Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Read online

  About the Book

  In 1854, Victorian miners fought a deadly battle under the flag of the Southern Cross at the Eureka Stockade. Though brief and doomed to fail, the battle is legend in both our history and in the Australian mind. Henry Lawson wrote poems about it, its symbolic flag is still raised, and even the 19th-century visitor Mark Twain called it ‘a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression’. Was this rebellion a fledgling nation’s first attempt to assert its independence under colonial rule? Or was it merely rabblerousing by unruly miners determined not to pay their taxes?

  In his inimitable style, Peter FitzSimons gets into the hearts and minds of those on the battlefield, and those behind the scenes, bringing to life Australian legends on both sides of the rebellion.

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAPS

  BACKGROUND AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: FROM GOLDEN FLEECE TO GOLD ITSELF

  CHAPTER TWO: VICTORIA

  CHAPTER THREE: THE GOLDEN GLOBE

  CHAPTER FOUR: EXODUS

  CHAPTER FIVE: TO THE DIGGINGS

  CHAPTER SIX: TROUBLE BREWS

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ENTER HOTHAM

  CHAPTER EIGHT: FIRE’S BURNING, FIRE’S BURNING, DRAW NEARER

  CHAPTER NINE: ALL RISE

  CHAPTER TEN: READING THE RIOT ACT

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: ‘WE SWEAR BY THE SOUTHERN CROSS …’

  CHAPTER TWELVE: ‘AUX ARMES, CITOYENS!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE QUEEN’S PEACE IS DISTURBED

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: AFTER THE TEMPEST

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  PICTURE SECTION

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  MORE AT RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA

  To Raffaello Carboni, Mrs Ellen Clacy, William Craig, Samuel

  Huyghue, Samuel Lazarus and William Bramwell Withers, whose

  contemporary - and, in the case of Withers, near-contemporary -

  accounts I have most enjoyed and relied upon in the formation of

  this book. And to all those diggers who fought so valiantly …

  ‘By and by there was a result, and I think it may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution - small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression … It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honourable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka Stockade, and Peter has his monument.’

  Mark Twain after visiting the Victorian goldfields in 1895

  ‘Eureka was more than an incident or passing phase. It was greater in significance than the short-lived revolt against tyrannical authority would suggest. The permanency of Eureka in its impact on our development was that it was the first real affirmation of our determination to be masters of our own political destiny.’

  Ben Chifley, Labor Prime Minister

  ‘The revolt at Eureka is the one picturesque bloodstain on the white pages of Australian history. British officials referred to it as “a trifling affair” but the little fight was big with results, for it helped to shatter official tyranny and to establish democratic rule in Australia.’

  The Lone Hand, January 1912

  BACKGROUND AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Like most Australians, the saga of the Eureka Stockade is in the very marrow of my bones. As a primary school kid in the late 1960s, I recall both the fun of participating in a mock Eureka Stockade re-enactment at the Mangrove Mountain Community Fair, and being pleased that I got to dress up as a good rebel and not in the red coat of a bad British soldier. We learnt about the subject briefly at Peats Ridge Public, and it was almost as much fun a legend from Australia’s past as the bushrangers - not that I was particularly interested in the Eureka saga academically.

  Nevertheless, in Mr Rex Ward’s history class at high school in Sydney in the mid-70s, that changed. On one particular sleepy afternoon I was doing what I usually did in history class - multiplying the number of bricks on the wall from top to bottom, by the number of bricks from left to right - when Mr Ward started his lesson on the Eureka Stockade. Remembering Mangrove Mountain and the excitement of it all, my ears pricked up and, for the first time in months, I not only sat up straight but went further. Out of pure bloody-mindedness I began to listen, and it was right there and then that my love of Australian history began - my enthrallment with that particular story sparked a wider, burning passion. The action! The characters! The fact - and this was perhaps the key - that this was a real Australian story!

  The leap forward to this book, however, was only relatively recent. A couple years ago, at a meeting of the directors of Ausflag in the Sydney suburb of Crows Nest, we were sifting through many worthy submissions from our fellow citizens of what a modern Australian flag should look like when the thought struck me: what a pity we Australians don’t have our own version of the Americans’ legendary Betsy Ross story, that country’s purported maker of the first ‘Stars and Stripes’ flag during the Revolutionary War.

  While the designs we were seeing were mostly admirable, I had my doubts as to whether the Australian people as a whole would ever choose a flag designed last Tuesday ahead of one designed at the beginning of the last century, one that had been fluttering ever since.

  And that, of course, led me to thinking about the Eureka story as the possible subject for a book. Look, I certainly didn’t think that the flag of the Southern Cross would ever be embraced as the answer - in the 21st century it is too associated with either right-wing racist rednecks who brandish it as a symbol of white Australia or hard left-wing members of the union movement who, far more admirably, wave it for workers’ rights. But, against that, Eureka was certainly a saga that encompassed our oldest and best-known flag after the national flag, and so it might be worth exploring anyway. All this happened in roughly the same time frame that my friend and researcher Henry Barrkman started suggesting that Eureka would be a good subject for me, and a producer from SBS Radio in Melbourne, Yvonne Davis, wrote to me, pointing out that the multicultural aspects of the saga had never been truly explored. (Multicultural aspects? What multicultural aspects? I wasn’t really aware that there were any?) And then, the breakthrough … Out of the blue, two brothers, Peter and Ron Craig, wrote to me saying they were the great-grandsons of William Craig, who had not only come out on the ship from Ireland with the hero of the piece, Peter Lalor, but also penned a long-forgotten book about Lalor and his experience in the Eureka Stockade. Given that I was interested in writing books on Australian history, they wondered if I would like to read their great-grandfather’s original manuscript?

  I would, and I did. We wined, we dined, we talked. I was hooked, and soon afterwards I began.

  Rarely have I been so enthused while working on a book. Yes, I have been equally passionate about other stories, just as stories, but with this one I felt I was getting to uncover the very foundation stones of what it is to be an Australian - from multiculturalism to mateship, from our broad distrust of the elites who would seek to rule over us, to our wide embrace of egalitarianism and insistence on a ‘fair go, mate’, to the very use of the word ‘mate’! In the diggers’ willingness to roll up their sleeves and just get on with it, whatever the appalling conditions, and their propensity to pull
together to overcome hardships, I recognised much of the spirit that the country was built on. In their refusal to cower before power - most particularly their loud insistence to the government of ‘no taxation without representation’ - and backing that up with their willingness to fight for their rights, even against overwhelming odds, I found fascinating parallels with the Boston Tea Party that I had never before appreciated.

  And early on, to my shame, I realised I knew more about that Boston Tea Party than I did about this seminal episode in our own history. I had no idea, for example, that on the eve of the Eureka battle, an Australian ‘Declaration of Independence’ had been written and enunciated; that diggers from other goldfields had marched to the aid of the men on Ballarat behind a man brandishing a sword as the lightning cracked, while they all sang ‘La Marseillaise‘! I simply didn’t know that for the first part of the actual battle the rebels gave at least as good as they got; that Karl Marx himself had followed the Eureka uprising and written about it; and that the court cases after the battle, as they put 13 of the rebels on trial for High Treason, had been the seminal court cases in Australian history and nothing less than a triumph of Australian justice. How exciting I found it that, far from being an isolated ‘local tax revolt’ as some of its deriders would have it, the Eureka rebellion was nothing less than the flowering of a broad international movement towards democracy, a flowering that put Australia at the very prow of democratic change around the world.

  In short, I soon became obsessed with the whole story, and determined to blow the dust off the saga and try to bring it to life using every resource I had and could access.

  In terms of making it accurate, the bad news was that there are so many layers of mythology surrounding what actually occurred, and even conflicting contemporary accounts, that it was frequently difficult to separate fact from fiction. However, the good news was that the source material - diaries, letters and newspapers - was bountiful beyond belief and rich in wonderful detail.

  Of course, it will be for you, the reader, to judge whether or not I have managed to pull it off, but my aim at the outset was to take that rich detail and place it at the service of making this book feel like a novel - to take the thousand points of light represented by footnoted fact and place the reader in the moment, rather than in the 21st century looking back with a telescope on events long ago. It is the approach I have employed in my books since coming under the influence of the American writer Gary Smith in 2000, most particularly in Kokoda, Tobruk, The Ballad of Les Darcy, Charles Kingsford Smith, Batavia and Mawson - but only with Sir Douglas Mawson have I been as blessed with as much fine detail as was available on this book. For the sake of that novel-like feel, for the sake of the storytelling, I have very occasionally created a direct quote from reported speech in a newspaper, diary or letter. For the same reason, I have stayed with the imperial form of measurement and used the spelling of the day, as in ‘Toorac’, as opposed to ‘Toorak’. In instances where two spellings were used at the time - i.e. ‘Ballarat’ and ‘Ballaarat’ - to avoid confusion I have chosen the modern version. And finally, in my attempts to make the story live and breathe, when no positive determination can be made as to which of many versions of the truth is correct - who designed and sewed the original Eureka flag, for example - I have put my reasons for choosing the version I did in the endnotes, rather than interrupt the narrative flow.

  In terms of researching the book, it was, if you’ll forgive the laboured metaphor, like finding myself in an entire goldfield of information, and I learnt very quickly where the most fertile fields, bearing the most valuable nuggets, were to be found.

  As I note in my dedication, the most valuable of the accounts from the time that I drew upon, and certainly the most colourful memoir, is the one written by Raffaello Carboni, despite its oft-maddening chronological contradictions. I also cite the diaries of Samuel Huyghue, Samuel Lazarus, John Lynch and the later personal accounts of Godfrey Howitt, Ellen Clacy, Antoine Fauchery, Henry Nicholls, Charles D. Ferguson and the aforementioned William Craig. The letters of Charles Pasley to his father were invaluable, as were the government official reports to their superiors, for example, those written by both Commissioner Robert Rede and Lieutenant-Governor Sir Charles Hotham. A compilation of contemporary accounts, Eureka: From the Official Records, assembled and edited by Ian MacFarlane, was a wonderful resource. Similarly, I would not have completed this book to the standard I desired without the Victorian Government’s collected papers - ‘Correspondence Relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia (1852-1856)’ which allowed me to gain better insight into the government’s side of the story. As an addendum, Historical Studies: Eureka Supplement, a collection of significant academic articles published on the centenary of Eureka in 1954, was invaluable.

  Of the historians who tackled the subject, William Bramwell Withers is the obvious stand-out in the 19th century, due to the fact that he lived at Ballarat and was able to draw on the memories and direct correspondence of many of the key players, who trusted him enough to tell him what they knew.

  Of the modern writers, the book to which I most constantly referred was John Molony’s Eureka. As to other books, the most valuable to me were Weston Bate’s Lucky City, H. J. Stacpoole’s Gold at Ballarat and, for a strong, clear overview of the whole story and excellent images, Geoff Hocking’s Eureka Stockade. Gregory Blake’s book, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart was vital for the wonderfully colourful and accurate details it provided for the actual assault on the Stockade. As a man who worked for four years compiling that book, I was grateful when Greg agreed to work with me to ensure that my own detail was well founded. As it turns out, we did not agree on all things, as I drew different conclusions from the evidence presented on a couple of issues, but he remained a fantastic source of advice and detailed information on the whole Eureka saga, and I thank him warmly. Similarly, David Hill’s book The Gold Rush provided a great overview of the history of gold digging in this country, including Eureka, and I am thankful that David was also a great source of advice throughout my writing of this book. Both Thomas Keneally and David Day have also covered Eureka in their own writings and were generous with their counsel, from which I profited, and I am in their debt. Beyond the aforementioned Craig brothers, I was contacted by many proud descendants of Eureka figures and they were universally helpful. But I particularly acknowledge the Noyce family, descended from Samuel Perry; Trevor Carroll, descended from Patrick Carroll; and Hazel Brombey, descended from Barnard Welch.

  In all of my historical books since Kokoda, I have called on my friend Dr Michael Cooper’s twin passions for medicine and history to help inform me on the medical aspects of the story, and in this book he was as valuable as ever, giving me detailed advice on everything from what a fresh bayonet wound would look like to how they amputated arms in Australia in 1854. I thank him warmly for his input, once again. I am indebted also to Dr Stephen Gale from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney for his expertise on matters geological, most particularly how gold was formed. Dr John Waugh of the University of Melbourne was wonderfully generous in lending his expertise on Australian constitutional history, as was my quasi-cousin, the former NSW Liberal parliamentarian Andrew Tink. I warmly thank them both. I am indebted to both Graham Fricke - the former County Court judge who practised at the Victorian Bar for 21 years before becoming an author on legal history - and Julian Burnside QC for their input on my chapter concerning the Eureka trials. James Phillips, the noted heritage architect from Melbourne, provided useful information on architectural details from Melbourne at the time of Eureka, and I thank him. So, too, the noted vexillologist (a student of flags) Ralph Kelly - who is also on the board of Ausflag with me - was more than helpful putting his expertise at the service of this book, which I deeply appreciate. John Vaughn of Australiana Flags also gave me valuable input, and I very much appreciated being able to call on the knowledge of two Eureka experts in Dr Joseph Toscano of the Anarchist Media
Institute and Dr Chris McConville of Victoria University. In London, Catherine Pope’s input on the English angles was very useful. Both Mark Latham and Gerard Henderson were useful and knowledgeable sounding boards on the political angles of the story, and I thank them.

  Way back when I wrote my first book in 1990, Basking in Beirut, my dear friend at The Sydney Morning Herald, Harriet Veitch, gave me wise counsel on every part of it and did the preliminary editing. Well, now 22 years and 25 books later, she still is, and I value more than ever her input into all things to do with the form and texture of this book. Similarly, I met my long-time researcher Sonja Goernitz at the Sydney Writers’ Festival seven years ago, and when I found she was German-born I thought I could probably use her talents for, perhaps, a day or two as I researched and wrote Tobruk. She, too, has worked for me on every book since and has been invaluable in terms of general research for Eureka, most particularly on the parts of the story set in New South Wales.

  I also thank Glenda Lynch of Canberra, who pursued leads in the National Archives; Megan Schlipalius of Perth, who handled the WA angles; my friend Julia Baird, who is writing her own biography on Queen Victoria and who helped me with that part of the story; and Jill Blee in Ballarat, who was a constant fount of detailed information on particular elements of the Eureka saga. Jane Macaulay designed the superb maps and illustrations in Mawson, and did so for this book as well - I am indebted to her. I also thank warmly Tim Sullivan, the Deputy CEO & Museums Director of The Sovereign Hill Museums Association, who went well above and beyond the call of duty in helping me out when I was in Ballarat - and also local mining historian Peter d’Auvergne.