Gold graves and glory Read online

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  Chartists wanted to form trade unions, so workers could join together and negotiate with their bosses. But trade unions were illegal, so anyone trying to form one was put in prison or transported to Australia.

  On 11 November, a meeting of about 10 000 diggers demanded the release of the three diggers in custody for arson, universal voting for all males and the abolition of the Licence and Gold Commission.

  But Governor Hotham refused and sent more troops to the diggings. On 28 November the troopers of the 40th Regiment were stoned by crowds as they approached.

  A drummer boy was shot in the leg, but it was reported that he’d been killed. It may have been the anger and frustration over this, as well as the beatings that many of the troopers got from the crowd, that made the troop’s revenge after the Eureka battle so violent a few days later.

  On 29 November at Bakery Hill about 12 000 diggers gathered in what was to be known as the Monster Meeting. They decided to burn their licences.

  THE PETTICOAT FLAG

  The miners raised their own flag to show their independence.

  There are many claims about who made or designed the flag. The most likely candidate seems to be a Canadian, Captain Charles Ross, who asked some diggers’ wives to make the flag and drew them a sketch on a scrap of paper. The story goes that the women used either tent material or someone’s silk wedding dress. Ross was later wounded and died.

  But the flag now on display in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery isn’t made of silk or tent material. It’s made from fine blue woollen cloth (possibly from cloth for a petticoat), cotton twill and fine lawn. It seems that it was sewn by three women—probably Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes.

  After the battle, Trooper John King climbed the flagpole and cut the Southern Cross down. His widow allowed the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery to have it on permanent loan.

  On 30 November, Gold Commissioner Rede ordered a licence hunt.

  And the diggings exploded. When the troops turned out to check the licences, the miners threw stones at them. Fights broke out and shots were fired from both sides. Several diggers were arrested.

  THE POLICE SPY

  Police Constable Henry Goodenough pretended to be a digger and reported all the preparations back to the government.

  A second ‘Roll up’ was held. Peter Lalor, a committee member of the Ballarat Reform League, hadn’t been prominent before, but now, as the diggers gathered, he took control. He leapt onto a tree stump with his pistol in his hand and swore an oath.

  The men knelt on the ground and recited the oath after him: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

  Lalor called for volunteers. His fellow rebels included the Prussian republican Frederick Vern, the Italian redshirt Raffaelo Carboni, and the Scottish Chartist Tom Kennedy.

  PETER LALOR

  Peter Lalor was born in 1827, an Irish engineer who worked on the new Melbourne to Geelong railway before he joined the gold rush. He had lived through the Irish potato famine of 1846–50, when one million Irish died of starvation, while food continued to be exported from Ireland to make money for the absent English owners of much of the country.

  He’d also seen the failed Irish rebellion against the United Kingdom in 1848. His brother had fought in it and died the following year. His father had been an Irish member of parliament. Landlords in Ireland had been evicting any tenant farmers who could not afford to pay their rent. And Lalor’s father had organised resistance by another group of farmers armed with pitchforks.

  In 1855 Lalor was elected to the Legislative Council to represent the miners and he was eventually made Minister for Railways. He became more conservative as he got older, and when the railway workers went on strike to get more than one day off a week, he brought in Chinese replacements. The workers barricaded the Geelong and Clunes roads and threw bricks at the Chinese.

  Vern had wanted to overthrow the King of Prussia and have an elected government.

  Carboni had fought to unite the many independent principalities of what is now Italy into a single nation-state.

  Like other Chartists, Kennedy had defied the British government in trying to form a union to improve people’s working conditions.

  Several hundred miners took the oath of allegiance to the Southern Cross. They marched off to the Eureka diggings and built a stockade from timber and slabs, reinforced with carts.

  All Friday the diggers kept working at the stockade, gathering as many firearms as possible, and forging pike heads. But others urged non-violence.

  THE EUREKA STOCKADE

  The Eureka Stockade was a fence about a yard high, built around just over an acre of land. But it wasn’t a military fort, with only those preparing to fight inside. It was part of the camp, with a blacksmith’s forge, people’s tents and women doing their laundry in big tubs.

  There were shops inside the stockade, too. Shopkeeper Martin Diamond was bayoneted in front of his shop inside the stockade, while his wife Anne watched.

  Other women were in the stockade too, like Anne Duke, one of the women who sewed the flag, Agnes Franks, who was in her tent, Molly Gavin and Nancy Quinane. The Quinane’s tent was burnt after the battle and Nancy was there to help when Lalor’s arm was amputated after he was badly wounded during the rebellion.

  On Saturday, 2 December, the authorities decided to act before the diggers’ rebellion got totally out of hand. Several hundred diggers manned the stockade during the day. But that Saturday night, most went home to sleep—or to drink. Fewer than half the rebels were left inside the stockade.

  Many, or even most, diggers had firearms. Gunfire could be heard every night on the diggings as miners fired their weapons to make sure their powder had not got wet during the day.

  By 3.30 in the morning on Sunday 3 December, soldiers and police officers started to take up their positions, only 300 yards from the stockade. The troops outnumbered the stockaders, two to one. Captain Thomas had instructed his troops to spare any person who did not show signs of resistance.

  And then they charged.

  At 4.45 a.m. the sentry who had been posted to guard the stockade fired a warning shot to alert the other diggers of the attack. Lalor tried desperately to get his men into some sort of order. Standing on a stump, he ordered them to hold fire until the troopers advanced closer, but a couple of bullets struck him in the shoulder.

  He yelled at his men to escape and hid among a pile of slabs, the blood flowing thickly from his wound.

  The battle was over in fifteen to twenty minutes, but the troopers kept bayoneting and shooting wounded diggers, burning tents, and slashing at people with their swords. Five troopers and 22 diggers were confirmed killed or later died of their wounds. Over 100 diggers were taken prisoner and marched down the hill.

  UNDER THEIR SKIRTS

  Those wide skirts turned out to have other uses, too! Patience Wearne and Elizabeth Wilson are said to have sheltered miners under their skirts. Elizabeth and her husband had a store opposite the stockade and Patience’s husband was one of the rebels. Peter Lalor was said to have sheltered under Mrs James Young’s skirts for a time.

  INNOCENT BYSTANDERS

  About 100 men were arrested. No-one knows how many miners were bayoneted after the battle, or burnt alive in their tents by the troopers.

  Many innocent people got caught up in the violence, too. Henry Powell was 23 and had walked over to visit a mate. Thinking he was one of the rebels, the police shot him. They then ran their horses back and forth over him and slashed at him with their swords while he screamed for help. Powell died three days later. He had identified his killer, but the man was let off because Powell hadn’t sworn a legal oath before he died.

  9-year-old James Campbell was one of the first people into the stockade after the battle. He said he saw the dead bodies, the wounded trying to rise, blood in the dust, flies in the blood—and a small terrier dog sitting howling on the chest of its dea
d master.

  LALOR LOSES ARM, GETS GIRL

  Lalor was hidden down a mineshaft and later helped back up to a hut in the ruined stockade. He was then taken to Father Smyth’s presbytery, where his arm was amputated by Dr Doyle on the night of 4 December. Then, with the stump still bleeding, he escaped on Father Smyth’s horse to Warrenheip.

  Anastasia Hayes, who helped sew the flag, was present during the amputation of Peter Lalor’s arm and after the operation took the arm and threw it down a mineshaft so the troops wouldn’t find it.

  A £200 reward was offered for Lalor’s capture.

  After a few weeks’ recovery, Lalor hid in a wagon going to Geelong, where his sweetheart Alice Dunne kept him hidden and looked after him. They were married on 10 July 1855.

  Lalor still had a warrant out for his arrest, but he was never taken into custody.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  There was terror in Melbourne when the news of the Eureka rebellion first reached town. Was an army of desperate miners marching under a new flag about to invade Melbourne?

  But public opinion soon swung in behind the miners, especially when exaggerated reports of the number of miners hurt and dead reached the city. Public meetings condemning the government were held in Melbourne, Geelong and Bendigo, and Governor Hotham had to post troops to keep order.

  People were horrified at the brutality of the troopers. Many, like the reformer Caroline Chisholm, who had no time for rebels and felt they’d be better off going home to their families, still thought that the events showed that ordinary people needed to be involved in public affairs, and that people had lost confidence in their government and the courts.

  Hotham and his secretary Foster were blamed for the disaster. Foster resigned.

  Troopers stopped checking licences. The Victorian jury let off all but one of the miners who had been arrested. Only Henry Seekamp, the editor of the Ballarat Times, was convicted and sentenced to six months for seditious libel.

  A Gold Fields Royal Commission was held and gave the miners almost everything they had asked for. The gold licence was abolished and replaced by a miner’s right, costing £1 per year. A miner’s right gave the digger the right to mine for gold and vote in the elections for parliament. Lalor and Humffray were elected unopposed in 1855 to the Legislative Council, and Lalor became Speaker of the House of Assembly in 1880.

  But the Eureka Stockade led to many other things too. It became a rallying point for freedom of speech and the right of every (white) man (not woman) to have a vote and the right to a fair trial.

  The new feeling that ordinary Australians had a right to vote for their leaders resulted in a growing push for self-government. New South Wales got an elected government in 1855, though the United Kingdom could still override any of its decisions. South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania all got parliaments between 1856 and 1857. And in 1859, the Moreton Bay District separated from New South Wales and was renamed Queensland.

  NO REWARDS

  No-one ever tried to claim any of the rewards for informing on the rebels. Perhaps like the convicts’ hatred of any ‘informer dog’, this was one of the early beginnings of Australian mateship.

  But there was something else the diggers wanted: no Chinese.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CHINESE COME TO NEW GOLD MOUNTAIN

  Most of the new chums looked pretty much the same—shaggy heard, tough trousers, cabbage tree hat. There were few ways to tell an English digger from a Prussian one—until they spoke.

  But there was one group who looked different—and there were a lot of them, too—the Chinese.

  Some people from the southern provinces of China had already come to work in Australia in the 1840s as indentured labourers.

  Indentured labourers could only work for one particular boss, either the one who had paid for them to come out to Australia, or another boss who paid the first boss for their labour.

  The word ‘indentured’ came from the middle ages, when multiple copies of a contract had little notches, or ‘indents’, cut into their pages.

  Indentured labourers weren’t slaves, because at the end of their contract they were free. But they didn’t have much freedom during that indenture.

  The Chinese indentured labourers worked for squatters and pastoralists as cooks, servants, gardeners, shepherds and vegie growers. Then at the end of their time they were supposed to be sent back home to China.

  Just as in Europe, the 1850s were a time of terrible poverty in China, especially around Canton (now Guangzhou), where many of the Chinese diggers came from. Invasions, rebellions, floods and famines in China between 1849 and 1887 meant that people were desperate for any way to survive.

  Like people in Europe and the United States, the Chinese found the thought of all that gold in what they called ‘Tsin Chin Sha’, or New Gold Mountain, irresistible.

  The old ‘Gold Mountain’ was the United States, with its Californian goldfields.

  But Australia and the United States were a long way away. How could poor Chinese families afford to send a son to find gold for them?

  Most of them couldn’t. Nearly all the Chinese miners who came to Australia sent most of their money to their masters in China, with a little going to their families. This made many of the diggers angry. They felt the money should have stayed in Australia.

  Many of the masters were warlords and were not above using blackmail. If the miners ran away in Australia, their families back home in China would be hurt or killed. Other masters were businessmen, who just wanted to make a profit from the miners. They advanced them the money to get to Australia, and the miners worked on the goldfields until they’d paid the debt.

  Almost no Chinese women came to Australia in the early days. (Just as there were far fewer women than men on the early convict fleets to Australia.) There was no money to pay their passage, and Chinese women had even less freedom than most European women did.

  Many families arranged for their young men to be married just before they left for Australia. This would help stop them from making a ‘bad’ marriage in Australia and staying there. It also meant that the young men had yet another reason to send money home.

  This was hard for the new wives left back in China. Many lived the rest of their lives with their husband’s family, often forced to work practically as slaves.

  After the young men had enlisted as indentured labourers, they started to walk.

  First they walked for about three days to get to a port such as Amoy or Canton. There they crowded onto junks bound for Hong Kong. With little food or clean water, they sweltered in cramped, dirty, crowded shelters in Hong Kong, often run by agents of the same businessmen or warlords who had advanced them the money to go to Australia. Many agents tried to get the men to run up big gambling debts, or become addicted to opium, so they could keep them under even stricter control.

  Finally, the indentured labourers got onto American or English ships bound for Australia.

  The first Chinese diggers landed at Geelong in 1853. By 1854 there were 2000 Chinese in Victoria. By 1855 there were 15 000 and by 1858 there were 40 000!

  Once the indentured labourers got to Australia, they walked yet again, in single file, wearing their wide straw hats, with their belongings slung from bamboo poles over their shoulders, till they got to the goldfields. They had to walk over 60 miles to Ballarat and 112 to Bendigo.

  On their way to the goldfields the Chinese often employed some of the would-be miners as cooks. They’d travel ahead of the main party and have a meal ready when the rest of the group arrived at camp.

  Australians ate lots of mutton, potatoes and bread. The Chinese didn’t really like any of that!

  Breakfast for them was mostly rice porridge, with pickled vegetables and salted fish, often caught and salted by the groups of Chinese fishermen already in Australia. There was a rice cake and cups of tea for lunch, and dinner was hot rice with pickled vegetables—mostly turnips, cabbage and peas.

  None of the min
ers of any nationality ate much fruit or veg and, due to the lack of vitamins in their diet, many of them got sick with scurvy, beri beri and barcoo rot.

  The Chinese miners ate much the same food when they arrived on the goldfields, with a few luxuries like dried duck.

  THE EXPERT MINERS

  Unlike most of the other miners—except those who’d come from the California diggings—many of the Chinese actually had been gold miners back home, and knew how to mine. They managed to make money out of sifting the mullock heaps—the great piles of rock the earlier miners had discarded.

  Other miners resented the Chinese for finding gold where no-one else could.

  They built stone walls to shore up the creek banks as they worked, and giant water ‘races’ or canals that stretched for miles across the country to bring water from high up in the hills to dry valleys and gullies so they could wash the gold from the soil. Some water races took more than three years to build.

  The other diggers should have welcomed the Chinese—all these hard-working miners who knew how to find gold and maybe even teach the ‘new chums’ some mining techniques. But instead the Chinese were often hated.

  JOSS HOUSES

  Once a Chinese community felt settled in an area, they built a joss house as a window to heaven to worship Zhu Yuanzhang, the former Buddhist monk who founded the great Ming dynasty.

  Zhu Yuanzhang taught the three virtues of unity, courage and honesty.