The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (74 page)

15
Coronial inquest into the death of James Scobie. PROV VPRS 5527/01.

16
Court reporters followed the case in both the
Age
and the
Argus
from 23 October to 24 November. Witness depositions and petitions are held in the Eureka Historical Collection at PROV VPRS 5527/01.

17
This observation is drawn from D'Ewes' own account.

18
See John Molony's
Eureka
, 55.

19
PROV VPRS 1189/92.

20
Argus
, 4 November 1854.

21
Alexander Dick describes the atmosphere of fear and alarm in Melbourne in his diary.

22
Melbourne Monthly Magazine
, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1855, p. 41.

23
Geelong Advertiser
, 18 October 1854.

24
Argus
, 18 November 1854.

25
PROV VPRS 5527/02

26
Argus
, 2 November 1854.

27
PROV VPRS 1189/468

28
McFarlane's account is based solely on the archival sources held by PROV.

29
Fifty years later, on 5 December 1904, Elizabeth Rowlands published a letter in the
Ballarat Courier
recounting her involvement in the events of 1854.

30
Riot at Ballarat
, Victorian Parliamentary Papers.

31
My account of the burning of Bentley's Hotel is drawn from evidence given to the Select Committee, which began hearing evidence on 2 November and tabled its report to Parliament on 21 November.

32
Emily's story is recounted in
Records of Pioneer Women
.

33
PROV VPRS 3253/60.

34
Catherine sent petitions for pecuniary aid and compensation in late 1854, 17 May 1855 and 14 November 1855. She claimed a loss of £30,000. PROV VPRS 1189/95 M55/912, S55/14.772.

35
Ballarat Times
, 2 September 1854.

36
Ellen owes her choice of words to the Great Litany of the
Book of Common Prayer
.

37
This is the document that Andrew Crowley showed me during our interview. He has since donated it to the Gold Museum, Ballarat. See plate section 3, and transcript, page 479.

38
Argus
, 4 November 1854.

39
Argus
, 13 November 1854.

TEN: HIGH CAMP

1
PROV VPRS 1189/153, K54/13.392. The submission was
not entertained being an anonymous communication.

2
This unofficial census is drawn from the account of John D'Ewes.

3
PROV VPRS 1189/91, G54/6826.

4
Geelong Advertiser
, 2 March 1854.

5
PROV VPRS 937/10. The letter is dated 20 March 1854. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and details pertaining to the Camp are drawn from police reports contained in the PROV series VPRS 937/10.

6
PROV VPRS 1189/164 G54/10.805 and H54/10533.

7
Neill's diary is used in Neil Smith's book,
Soldiers Bleed Too
. The diary is in private hands. Smith's self-published book endeavours to ‘put the case from the Redcoat view', concluding that ‘these men fought honourably and with courage in what was a difficult and hostile environment'.

8
PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54/14.002.

9
PROV VPRS 1189/153, K54/13.392.

10
PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11824.

11
PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11824.

12
PROV VPRS 1189/92 H54/11836.

13
Geelong Advertiser,
10 March 1854.

14
All details of Catherine McLister's case are drawn from the PROV series VPRS 1189/153, K54/12.242.

15
Robert McLister's death certificate in 1874 lists his profession as ‘constable', indicating a return to the police force at some time subsequent to his wife's death.

16
Note that Geoffrey Blainey has made the point that the Eureka story has conventionally been written from the perspective of the miners only in his essay, ‘Eureka: Why Hotham Decided to Swoop'. For an unusual approach to the emotional lives of soldiers, see Joanna Bourke,
An Intimate History of Killing.

ELEVEN: CROSSING THE LINE (REPRISE)

1
Ballarat Times
, 11 November 1854.

2
Ballarat Times
, 25 October 1854.

3
Ballarat Times
, 25 October 1854.

4
Geelong Advertiser,
28 October 1854.

5
PROV VPRS 12882.1.

6
Gregory Blake puts this case strongly in
To Pierce the Tyrant's Heart
.

7
Ballarat Star,
6 December 1884.

8
Geelong Advertiser
, 3 November 1854.

9
Geelong Advertiser
, 28 October 1854.

10
Geelong Advertiser
, 30 October 1854.

11
Geelong Advertiser
, 30 October 1854.

12
Ballarat Times
, 11 November 1854.

13
PROV VPRS 1095 box 2.

14
My thanks to Andrew Vincent for the Latin translation.

15
Ballarat Times
, 8 September 1856.

16
See, for example, Edith Thomas's book,
Les Petroleuses
, translated in its English edition as
The Women Incendiaries
.

17
William Howitt reports the incident in
Land, Labour and Gold
.

18
Ballarat Times
, 15 August 1856.

19
PROV VPRS 5527/01.

20
Argus
, 1 November 1854. Detective Cummings later commenced legal proceedings for libel against the journalist, declaring that Mrs Bentley had not been handcuffed but rather had sat by the side of her co-accused Hance, who was cuffed.

21
Argus
, 20 November 1854.

22
Age
, 20 November 1854.

23
Argus
, 16 November 1854.

24
Argus
, 16 November 1854.

25
PROV VPRS 4066.01.

26
PROV VPRS 1085/08.

27
Argus
, 29 November 1854.

28
PROV VPRS 30/P/37.

29
The observations of W. H. Foster are drawn from the letters to his parents held in the State Library of Victoria.

30
PROV VPRS 1085/08.

31
PROV VPRS1189/92 K54/13219.

32
Keith Bowden makes this point in his study of Ballarat's doctors.

33
Ballarat Times
, 18 November 1854.

34
The context in which the word was used was ironic:
The rebels, as they are pleased to term us
, would not be conciliated while there was still corruption and double-dealing in the judiciary:
Geelong Advertiser
, 30 November 1854.

35
Geelong Advertiser
, 1 December 1854.

36
Geelong Advertiser
, 1 December 1854.

37
As reported by Howitt in
Land, Labour and Gold
.

38
Anne Beggs-Sunter, ‘Contesting the Flag: The Mixed Messages of the Eureka Flag', footnote 12.

39
Dorothy Wickham et al.,
The Eureka Flag: Our Starry Banner
, 11.

40
There is certainly evidence that in 1854 people visualised the Southern Cross as a star-studded Latin cross. In Hevelius's influential
Firmamentum
(1690), the first star atlas to depict the southern skies, Crux was depicted under the rear legs of Centaurus as a curved-edge Latin Cross riveted with a star on each of its four extremities. In
Purgatorio
, Dante attributed the cardinal virtues of Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude to the four brightest stars of the Southern Cross constellation. And in Alexander von Humbolt's
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent 1799-1804
, published in 1852, the popular scientist-explorer wrote:

A religious sentiment attaches them [the Spaniards] to a constellation the form of which recalls the sign of the faith planted by their ancestors in the deserts of the New World.

Von Humbolt drew his Crux with five stars contained within an angular cross.

Another sign of faith might have influenced the design of the Eureka Flag. Its five stars are eight-pointed. It is possible that this is because, in pattern-making terms, an eight-pointed star is the easiest to cut out quickly. But it is equally conceivable that the number of points was chosen with a less pragmatic view. In Christian religious iconography, the eight-pointed star is known as the Star of Redemption. Eight traditionally represents regeneration, hence the octagonal base of the baptismal font. (Noah also saved eight people on his ark and Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth.) So perhaps the eight-pointed Eureka stars symbolised new beginnings too: a new home, a new start, and now, a new and redemptive relationship of the governed to the laws that governed them. Early Fenian flags, flown by Irish republicans in the mid-nineteenth century, also employed eight-pointed stars.

41
Kristin Phillips on Youtube, 12 May 2013: ‘2010 Eureka Flag Conservator Kristin Phillips on conserving an Australian icon'. In August 2013 she added this in an email:

It would have taken longer than a couple of nights to make the flag. It is big. The cutting out and pinning would have been difficult without a reasonable space to work in. By my very rough calculation there are approximately twenty-nine metres of seams and the flat felled seam is double—requiring two rows of hand stitching—so that's effectively fifty-eight metres of sewing. Flat out, with the seam all ready to go and no pinning etc., you can sew at about a metre per half hour. So at best that would mean that the time it would take to hand sew the fifty-eight metres would be twenty-nine hours. But you have to cut it, pin it and work out how to physically fit the people around the flag, as you couldn't all be doing it at the same time. For example, as you sew around a star you need to move the flag around so your hand is in the right spot, which affects the other people working on it. I would think that this would effectively double the time required, so sixty hours at the very least; and, again, this is not including the time to cut it out and pin it.

42
Artlab Australia, Condition Assessment, Eureka Flag, May 2010.

43
PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54.13.511.

44
Geelong Advertiser
, 2 December 1854.

45
PROV VPRS 1085/08.

46
Ballarat Courier
, 5 December 1904.

47
PROV VPRS 1085/08.

48
Argus
, 11 April 1917. Frederick Vern later wrote that Lalor stepped forward because he was the only
public speaker
there at the time. Vern and Captain Ross were down at the Eureka.

49
John Molony claims that Kennedy's words are an old Scottish saying, 93.

50
Anne Diamond née Keane gave evidence to the Gold Fields Commission of Enquiry on 26 December 1854.

51
In his essay, ‘Eureka: Why Hotham Decided to Swoop', Geoffrey Blainey also argues that the Eureka Stockade was a strategic disaster, but for another reason. He argues that if the miners had fought a guerilla war, fanning out among the hills, bush and tents instead of barricading themselves in like sitting ducks, they could have ‘won'. Blainey takes too literal an idea of warfare here. The Stockade was symbolic, not strategic.

52
Vern claimed that although Lalor knelt down and swore to
protect each other
, he did not ask the miners to swear allegiance to the flag.

53
PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54.512.

54
PROV VPRS 1189/92 K54/13.570.

55
PROV VPRS 12882.3 no. 27.

56
Report of the Ballarat correspondent to the
Geelong Advertiser
, written at 5am on 1 December 1854.

TWELVE: BLOODY SUNDAY

1
The
Geelong Advertiser
(1 December 1954) noted that the
absence of drunken men
was
remarkable
.

2
Money
, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was described at the time as
a play which, for pathos, unexaggerated sentiment and elegant sarcasm, stands unrivalled in modern dramatic literature.
It premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1840.
Hobart Courier
, 7 October 1854.

3
Geelong Advertiser
, 2 December 1854.

4
Ballarat Times
, 3 December 1854.

5
Eyewitness H. R. Nicholls revealed this detail in his 1890 reminiscences.

6
The letter is quoted in Molony, though no source is given.

7
Interview with Stephen Cuming in
Ballarat Courier
, 3 December 1897.

8
Menstrual synchrony among co-habiting women is widely accepted in the scientific literature. Lunar synchrony is more controversial but has its champions within orthodox science. See, for example, W. B. Cutler and C. R. Garcia, ‘The Psychoneuroendocrinology of the Ovulatory Cycle of Women: A Review',
Psychoneuroendocrinology
, vol. 5, 1979, 89–111. In ‘Menstrual Synchrony—An Update and Review', C. A. Graham concludes that although menstrual synchrony is widely documented in scientific studies, the precise mechanisms involved and the adaptive function of menstrual synchrony are still not understood.
Human Nature
, vol. 2, issue 4, 1991, 293–311. There is an extensive literature of women's health and spirituality devoted to lunar menstrual synchrony. See, for example, Lara Owen,
Her Blood is Gold: Celebrating the Power of Menstruation
(San Francisco: Harper, 1993).

9
Evidence of policeman Robert Tully at the state trials:
Geelong Advertiser
, 28 February 1855.