The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (50 page)

On 27 October—just eleven days after the Eureka Hotel riot and the same day that the Camp drew up plans for its defence—Mrs Catherine McLister served a written complaint to the chief commissioner of police, Captain McMahon. Catherine was the wife of Sergeant Robert McLister, who was based at the Ballarat Camp. Catherine was a twenty-eight-year-old Irish woman from County Donegal, newly married to Robert, then a clerk. Marrying down, she had arrived in Victoria in late 1853. This is what she wrote in her explosive letter to McMahon:

I beg to state that about two months ago Capt Evans grossly insulted me a non-commissioned officer's wife by indecently expressing his person in his own room and also by his frequent visits to my tent in the absence of my husband.
¹⁴

Catherine was clearly literate and unfazed by the bureaucracy of sin. As the second daughter of William Fenton, a member of the Northern Irish Protestant gentry and the governor at the jail in Lifford, a British army garrison, she had been raised on a diet of discipline and punishment.

Captain McMahon took Catherine's complaint with due gravity. He investigated her claim and found that
the explanation forwarded by the Inspector of Police was insufficient
. McMahon came to Ballarat and assembled a board to hear evidence from both parties. The board was comprised of Police Magistrate Charles Hackett, a Protestant Irish barrister with a splendid set of blond whiskers, Police Magistrate Evelyn Pitfield Shirley Sturt, the East India man who took over from D'Ewes after his dishonourable discharge, and Robert Rede. Hackett and Sturt had both served on the board of enquiry into the burning of the Eureka Hotel. Sturt would go on to serve as a member of the royal commission on the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition. The three men made for a formidable inquisition.

The board of enquiry sat on 28 October. Catherine's original letter was read aloud. Then Gordon Evans came out swinging. He wholly disputed Catherine's claim of impropriety. He did craftily admit
that a certain degree of familiarity has existed between us
but said that he had
always considered that that familiarity was sought for by her
. But Catherine was not intimidated by the suggestion of her implied consent to Evans' familiarities. Before the board, with Evans present, Catherine gave this extraordinary testimony:

I was working at my tent. Mr Evans came down and asked me to sew a few buttons on his shirt. I told him to send them by his servant. He said the servant was busy and asked me to go for them. He said if he was not there I should find them on the table. I said if my husband will allow me, I will go. I asked my husband who had no objection—this was in the evening not dark about 4. I went to Mr Evans and he shut the door and locked it—I did not know it was locked until it had occasion to be opened. He pointed out the shirts…Mr Evans came behind me and put his arm round my waist. He was dressed, the front of his pantaloons were open and his person exposed…Mr Evans did not use any violence when he put his arm round my waist. He said ‘look at this' and then I saw his trousers were undone.

Catherine was not finished.
I was always suspicious of Mr Evans, from the way he looked at me
, she said
, he was very often down at my tent. I often would not answer him. He came when he knew my husband was off the camp as he had given him leave.
She distrusted his motives, she said, but never thought he would accost her.

The offence had taken place two months earlier. Catherine had not told anybody, including her husband. She was coming forward now, she said, because her husband had recently been arrested and mistreated by Evans, which, she believed, was because she had not
complied with Mr Evans desire
.

Perhaps Catherine was also inspired to action by a meeting of fifteen thousand members of the digging community who had gathered on 22 October—five days before the date of her complaint—at Bakery Hill to raise funds for the defence of McIntyre and Fletcher. At the meeting, the people had passed a resolution condemning the
daily violation of the personal liberty of the subject
. Did Catherine see a parallel between the scape-goating of McIntyre and Fletcher and her husband's susceptibility to Evans' wrath? Did she equate the violation of her own body with the liberal agenda of the mass body politic? Did she liken male predation and female vulnerability to the autocratic misrule that was clearly occurring on both sides of the Camp's white picketed perimeter? Perhaps she was simply a wrathful woman responding to the anger in the air. Perhaps Evans was simply a letch, and Ballarat's culture of complaint gave Catherine licence to warn him off for good.

Next Evans cross-examined Catherine. She acknowledged that she had been in Evans' room several times, in order to do small jobs for him, with her husband's permission. Evans had never before
insulted
her. He had
joked but was tartly answered
. Nothing a girl who had grown up in a garrison town could not handle. Evans had often been to her tent, but was never admitted.
I positively deny that any improper familiarity existed between myself and Mr Evans
, she told the board firmly.

Mrs Elizabeth Crowther, another officer's wife, came forward as a witness. Mrs Crowther was often in Mrs McLister's tent because
it was more comfortable than mine
and
for the sake of company
. She testified that
[Catherine] never told me that Mr Evans had taken any liberties with her, but she seemed to be afraid of being with Mr Evans alone
. Robert Kane, servant to Evans, swore that Mrs McLister had previously been to the captain's room to put buttons on his shirts but
I never saw her look excited
when she left. Would ‘looking excited' be a good thing or a bad thing, though? A sign of guilty pleasure or of furious indignation?

Catherine herself cross-examined the witnesses, who could not fault her character. Only one witness, Sergeant Major Robert Milne, hinted at a motivation for Catherine to make a false claim: that Evans had put her husband under arrest and that he had overheard Captain McLister say that
somebody would have to pay for it.
Evans swooped on this logic, claiming that the
vindictive motives of the prosecution were self evident
.

The board deliberated briefly before declaring that Catherine's charge could not be supported. The decision was unanimous. Rede might have made use of the occasion in the war against his rival; he chose not to. The board's reasoning was that Catherine had not told anyone about the incident at the time, not even her
intimate friend
Mrs Crowther. Surely an offended woman would admit the source of her shock to another woman. Further, the board found it improbable that such
a gross insult
—Evans flashing his John Thomas—would not occasion a woman to cry for help.

That the impulse of the moment would naturally have led to exclamation on the part of Mrs McLister, which must have been heard, on the contrary the shirts alluded to were taken away by Mrs McLister for the purpose required.

So, if Catherine had made a more womanly scene—throwing the shirts up in the air and running from the room shrieking—she might have been believed. But having calmly instigated an official enquiry, she found her claim dismissed as vexatious.

The McLister incident was not quietly dismissed as a quaint colonial bedroom farce. The board's decision was forwarded to Governor Hotham in Melbourne. In the context of other recent acts of rebelliousness in Ballarat, Catherine's stand might have been viewed as yet more evidence of the mounting tension, antagonism and complex web of deceit of which His Excellency needed to be kept abreast. A woman taking senior officials to task—the inspector of police, no less—was further proof that the entire Ballarat population was disorderly and ungovernable and thus required a firm hand.

On 6 November, Hotham appended a note to the McLister file with his characteristic brevity:
The Report of the Board is
conclusive
. That the complainant was a woman may have been another factor in keeping close tabs on the intra-Camp skirmish. Men who made a fuss in the Camp could be dealt with by their immediate hierarchical superiors. But wives like Catherine McLister were not servants of the state; only their husbands could discipline them. And if their husbands could not?

Trouble.

There are few traces of Mrs Catherine McLister other than the transcripts of her day in court and her death certificate, which reveals that she died during the birth of her first child, James, in March 1858 in Geelong. By this time, Robert McLister's profession was listed as
gold digger
, indicating that his wife's principled action may have cost him his job.
¹⁵
Catherine had suffered from consumption for over four years and the official cause of her death was
phthisis larengis
, throat lesions caused by acute tuberculosis. Baby James died of
debility
eleven days later. It's unclear why Catherine and Robert chose to migrate to Victoria (her health? his career? the recent deaths of her father and sister?), whether her upbringing in County Donegal nurtured an insubordinate spirit or how a well-heeled woman felt about living in a windblown tent at the arse-end of the colonial world. But there is no doubt that Catherine's official complaint was a radical act of disclosure: her way of saying
look at this.

There are many unanswered questions around Catherine's courageous decision to haul a police inspector before a judicial board. But the case clearly demonstrates two important points. First, her vocal opposition to being manhandled by Evans shows that while the Camp may have been a bastion of power and privilege—male privilege—it was not an exclusively male domain. It was a civil base camp-cum-garrison that housed women alongside their partners. They walked its muddy corridors, slept under its canvas ceilings, serviced its masters and provided corporeal fodder for the fantasies and responsibilities of men. Catherine's presence lends another perspective to the mood and motivation of the Camp when faced with threats of attack from the rebellious digging population. Yes, the Camp represented an
ancien regime
sandbagging itself against the tides of democratic change: the Camp was ‘The Man', and the diggers and storekeepers believed it was time to stick it to The Man. But the Camp was also an isolated and physically vulnerable outpost of imperial authority, in which husbands daily feared for the safety of their wives and children. Both from enemies without, and, it appears, from within. The presence of women at the Camp restores some of the humanity to the men on the offensive side of the Stockade, even crude bullies like Evans.
¹⁶

Second, in witnessing the power struggles in a gendered world, we come to realise that the Camp was not a unified, harmonious entity—as its cosily inclusive label might suggest. The battles being fought on the Ballarat diggings were not so black and white as the conventional ‘miners versus military' line-up implies. Rather, tensions around ethnicity, rank and sex fuelled internal resentments, even while, as Samuel Huyghue described, the commissioners maintained an
aristocratic and exclusive front, tricked out in scraps of braid and gold lace…and often redolent of perfume…faithful to the prescriptions of caste.
Once the crack appears—and Catherine McLister's public defiance of abusive relationships of authority constitutes such a fissure—we can begin to prise open the surprisingly brittle front of goldfields officialdom.

If Chief Commissioner McMahon in Melbourne could see the writing on the tatty canvas walls, he should have paid heed to just one line in the barrage of correspondence issuing from the Camp. On 25 September, Captain Evans warned
I have not accommodation beyond my own complement of men for any emergency that may arise
. Three weeks later Bentley's Hotel was a pile of cinders and the whole miserable, maudlin, mutinous Camp was under siege. Or, more precisely, it was in the grip of a siege mentality, as not a single stone had yet been hurled in the Camp's direction. But the mere scent of a digger revolt rising up from the Flat, compounded by internal chaos, was enough to frighten the horses.