Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Page 5

  Exactly. Patt Lalor - so the story goes - while attending a meeting in Maryborough on 10 February 1831, openly declared that he would never again pay tithes. He was proud to say that though the Tithe Men could take his property and put it on the market if they liked, he felt sure his countrymen had such high respect for his cause that no-one would put their hand up to buy it.

  When the local clergyman sent his bailiff to take away 25 of Lalor’s sheep, Lalor was able to get a brief enough legal intervention to have each animal branded with the word ‘TITHE’. They were taken back and put on sale before a large crowd at the Mountrath fair, and not one hand was raised to buy them at any price! When the clergyman’s agent, Mr Brough, suddenly bought them himself, the crowd surged forward, only to be stopped by Lalor. He was a man of peace, and there were other ways.

  As no-one in the region would buy the sheep, Brough had them taken by a bailiff to Dublin, but that unfortunate bailiff found that all the way to that city, every time he stopped for food and shelter, doors were closed to him. He arrived at Dublin a shattered, exhausted man, only to find no-one would buy them there, either. The sheep were then shipped to Liverpool. ‘However a priest of Irish origin and faithful to the cause warned the salesmen in Liverpool what had happened with the sheep in Ireland. The sheep weren’t sold in Liverpool either and were then driven to Manchester where the story goes that they died on the road.’ The Church of England never received a penny from Lalor’s sheep, while, as the elected representative of the Queen’s County (1832-35), Lalor was able to continue to fight the good fight in no less than the British House of Commons.

  The eldest of Patrick Lalor’s twelve children, Fintan, however, had no patience for such comparatively gentle means of protest. He had a rage within that drove him away from peaceful resolution and towards bloody revolution. To that end, despite being frequently ill, he continually displayed his eloquence and courage for the cause in the public domain, speaking at meetings and writing to journals, while also doing more clandestine work away from the gaze of the authorities. Inspiring passion in others is where he truly excelled. Absent rich British landlords taking rent from the poor Irish farmers working their land - Lalor described this as no more than: ‘the robber’s right by which the lands of this country are beholden in fee of the British Crown. I acknowledge no right of property in a small class which goes to abrogate the rights of a numerous people … I deny and challenge all such rights, howsoever founded or enforced. I challenge them as founded only on the code of the brigand, and enforced only by the sanction of the hangman.’44

  Another thundering editorial published in The Irish Felon on 1 July 1848 was addressed directly to the British government: ‘We hold the present existing government of this island, and all existing rights of property in our soil, to be mere usurpation and tyranny, and to be null and void as of moral effect; and our purpose is to abolish them utterly, or lose our lives in the attempt. The right founded on conquest and affirmed by laws made by the conquerors themselves, we regard as no other than the right of the robber on a larger scale. We owe no obedience to laws enacted by another nation without our assent; nor respect to assumed rights of property which are starving and exterminating our people.’45

  Fintan Lalor was equally forthright in what he and his people intended to do about it:

  ‘We have determined to set about creating, as speedily as possible, a military organisation.’46

  And even then he was only warming up, urging Ireland to ‘close for our final struggle with England’ to ensure the country could be ‘Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky … without suit or service, faith or fealty, rent or render, to any power under Heaven’.47

  ‘Remember this,’ he famously wrote in another article for The Irish Felon on 22 July 1848, his words strong enough to echo through the ages, ‘that somewhere, somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made … 48 Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green for ever?’49

  In the face of this passion made public - a very dangerous pursuit when being hanged for treason was a real possibility - Patrick Lalor’s relationship with his son became so strained that it was close to rupture. The father feared the consequence of his son’s revolutionary zeal.

  Less than a week after publishing that last diatribe, brave Fintan Lalor was arrested and thrown into prison. His work, however, would go on. All over Ireland, others too had been rising.

  In Tipperary, Irishmen of the Young Ireland movement had launched a nationalist revolt against English rule, standing their ground against British forces in nothing less than a cabbage patch, intent on declaring an independent Irish republic. True, the revolt had been crushed by the British forces and many of the local lads arrested, convicted and transported to Australia for sedition, but it was a start!

  While the revolutionaries needed the Irish peasants to rise and join them in the revolt, the most urgent concern of the peasantry at this point was to simply feed themselves as the potato famine bit deeper and deeper, taking the lives of no fewer than one million Irish. For many, the only way out appeared to be to actually get out, sell their belongings for whatever they could and secure passage for themselves and their families on ships bound elsewhere - with the United States of America and Australia being favourites.

  As to Fintan Lalor, though subsequently released from prison because he was so ill, he died not long afterwards and was buried an Irish hero. The famed Irish patriot Charles Gavan Duffy would describe him as ‘the most original and intense of all the men who have preached revolutionary politics in Ireland’.50

  Though the youngest Lalor had deeply admired his eldest brother’s political passion, 21-year-old Peter was a far quieter type of man. Educated at Dublin’s prestigious Trinity College (despite his Catholicism) where he studied hard to be a civil engineer - he really preferred building things to tearing them down - he had not the time, interest or disposition to become involved in the nuts and bolts, the cloak and dagger, the fire and brimstone needed to stoke a revolution. The last thing the Lalor family needed at this point was more trouble, and the quietly spoken Peter steered clear of it - well clear of it.

  Like so many of his compatriots, Peter began to contemplate joining the millions of Irish who were leaving. In those new lands, there were apparently thousands of acres to spare, enough to build a whole new life upon, a place where a people could prosper.

  In Italy, meanwhile, a close equivalent to the Young Ireland movement was La Giovine Italia - Young Italy - devoted to liberating the lands around Milan and Venice from the grip of the oppressive Austrian Empire so that a unified Italian republic could be formed.

  In the latter part of the 1840s, the most legendary of the military leaders in this struggle was Giuseppe Garibaldi, who encouraged the people to rise and join him, before subsequently supporting, by force of arms, the Roman Republic.

  One of his citizens-turned-soldier was a highly educated 32-year-old former seminarian by the name of Raffaello Carboni, hailing from the northern Italian town of Urbino. Physically, he was a small man, but some clues to his rather flamboyant passion for the cause at hand were provided by his flowing red hair and beard, the flashing quixotic look he had in his eyes and the fact that he generated such energy that he had a great deal of trouble keeping still. In times of peace, this energy led him to learn five languages and as many instruments, travel all over Europe, become an author, journalist and composer. In times of war, an activist on many political fronts, it led him to the battlefront under Garibaldi.

  Where there was action, there was Carboni. In the course of battle he received no fewer than three wounds, including a particularly bad one to his left leg. He escaped with his life - just - and though there was no diminution in his passion for the cause, still he decided it would be wiser to leave Italy for a time.

  Now, if America was spared such uprisings it was because their own revolt against iniquitous rule had alread
y occurred some three-quarters of a century earlier with the American War of Independence, and their own republic had taken a strong hold.

  And yet there, too, something far more intoxicating than revolution was in the air.

  In California in late January 1848, a building foreman named John Marshall was just completing construction on a sawmill by the American River for his boss John Sutter, at a place called Sutter’s Mill, near Coloma, when something amazing happened. Having allowed the natural flow of the river to widen and deepen the tailrace overnight, the next morning he noticed a shiny metal in the channel bed. It was … sort of … golden.

  Taking it to Sutter, the two had it tested and the news was confirmed: it was gold.

  Marshall was elated, Sutter … deflated.

  The joy that men have felt through the ages at finding buried treasure is all the more elevated when the treasure is a gift from Mother Nature herself. However, Sutter felt the equally familiar fear of one already wealthy who realises his whole world risks being upended at the hands of others, others less worthy, who are seeking an entirely different type of wealth.

  For all that, because Sutter had huge plans in this area - not just for a lumber mill but for building an entire agricultural empire - he managed to convince Marshall to keep quiet about the discovery … for the moment.

  Yet gold - gold! - and secrecy simply do not go together. Since forever, there has been something about that lustrous, shiny metal that makes men whisper excitedly to confidants, who inevitably whisper the news to others, and others still, until those whispers in the wind amount to a breeze, a blow and then a gale, until a full-blown storm is underway.

  It was not long after the news reached San Francisco, a small outpost of just 1000 people, that newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan set up a store to sell gold prospecting supplies. ‘A tall man, darkly handsome, whose hair fell in soft brown waves to his shoulders from under a broad-brimmed beaver hat, he was soon to be seen strutting down the main street clutching in his right hand a vial of gold. ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’ announced Brannan.

  He was a newspaper publisher - why not put it on the front page? The answer was simple: after the journalists and production staff found out what the following day’s article was, they had all simply left for the goldfields and there was no-one left to put the paper out and …

  And what is that sound?

  What sound?

  That … rushing sound!

  It was the sound of vast swathes of humanity moving, by every means of locomotion imaginable, up every path, track and road they could find - coming from all directions - towards the spot on the American River where gold had been found. The 1849 gold rush had begun within days of Brannan broadcasting the news, and Sutter was soon proven quite right in his fears. For not only were his own workers among those who abandoned their posts on his lumber mills to pursue gold, but the once quiet spot was soon inundated with hundreds and then thousands of would-be miners - many of them veterans of the just finished war against Mexico - who stole his cattle, ‘harvested’ his crops and took over his land. He was soon ruined, not that anybody particularly noticed or cared. They were too busy going after gold, and finding it!

  News of the find reached Europe in mid-October51 1848, where it caused a fevering of the brow of many men who immediately left for California, and a scratching of the brows of the two German intellectuals who had penned The Communist Manifesto: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their views of the economic world had simply not encompassed this.

  As Engels put it in a letter to Marx, the discovery of gold was a case ‘not provided for in the Manifesto: creation of large new markets out of nothing’.52

  This would require some more analysis. Who knew what effect such a discovery would have on the war between the economic classes? One thing was certain: the world was indeed turning upside down now that the working class was suddenly becoming rich, and many a rich man who had previously become wealthy on the back of that working-class labour now denied him was going broke!

  And all of it at a time when the oppressed classes across the world were getting themselves organised to demand the rights so long denied them. Who knew just what changes these two powerful forces - arising at the same time in history and both attacking the established order - would work on the world, even in its most remote parts?

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM GOLDEN FLEECE TO GOLD ITSELF …

  Potent as was the wonderful lamp of Aladdin, and magnificent as were its successes, the power of gold has equalled in its marvellous effects all that the warm orient fancy has pictured for us in the Arabian Nights. Gold has done even more than ever mere magician achieved. It certainly has operated magically in Australia, and in no part of the country has it created greater marvels than in Ballarat … 1

  W. B. Withers in History of Ballarat

  Gold rush!

  In Australia, the good tidings of what is happening in California breaks on 23 December 1848, when, under the banner headline NEW GOLD MINE, The Sydney Morning Herald announces:

  We have received, per Euphemia, dates from California to the 20th of June … The only item of interest is the news from the gold diggers - other matters receive no attention. The whole country is in a state of turmoil, and everybody is flying to the gold region to reap a fortune. All the seaport towns are deserted. Out of a population of nearly one thousand, San Francisco only contains about fifty or sixty souls, and these would leave were it possible. The news of the gold discoveries has spread with lightning speed, and the minister, merchant, artisan, mechanic, farmer, labourer, and loafer, have all gone to seek their fortune. Farms and crops are deserted, and all branches of business are at a stand … 2

  It is fascinating news, with one particular complication: where exactly is California? Most Australians have never heard of it. Quickly enough, consultation with the atlas reveals it is a region on the west coast of the United States of America, on the other side of the Pacific from the east coast of Australia. This is a tad problematic as no regular shipping lines run between the two coasts, but such is the clamour to cross over that within a bare few months there is many a ship seen splitting the heads of Sydney’s Port Jackson and sailing into the swell directly north-east, laden with thousands of men eager to try their luck on these new diggings.

  As a matter of fact, in time there are so many men leaving, even whole families, that it threatens the very stability of the colony. For without all those men, who will run the farms, the foundries and factories, the stores and silos, not to mention repair the roads and shepherd the sheep? Who will do the work necessary to make the colony grow and become strong in this oft-hostile continent? With just 200,000 people in the entire country, it simply cannot sustain the continued leaching of able-bodied men to foreign goldfields. There seems to be only one answer: Australia must find its own gold.

  In the meantime, they would just have to put up with the heavy exodus of men.

  11 November 1850, Melbourne, news is received at ‘The Chalet’

  If there is a little bit of Europe in Melbourne at this time, it is to be found at the end of the long carriage driveway on the estate of Jolimont en Murs, past the grotto, shrubberies and bountiful diamond-and-sickle-shaped garden beds in the latest style, to the flowering-creeper-adorned house where Charles La Trobe and his family live. It is a place known by many a loyal subject as ‘The Chalet’ for its uniquely Continental form.

  ‘Small as our establishment is,’ La Trobe had described it to his older sister Charlotte in England, ‘I assure you that there is not a more comfortable, well regulated and more tasty one in this part of the world both without and within.’3

  Though modest by London standards, the estate is really something compared to the rest of Melbourne and, though the setting is a triumph of taste rather than treasure, at least the glassware is crystal and the silverware actual silver. Invitations are highly prized and, on this particular night, while Charles La Trobe preside
s at the head of the table and one of the guests is regaling the assembly with a very jolly story of how in India - if you can believe it! - they use leaves of the banana plant for plates, he is interrupted by the sound of thundering hooves and carriage wheels coming to a halt on the gravel driveway. In an instant, the insistent pounding of at least two sticks comes on the door. Whoever has arrived is in a desperate hurry.

  Charles La Trobe is not perturbed, however, and as one of the servants answers the summons he neatens up his neckerchief and comments that perhaps the pounding on the door has come from ‘a new governor in search of a night’s lodging!’4

  Begging your leave, Your Honour, but the new arrivals prove to be the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, William Nicholson, and his immediate predecessor in the post, Augustus Frederick Adolphus Greeves. Nicholson, who for some reasons has a rag tied around one of his fingers, is flourishing an Adelaide newspaper that has just arrived - highly prized, for that city usually gets its news from England between five and eight days earlier than Melbourne.

  ‘Your Honour,’ he says, ‘allow me to draw your attention to the fact that the Separation Bill has passed through both Houses. The news is spreading quickly, and I shall be unable to restrain the people.’5

  La Trobe, of course, understands only too well the import of the revelation, that the British Parliament had actually passed this Separation Bill on 1 August, a little over three months earlier. It is what his colony has been straining towards for well over a decade: separation from New South Wales. It means that its six parliamentarians will return from the New South Wales Legislative Council in Sydney, and, if elected or appointed, instead be part of a separate Legislative Council set up in Melbourne …