The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (49 page)

Hopkins then struck another officer and shouted that he wanted to be discharged from the police.
The exhibition he made on the Gold Fields
, worried Taylor,
was calculated to bring disgrace on the force.

It wouldn't have taken much. The police cohort at Ballarat did not exactly float on a tide of public esteem. Reports from Inspector Gordon Evans to Melbourne throughout 1854 attest to either the low standard of recruits or the effects of the conditions on formerly upstanding fellows. Police constable John Reagan was suspended for being
not shaved, dirty, and having all the appearance of an habitual drunkard
. Daniel Wright was
discharged with bad character as he was frequently under the influence of liquor
. Trooper James Butler was transferred to the foot police due to being a
very slovenly man who knows nothing of horses
. Arthur Shirvington was imprisoned in the Camp lockup for two days after he went absent without leave all night and
returned home drunk and fighting in public houses
. Acting Sergeant John Dougherty was found in Canadian Gully
lying in a state of stupidity from the effects of drink
. Thomas Milne was sentenced to three days' imprisonment for being drunk on guard. In August the lockup keeper requested the sub-inspector to accompany him to the prison
to see the state of the Sentry posted there…the sentry was lying on his face and hands insensibly drunk, his arms were placed by the side of the door…the man was in such a state that he was obliged to be carried away on the shoulders of another man
. Constable John Regan was given three days' imprisonment for
making use of abusive and highly obscene language to Sgt Rutter while in the execution of his duty
. The bench sentenced Constable William Thompson to three months' imprisonment for habitual drunkenness. Thompson was
presently labouring under a very severe attack of Delirium tremens
.

There is a theme emerging.

By late August, Evans was asked to explain what he intended to do about his force's appalling behaviour and morale. He responded that he couldn't discharge all the men whom he rightfully should due to their
inveterate habitual drunkenness
. If he took such drastic action, he wouldn't have enough men to do the job. The number of commissioned officers was already much below its authorised number and those who were in the Camp
frequently complain of their duties being rendered more arduous in consequence of this insufficiency
. Guards on night shift were forced to perform on the following day various backbreaking tasks (including carting wood and water, which should have been the job of a paid labourer)
and frequently that of searching for unlicensed miners
. He also wished to point out:

the great discomfort and hardships endured by the men during the past winter owing to the want of proper accommodation and which no doubt of itself tended to make them unhappy and discontented, there being no Barracks and on many occasions no stretchers or blankets for them in the miserable tents they were compelled to live in.

Many men had either applied for discharges, committed some heinous act in the hope of being discharged or simply deserted. In July, one brave and uncommonly literate constable, L. H. Webb, had written directly to the chief commissioner of police requesting a discharge. He knew the proper procedure was to go through Ballarat's inspector, but he was loath to do so because of Evans' past form in taunting and bullying his men.
I am not a drunken soldier
, wrote Webb,

I can pluck up spirit to complain of oppression… petty tyranny should be restrained and the advantages of position should not be a vantage ground wherein the officer may insult and wound the feelings of an inferior with impunity.

Was this a trap or a digger? The language employed by those on the hill and those on the flats to express grievance was eerily similar.

The third sibling squabbling over its puny share of the pie of the civil service and the police was the military. By the winter of 1854, the members of the 40th Regiment stationed at Ballarat were still housed in leaky, breezy tents. The garrison included some army wives. Corporal John Neill, an Irishman, lived in the Camp with his wife, Ellen, and their baby, Fanny, who had been born in Waterford shortly before her parents' departure for Australia. Neill kept a diary that speaks poignantly of the conflict between his family duties and his military role. He wrote of having to coax his daughter to sleep in her cot on the hill,
only to have her awaken screaming
as gun shots rang out on the flats each night.
⁷
Ellen Neill was certainly not the only military wife in the Camp, but since the army didn't keep records of its wives, there is no information about any others.

There was, however, a surfeit of correspondence regarding all other matters of daily intercourse. From June to December, the military leadership waged a campaign of paper warfare on the Colonial Office, with the strategic aim of securing a new barracks for the soldiers stationed at Ballarat. A barrage of letters flew between Ballarat and Melbourne. As the Camp was so overcrowded, the military proposed constructing a new building
adjacent to but not within the present limits
of the Camp. The Colonial Office prevaricated, suggesting it planned to sell the present Camp site and build a
far more commodious
Camp of stone buildings on a site one hundred yards from the present one. It was clear to all, however, that this could not happen. Town allotments had already been sold all around the Camp, which was now boxed in by private property. There was simply no room to expand.
It was a great error in the first instance not to have made a larger Reserve for the Government Establishments
, wrote Assistant Engineer Henry Lane—if for no other reason than that the Camp's congested tangle of wood and canvas structures was a perfect firetrap. One spark and the whole place would go up in flames.

Meanwhile, once the police command got wind of the military's intention to station its contingent outside the Camp's perimeter, it made a rearguard pitch to secure any new barracks for itself. Who would get the improved quarters, should they ever be built, was now in dispute. Robert Rede conceded
the impossibility of ever making the Ballarat Camp a good one
.
⁸

If it was tense and uncomfortable on the inside, there was no relief to be had outside the Camp. Relations between the mining community and the police, soldiers and government officials had been on the nose for months.
There are no Standing Orders for the guidance of the Force,
one man wrote anonymously to the Police Commission of Enquiry,
consequently the men are very often led unwittingly into the committal of acts of harshness which inflames the Public Mind against the Government and its employees.
⁹
The informant suggested that issuing a rulebook to every officer would be a good start to rebuilding trust. But it would take more than an etiquette manual to restore public confidence. After the Eureka Hotel riot, the serfs began to smell fear in their masters. On 22 October, Thomas Pierson recorded in his diary that the soldiers and police
don't dare leave the Camp
. People would
hoot
at them in the street, jeer as they rode high in their saddles, shout
Joe! Joe! Joe!
—a snappy goldfields pejorative for the pigs, the filth.

And there was precedent for what could happen when local outrage against the British imperial ruling class, and its blatant disregard for citizens' aspirations to democratic rights and freedoms, boiled over. In Canada in 1837, eight hundred followers of a popular reformist movement marched on Toronto armed with pitchforks, staves and guns, in an attempt to overthrow the oligarchic administration and establish self-government. Local militias mercilessly put down the uprising. But the Upper Canada rebellions of 1838 ultimately led to the introduction of responsible government and the end of authoritarian rule in Canada. Gordon Evans' father was a general in the British army stationed in Canada and may have been stationed in Quebec—a witness to the carnage.

On 27 October, the day after Andrew McIntyre and Thomas Fletcher were arbitrarily arrested for their alleged role in the Eureka Hotel arson, a plan was hatched to defend the indefensible Camp.

There was more pissing on posts happening in the Ballarat Camp than all the chained guard dogs of the diggings could manage in a month of Sundays. As chief of the civil force, Resident Commissioner Robert Rede was theoretically entitled to choose his post. Or was he? In-fighting about accommodation was just the acquisitive tip of a looming iceberg of power struggles within the Camp.

The foremost clash was between Rede (aged thirty-nine) and Police Inspector Gordon Evans (aged twenty-nine). Evans was appointed to Ballarat in February 1854, Rede in May. They were both on a salary of £700 a year. As we have seen from the parliamentary fallout over the Eureka Hotel fire, both manipulated the curious power vacuum when it suited them to avoid ultimate responsibility. But the fact is that these men were engaged in a dispute that began in June over the Camp's hierarchy and demarcation. The conflict started when Evans wrote to the chief commissioner of police in Melbourne regarding Rede's requests to station more police at Creswick Creek. Was Evans in charge of his men's movements or not? Why was Rede involving himself in matters of policing? By late September, the dispute was putatively resolved when a circular was sent from Melbourne stating that at all times Rede was to have paramount authority.
¹⁰
Evans was clearly still smarting about this when he blamed Rede for the riot outside Bentley's Hotel.

The riot was the unanticipated turning point in Rede's one-upmanship with Evans. He now had to back up his dominant position: prove that the powers-that-be in Melbourne had shown faith in the right fellow. He wasn't just demonstrating to the irritated and unruly digging community that insubordination would not be tolerated. He was performing for his own troops as well. And not all in Melbourne were in one mind about Rede's fitness to command a sinking ship. A week after the hotel riot, the chief commissioner of police publicly recorded his opinion that
in consequence of the still excited state of this Gold Field [Ballarat]… it is probable that we may not be able to avoid a collision
. In the face of
a powerful mob
—in particular
the Tipperary Mob, one of the most powerful and troublesome to contend with and who seem bent on mischief
—the chief commissioner called for a reinforcement of police numbers. The Camp, he believed, was
impossible to defend
.
¹¹
Did Rede take it as a personal slight or a judgment on the architectural and geographic insecurity of the site? It was Rede who ordered the arrest of Fletcher and McIntyre
to give a fearful lesson
.
¹²
But a lesson to whom?

What Ballarat's resident commissioner needed was an ally. Instead, he had Gordon Evans.

When Evans was appointed as police inspector of Ballarat in February 1854, his appointment met with
great dissatisfaction
from both residents and the force he was to command. On first hearing the news, police officers piled their arms and refused to serve under Evans, while the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
labelled his appointment
a decided insult
to the inhabitants of Ballarat. At twenty-nine, Evans had already made a lifetime's worth of enemies. In March, the diggers and storekeepers of Ballarat got up a petition against the appointment, outlining instances of his past abuses of power and insisting that
no self-respecting man will submit to the control of a tyrannical Inspector
. The
GEELONG ADVERTISER
, reporting the signing of the petition, warned of the
rapidly increasing dangerous position of disorder
under Evans.
¹³
This was all before Evans and Rede began their cutthroat pas de deux. Frederick Vern later wrote that
it was the sneering conduct of Captain Evans
during the meeting to protest Scobie's murder
that was the direct cause of the burning down of the Eureka Hotel.
Evans drew heated criticism from many quarters, but the most open challenge to his fitness for office, the loudest call for the redress of wrongs inflicted by his hand came from a woman. The stone was cast by one of those troublesome non-commissioned officers' wives.