The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (47 page)

Seekamp could only view the cascade of October's events as an inevitable step towards liberty,
a child beginning to walk, in a little time the child will be able to stand alone
. But twenty-six-year-old Henry had no offspring of his own; he was stepfather to Clara's children. He may not have been in the best position to wield metaphors of infant development. Children also discover their narcissistic will. Separating from their psychically overbearing parents requires a monstrous act of defiance—something approximating Bonwick's prophecy of
selfishness
and
indulgence
.

Surely some malignant spell
, surmised the
ARGUS
,
must blind the Captain, that he cannot see the rocks ahead
.
³⁸

The fine weather was a boon to government surveillance of the diggings. From late September, licence hunting stepped up with a new vigour now the winter mud was gone. Suddenly, large, armed military forces were sent out from the Camp to patrol the diggings. Foot police carried batons. Soldiers wielded carbines, swords and holster pistols. Some were mounted, parading frisky horses through tents and holes in search of unlicensed miners.
A new chum
, wrote An Englishman to the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
on 10 October, might think the show of force was to intimidate criminals against the dog poisoning, horse stealing and tent breaking that had become endemic this spring. But no, it was merely digger hunting, pursued with an
unusual degree of severity
since Hotham's visit to the goldfields. The Englishman attributed the new regime to the resident commissioner
proving his utility.

Others could see that the new governor had pledged to remedy the colony's ailing economy and was going about the task with obdurate zeal. The public service was being whittled to a shoestring to reduce expenditure. On the income side of the ledger there were only liquor excises and mining licences to lift the bottom line. The diggers would conveniently drink to their hearts' content, but showed increasing reluctance to produce a valid licence. What was a governor to do, other than order his minions to carry out more licence hunts? If once a week was not enough to demonstrate that this government meant business, then make it twice. Or every day bar the Sabbath.
Is it to be endured
, wrote the Englishman,
in a possession of the British Crown, that an armed police force may ‘bail up' and require the production of your badge in all places at all times? Does this happen in London?
He finished by calling for some
more influential pen
to take up the cause of the unrepresented digger. Ellen Young patriotically obliged.

On 4 November, following Scobie's murder, the Eureka Hotel riot and the fire, the arrests, the trials and the public meetings, Ellen captured the mood of her clan in a long letter to the
BALLARAT TIMES
.

I can but remark on the sad picture of humanity your last Saturday's paper presents…Alas for the poor diggers, over whose spoil the whole tribe are squabbling. Alas for the honest of each party that he should be sacrificed to the dishonest. Alas, alas for us all that we cannot get a snap of land to keep a pig live pretty, and grow cabbages on; and
three times
alas; let it
three times
be for us (the people) poor dupes… following in high hopes the jack o' lantern dancing over the land, his false light blinding all.

Here we have the diggers as fools and their governor as the will-o'-the-wisp trickster figure of English folklore who draws innocent travellers down the garden path with devilish false promises. Hotham had betrayed Ellen's early trust. She would now place her faith in another organ of authority, the fourth estate. Her letter continued:
We ought to congratulate ourselves in possessing so admirable a vent as your paper for the spleen. How amiable shall we become in time…I am but a simple dreamer at the foot of the mount.

While Ellen Young waxed lyrical at her literary base camp, a host of nameless sherpas did the grunt work to spread the word of mutiny on the streets. Gossip and rumour, writes Bernard Capp, were ‘a powerful coercive weapon, defining and reasserting the social values of the community'. Traditionally, he says, women have wielded gossip as a form of ‘quasi-public power'. Through informal networks and collective pressure, women were able to play a role as active citizens, turning private grievances into public issues and refashioning themselves as the persecutors rather than the persecuted. Capp argues that this ‘informal political world based on female networks' was vital in shaping public opinion in pre-industrial communities, particularly in times of crisis. Gossip and rumour could be malicious and judgmental or simply informative about comings and goings central to the community's wellbeing. Gossip was a powerful tool for otherwise disenfranchised people, but its central importance is not reflected in the /files/14/49/20/f144920/public/historical record, for the simple fact that by its very nature rumour is spread discreetly, in whispers—often Chinese whispers—at the marketplace or at work in the fields. Gossip is the backdrop to what survives in hard copy, such as Ellen Young's letters to the editor.

The public record of Ballarat's rumour-mongers is surprisingly resilient. Ellen Clacy described the interior of your average shop on the diggings:
pork and currants, saddles and frocks, baby linen and tallow, all are heaped indiscriminately together…added to which, there are children bawling, men swearing, store-keeper sulky, and last, not least, women's tongues going nineteen to the dozen.
Raffaello Carboni begins his account of the Catholic servant affair like so:
The following story was going the rounds of the Eureka
. The
TIMES
revealed that prior to the destruction of the Eureka Hotel, rumours had been flying thick and fast. Police Magistrate D'Ewes was a partner in the business. Bentley had paid thousands of pounds for exoneration. The licensing bench was bribed. And the paramount tall story: Catherine Bentley was in fact Scobie's wife!

On 24 October, the
AGE
reported
an eventful week at Ballarat
: Monday, the bank robbery; Tuesday, rioting; Wednesday and Thursday
taken up guessing at what might be next looked for
, including brazen anecdotes that Avoca, Maryborough and Creswick Creek
had on the same or following day as ourselves set the authorities
at defiance
; Friday, arrest of the manager of the Bank of New South Wales; and Sunday, a meeting of the Irish regarding the Father Smyth and Johnston incident. The
AGE
's Ballarat correspondent revealed rumours that the Avoca Camp had been burned down, that the Maryborough Camp was under siege by diggers, that the unemployed of Melbourne had risen up at the news of the Ballarat riot, and that the Bank of Victoria was broke.
Added to the talk about such matters
, wrote the correspondent,
was an interminable controversy as to the pros and cons of Bentley's case
. You didn't need a soapbox to be heard in Ballarat. A person couldn't blow her nose
without drawing around them a crowd of sympathisers
.

As the
ARGUS
correspondent wrote,
The growth of revolutionary opinion
is predicated on such tittle-tattle.
³⁹

When James Bentley fled from the flames of his ruined empire to the protection of the commissioners, an insidious rumour started doing the rounds. The government compound was going to be attacked! The diggers were going to come that night. Vengeful miners were going to prise Bentley from his refuge and drag him back to his smoking lair. Justice would be done, even if Judge Lynch had to do the reckoning.

Spies brought the news from the Flat to the Camp. The garrison was put under arms. No one was allowed to enter or leave. The night, according to Camp resident Samuel Huyghue,
passed alert in expectation
of an attack. The next day, 18 October,
the females were ordered to leave the Camp, as it was considered that at such a time they would be safer anywhere than with us.
Families split up. Anxious wives abandoned their husbands to the patent fury of the mob. Did pregnant Margaret Brown Howden Johnston leave? Where did she go? Her diary is mute.
Some poor souls
, said Huyghue,
were ultimately permitted to remain on the plea that they had no home or protectors elsewhere
. These women and children took refuge in the commissariat store
whenever there was an alarm
. The walls of the store were partly bullet proof, being formed of roughly hewn slabs.
But you could still insert a finger between them
, worried Huyghue.

And rumours could slide under doors like shape-shifting vapours in the night. They could waft between slabs. Seep beneath skin. Penetrate the soundest of minds. Gossip and rumour could fuel a fire as well as any kindling and flame.

Shaken to its core by the power of an idea, the Camp would never recover.

TEN

HIGH CAMP

On the ship of the Victorian goldfields
, the resident commissioner was captain. His first mates were the assistant commissioners, magistrates and other senior civil servants; the coroner was the ship's surgeon-superintendent. The police were the ordinary seamen, poorly paid henchmen who did the hard slog. A submission to a commission of enquiry into the Victorian police force, held in late 1854, described the boys in blue like this:

The service generally is so unpopular, that, with few exceptions, only those who are either too idle to do any thing else, or who having failed in all their other attempts to gain a livelihood as a last resource enlist into the Police, the latter, after having accumulated a little money become disgusted with the Service, and either desert or commit some fault in the hope of being discharged. This is more particularly applicable to the Police on the Gold Fields.
¹

On the Victorian goldfields there was also a military presence, a royal barge with its own hierarchies of power and customs of privilege. There was, of course, no ship's matron to regulate the behaviour or check the welfare of the goldfields women.

In Ballarat, this whole clamorous crew was housed at the Government Camp. To the diggers and storekeepers, the Camp was a hive of treachery and deceit, a bastion of vested interests and autocratic inconsistency. But what of the Camp's inhabitants? Were they sitting pretty up in their topographical tower? Enjoying a room with an enchanting view? Living the high life? Alas no. Long before the exoneration of James Bentley made the government's compound a target of enmity, its residents were anything but happy campers.