The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (4 page)

It makes sense, then, that the women of Eureka did not begin, in Yalom's words, ‘to create out of disaster an art of survival and transcendence' until much later in the nineteenth century, when permanent homes had been made, families reared and the institutions and social structures of colonial life firmly established.

By the thirtieth anniversary of Eureka, in 1884, some women made a conscious decision to cut a swathe through the masculinist rhetoric that filled the papers and strode the podiums. In July 1884, when Ballarat was in full swing planning for the biggest-yet Eureka commemoration and its associated civic boosterism, this appeared in the
BALLARAT STAR
:

The Eureka Stockade
(by a Lady who was there)

Ballarat, the golden,

Onward, onward go

And may nothing ever

Thy prosperity o'erthrow

May all your sons and daughters

A glorious future see

And ne'er forget the old, old spot

Where we fought for liberty.
⁸

The Lady Who Was There wrapped her civic pride around a collectivist morality to which she clearly felt an abiding sense of kinship. The Eureka fight was her fight, and she publicly claimed a direct part in the spectacle of democratic progress.

On 28 November, another anonymous woman wrote a letter to the editor of the
BALLARAT STAR
with a less exalted but equally significant assertion. (The fact that these correspondents didn't commit their names to paper indicates both the strength of Victorian-era restrictions on women's public role and the intense local controversy that Eureka memory still evoked.) Identifying herself as
a Female of '54
, the woman disputed the memory of a previous correspondent—none other than Eureka hero, town father and Member of the Legislative Assembly J. B. Humffray—who declared, despite persistent rumours to the contrary, that no one had been shot by the authorities on that grim Monday when Charles Evans watched the funeral processions.

The woman wrote:
I for one was wounded on that night, and by the soldiers too.
A bullet fired from the Government Camp had grazed her head and
completely carried away hair and skin from the crown to the forehead
. She had waited thirty years to tell this story, and there was more:

I felt stupid for a moment or so, I then caught my baby in my arms, and tried to run across the flat, having only my night-dress on. I tried to run with my child before me in a stooping manner, for the soldiers were still firing. My night-dress became entangled in my feet and I fell to the ground. At that moment, a cloud passed over the moon. It became dark instantly and the firing of the soldiers stopped.

This correspondent was in no doubt of the dramatic conclusion to her story:
Had the moon not clouded at the moment that it did, I should not have been here to tell you this.
⁹

Another woman was not so lucky. On the centenary of Eureka in 1954, thousands of people gathered in Ballarat on a weekend of torrential summer rain. Townsfolk who had braved the storm marched to City Hall, where a local actor, Mr Bernard D'Arcy, read ‘the Lalor oration'. The
ARGUS
noted that one of the sodden attendees, Mr L. Moyle, had travelled from distant Upwey in order to honour his grandmother, Mrs Catherine Smith, who was shot in the side at Eureka and died three weeks later from her wounds.
¹⁰

Was there more than one woman who died that brutal December day?

One thing is certain. The women of Eureka felt an unbreakable bond of belonging with an epic community and influential history, and they wanted their participation recognised and remembered.

Catherine Bentley, Anastasia Hayes, Margaret Johnston and the murdered wife of a Stockader are calling us across a century and a half. Forcing us to reimagine life on the Victorian goldfields and to interrogate the received wisdom of a masculinist Eureka. The material and documentary residue of their lives is everywhere: clinging to dusty files at the Public Record Office, trapped within the yellowing pages of newspapers, transmitted by generations of descendants. It demands that we ask new questions.

What if the hot-tempered, free-wheeling gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? And what if their wives and families weren't far away across the watery wastes, but right by their sides? What if there were women and children inside the Eureka Stockade, defending their rights while defending themselves against a barrage of military-issue bullets?

And what if the soldiers who were firing upon civilians—including women—were themselves husbands and fathers, with wives and babies crouched not two miles away within a sandbagged Government Camp?

How do the answers to these previously neglected questions change what over one hundred and fifty years of Eureka scholarship, commemoration and celebration have taught us about the so-called ‘birthplace of Australian democracy'? Who, in fact, were the midwives to that precious delivery?

And if the birth attendants included ratbag women as well as reckless men, did their vision of democracy extend beyond the abolition of a poll tax to wider subversions of old-world tyranny? Did the unbiddable women of Ballarat claim a stake for themselves as members of the popular mass movement for political reform? Did they too want the vote? Tax relief? Justice?

This book asks these questions—and, like most works of history based on primary sources, the answers throw up many more conundrums besides. Why did Ballarat experience an explosive baby boom in the mid-1850s? Why was there a routinely observed spike in domestic violence on the Victorian goldfields, which garnered the ignominious laurel of ‘the wife-bashing capital of the world'? Why were so many self-made women working alongside those famously entrepreneurial men? Why did Caroline Chisholm—the woman who once graced our five-dollar note—send a boatload of Jewish girls from London to Melbourne in 1853? And why were there so many men dressing up in female attire?

Then there are the elephant-in-the-room questions.

If there were women in and around the Eureka Stockade that brutal Sunday morning, what other outrages might have been perpetrated against them by the battle's frenzied victors?

And the big question, hanging over my checklist of challenges like a storm cloud: why haven't we gone down this road before? As students in an all-girls school, taught by a female history teacher, why didn't I or my classmates ever think behind the words in our textbooks? Why did not
one
of us ever think to ask, where are
we
in this story?

Like Henry Reynolds' ground-breaking
Why Weren't We Told?,
which shattered the myth that the colonisation of Australia was a benign and uncontested process, this is the first book to retell the Eureka story complete: as it was.

Women were there. They mined for gold and much else of economic value besides. They paid taxes. They fought for their rights. And they were killed in the crossfire of a nascent new world order.

PART 1

TRANSITIONS

ONE

A VIRGIN COUNTRY

You could hear Ballarat before seeing it.

It took Charles Evans a full week to walk to the diggings. Leaving Melbourne on 9 November 1853, Charles, his brother George and travelling companion John Basson Humffray dragged a bullock dray up long steep hills and down treacherous ravines. The dray became mercilessly bogged on some stretches of the road; on others, it was all the Englishmen could do to keep the cart from overturning in potholes, sunk deep by the ambitions of thousands of hopeful immigrants.
The undertaking was far from pleasant
, wrote Charles in his diary. But there were compensations. Crossing a creek and preparing to camp for the night, Charles noted that:

the scene from the hills was lovely beyond expression—the sun had set and a mellow twilight and the silvery rays of a full moon shed a soft light over the beautiful landscape…I can not remember any scene in my own country…to excel it—I was going to say, perhaps even to equal it.

A series of narrow ravines marked the long-awaited end to the ninety-mile journey from Melbourne.
We found to our alarm
, wrote Charles,
that we had one of the most dangerous and precipitous
roads to descend which I ever saw attempted
. The final stretch of road ascended to a high tableland, and it was up this last incline that Charles Evans finally trudged, beckoned by the siren call of a scene he could hear but in no way envision. Atop the last gully, he was surrounded by eucalyptus and casuarina trees laced with wild cherry and honeysuckle. Another chronicler arriving in 1853, Thomas McCombie, recorded his first impressions of the Golden City:

A confused sound like the noise of a mighty multitude broke upon our ears and a sudden turn of the road brought us in full view of Ballarat. I freely confess that no scene have I ever witnessed made so deep and lasting an impression on my mind.
¹

First, there was the barking of thousands of dogs chained outside tents and mine shafts, marking territory. Then there were the horse bells, the crack of whips, the shrill chorus of parrots and the mirth of the kookaburra. The
laughing jackass
, newcomers like young John Deegan called it—was the bird greeting or mocking them? There was nothing ambiguous about
the uproarious blasphemy of bullock drivers
, their oaths echoing across the basin.
Over all
, Deegan wrote years later,
that vague, indescribably murmurous sound, which seems to pervade the air where a crowd is in active motion
was his first impression, and it would never leave him. It was like a
genuine fairy tale
.

Charles Evans made his final approach in the morning, but the bewitching effect was particularly astonishing for those weary travellers who arrived at night. Henry Mundy, a twenty-year-old shepherd who had migrated from England with his parents in 1844, walked from Geelong to Ballarat to find his fortune. As Mundy later recalled,
the noises and scenes were indescribable
.
²
Standing on the ridge, he could see only the twinkle of a thousand campfires, like a mirror image of the night sky. Yet the noise was still bellowing. During the evening meal,
the talking and yelling was incessant
. Later, there was the ubiquitous firing of guns and pistols, a release of the day's pent-up emotion, and accompanying the firearms, the ever-present rolling choir of the dogs. After the ritual gunfire ceased,
accordions, concertinas, fiddles, flutes, clarionettes, cornets, bugles, all were set going each with his own tune
. The effect, said Mundy, was
deafening
.

Bug-eyed and prickle-eared, those who arrived during the prosperous months of late 1853 looked down upon a sprawling tent city. In the foreground lay the vast level diggings of East Ballarat. A creek wound through a valley of low, flat mounds and conical hills. Rising in the distance, Bakery Hill; and on the spur, the site of the original 1851 strikes, Golden Point. Perched on the plateau above the diggings was the Camp, home to
the aristocracy of the canvas city of Ballarat
. This is how Thomas McCombie described the officers of the Gold Fields Commission, police and assorted civil servants entrusted with administering the impetuous throng of gold seekers. Nestled beside the Camp on a neat grid of streets was an embryonic township of stores and homes, some confident enough to be constructed of timber.

Encircling the whole was a ring of green, the remnant fringe of a thick scrub that had once covered the entire basin.
The diggers
, observed English journalist William Howitt,
seem to have two especial propensities, those of firing guns and felling trees…Every tree is felled, every feature of Nature is annihilated
.
³
The majority of timber was used for tent poles and mine shaft supports, but in late 1853, Ballarat was also a ravenous camping ground, gorging on wood for heat, light and fuel.
The blue smoke of ten thousand campfires curled slowly upward
, observed John Deegan,
and blended with the haze of the summer evening
.

There were so many people going about their business, remarked Thomas McCombie from his ledge on the ravine, that
the ground actually appeared as if in motion
. From this distance, the people of Ballarat resembled a pulsating swarm. Henry Mundy too was struck by the
lively busy hive
, the throb of a community in constant motion, its kinetic charge heightened by the mad flapping of hundreds of flags.
Tents and stores in the flats, on the hills, in the gullies, everywhere one cast his eyes
, noted Mundy,
every store had two or three flags flying; flags of all nations but principally the Union Jack.
In the face of all the overwhelming novelty, a Ballarat greenhorn like Charles Evans could at least gravitate towards the familiarity of his national ensign.

It was like some grand dream…an entrance into fairy-land
, wrote McCombie. He stood for a moment and watched the frenzied bustle. Listened to the din of thousands of cradles rocking gold out of clay on either side of a creek, startled as diggers popped in and out of holes like frantic moles.
It was a scene altogether so novel, unexpected and unlike the dull every-day world
, McCombie recorded. The view from the hill was so extraordinary that, once venturing into the basin—a taut geological drum vibrating with human enterprise—one could only anticipate
a new order of things
.