Why The Eureka Rebellion Still Matters

Peter FitzSimons, author and journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald  and Sun-Herald has written Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution to investigate the hearts and minds of those on the battlefield, and those behind the scenes, bringing to life Australian legends on both sides of the rebellion. Peter Fitzsimons addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 4 February 2013. The paper which follows was taken from a transcript of Peter Fitzsimons’ speech.         

 WHY THE EUREKA REBELLION STILL MATTERS 

PETER FITZSIMONS

I’m delighted to address The Sydney Institute. When I’m in a room like this (not that I am often) I always love that line from our former Prime Minister Paul Keating where he said, “If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re really just camping out.” I don’t think there are any more magnificent cities in the world than this one.

After that introduction quite a few of you will be looking at me thinking, “Well, he looks like a former footballer, no doubt about that. There is no way on earth he looks like an author.” And if you are thinking that, you’re not the first to have so thought.

About 21 years ago, I experienced one of the more humiliating moments of my life. I was invited to the highly prestigious opening of the Rembrandt exhibition at the New South Wales Art Gallery, only because my sister-in-law was the curator who had brought it out from Holland. Before the exhibition, my sister had given me strict instructions how to wear the black tie properly, how to hold the champagne glass by the stem and advised not to guzzle and throw it down our throats – we sip and we converse and we move on.

I was desperately trying to fit in with the literati of the Sydney Arts world. And, I couldn’t help but notice the Director of the New South Wales Art Gallery, Edmund Capon, kept sneaking glances at me. It was as if he was thinking, “What kind of Neanderthal is this? Who has wandered into the New South Wales Art Gallery by mistake?” As we talked at some stage, I managed to work into the conversation that I had just finished my first book. He immediately brightened up, congratulated me and encouraged me to read another one.

In terms of writing this book on the Eureka affair, I’ll give you just a one or two minutes on its background. From the time I was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald – sometime around 30 May 1986 – I had a passion for writing. I loved it; that is what I wanted to do.

My first breakthrough book (if I can call it that) was writing a biography of Nick Farr-Jones. That was a fabulous way to start. Given that I was writing a biography of my best friend, who captained the Wallabies to the World Cup, Nick was a wonderfully colourful subject. He did everything from winning the World Cup to throwing a sand shoe at Alan Jones’ head in the dressing room. Sadly he missed.

I did several other sports books thereafter. The hardest book I did was in the late 1990s. I wrote a book about Kim Christian Beazley, former Labour opposition leader. The hardest book that I’ve ever done in my life. I knew so little about my subject when I began. After my first meeting with Kim in Canberra, I flew back to Sydney with what I thought was a triumph, sent an email to my editor-in-chief saying I’d just agreed to write Kim Beazley’s biography, and I might be needing some time off. He sent me back an email saying “Well done, I’m sure you’ll do yourself and the Herald proud. I think you should know, however, that Beazley is spelt with a ‘z’”. That book toughened me up because that line “what does not kill me makes me stronger” held true – that book nearly killed me.

I then did a quite a series of military books, oddly enough. I wrote a book on Nancy Wake which I thought would sell five or ten thousand copies, and it sold twenty times that. It was then that I realised there was a hunger for Australian history. So the next ten years was filled with Kokoda, Tobruk, Kingsford-Smith, Mawson and the best of the lot – the best I’ll ever do – on the shipwreck of the Batavia. So, now, I’ve got Eureka in the marrow of my bones. Many of my books would start from a position of profound ignorance. I would use that ignorance to tell the story, thinking that if I didn’t know the details or the building blocks for the story, perhaps the readers wouldn’t as well, and so could weave in some understanding of it.

But with Eureka, in my memory when I was perhaps five or six years old at the Mangrove Mountain Community Fair, there was a stockade and there were young boys in red coats and there were those of us who were rebels. And I remember being very glad that I was a rebel because I was on the side of the goodies. Then, ten years later, I was in a history class at Knox, in Rex Ward’s fourth year class. I was doing what I always did in history class – counting the bricks from the top to the bottom and multiplying them from the right to the left to work out how many bricks there were in the room because I found that it helped to pass the time.

Rex started talking about Eureka and I listened. This was the first time I had really listened. What a fabulous story it was – partly because it’s a great story in its own right. But for me, as a young Australian, the great thing about it was that it wasn’t a French revolution, or a Russian revolution or an American civil war. It was a great Australian story.

The genesis of this particular book was also that I’m on the board of AusFlag, an organisation devoted to developing an Australian flag, unencumbered by a foreign flag on it. I always cite the line from the American comedian Jerry Seinfeld who came out to Australia in the year 2000 and said “I love your flag. Great Britain at night”.

One night we were at Crows Nest, sitting around the Ausflag board table having dinner, and going through submissions of various flags that our fellow citizens had put forward. If there was a theme it was boomerangs, kangaroos, meat pies, Holden cars. It was that sort of symbolism. Then I had a moment, thinking, “I just don’t believe Australians are going to salute one of these flags, ahead of the flag that we’ve had for the last 100 years.” I began to wonder if we’d had ever had a flag that we could call our very own. I rejected the Eureka flag as a possibility because of its association with the BLF and the hard-left militants of the union movement and, on the other hand, with the nutters on Cronulla beach ludicrously brandishing the Eureka flag as an absurd symbol of white supremacy. So I rejected it.

Then I started looking into the story and researching it. I came to some understanding of it. A few people discouraged me. Bob Carr waved a dismissive hand saying, “Eureka, local tax revolt.” But I believe it was a hell of a lot more than a local tax revolt. I was fascinated by the history of Melbourne to begin and John Batman. It might have ended in disaster. In 1803, there was an attempt to establish a settlement. It failed, but three convicts stayed behind. Thirty-two years later John Batman came up the Yarra River to find a wild man living on its banks – one of the three convicts left behind – with two Aboriginal wives and five children. His name was William Buckley.

So, in 1835, Port Philip Bay and the surrounds was settled. People began moving out to what was known as the Australia Felix, the highland and central lands of Victoria where squatters spread rapidly over good grazing lands. In the meantime, through Europe, there was a rise of people demanding the basic tenents of the liberal democracy we know today. In Great Britain, they were called the Chartists, a curious coalition of liberal democratic politicians and the working class.

They had six basic demands. They wanted males over 21 to be able to have the vote; they wanted the secret ballot; no property qualifications for those who voted or those who stood in parliament; they wanted paid parliamentarians; they wanted constituencies of equal size and they wanted parliament to be elected annually. My favourite story is of 23 April 1848, when 15,000 chartists marched on Parliament House in London. The Colonel of the Red Coats sent to stop them called to the leader of the Chartists that is they crossed the bridge over the Thames to Parliament House, they would be shot and disembowelled. They refused to cross the bridge. 

Around the same time, in 1849, they discovered gold in California. Many of the activists in the movements of Europe were among the men who took to the ships heading for goldfields. An Australian man by the name of Edward Hargreaves also took off for California but was not successful. But he found the gold bearing country very like that he had left in Bathurst. In 1851 he returned to Australia, he borrowed ten pounds and travelled to a little place called on Summer Hill Creek. There he panned a few specks of gold. Before long, he had started a gold rush around Ophir.

Sydney went mad, along with hundreds from Melbourne. The rush left others worried Melbourne would be emptied so the search was on for gold in Victoria with a 200 pound reward for anyone who could find gold in Victoria. Within two days someone had. The rush of Melburnians back home began, and to a place called Ballarat – an Aboriginal word. In this beautiful valley, the gold was like no other – in California they were measuring gold in ounces; in Ballarat they measured it in pounds. The Ballarat gold rush changed the entire social order so that a poor man could go down a hole and come up a rich man. They were finding nuggets worth 5,000 pounds – unimaginable when the constables were being paid five shillings a week.

Then the obvious thing happened. When you have that level of gold, that level of wealth available – and pretty much on the surface – all the other service providers headed for the hills as well. Magistrates, politicians, the labourers of the squatters were all saying, “That’s enough, I’m off to the diggings.” With the lack of labour, the squatters went to the government demanding they impose order. It was, after all, Crown land. So the government came up with a law which imposed a licence on anyone who dug on Crown land for gold – 30 shillings a month for land 8 feet by 8 feet or 64 square feet – that’s 18 pounds a year. The diggers were outraged – after all the squatters were paying a lot less for 6,000 acres of Crown land. It was a huge injustice.  

And so the agitation began – fuelled by some who had been activists previously involved in political action in Europe. One was Peter Lalor, the eleventh child of a famous political family in Ireland. His eldest sibling was James Fintan Lalor who had written in an Irish newspaper in 1848, “We’ll strike the first blow for Ireland, whose wreath will be green forever.” For his trouble the British threw him in jail and he died shortly after being let out.

Peter Lalor had politics in his blood but he had also seen what happens to those who get involved. On the 19 October 1852, coming to Melbourne through Port Philip Bay on the Scindian, Peter Lalor saw a forest of masts in Hobson’s Bay. Abandoned ships whose crews had headed for the goldfields. Lalor was simply one of many and they were coming from everywhere, all over the world. It was the beginnings of multicultural Australia.

On the goldfields, men became mates, all digging together. The way it worked was they dug, they found gold and they put it into a pot and divided it equally every Saturday. But the problems abounded. There was the water table and collapsing shafts, and the need to watch how your digging affected the diggings of others next to you.  Across the goldfields around Ballarat, there were some 25,000 people by 1854. And the populations of the fields made connections. Not just the diggers but also the shopkeepers, some of whom were in partnerships with diggers.

The licence meant a licence hunt – the Red Coats crossing the goldfields asking for diggers to show their licences. Men in the mud, men who couldn’t keep a licence with them all day. Fines and punishments followed. By 1854, the gold became harder to find but the licence still had to be paid. And the mines needed to go deeper. More risks, more costs.  On 11 November – a date famous in our history later for other events – the Ballarat Reform League was formed. Diggers were starting to organise protests at the miner’s licence

The Ballarat Reform League demanded no taxation without representation. It wanted democracy and the abolition of the mining licence. It wanted a fairer system. In addition, it demanded that males over 21 should have the vote and a secret ballot; that there be no property qualifications for those who stood for parliament or those who voted for parliament; that parliamentarians should be paid and constituencies should be equal; that there should be annual election of parliament. This was the Chartists program in Great Britain. But in Ballarat, the Reform League would not be stopped at the bridge.  By the time the Red Coats confronted the miners, they had built a stockade. It was a case of the miners saying, “Come and get us.”

In late November, there was monster meeting after monster meeting and progressively greater feeling with better organisation. By the latter part of November, the diggers decide they want a flag of their own. There are many theories about the design and designer of the Eureka flag. The one that I love most is that the designer of the Eureka flag was a Canadian, a 25 year old Canadian named Charles Ross. You can see a photo of Charles Ross in my book – a good looking man. On 29 November 1854, at 11 o’clock, atop Bakery Hill the diggers of the Ballarat Reform League hauled up the Eureka flag. Diggers come from everywhere. Some took out their licences and threw them on a bonfire challenging the Red Coats to come and take them prisoner.  

At this point, a sane government would pull back. Instead, local commissioner Robert Reid sent in the Red Coats the following morning, men on horseback, bayonets drawn. They arrested 80 diggers after a fight. On 30 November, 10,000 diggers gathered on the hill and Peter Lalor came to the fore. He climbed up a stump, put his fist in the air and said, “Liberty!” Then he urged the miners to kneel down in a circle around him, and to raise their right hands towards the Southern Cross. And they repeated after him, “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and our liberties.” From that moment they were united.  

They marched to the Eureka stockade, an enclosed acre behind a very rough, fence and start doing their drills. “Present arms. Left. Right. Left Right” The Red Coats were watching, taking reports from a few spies. Lalor had sent out emissaries to nearby goldfields to ask for men, guns and ammunition as soon as they could find them.

Foremost among them was a Scot by the name of Tom Kennedy and he gave a brilliant address to 2,000 diggers at Creswick, a mesmerising speech. So impassioned was his speech that miners marched that night from Creswick to Ballarat which is 18 miles. And they sang the Marseillaise which had already become a great revolutionary anthem.

By 1 December the stockade was fully prepared for attack. Lalor was asked by a man called Nicholson, “What is that you want?” He replied, “Independence, we want independence.” That afternoon Nicholson penned a declaration of independence. The declaration of independence was nothing like its American counterpart. It was more a drunken ramble, quite incoherent but lengthy. All the same it was their declaration of independence. Lalor named Alfred Black as his secretary of war and when Alfred Black stood on a stump on a Friday afternoon and read the declaration out, the diggers cheered.

On the Saturday, in the classic Australian fashion, things calmed down a bit; there was some drinking, a little bit of relaxing, a bit of “I’m missing my missus”. The stockade had a thousand strong in it at midday but, as the mood relaxed, men started back home.  The feeling among those who remained was that the Red Coats would never attack on a Sunday, that’s the Sabbath, nothing happens on the Sabbath. But Commissioner Reid had decided to attack all the same. He had written to Governor Hotham on Saturday afternoon that, “make no mistake, if we lose Ballarat we will lose the colony. We’ve got to crush them and we’ve got to crush them hard.”

Hotham had already sent up serious artillery with 800 men on their way to Ballarat at that time. At 2:30am, Red Coats were roused in the government camps and set out to silently take positions around the stockade. Inside the stockade there were only about 120-130 men by then, including Peter Lalor. The fight began with a shot from a miner – one of the diggers outside had seen the Red Coats and he lined up his rifle and fired the first shot in anger. A Red Coat fell dead. From that moment on, it was war.

The Red Coats, in military formation, charged the stockade. The diggers fired back at them. Lalor’s first commands were, “California rangers to the front”. These were 20 men who had experience, veterans from the Mexican-American war. They fought well and were able to hold the soldiers off for about 20 minutes. Lalor was shot in the left shoulder very early in the battle. He was hidden by his men under a pile of logs.

After 20 minutes, the battle was all but over but then came the revenge attacks. The Red Coats did not behave well. They set fire to a lot of the tents nearby and committed atrocities or killings that were not necessary. Some 25 diggers were killed and some four or five of the soldiers were left dead. About 119 of the diggers were soon in the government camp under lock and key. After legal proceedings, 13 miners were charged with high treason.

Back in Melbourne, a rumour went around that civil war had started and 25,000 miners were on the march for Melbourne. Then, after it became apparent that they weren’t on the march, the feeling became one of outrage that the government had killed so many simply over a mining tax. The Victorian government went from being totally in control to a huge outpouring of outrage from the people. The only way Governor Hotham could justify what had happened was to prove that these thirteen men charged with treason were indeed guilty. Their trial deserves a book of its own.

The first to be tried was a black-American slave who had most likely escaped from Louisiana. He was named John Joseph and he was a fiercely intelligent man. He had Irish lawyers to defend him pro bono. They said to him, “We know you’re intelligent, we know you’re very smart, but for the purposes of this exercise, for our defence of you, we want you to look stupid. We want you to look seriously dumb, and blink a lot.” So the basic defence would become what would this simple man understand of “treason” – this “nigger” from the cotton south of America would not know who Queen Victoria was, let alone have acted in a manner to bring her down.

After two days, John Joseph was acquitted. He was raised on the shoulders of the 5000 people outside. And, over the next three months, all thirteen accused were acquitted. The government was discredited. Peter Lalor, in the meantime, had escaped. He was never put on trial. Hunted for months with a reward offered for his capture of 200 pounds, he was Australia’s first one-armed bandit moving uphill and down dale trying to get away.  He did and less than a year later – on 27 November 1866 – Peter Lalor was sworn in as a Member of the Legislative Council of Victoria. The final line of my book is, “He had not changed – Australia, his adopted homeland had changed”. Eureka transformed everything.

Within years, men over 21 were granted the right to vote, there was a secret ballot and no property qualifications for voting and there were equal constituencies. Eureka was the catalyst for much of that change. We were the first country in the world with a secret ballot, among the first to have no property qualifications for voting and we were just behind New Zealand in granting the franchise to women.

There’s a whole lot in Eureka for Australians to be proud of. It was a fantastic exercise in democracy. It led the world in democratic reform and was superbly multicultural. A great chronicler of what happened was Raphaelo Carboni, from Italy, who wrote, “We are of all nations and colours, … diggers that come together, irrespective of nationality, religion or colour, to salute the Southern Cross as the refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth.”

Peter Lalor left his own account, of how he looked around and saw “brave and honest” men who had come thousands of miles to “labour for independence” – “I knew that hundreds were in great poverty who would possess wealth and happiness if allowed to cultivate the wilderness that surrounded us.”

Obviously Australian nationalism can never reduce to just one legend, but Eureka offers great potential to a nation found floundering for a national story.