In denial

One of the things that struck me particularly about last night’s Newsnight Special, was the extent to which Democrats remained in a state of denial not only about the election of Donald Trump but also about the reasons why he won.  There was a palpable sense in which they simply could not believe that their neo-liberal experiment had been rejected by a substantial proportion of the population; a remaining belief that they were the ‘establishment’ and that they had a God-given right to rule and that the people had been duped by a demagogue with promises that he would be unable to carry out.   It was the same with Brexit where few were prepared to saw the ‘Leave’ would win, something many ‘Leavers’ also thought.  The polls in both Britain and the USA got it badly wrong and political elites across Europe—with national elections in 2017—are looking with increased scepticism at polls that suggest they will win and the populist resurgence will fail.  The issues which the political establishment have failed to address are broadly the same across the western world—the benefits of global economic prosperity have not be spread across society with those that have gaining more and those without losing further; the impact of uncontrolled immigration; a burgeoning sense that government is unresponsive, unaccountable (yes we have elections but the result is simply more of the same) and corrupt; and, the overarching sense that the democratic experiment is under threat from globalism and global institutions whose power is increasingly pervasive and linked to national institutions and elites.

 

Old and New or Old and Old?

This sense of denial is evident in the ways in which Brexit has to date been managed.  There had been virtually no preparation in case of a Leave victory; the assumption was that Remain would win (just) and that this would give the EU such a shock that it would give the UK the reforms it wanted.  The government and civil service had done little; the Leave campaign had made lots of statements about what would happen after Brexit but had not formulated them as anything more than rhetorical flourishes.  The 24 June and 10 November—the day after the vote—found the political elites in a position they never imagined. Most British politicians say, at least publically, that they accept the ‘will of the people’ adding the all important ‘but’.  ‘But’ is the establishment’s response to the referendum.  Yes we know ‘Brexit means Brexit’ but what does Brexit mean in practice.  Apart from a few diehard ‘remoaners’, we are going to leave the EU but on what terms?  The legal decision means that triggering Article 50 means that Parliament will have a statutory input but are we talking a rubber-stamping the legislation or is it something up for debate and amending?  And the negotiations should they be left to the government…it’s right when it says that you can’t give a running commentary as it would compromise your negotiating position…or should Parliament have the final say or the people through a second referendum?  The problem with the government’s position—and the EU Commission is right here—is that it wants to be shorn of the institutional dimensions of the EU whilst retaining as closely as possible the current economic benefits of membership; a case of one foot in and one foot out, a hokey-cokey solution.  Now that really is denial.

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.

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[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.

Globalisation and nativism

Talking to an eminent pollster this afternoon I was struck by the number of occasions she said ‘But that’s not what was supposed to happen.’  But then she’d said the same thing after the Brexit victory in late June and she could well be in the same position if President Le Pen takes over in France.  I was also struck by the number of occasions in the weeks leading up both to Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory that commentators said that people’s common-sense dictated that they would vote for the status quo and that they would not vote for ‘walking off a cliff’.  What both victories show is that globalisation has not spread its benefits across society and that many people, especially the white working-classes, not only feel that they have been left behind by global trends but that their feelings reflected the harsh realities of economic change—deindustrialisation because things can be manufactured more cheaply abroad but government had provided no alternative economic opportunities for those who lost out.  Brexit should have warned the Democrats of the consequences of failing to listen to working-class anger…but no, the political establishment continued down their road to political emasculation undaunted.

 

 

 

 

What has happened in the last decade has been a shift in people’s attitudes to globalisation though it was already a growing force before the financial ‘crash’ of 2008.  Globalisation in the West resulted in the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the middle- and working-classes feeling forgotten by an establishment whose sole aim appeared to be ‘let’s make money whatever the social cost’.  This may have been a tenable, if morally bankrupt, position while those beyond the charmed establishment circle were content with the crumbs from their masters’ tables…the financial crash changed all that.  People became viscerally angry with bankers who appeared to wield power without responsibility knowing that the state would be compelled to bail them out if things went wrong and arrogantly most appeared not to care complaining that they no longer had their six-figure bonuses slashed and expecting society to understand.  And, of course, the establishment did what was expected of them…they used tax-payers’ money to bail them out. No bankers went to jail because of their reckless roulette behaviour.  Did bankers’ behaviour change?  Well, there were a few mea culpas but then things adapted to the new circumstances and bonuses were back, interest on savings was slashed and bank profits began their upward trajectory again.  The establishment might have thought…problem solved but bailing out the banks was one thing but bailing out other industries and protecting jobs, that’s something very difficult…nationalising banks might be a good thing, but nationalising steel production that’s another thing.  So the bankers, seen as part of the establishment, were protected but steel workers were not…yes the government made all the right noises but the end result was always the same…stagnant wages, unemployment, community disintegration, deindustrialisation and cheaper foreign imports and losing out to the economic rebalancing that comes with globalisation.

At the same time that many in the working-classes felt under pressure, levels of immigration increased with growing numbers, often fleeing conflict, crossing international borders in search of economic security.  For proponents of globalisation this was a good thing…if you allow unfettered immigration then wages will fall—a simple result of supply and demand--and profits rise.  The problem was not immigration itself but its rapidity and scale…too many immigrants too quickly placed pressure on infrastructures already stretched by austerity policies across the West.  Again it was the white working-classes that disproportionately bore the brunt of this process…it was their services that were under pressure whether in education, health or housing; it was their jobs that were threatened by being undercut by cheap immigrant labour; it was their communities whose cultural character changed in a matter of a decade.  And the establishment, well, did very little…it did not provide the finance necessary for local authorities to build more cheap housing, new schools and hospitals.  Is it surprising that the level of ‘hate crime’ and racially aggravated offences increased?  In the UK, whether you could deport people or not was a matter no longer decided in London but in Brussels while in the USA support for ‘Trump’s wall’ was symptomatic of the depth of the establishment’s failure to understand people’s anger and that this anger was being directed against migrants.

Nativism and populism—usually together—tend to occur where sections in society feel that their status is in some way threatened or compromised by the uncaring attitude of the liberal political establishment.  Its character may vary but it is based on the dualism between them and us.  Brexit in many respects represented ‘institutional nativism’ where them is the increasingly pervasive interventionism of the European Union and us is the reclaiming of British sovereignty…the nativist question is where ought power in Britain lie?  The establishment had, since the referendum in 1975, maintained its support for the European Union as an economic institution though increasingly not as a political one…Britain always saw itself as ‘exceptionalist’ in relation to the EU with its non-adoption of the euro, its rebates and red lines where the hope was that the EU would reform itself at satisfy the establishment’s wish to remain a member.  Yet, for the past twenty years, the people increasingly and inexorably moved away from that political position…was promised an input through referendums that never occurred and which, had David Cameron not decided to slay the Eurosceptic dragon in his own party, would probably still be the case…there were always good reasons from the political elites not to ask the people, they might get the wrong answer (which of course they did).  As with Trumpian nativism, migration became a central issue on Brexit building a wall—whether symbolic or actual in the USA is unclear—as a means of controlling immigration though what ‘controlling’ means is unclear.  In the United States, unlike in Britain, nativism is linked to isolationism, the policy of the 1920s and 1930s…the view that we need to make America ‘great again’ at home, addressing the anger of the white working-classes among Trump’s key supporters if necessary, and unlike the UK that sees its future in global free trade, through protectionism and by building economic, political and military strength at home.

 

Brexit and Trump’s decisive victory are both revolts against neo-liberal establishments and elites that were not merely deaf to the concerns of the working-classes but never entered into any form of dialogue with them.  They appear to have assumed that they knew what the proper directions were for the UK and USA and, I suspect it never even entered their mind until it was too late, that many people thought it was the wrong direction.  The neo-liberal elites in Europe are under sustained attack.  Marine Le Pen wants France to leave the EU and will contest the presidential elections next year and so does Bepe Grillo leader of the populist Five Star Movement in Italy.  Italy will hold a constitutional referendum in December that may unseat Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.  There are also strong anti-EU parties in the Netherlands and increasingly in Germany that won a surge of support in September’s local government elections.   The liberal consensus that has been a central feature of political discourse since 1945 is now in tatters. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reacting to judgements

Conservative MP Dominic Grieve said the criticisms over the High Court judges' decision were ‘horrifying’ and reminded him of ‘Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe’.Three High Court judges found that the government could not start the formal process - the triggering of Article 50 - of leaving the EU by using the royal prerogative alone, and would need the backing of Parliament.  There have been many occasions in the past when judges have made ‘political’ decisions that have been unpopular with one group in society or another and they have faced the opprobrium of the public and not only were they regarded, to use the headline in yesterday’s Daily Mail, as ‘enemies of the people’ but especially in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries paid with their lives.  This was before the ‘independence of the judiciary’ was established in the early eighteenth century.  Let us be clear, the appellate judiciary in the High and Supreme Courts are asked to make decisions on points of law and, while they may well have their own views on Brexit—it would be surprising if they did not—that was not the issue on which they were asked to adjudicate.  They were simply asked whether the government had the right to trigger Article 50 without there being a vote in Parliament. To my mind rightly, they decided that the government could not use its executive powers because it would mean effectively overturning an act of Parliament, the domain of the House of Commons and House of Lords.

 

 

Labour has urged the government to come out and defend the three judges behind the controversial High Court ruling on the process of leaving the EU and  called the silence of Justice Secretary Liz Truss ‘embarrassing’ and said she had ‘let down’ the judiciary. 

The reaction to the judgement highlights the ignorance many of us have about the nature of the judiciary and the basis on which it makes decisions.  While the effect of the judgement has political consequences, it was not—and this was something the judges recognised in their statement about it not being political within the judgement—a political judgement but simply a restatement of what the law has been since the seventeenth century: the executive does not have the right to dispense with laws by decree.  Those who called for Brexit wanted Parliament to assert its sovereign powers and this is precisely what this judgement allows them to do.  You might not like the judgement and it might be inconvenient but you’ve got what you voted for…a sovereign parliament asserting its rights.

The critical question now is how Parliament uses those rights.  We know that the Lords largely supported the ‘Remain’ position whilst the Commons also had a less clear majority in favour of remaining.  But the people have spoken and most of the MPs interviewed in the media suggested that they would vote for Article 50…assuming a one line bill…but the Lords appear less clear.  There have been calls for transparency about what the aims of the negotiation will be and resistance from the government to what it calls a ‘running commentary’ on the issue.  The problem with this is that there is little consensus among those calling for transparency over what that actually means in this context.  Should the government simply lay down the broad principles…’we want to achieve a, b and c…that it seeks to achieve?  Well, yes but nothing more…you cannot have a situation where 650 MPs are effectively the negotiating team for Brexit…it simply won’t work.  Once it has completed its negotiation should it bring this back to Parliament for approval…again probably yes…but whether Parliament can then amend those conclusions or not becomes difficult.  Presumably the EU will say after the negotiations…this is what we’ve agreed, you have to accept it and if not, you leave the EU with no agreement about further relations.  We all knew that Brexit was going to be messy; Thursday’s legal judgement simply messed things up a little more. 

Brexit…A Never-Ending story

The High Court has ruled that the government does not have the power to trigger Article 50 - to start formal exit negotiations with the EU - without the approval of Parliament. What parliamentary approval means is unclear because the High Court did not specify.  So it could mean full legislation or a resolution, either by the House of Commons or from both houses. A resolution could be quicker and simpler, allowing the government to seek a very narrow resolution from MPs that grants approval for the triggering of Article 50. But using a narrow resolution could also be challenged in the courts, whereas full legislation should be watertight. Full legislation would be more complicated and time-consuming because it would require debates in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, allowing amendments to be tabled that could, for instance, limit the government's freedom in negotiations about the UK’s future relationship with the EU. 

In effect, the legal judgement—that will be appealed to the Supreme Court (but could it then be appealed to the European Court of Justice?)—reiterated the principle  laid down in 1610 during James I-Vi’s reign that the prerogative powers of the Crown—today exercised by the Prime Minister—do not have precedence over the powers of the legislature.  In the Case of Proclamations Sir Edward Coke stated ’the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him’  while the Bill of Rights 1688 confirmed this by stating that suspending and dispensing with ‘laws or the exercise of laws by regall authoritie as it hath been assumed and exercised of late is illegall’.  Parliamentary sovereignty has also been recognised in many leading cases as the highest constitutional authority.  The case centred round the argument that prerogative powers could not be used to invoke Article 50 because it would result in abolition of rights established in the 1972 European Communities Act without the legislation being repealed by Parliament.

Campaigners who brought the case insist it was about ‘process not politics’ and the High Court made clear that there’s was not a political judgement but the decision has huge implications, not just on the timing but on the terms of Brexit.  It lays Parliament open to criticism that it is trying to subvert the will of the people expressed in the referendum…ah, well the referendum was only advisory and not binding on Parliament…so we’ve listened to what you say but we have to act in the ‘national interest’ and the national interest dictates that we don’t really leave the EU.  It could also lead to a constitutional crisis between the elected Commons where most MPS will probably support Brexit—the question is not whether but what form it should take—and the unelected Lords that was largely in favour of Remain.   The potential for this increases the likelihood that the Prime Minister will call a General Election early next year.  There are certain advantages in doing so with the polls giving the Conservatives a clear victory as well as the potential for a Labour meltdown.  Assuming that she won, the Prime Minister could put invoking Article 50 into the manifesto that would head off problems with getting the necessary legislation through the Lords (it can’t vote against legislation contained in the manifesto). 

What happens now is far from clear.  An appeal will be held over five days in early December and if, as I suspect will be the case, what is an unequivocal High Court decision is upheld, the government will need to introduce legislation in early January 2017 (or even before Christmas) to seek parliamentary approval to invoke Article 50.  The High Court stated that once invoked Article 50 could not be revoked…Lord Kerr, the author of Article 50, had stated before the judgement that the process could be stopped if both parties agreed.  Though some MPs will certainly vote against invoking Article 50, having voted for a referendum by 6:1, it seems probable that any legislation will pass the Commons with relative ease so long as MPs are given some information about what the government’s plans are; the House of Lords is more problematic and prolonged resistance might result in the use of the Parliament Act to get the bill through.  If this was the case the planned timetable for leaving the EU would be thrown into question with Article 50 not invoked until much later in the year or even 2018.

Nigel Farage said that the ruling could be the start of a ‘deliberate wilful attempt’ to ‘betray voters’ and an attempt to ‘water down what people had voted for’.  Whether this is right or not, what we have seen today is a reassertion of the authority of the political elite at the expense of the popular will.  While we may still leave the EU, the decision about what ‘leaving the EU’ means will in practice l be what the political establishment decides and I am certain it will use the nebulous notion of ‘in the national interest’ to justify their decision.

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.

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[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.

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]

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[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.