The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (52 page)

What is noteworthy about the petition, apart from the huge number of signatories, is the fact that it was almost certainly written by a woman—Mary Stevens. Again, this is information that has never before come to light, though it's not difficult to deduce, since Mary's careful handwriting tops the list of signatures. But who was Mary Stevens? Both she and A. W. Arnold were employed at the Adelphi Theatre: they were actors, noted for their fine performances in Sarah Hanmer's productions. Arnold was also a witness to the burning of Bentley's Hotel, and Robert Burnett, a fellow American working as a barber, has been credited as the man who fired the first shot in the ‘Ballarat War'.
⁶
It's unclear whether Mary Stevens and the incarcerated Frank Carey were in a romantic relationship when Mary took it upon herself to orchestrate his liberation. If they were, it didn't last. Frank Carey married nineteen-year-old German-born immigrant Dorette Hahn in 1855. Their only child, Francis, was born in September 1856, by which stage Carey was a fully licensed hotelkeeper.

Any government spy worth his salt would have realised that the Adelphi Hotel had become the primary nucleus of radicalism over the winter of 1854. Digger activists could gripe and moan and rally and plot and plan in the open air, around their shafts or the campfire at night, but rabble-rousing was warmer, drier and less susceptible to pricked ears within the confines of a spacious tent-cum-theatre guarded by a trustworthy collaborator. The Adelphi was a safe house, presided over by Mrs Hanmer, a respectable widow and acclaimed theatrical manager. She provided a refuge for the disaffected, with whose cause she clearly sympathised. After Carey was arrested the second time, Mrs Hanmer gave a benefit to raise funds for his release. While the Jews of Ballarat kvetched and prayed at the Clarendon Hotel (it was there they formed a minyan prior to the erection of the first synagogue in 1861), the Germans drank and caroused at the Wiesenhavern Brothers' Prince Albert Hotel on Bakery Hill and the Irish centred their activities at Father Smyth's St Alipius tent church, Mrs Hanmer presented the Americans with a velvet-curtained front. Another of Sarah's actors, Frank D'Amari, later attested that
most of the principal players in bringing justice to Bentley
were Americans.
⁷
It was the Americans, he said, who called for Bentley's lynching.

But here was the crucial rub. The American community of Victoria formed a large and prosperous class of merchants and entrepreneurs. In January 1854, Freeman Cobb, John Murray Peck, John Lamber and James Swanton established the American Telegraph Line of Coaches, later to be known as Cobb and Co. The company ran coaches that linked all the major goldfields with Melbourne and with each other. This transport network was crucial to pastoral and commercial expansion in Victoria. In Melbourne, George Francis Train, Henry Nicholls and others were presiding over prosperous mercantile businesses with links to large international financiers. Train was the major backer of Cobb and Co. as well as the Australian correspondent to the
BOSTON GLOBE
. A goldfields fracas involving an American citizen, then, was a tricky affair: a delicate balancing act of diplomacy between local affairs and the bigger picture of American influence. And it was for this reason that twenty-one-year-old Mary Stevens' petition, with its lengthy trail of signatures, went straight to the top of the government's in-tray.

Chief Commissioner McMahon wrote to Robert Rede on 3 October, enclosing a copy of the petition and requesting immediate clarification from the magistrates as to whether any grounds existed for His Excellency's clemency. This was definitely not standard operating procedure. Matters became still more peculiar when the American consul in Melbourne, James Tarleton, made representations to Governor Hotham on behalf of the Ballarat boarding-house keeper Carey. He vouched that the Americans at Ballarat were
law loving and law abiding citizens.
⁸
On 29 October, Frank Carey's sentence was remitted. Mrs Hanmer's players: take a bow. Your encore is yet to come.

Governor Hotham made two deft moves in response to the burning of Bentley's Hotel. With the right hand, he empowered a select committee to investigate the matter, taking evidence from any person who wished to speak up. E. P. S. Sturt was to head it up, fresh from presiding over Catherine McLister's sexual harassment hearing. With the left hand, Hotham ordered the extra companies of the 12th and 40th regiments to fill the Camp with redcoats. It seemed an ingenious plan. Give the people the chance to vent their collective spleen while making it obvious that Ballarat was now awash with a military presence. Not everyone was convinced, however, that Hotham had Ballarat's best interests at heart.
We ask for bread and we get a stone
, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
.
We demand some attention be paid to our miserable conditions and get sent an army.
⁹

The committee took evidence at Bath's Hotel from 2 November to 10 November. The weather was oppressively hot during this week, and hundreds of diggers availed themselves of the opportunity to sit for a while in the lounge bar and tell the commissioners about what ailed them. Women gave evidence too, including Mrs Joanna Bath, though their testimony didn't make it into the published report that was tabled in parliament on 21 November. The commissioners' job was to establish whether there were any grounds for supposing that
improper motives
influenced the magistrates in their exoneration of James Bentley for Scobie's murder, and also whether the conduct of the officers of the Camp generally had been such
as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population
. When the enquiry was completed, the answers were no and yes. This would not be popular news.

But there was a concession. Both James and Catherine Bentley, along with their servants Hance and Farrell, had been rearrested in the middle of October and sent to Melbourne for trial. And now, as another sop to the offended diggers, John D'Ewes and Robert Milne were relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of Ballarat. Many believed the wrong men had copped it.
This affair will make Ballarat too hot for Mr Johnstone in a short time
, wrote the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
;
the sooner he is shifted the better
.
¹⁰
James Johnston continued to receive threats to his life and liberty after the commission cleared him. (Maggie's diary reveals nothing of the pressure-cooker tensions of November.) Robert Rede and Gordon Evans were also absolved of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, John D'Ewes refused to go quietly. He protested his honesty and integrity until the last, all the while claiming that every other senior official in the Camp was nothing more than a money-grubbing land speculator tricked out in brass buttons and government-issue bayonets.

At least D'Ewes no longer had to fret about his accommodation. That was left to those remaining in Camp. The second half of Hotham's plan was about as efficacious as the first. The arrival of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little fish into an already overpacked tin.
Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses now poured in on us
, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
,
the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence. Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.
¹¹
The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas's new plan of defence, meant that soldiers and police were on twenty-four-hour patrols. From the outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.

On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military. Without this skirmish, the
BALLARAT TIMES
reported facetiously,
we should have little to talk about
. The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the affair had been quickly hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the
BALLARAT TIMES
. He complained of the conditions endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. (This means the letter's author arrived with either the 40th Regiment on 24 October or the 12th on 28 October.) His detachment was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily. They were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding
as if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers
. With the
inadequate remuneration
of only two shillings a day,
the soldier is unjustly dealt with
, complained the man.
¹²
Who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers' cause? The military leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might extend some brotherly love? His fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion of their own?

While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised.
A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together
, noted the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
of the particular mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat. On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would be the
attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers
. Around the speakers platform were placed English, Scots, Irish, French and United States national flags. A German band played. Henry Holyoake, Thomas Kennedy and George Black spoke for over four hours. The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn. American consul James Tarleton was in town, at the behest of Ballarat's American community, who put on
an American dinner
in his honour at the Adelphi. Tarleton asked to address the meeting about the Carey affair. This odd gesture was, perhaps, a pre-emptive move to ward off a growing insinuation of favouritism towards the Americans, especially after charges of arson were dropped against young Yankee digger Albert Hurd, who had also been arrested after the Eureka Hotel fire. It was rumoured that Hurd's release was influenced by back-room deals that were
half American, half Masonic
.
¹³

The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for the events that would now tumble like dominoes towards their catastrophic resolution.

On 11 November 1854, a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier Alpheus Boynton was there and noted in his diary the
talented men
who put down picks and pans and
took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men.
The Ballarat Reform League united the proto-societies that had been popping up over the previous weeks, an Irish union here, a German
bund
there.

The reform league elected its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of the Catholic teacher Anastasia, was appointed as chairman. Humffray, Kennedy and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting. They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that committed to ink the chief grievances and goals of the league. A manifesto of democratic principles, its primary tenets were: free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of parliament; and fixed parliamentary terms. Thus the aim of moral rights for the disenfranchised goldfields population (dignity, equity, justice) was codified into a standard template of Chartist-inspired political rights.

The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely touted as the first formal step on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter' was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant historical documents. Yet oddly enough, the
BALLARAT TIMES
makes only brief—if bombastic—mention of this monster meeting.
It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country
, wrote Henry Seekamp,
that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus of Australian Independence
. A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.