Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Read online

  In terms of really in-depth research on the Melbourne and Ballarat parts of the story, however - going for the rich mother lode that lay deep down below the surface - I was blessed with the best.

  For this particular book, I knew I needed someone on the ground in Melbourne to trawl the archives of the State Library of Victoria and the Public Record Office Victoria to get to the primary documents that, ideally, would allow me to sort through the many previously referred to layers of legend that have wrapped themselves around Eureka, not to mention the conflicting accounts from those there at the time, and try to work out what actually happened.

  In this regard, I could not have done better than PhD candidate in Sociology at Deakin University Libby Effeney, who retrieved countless treasures for me and resolved many of the aforementioned conflicting accounts. In contemplating her input, I am reminded of a line my old rugby coach Peter Fenton said after the Sydney team I had the honour to be a part of toured Europe in 1984.

  ‘We thought,’ he told people afterwards, ‘we would take this kid Nick Farr-Jones along with us, to give him a bit of experience. But it turned out, he took us!’

  Many people from many institutions were extremely helpful to both myself and my researchers in digging out information, but I particularly thank Bob Allen from the Eureka Centre in Ballarat, Tim Hogan and Chris Wade from the State Library of Victoria, the staff of the Public Record Office Victoria, the Mitchell Library in Sydney and those of The Royal Anglican Regiment Museum in England. A special thanks, too, to Jack Roberts and the team at Reason in Revolt, who digitised many of the existing issues of The Ballarat Times. Thank you, especially, to the online digital project Trove, an initiative of the National Library of Australia, which has digitised many of the historical newspapers, in partnership with state libraries, used in the research of this book. What a resource that is - and what a privilege to be able to instantly access contemporary accounts from journalists on the ground at the time, compare them, and get ever closer to the truth.

  I thank all at Random House, particularly Margie Seale, Nikki Christer and, as ever, Alison Urquhart for backing the project from the first. As to my editor, Brandon VanOver, he had a great feel for the story from the moment we began discussing it, and I am indebted to the thoroughness of his approach, his professionalism and skill in spotting inconsistencies, repetitive prose, and all the rest - and suggesting ways of fixing them.

  Let me, most importantly, acknowledge the highly professional work of my dear friend and principal researcher on this book, Henry Barrkman, who also coordinated the work of many of the other researchers. His dedication to pursuing the highest degree of accuracy in any given matter was unwavering (read, obsessive to the point of needing medical help). This fanatical and high-energy streak was particularly useful in this book, as the mass of material of differing value required precisely his high level of skill and deep care to get it right. I am in your debt, Henry - as is this book.

  Finally, I thank my wife, Lisa, a professional editor by background, who kept me sane through the toughest part of the writing and, as ever, provided unending encouragement and strength whenever I flagged. (Still, it was always a Eureka flag, now that I come to think of it.)

  All up, I hope you enjoy reading the book at least half as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

  Peter FitzSimons

  Neutral Bay, Sydney

  September 2012

  Author’s Note

  For the sake of good storytelling, I have very occasionally created a direct quote from an indirect quote in a newspaper. However, this has required only changes to pronouns, word endings and the like, and I have always remained faithful to the original. I have certainly not created any words or concepts that do not appear in the original source. For example, the original, ‘He protested against the whole of the proceedings; the meeting was more to enrich the rich, and oppress the poor man’, now reads, ‘I protest against the whole of the proceedings,’ he finishes his address. ‘This meeting is more to enrich the rich, and oppress the poor man.’

  PROLOGUE

  Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?

  …

  This yellow slave

  Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,

  Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

  And give them title, knee and approbation

  With senators on the bench …

  William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene III

  In the time before Australia was Australia, all that we now see before us of our brown and pleasant land consisted of fragments of solidified crust, colliding and crumpling. Molten rock was hurled out across the constantly changing land surface, even as huge jets of steam burst forth into the atmosphere …

  In the bowels of the earth, at extremely high temperatures, the most desirable element of all was dissolved in saline waters: gold. These waters, too compressed to turn into steam, also shot upwards ever upwards to the surface. Ever and always, that water streamed, screamed, along the path of least resistance, through whatever cracks, fissures and fault lines lay before it. And then, when the conditions were just right, in certain very rare and scattered parts of Australia, as the water cooled or indeed turned into steam, the dissolved gold was deposited as veins in the surrounding rock, such as quartz and slate. These veins could in turn be broken down by water, by ice, by geological and chemical processes, and by erosion over hundreds of millions of years, which could reduce whole thrusting mountains of rock into shattered, scattered fragments. Frequently the gold released from the veins settled as small specks in streams, mixing with sand and other mineral deposits. Sometimes it was left as whole nuggets just on or near the surface. In many places, ancient streams thick with such nuggets were later buried beneath brief volcanic outflows, and as the land continued to weather and change once more to cover those original streams, the gold was again buried deep beneath the surface of rich alluvial soil. In one particular spot, in the south-east corner of that emerging continent to be called Australia, the gold was laid thickly in a tight crisscross of streams on, around and beneath a curiously elongated, dome-like hill.

  And there the gold lay for eons as plant life slowly began to appear, followed eventually by animals, birds, insects, fish and finally … people, as the land we know as Australia did indeed become exactly that.

  To be sure, all that glittered was not gold, and in fact the gold glittered so little that the first of the continent’s indigenous people, who arrived some 60,000 years ago, knew little and cared less about it. Oh yes, they loved the land alright, but contrary to the later notion of owning the land, the Aborigines felt that the land owned them, or at least that they were an inseparable part of it. Of the things they saw around them, far more interesting were the animals, fish, birds and creatures that they knew had come from the Dreamtime, and many of them embodied the spirits of their ancient ancestors. Those flecks of lustre here and there that the natives may have occasionally seen on various pebbles as they crossed the creeks, and even the nuggets, were a little interesting because they shone so, but, as gold was of no practical use, it was not particularly valued. They pushed on, pursued the songlines of their existence, prospered, and, as they thinly populated the land, named particular features as they went.

  The local Wathaurong clan called one such place - a wide valley nestled amidst soft, rolling hills, graced by bubbling creeks and shaded by a thick and fragrant cover of eucalyptus trees - ballaarat, a place to recline on your balla, your elbow. After all, this place where the flat met the bush by a curiously elongated hill that looked a little like an echidna was teeming with life. The food sources of kangaroos, wallabies, possums, echidnas, wombats and myriad others were never far away and the fresh water supply was constant - even at the height of the heat, after the flowers bloomed and before the snakes disappeared.

  And yet one day, in the direction of the rising sun, a bizarrely white man by the name of Captain Cook had come with many other white
men on a big ship they called Endeavour, eventually stopping in a bay before departing again. For eighteen summers the Gadigal people around Botany Bay had thought that it had been no more than a strange visitation by their ancestors in a curious form and there would be no more of it. After all, they had all been raised on tribal stories of spirit-creatures that wandered the land and the sea performing fantastic acts before just as quickly disappearing, and these extraordinary white men in their big canoe fitted exactly into their Dreaming - it was just the first time they had seen those stories for themselves.

  But return the men did, and far more powerfully and numerously than before.

  In January of 1788, many more strange white men came under the command of one ‘Captain Phillip’, and this time they did not go away. They stayed. They cut down trees. They brought strange animals and plants - and terrible diseases - with them. They did not understand or respect that the tribes were of the land. In fact, they started chasing them off it, putting up fences and scouring all over, exploring, looking for whatever easy treasures there might be upon it that they could plunder.

  And there was some real treasure there! In August 1788, the convict James Daley begged to report that he had discovered something very interesting on some of the land he had been tilling down by the harbour near Government House in the new town of Sydney, something that glittered … maybe even gold!

  As good as his word, Daley produced from a matchbox what indeed looked to be tiny pieces of the precious metal. Now, he informed the Lieutenant-Governor, Major Robert Ross, with amazing presumption for one who had been transported to New South Wales for seven years for being a criminal, in return for his and a particular female convict’s freedom, together with their passage back to England on the next ship sailing, and a moderate amount of money … he was prepared to tell him where that gold was to be found. Upon the Lieutenant-Governor’s counteroffer, however, that Daley either tell him immediately or receive 100 lashes, the convict decided, upon consideration, to accept. Strangely, however, after arriving on the spot in the company of an officer and some soldiers, Daley ran off! And things became stranger still. For after arriving back in the camp early in the afternoon, he informed all and sundry that he had left the officer in possession of a goldmine, and after grabbing a few things from his tent, disappeared once more. Where to?

  Exactly. As a white man in a land populated by blacks, there was really nowhere but the settlement to go to, and ‘the want of provisions soon brought him from his concealment’.1 And now, another officer put a different deal to him. Purposefully loading his gun, he invited the miscreant to confess where the ‘gold’ had come from. Again, Daley decided to accept.

  For you see, he stammered, strictly speaking it was not really quite gold at all. He had simply filed down a yellow belt buckle and mixed it with some gold from a guinea.

  And that was that. Far from his freedom and a trip home with his love, Daley received 100 lashes from a cat-o’-nine-tails for his trouble, as well as being obliged to ‘wear a canvas frock with the letter “R” cut and sewn upon it, to distinguish him more particularly from others as a rogue’.2 Tragically, four months later, ‘the poor wretch was executed for housebreaking’.3

  Not that any of the excitement halted, for even a moment, the spread of white people across the land, pushing the Aboriginal people out as they went.

  Yet it wasn’t as if the white men didn’t have serious fights of their own, between themselves.

  Some of the Irish convicts had been sent to the colonies specifically for their involvement in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, whereby the brave patriots had taken up such arms as they could get their hands on - mostly homemade pikes - and attempted to overthrow British rule from their lands. In the famed Battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June of that year, some 20,000 of them had clashed with the same number of heavily armed British troops at a place called Vinegar Hill in County Wexford, Ireland, and acquitted themselves superbly well. True, the rebels lost the battle, but the way they had wielded their mere pikes against the artillery and rifles of the occupiers would gladden Irish hearts for generations to come.

  In fact, and this was the point, Australia had its own mini-version of just such an uprising, led by some of the veterans of that campaign - and using ‘Vinegar Hill’ for a password - with plans for 200 convicts at Castle Hill to meet up with around 1000 supporters from the Hawkesbury and march on Sydney to gain their freedom. The signal for the uprising to begin occurred on the unseasonably hot and humid evening of 4 March 1804, when a ‘vigorously rung bell’ set 200 rebels to rise as one and a hut at Castle Hill was set ablaze. Thereafter, the raging 200, initially wielding their pikes, set off.

  After breaking into Government Farm’s armoury to steal guns and ammunition, they marched on Parramatta, raiding farm after farm along the way to get more weapons, shouting the cry of the insurgents in old Ireland six years earlier, ‘Death or Liberty!’, as they went. On the spot, the most notable veteran of the Irish Vinegar Hill battle who was among them, their leader Philip Cunningham, was unanimously voted by the other rebels as the ‘King of the Australian Empire’. In short order they had 180 muskets, swords and pistols between them, as well as - and this proved enormously significant - more alcohol than they could possibly drink, though they tried hard enough … Their freedom was intoxicating in every way.

  That night, in his gracious Parramatta home, the Reverend Samuel Marsden - otherwise known as ‘the Flogging Parson’ - was enjoying dinner with his wife and children and their distinguished guest, none other than Elizabeth Macarthur (wife of soldier, pioneer and entrepreneur John Macarthur and the first soldier’s wife to arrive in New South Wales), when just after the clock on the mantelpiece had struck nine times their door was flung open. In an instant, a local settler, William Joyce, had burst into the room. As Mrs Macarthur would recall ever after, he was ‘pale and in violent agitation’.

  ‘Sir,’ Mr Joyce gasped, ‘come with me. And you, too, Madam.’4

  In shattered fragments, his story soon emerged. Only a short time earlier, the Irish convicts had raided his Seven Hills farm, dragged him from his bed and taken him hostage. It had only been in extremis that he had managed to escape. Behind him, even as he spoke, the testament to the truth of his words was seen by the glow in the night sky to their north. The ‘Croppies’, as the convicts were known, really were rising. Within minutes panic gripped all of Parramatta’s 1200 residents as the word spread. There was menace in that glow and the streets were now filled with settlers fleeing before the approaching mob of convicts. Run for your lives!

  After a singularly anxious night, mercifully, the beat of a military drum was heard as dawn broke. Summoned from Sydney, the soldiers had marched through the night. Governor King had declared martial law and sent them out after the rebels!

  And, just as had happened in ol’ Ireland, the British forces proved equal to the task, ruthlessly crushing the insurrection. After 29 soldiers, backed by 50 armed civilians, caught up with the convicts, the battle lasted no longer than 30 minutes. When the smoke had cleared, 15 of the rebels had been killed, with another nine subsequently hanged for their trouble - including Cunningham, that very night, without trial.

  Nevertheless, for a brief time those Irish rebels had indeed had their freedom and it, too, would inspire Irish people in Australia for generations to come.

  Generally, however, such disturbances were few, and the colony continued to grow - and well beyond Sydney, at that. Sometimes as the colony expanded, settlers discovered things that, while nothing to the natives, were potentially extremely valuable to them. A case in point came in 1823 when, after the white settlers had pushed through to get west of the Blue Mountains that book-ended the Sydney settlement on one side with the Pacific Ocean on the other, an Irish-born government surveyor by the name of James McBrien was surveying a new road 15 miles south-east of Bathurst, right by the Fish River, when his attention was caught by ‘numerous particles of gold convenient to the river’.5


  Look, if it had been an extraordinary amount of gold, or if he had not been on government business at the time, perhaps he might have followed up on it. As it was, it wasn’t really that much gold to worry too much about, so he merely took some specimens and reported it to his masters when he returned to Sydney.

  But for the authorities, too, it was problematic. They were running not just a colony but a penal colony, where the most important thing was a certain dull stability. Who knew what might happen if the convicts, and perhaps more particularly their guards, felt that a fortune in gold might be had if only they broke free of their shackles, or put down their guns and batons and took to the hills?

  Already there was a growing gap between those who ruled in the colonies and those who were meant to be ruled. For there was something troubling about this growing generation of young people who had not been born in, or even been to, England. There was an increasingly distinctive way they had in dressing - sort of slovenly and uncaring - and of speaking - dashed ambivalent about pronouncing vowels for one thing. They tended to be bigger and more raw-boned than recent arrivals of the same age come from the motherland. They were darker for being more exposed to the sun and, while they were not necessarily insolent, there was a certain lack of automatic deference to their obvious betters.

  Most troubling of all, more and more of them appeared to identify more with being from the colonies than with being the sons and daughters of Great Britain! They were, in short, disloyal ingrates best summed up by an editorial in a Sydney newspaper in 1826, which put its finger right on the rough nut of the problem: ‘They have lost their English spirit and have degenerated into Australians.’6