrived here a few days before, the bloodshed of last Sunday would have been avoided. [11]

Though he condemned the rebellion, he showed his disapproval of the actions that had caused it. [12] Grievances were aired, tension subsided, arms were handed in and martial law was repealed on 9 December. [13] According to the Argus:

…the moral force party, now that they are relieved from the threats and intimidations of the armed agitators, are fast assuming a preponderance. [14]

In the days and weeks that followed the decisive military victory at the Stockade, there was a groundswell of public indignation in Melbourne as well as in Ballarat against what was seen as a brutal over-reaction to a situation largely brought about by the actions of Gold Commission and government officials. Rede, who made the vital decisions in the few days before Eureka, though never blamed by Hotham, was moved from Ballarat remaining on full pay until late in 1855 when Hotham arranged for his appointment as deputy-sheriff of Geelong and commandant of the Volunteer Rifles. He became sheriff of Geelong in 1857, Ballarat in 1868 and Melbourne in 1877. On 16 December, Inspector Foster of Ballarat reported that threats had been made to the lives of several police officers and recommended that most of Ballarat’s pre-Stockade police should be moved out of the area for their own safety.

There were also casualties in government. The public meeting in Melbourne on 5 December called for the resignation of Colonial Secretary Foster. [15] In fact, he had done this the previous day although Hotham did not announce it for a week. Foster had been under relentless attack in the press for several months and every problem in the colony’s government was blamed on him. This was both unjustifiable and unfair since, under Hotham, he had already been deprived of much of his authority. Whether Hotham used Foster as a scapegoat for Eureka is questionable but he was certainly glad to see him go. He could now appoint a Colonial Secretary with whom he could work and who had the people’s confidence. This was clearly evident in his choice of William Haines as Foster’s replacement with whom Hotham quickly developed an excellent working relationship. [16]

What of Hotham’s responsibility for Eureka? To his credit, but to his own detriment, he always accepted full responsibility for the policies that had been followed on the goldfields. However, his action in pursuing the 13 rebels charged with High Treason while protecting government officers at Ballarat with an Act of Indemnity was unpopular with many in the colony. On 10 January 1855, the Gold Fields Commission wrote to Hotham recommending a general amnesty for all those connected with the Stockade, a suggestion he flatly rejected. [17] In addition, Hotham tried to restrict the Gold Field Commission by directing it to avoid the Eureka issue, something it overruled as a violation of its independence. This incident ‘was indicative of the barrier of hostility that was building up between the Governor and the colonists’. [18] Until Eureka, Hotham had retained a degree of public support and, although there was a growing hostility to the government, it was not directed against the Governor. After Eureka, if Hotham had had the ‘instincts of a politician he could easily have salvaged his popularity at this stage’. [19] If he had announced a general amnesty for the Eureka prisoners and waived the gold license pending the Royal Commission’s report, he would have been largely freed from personal blame. By refusing to do both, Hotham found himself the focus for the increasingly emotional reaction to the tragedy of Eureka leading to a very public humiliation when the Eureka prisoners were acquitted of high treason in March 1855.

The Royal Commission released its report in late March 1855 and was scathing in its criticism of the handling of events at Ballarat. Unsurprisingly, it agreed with all of the diggers’ demands, mindful that rebellion might reoccur in the colony. It decided that the causes of the Eureka rebellion included a lack of political rights, the diggers’ inability to buy land and the way the mining license was collected. Although the license was the trigger that led to the unrest, by itself it was not the main cause. The Commission recommended that the license be abolished and replaced with an export duty on gold and that diggers would pay an annual £1 miners’ right. [20] The local courts replaced the hated and corrupt Gold Commission and regulated conditions on the goldfields. On the 14 July 1855, just eight months after the Eureka rebellion, nine members of the mining community, including Raffaelo Carboni, were elected unanimously at Bakery Hill to the local courts. The diggers’ control of the local courts was seen by the mining community as the ‘blood bought rights’ of the Eureka rebellion. The right to elect members to the Legislative Council led to two of the digger leaders, Peter Lalor and John Humffray join the Council in November 1855, less than a year after the massacre. The Commission of Enquiry also recommended that the squatters’ control of the land be broken, and the diggers have the right to buy land. The resultant subdivision of land around mining sites led to the development of some of Victoria’s most important regional towns and cities. ‘The day of arbitrary or despotic rule in Victoria was over’. [21]

The rebels at Eureka found themselves caught up in events that were fast-moving and had armed themselves for defence against the authorities. Yet, their use of the Southern Cross and a defiant rhetoric that went beyond the popular constitutionalism of previous protests led Hotham, with some justification to regard them as involved in rebellion. Unlike the rebellions in the Canadas and in South Wales, there is considerable disagreement about what sort of rebellion Eureka actually was and what it came to mean. For Bob O’Brien:

The attack on the miners at Eureka was something like the slaughter carried out by the Chinese regime on human rights demonstrators in and around Tien An Men Square in 1989…In a sense, the slaughter at Eureka was a riot by administrators, soldiers and police representing the old order of privilege and patronage. They were making a last-ditch attack on the gold-rush immigrants who foreshadowed a new order in which human dignity would be respected. Eureka is ultimately about human rights. [22]

By contrast, Audrey Oldfield suggests:

If viewed as a revolution to gain redress of grievances and greater democracy, it was certainly more successful than most of the greater revolutions in Europe and the uprising in Ireland six years before! [23]

Geoffrey Blainey commented:

Eureka became a legend, a battle-cry for nationalists, republicans, liberals, radicals, or communists, each creed finding in the rebellion the lessons they liked to see…In fact the new colonies’ political constitutions were not affected by Eureka, but the first Parliament that met under Victoria's new constitution was alert to the democratic spirit of the goldfields, and passed laws enabling each adult man in Victoria to vote at elections, to vote by secret ballot, and to stand for the Legislative Assembly. [24]

The extent to which the Eureka Stockade was instrumental in precipitating change and the extent to which change was inevitable remains a point of contention. There can be no doubt however that the Eureka affair has echoed and re-echoed in the national political consciousness down to the present day. The Eureka affair has been variously characterised and mythologised as the cradle of Australian democracy, as a revolt of free men against imperial tyranny, of labour against a privileged ruling class, of independent free enterprise against burdensome taxation, as an expression of multicultural republicanism, and so on. Notwithstanding, this enduring if ambiguous legacy was not apparent in Ballarat in the immediate aftermath of Eureka. The inclination among officials and the Ballarat community alike was to forget the incident. There were also mixed feelings in the general community. Some remained antagonistic, seeing the Stockade episode as the result of the extreme actions of a few hotheads. Indeed, a number of the Stockaders themselves, including Lalor, were quick to move on in respectable and profitable new directions. As a result, the event soon faded from public consciousness, the materials used in the construction of the Stockade were reclaimed for other purposes and its physical trace disappeared. Nevertheless, people did not forget. Geoffrey Blainey again:

It seems to me that Rede and Hotham were determined to push protest into a resistance that be called rebellion and justify suppression…Tragedies like Eureka have occurred and will be repeated across time and throughout the world when governments fail to heed the voice of the people and ignore their needs and rights. [25]

The events that took place at the Eureka Stockade in December 1854 have achieved a privileged status within Australian national mythology. As Stuart Macintyre observed:

The Eureka rebellion became a formative event in the national mythology…its celebrants saw it as a belated counterpart to the Declaration of Independence of the American colonists eighty years earlier, without which a transition to nationhood was incomplete. [26]

The diggers’ resistance at Eureka and the brutal actions of the colonial authorities in suppressing it have taken on a significance exceeding the actual events and accounts of Eureka in various histories of Australia have a tendency to elide the specific details of the incident in favour of situating the event in a narrative of the nation. [27]

---

[1] Victoria Government Gazette, 4 December 1854 ‘Martial Law at Ballaarat’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 4.

[2] ‘Legislative Council’, Argus, 6 December 1854, pp. 4-5, detailed the address supporting Hotham in the Legislative Council.

[3] ‘The Legislative Council’, Argus, 8 December 1854, p. 4.

[4] 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’.

[5] Ibid, MacFarlane, Ian, (ed.), Eureka From the Official Records, pp. 205-207, contains a list of those arrested.

[6] The Age, 5 December 1854.

[7] ‘Defence of the City, Great Public Meeting’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 7.

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

[9] McNicoll, Ronald, ‘Sir Robert Nickle (1786-1855)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 339-340.

[10] On the return to normality in Ballarat, see ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 7 December 1854, p. 4, and a report a week later, ‘Ballaarat’, Argus 18 December 1854, p. 5.

[11] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 9 December 1854, p. 5

[12] SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 6 December 1854, p. 145, echoed this view: ‘He [Nickle] stepped out of his carriage as the troops were on their way to the Camp & addressed them in very sensible & politic, he seemed to deplore the late sacrifice of life & expressed him anxious to do all in his power to restore confidence & tranquillity’. On 8 December, Evans wrote: ‘The temperate attitude assumed by Sir Robert Nichol has done a good deal toward restoring confidence & the majority seem earnestly desirous of peace. The late lamentable occurrences have been most disastrous to both diggers and storekeepers -trade has been all but suspended…’

[13] This was announced in the Government Gazette, 6 December 1854, ‘Revocation of Martial Law in Ballaarat’, Argus, 8 December 1854, p. 5.

[14] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 9 December 1854, p. 5

[15] ‘Mr Foster’s Resignation’, Argus, 7 December 1854, p. 4.

[16] ‘Causes of Revolt’, Argus, 6 December 1854, p. 6, attacked Foster.

[17] ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 11 January 1855, p. 5, ‘The Approaching Trials’, Argus, 13 January 1855, p. 4, ‘The Amnesty’, Argus, 20 January 1855, p. 4.

[18] Ibid, Charles Hotham, p. 159.

[19] Ibid, p. 163.

[20] Connelly, C. N. ‘Miners’ Rights’, Curthoys, A., and Markus, A., (eds.), Who are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working-class, (Hale and Iremonger), 1978, pp. 35-47.

[21] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, p. 175.

[22] Ibid, Massacre at Eureka.

[23] Oldfield, Audrey, The Great Republic of the Southern Seas: Republicans in Nineteenth-Century Australia, (Hale & Iremonger), 1999, p. 195.

[24] Ibid, Blainey, Geoffrey, The Rush that Never Ended, pp. 56-57.

[25] Blainey, Geoffrey, ‘The Significance of Eureka’, 2004, quoted in The Eureka Echo, Vol. 23, (4), (2004).

[26] Macintyre, Stuart, A Concise History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1999, p. 90.

[27] Elder, Catriona Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, (Allen & Unwin), 2007, pp. 23-40.

From victory to defeat

News of the successful attack on the Stockade finally reached Melbourne in the early hours of Monday 4 December but it only partially relieved Hotham’s anxiety. The immediate danger may have been removed but it was possible that Eureka was the beginning of a larger rebellion and his immediate response was to request reinforcements from VDL. He also met a delegation of ‘influential’ citizens asking them to organise a defence of Melbourne as all his troops were in Ballarat and over 1,500 special constables were sworn in as a result. Hotham and his Executive Council proclaimed martial law in and around Ballarat. [1] In an effort to muster support, he presented his case to the Legislative Council on 4 December and to the squatters’ representatives two days later. [2] Both bodies pledged their support ‘to maintain the law and preserve the community from social disorganisation’. [3] Hotham unconvincingly attempted to blame the rebellion on ‘foreigners’ and the Irish. There was widespread contemporary criticism for the lenient ways in which Hotham treated American citizens who had been involved in the rebellion. This action reinforced the erroneous view that Americans did not play as active role. [4] Most of the movement’s leadership were still at large and out of the 114 arrested only eleven were ‘foreigners’ and around thirty Irish. Rewards were offered for the leaders of the insurgents. The authorities were under the impression that Vern was the rebel leader and a reward of £500 was offered for his capture and only £200 for the arrest of Lalor and Black, the ‘minister for war’ who had not been in the Stockade during the attack, for inciting men to arms. None were arrested. [5]

Reactions to the attack on the Eureka Stockade were immediate and led to an extraordinarilyEurer rapid reversal in public opinion. News spread quickly. The Ballarat Times printed a report with black borders on the day of the attack, the Geelong Advertiser the following day and on Tuesday, other major newspapers in the colony prominently displayed accounts. Before long however, disgust at the atrocities quickly turned Victorians against Hotham’s Government especially when it was clear Melbourne was not threatened. Sympathy was now with the defeated diggers and government forces were regarded as murderers and butchers. The Age stated:

There are not a dozen respectable citizens in Melbourne who do not entertain an indignant feeling against it for its weakness, its folly and its last crowning error. They do not sympathise with injustice and coercion. [6]

On 5 December, over 4,000 people attended a loyalist meeting called by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne to consider the defence of the town against a possible outbreak of lawlessness and to give the people of Melbourne an opportunity to show their support for the authorities. [7] Both John Pascoe Fawkner and John O’Shanassy called for moderation but this was followed by a speaker in the audience calling upon the government to resign. The Lord Mayor tried to end the meeting by vacating the chair but, instead of leaving, the audience installed a new chairman. A number of speakers maintained that the Colonial Secretary, John Foster was responsible for the recent disaster. A motion that he should be removed from office received overwhelming support and Doctors Embling and Owens were instructed to convey this to Hotham. By Wednesday 6 December, public meetings were being called across Victoria, condemning the government’s actions and newspapers began to appear attacking Hotham. Around 6,000 Melbourne residents gathered outside St. Paul’s on 6 December and refused to support the government’s action, called for the diggers’ grievances to be addressed but condemned the act of rebellion. [8] Meetings were held calling for the release of the prisoners, public representation and liberty and justice. On 9 December, gatherings of about 600 people in Castlemaine and 2,000 in Bendigo opposed the license and condemned the attack on the Stockade. Within a few days, a comprehensive military victory had become a political defeat.

The turmoil in Melbourne was in stark contrast to the prevailing mood in Ballarat. On Tuesday 5 December, the commander of the colony’s military forces Major-General Sir Robert Nickle, who had been knighted in 1841 for his services during the Canadian rebellion, arrived to take command in Ballarat. [9] He successfully lowered the political temperature and his conciliatory manner helped restore public confidence and the Ballarat diggers quickly resumed their normal work. [10] The Argus commented:

The martial law administered by Sir R. Nickle is about as far superior to the Commissioner’s law, under which we have been so long labouring, as it is possible for anything human to be. Had Sir R. Nickle arrived here a few days before, the bloodshed of last Sunday would have been avoided. [11]

Though he condemned the rebellion, he showed his disapproval of the actions that had caused it. [12] Grievances were aired, tension subsided, arms were handed in and martial law was repealed on 9 December. [13] According to the Argus:

…the moral force party, now that they are relieved from the threats and intimidations of the armed agitators, are fast assuming a preponderance. [14]

In the days and weeks that followed the decisive military victory at the Stockade, there was a groundswell of public indignation in Melbourne as well as in Ballarat against what was seen as a brutal over-reaction to a situation largely brought about by the actions of Gold Commission and government officials. Rede, who made the vital decisions in the few days before Eureka, though never blamed by Hotham, was moved from Ballarat remaining on full pay until late in 1855 when Hotham arranged for his appointment as deputy-sheriff of Geelong and commandant of the Volunteer Rifles. He became sheriff of Geelong in 1857, Ballarat in 1868 and Melbourne in 1877. On 16 December, Inspector Foster of Ballarat reported that threats had been made to the lives of several police officers and recommended that most of Ballarat’s pre-Stockade police should be moved out of the area for their own safety.

There were also casualties in government. The public meeting in Melbourne on 5 December called for the resignation of Colonial Secretary Foster. [15] In fact, he had done this the previous day although Hotham did not announce it for a week. Foster had been under relentless attack in the press for several months and every problem in the colony’s government was blamed on him. This was both unjustifiable and unfair since, under Hotham, he had already been deprived of much of his authority. Whether Hotham used Foster as a scapegoat for Eureka is questionable but he was certainly glad to see him go. He could now appoint a Colonial Secretary with whom he could work and who had the people’s confidence. This was clearly evident in his choice of William Haines as Foster’s replacement with whom Hotham quickly developed an excellent working relationship. [16]

What of Hotham’s responsibility for Eureka? To his credit, but to his own detriment, he always accepted full responsibility for the policies that had been followed on the goldfields. However, his action in pursuing the 13 rebels charged with High Treason while protecting government officers at Ballarat with an Act of Indemnity was unpopular with many in the colony. On 10 January 1855, the Gold Fields Commission wrote to Hotham recommending a general amnesty for all those connected with the Stockade, a suggestion he flatly rejected. [17] In addition, Hotham tried to restrict the Gold Field Commission by directing it to avoid the Eureka issue, something it overruled as a violation of its independence. This incident ‘was indicative of the barrier of hostility that was building up between the Governor and the colonists’. [18] Until Eureka, Hotham had retained a degree of public support and, although there was a growing hostility to the government, it was not directed against the Governor. After Eureka, if Hotham had had the ‘instincts of a politician he could easily have salvaged his popularity at this stage’. [19] If he had announced a general amnesty for the Eureka prisoners and waived the gold license pending the Royal Commission’s report, he would have been largely freed from personal blame. By refusing to do both, Hotham found himself the focus for the increasingly emotional reaction to the tragedy of Eureka leading to a very public humiliation when the Eureka prisoners were acquitted of high treason in March 1855.

The Royal Commission released its report in late March 1855 and was scathing in its criticism of the handling of events at Ballarat. Unsurprisingly, it agreed with all of the diggers’ demands, mindful that rebellion might reoccur in the colony. It decided that the causes of the Eureka rebellion included a lack of political rights, the diggers’ inability to buy land and the way the mining license was collected. Although the license was the trigger that led to the unrest, by itself it was not the main cause. The Commission recommended that the license be abolished and replaced with an export duty on gold and that diggers would pay an annual £1 miners’ right. [20] The local courts replaced the hated and corrupt Gold Commission and regulated conditions on the goldfields. On the 14 July 1855, just eight months after the Eureka rebellion, nine members of the mining community, including Raffaelo Carboni, were elected unanimously at Bakery Hill to the local courts. The diggers’ control of the local courts was seen by the mining community as the ‘blood bought rights’ of the Eureka rebellion. The right to elect members to the Legislative Council led to two of the digger leaders, Peter Lalor and John Humffray join the Council in November 1855, less than a year after the massacre. The Commission of Enquiry also recommended that the squatters’ control of the land be broken, and the diggers have the right to buy land. The resultant subdivision of land around mining sites led to the development of some of Victoria’s most important regional towns and cities. ‘The day of arbitrary or despotic rule in Victoria was over’. [21]

The rebels at Eureka found themselves caught up in events that were fast-moving and had armed themselves for defence against the authorities. Yet, their use of the Southern Cross and a defiant rhetoric that went beyond the popular constitutionalism of previous protests led Hotham, with some justification to regard them as involved in rebellion. Unlike the rebellions in the Canadas and in South Wales, there is considerable disagreement about what sort of rebellion Eureka actually was and what it came to mean. For Bob O’Brien:

The attack on the miners at Eureka was something like the slaughter carried out by the Chinese regime on human rights demonstrators in and around Tien An Men Square in 1989…In a sense, the slaughter at Eureka was a riot by administrators, soldiers and police representing the old order of privilege and patronage. They were making a last-ditch attack on the gold-rush immigrants who foreshadowed a new order in which human dignity would be respected. Eureka is ultimately about human rights. [22]

By contrast, Audrey Oldfield suggests:

If viewed as a revolution to gain redress of grievances and greater democracy, it was certainly more successful than most of the greater revolutions in Europe and the uprising in Ireland six years before! [23]

Geoffrey Blainey commented:

Eureka became a legend, a battle-cry for nationalists, republicans, liberals, radicals, or communists, each creed finding in the rebellion the lessons they liked to see…In fact the new colonies’ political constitutions were not affected by Eureka, but the first Parliament that met under Victoria's new constitution was alert to the democratic spirit of the goldfields, and passed laws enabling each adult man in Victoria to vote at elections, to vote by secret ballot, and to stand for the Legislative Assembly. [24]

The extent to which the Eureka Stockade was instrumental in precipitating change and the extent to which change was inevitable remains a point of contention. There can be no doubt however that the Eureka affair has echoed and re-echoed in the national political consciousness down to the present day. The Eureka affair has been variously characterised and mythologised as the cradle of Australian democracy, as a revolt of free men against imperial tyranny, of labour against a privileged ruling class, of independent free enterprise against burdensome taxation, as an expression of multicultural republicanism, and so on. Notwithstanding, this enduring if ambiguous legacy was not apparent in Ballarat in the immediate aftermath of Eureka. The inclination among officials and the Ballarat community alike was to forget the incident. There were also mixed feelings in the general community. Some remained antagonistic, seeing the Stockade episode as the result of the extreme actions of a few hotheads. Indeed, a number of the Stockaders themselves, including Lalor, were quick to move on in respectable and profitable new directions. As a result, the event soon faded from public consciousness, the materials used in the construction of the Stockade were reclaimed for other purposes and its physical trace disappeared. Nevertheless, people did not forget. Geoffrey Blainey again:

It seems to me that Rede and Hotham were determined to push protest into a resistance that be called rebellion and justify suppression…Tragedies like Eureka have occurred and will be repeated across time and throughout the world when governments fail to heed the voice of the people and ignore their needs and rights. [25]

The events that took place at the Eureka Stockade in December 1854 have achieved a privileged status within Australian national mythology. As Stuart Macintyre observed:

The Eureka rebellion became a formative event in the national mythology…its celebrants saw it as a belated counterpart to the Declaration of Independence of the American colonists eighty years earlier, without which a transition to nationhood was incomplete. [26]

The diggers’ resistance at Eureka and the brutal actions of the colonial authorities in suppressing it have taken on a significance exceeding the actual events and accounts of Eureka in various histories of Australia have a tendency to elide the specific details of the incident in favour of situating the event in a narrative of the nation. [27]

---

[1] Victoria Government Gazette, 4 December 1854 ‘Martial Law at Ballaarat’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 4.

[2] ‘Legislative Council’, Argus, 6 December 1854, pp. 4-5, detailed the address supporting Hotham in the Legislative Council.

[3] ‘The Legislative Council’, Argus, 8 December 1854, p. 4.

[4] 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’.

[5] Ibid, MacFarlane, Ian, (ed.), Eureka From the Official Records, pp. 205-207, contains a list of those arrested.

[6] The Age, 5 December 1854.

[7] ‘Defence of the City, Great Public Meeting’, Argus, 5 December 1854, p. 7.

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

[9] McNicoll, Ronald, ‘Sir Robert Nickle (1786-1855)’, ADB, Vol. 5, pp. 339-340.

[10] On the return to normality in Ballarat, see ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 7 December 1854, p. 4, and a report a week later, ‘Ballaarat’, Argus 18 December 1854, p. 5.

[11] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 9 December 1854, p. 5

[12] SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 6 December 1854, p. 145, echoed this view: ‘He [Nickle] stepped out of his carriage as the troops were on their way to the Camp & addressed them in very sensible & politic, he seemed to deplore the late sacrifice of life & expressed him anxious to do all in his power to restore confidence & tranquillity’. On 8 December, Evans wrote: ‘The temperate attitude assumed by Sir Robert Nichol has done a good deal toward restoring confidence & the majority seem earnestly desirous of peace. The late lamentable occurrences have been most disastrous to both diggers and storekeepers -trade has been all but suspended…’

[13] This was announced in the Government Gazette, 6 December 1854, ‘Revocation of Martial Law in Ballaarat’, Argus, 8 December 1854, p. 5.

[14] ‘Geelong’, Argus, 9 December 1854, p. 5

[15] ‘Mr Foster’s Resignation’, Argus, 7 December 1854, p. 4.

[16] ‘Causes of Revolt’, Argus, 6 December 1854, p. 6, attacked Foster.

[17] ‘Ballaarat’, Argus, 11 January 1855, p. 5, ‘The Approaching Trials’, Argus, 13 January 1855, p. 4, ‘The Amnesty’, Argus, 20 January 1855, p. 4.

[18] Ibid, Charles Hotham, p. 159.

[19] Ibid, p. 163.

[20] Connelly, C. N. ‘Miners’ Rights’, Curthoys, A., and Markus, A., (eds.), Who are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working-class, (Hale and Iremonger), 1978, pp. 35-47.

[21] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, p. 175.

[22] Ibid, Massacre at Eureka.

[23] Oldfield, Audrey, The Great Republic of the Southern Seas: Republicans in Nineteenth-Century Australia, (Hale & Iremonger), 1999, p. 195.

[24] Ibid, Blainey, Geoffrey, The Rush that Never Ended, pp. 56-57.

[25] Blainey, Geoffrey, ‘The Significance of Eureka’, 2004, quoted in The Eureka Echo, Vol. 23, (4), (2004).

[26] Macintyre, Stuart, A Concise History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1999, p. 90.

[27] Elder, Catriona Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, (Allen & Unwin), 2007, pp. 23-40.