The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (44 page)

The court was crammed to suffocation on the morning of the judicial enquiry into the murder of James Scobie. It was 12 October. James and Catherine Bentley and their servants, Farrell and Hance, were in the dock. D'Ewes, Rede and Johnston presided over an agitated crowd. There was no jury. The
BALLARAT TIMES
had been fulminating about the case for days. James Bentley was characterised as exhibiting
all the wiles and blandishments of a wealthy publican
. Scobie's death was described as
melancholy
. The newspaper detailed inconsistencies and irregularities of the coronial inquest, and proffered ‘facts' counter to the ones given at the inquest.

Yet a letter to the
BALLARAT TIMES
published on 14 October shows that the Bentleys did have the support of certain sections of Ballarat society. The letter was addressed to James and signed by more than a hundred of Ballarat's
storekeepers, diggers and inhabitants
. It stated that the signatories

duly appreciating the conduct and manner you have evinced in carrying on the Eureka Hotel, and feeling that you could not either directly or indirectly, in the late lamentable occurrence, have been in any way accessary [sic]…are assured that your urbanity and manly behaviour will still continue to guarantee to so well a conducted house, its full share of public patronage.

A portion of the Ballarat population was confident of the Bentleys' innocence.

Over two nail-biting days, the witnesses took the stand. All the residents of the hotel testified that Mr and Mrs Bentley had not left that evening, that they remained in their bedroom together until Dr Carr arrived. Mary Gadd, Catherine's sister, swore that she could
hear every thing that passes in [their] room
. A butcher residing opposite the hotel swore that Bentley was not one of the men he saw fighting.
It was moonlight
so he could see clearly and
[I] would know him by his general appearance and being lame
. Mary Ann Welch and her son Bernard were called last. It was now that Mary Ann testified that she heard Catherine Bentley say ‘How dare you break my window'.
The voice, to the best of my belief, was Mrs Bentley's
, said Mary Ann.
I live within a few yards at the back of the hotel, and often heard Mrs Bentley's voice before
. Bernard Welch told again what he'd seen through his peephole. The
TIMES
thought him
a very intelligent boy
.

The magistrates retired to an adjoining room for half an hour to make their decision. Before a hushed crowed, John D'Ewes declared that after assessing all the evidence,
not a shadow of an imputation remained on Mr Bentley's character
. Robert Rede followed suit. James Johnston dissented, unpredictable as ever. The prisoners were free to go.

Thomas Pierson made a tally of the grievances under which Ballarat was now groaning. The governor's actions didn't match his promises. Hotham's hypocrisy had
created quite a dislike for him
. There was no representation of the miners in the legislature. Digger hunts had increased to five days per week. Sixteen bullies on horseback, their muskets loaded and swords drawn, would descend on the diggings. Fifty foot soldiers with clubs would
vomit themselves forth
from the Camp. The diggers felt under siege, with no benevolent governor to shield them and no elected leader to represent them. Constitutionally, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

The residents of Ballarat were not the only ones to sense danger in the air that October of 1854. Back in March, Britain had declared war on Russia. The Crimean War, fought by an alliance of the British Empire, France and the Ottoman Empire against the Russian Empire, played like a backbeat against the local pulse of dissonance and discord in Victoria over the winter and spring of that watershed year. The war (so far as any military conflict can be reduced to a sentence) was fought over Russian imperialist expansion into territories in Turkey, the Baltic and the Middle East. There was also a minor naval skirmish in the Far East in September 1854. News from the various fronts, culled from the British press months after the reports were written, flooded the Victorian newspapers. Victoria followed Britain's lead in observing a day of fasting on 4 August, to commemorate lives lost in the war. Subscriptions were collected to send to the Widows' Fund in Britain.

Then, in a bizarre twist of reason, the inhabitants of Melbourne managed to convince themselves that their humble port town was under threat from Russian invasion. There was no strategic logic in the panic, only wartime paranoia and, perhaps, projected fear of mutiny from the unruly goldfields. In Geelong, a rifle corps was organised and a weekly half-holiday proclaimed to give citizens time to practise rifle shooting, lest their town come under attack. The holiday was quickly abandoned and the corps reduced to a few gung-ho Germans, but the sense of lingering peril remained.
²¹

Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the French consul to Victoria, Lionel de Chabrillan, was in Melbourne in October 1854 when anxiety about an imminent attack came to a head. Her diary entry:

Cannon fire has again just signalled the arrival of a ship. Tomorrow we shall have news from France. The cannon rumbled all night. All the inhabitants stayed on their feet, either in the streets or at their windows. Since the Crimean War, which is always on their minds, and because there is not a single warship in the Melbourne harbour, they are always imagining that the Russians are going to attempt an invasion to pillage the gold of the whole of Australia. They walk about in large groups, prepared for battle. The governor has been informed and he arrives from Toorack [sic], situated six leagues from Melbourne. They follow him; they run towards the harbour. Lionel does likewise. The sky is red and all the ships in port seem to be on fire. They think they hear cries of distress.

Mrs Massey was at a ball when reports of the invasion struck. Pandemonium! Scottish-born Robert Anderson joined the thousands of people flocking to the harbour
in a state of great excitement. Shots were thundering away, rockets, shells and everything else to make the colonials believe the Russians had arrived
, Anderson recalled in his memoir.
The whole town was roused up, all was uproar, the soldiers called out and armed, all the policemen we could muster.

It was not until daylight that the hoax was revealed. The Battle of Melbourne, as it became known, was an elaborate practical joke played by the captain of the
Great Britain
, as revenge for having his ship put in quarantine. Hotham, who longed to command a naval battalion in the real war, was not amused.
PUNCH
had a field day. A farcical play called
The Battle of Melbourne
was quickly written and performed. The
scaremongers and alarmists
, as Céleste de Chabrillan called them, were forced to lick their wounded pride. One commentator later noted that Melburnians were prone
to lurch from panic to panic
.
²²

The Russians were not coming, but the communal adrenaline had barely subsided when news of a genuine breach of the peace hit the presses.

What is a land of opportunity if not an invitation to opportunism? On 16 October, at 2pm, four felons seized the day. Wearing black crepe veils tied around their faces, cord trousers, blue shirts and sou'westers, the thieves marched into the Ballarat branch of the Bank of Victoria and marched straight back out again bearing £15,000 in gold and cash.
It was a clever robbery and well carried out
, remembered Charles Ferguson,
and had it not been for the extravagant and dashing Madam Quin, it probably would not have been exposed
.

Mrs Ann Quin was the wife of one of the thieves, and the Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne newspapers followed her and the other scoundrels' movements with tremulous interest (not least because of the £500 reward offered for information leading to an arrest). The robbery, reported in the Tasmanian press as a daring escapade, emblematic of the anarchic, ungovernable diggings, was a cause célèbre: a brazen theft of the golden goose and her eggs, carried out virtually under the nose of the sleeping giants at the Camp.

For weeks the robbery was a complete mystery to the police. Police Inspector Gordon Evans reported to his Melbourne superiors that four men had forcibly entered the bank, bound and gagged the manager and clerk and then emptied the safe, leaving behind them their hats, veils and shirts. The criminals had simply melted back into the landscape of uniform canvas tents and rabbit holes as slickly as they had emerged. No identification could be made and there was no clue to the road taken. For two weeks, it looked like the perfect crime. Since the robbery, the police are
all alive
, reported the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
; the handsome reward had made the force suddenly alert to the slightest innuendo.
²³

But in Victoria, money didn't whisper, it roared, and such prodigious booty could not long be muffled. Quin—of the Ballarat grocery firm of Garret, Marriet and Quin—was captured on 18 November at the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel in Flinders Street in the company of Mrs Quin and their three children. Ann Quin had been sighted in Geelong where
she was cutting a rather wide swath and spending money left and right.
Quin had been caught out buying a £50 diamond ring with the stolen Bank of Victoria notes.

Mrs Quin entered the dock with a babe in arms. The
ARGUS
reported:

she is a plump, rosy-cheeked, country-looking, young woman, about twenty-two years of age, and certainly does not seem very largely endowed with either intelligence, cunning or daring to mark her as the helpmeet for a first class burglar.
²⁴

Ann Quin was refused bail. Marriet was caught the next day in bed with a prostitute in a Spring Street
house of ill-fame.
Garret, alias Bolton, was spied on his way to Adelaide and headed off at the pass. His
fancy woman
had already left for England on the
Calcutta
. The Quin family had also booked a passage on the ship prior to their arrest. Mr Quin later turned
state approver
and
peached
on his former business associates. He confessed that the robbery had been planned a week prior to its execution, that their guns were loaded with paper, not powder or shot, and that they had made a prior agreement that no violence was to be done.

But what of the fourth man? It was three more weeks before ‘he' was brought in, and over 150 years before it became readily apparent that the fourth felon was in all likelihood a woman. At the front of the relevant files in the Public Record Office of Victoria, the name Elijah Smith is listed with the others. Yet inside, in the court testimonies themselves, the name Eliza Smith appears repeatedly.
²⁵
The fourth robber, Elijah, was in fact Eliza, disguised beneath a veil drawn by gender-blind bureaucrats.

Eliza Smith was arrested at the Turf Hotel on the Eureka Lead. Like Mrs Quin, she was spending freely in local stores and showing off her ample cleavage to every miner who took an interest. Tucked in her bodice was a roll of £10 notes, fresh from the Bank of Victoria. She was also eager to flash another roll of notes secreted in her stockings. Robert Tait, the landlord of the hotel, was witness to one of Eliza's displays (
she called me on one side and pulled a number of notes from her bosom…she stooped down and produced a parcel of notes from her stockings
) and called the police. When the traps came to arrest her, along with a man who was also passing stolen notes, Eliza fought like fury.
I had great difficulty taking them
, said the arresting officer in court,