The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (55 page)

That night, a rumour spread that the Camp had been burnt down. Another report said the whole 40th Regiment was going up. The gossip was exaggerated, but a deployment was certainly on the move. They would first sail to Geelong, gather reinforcements and head up to Ballarat from there. Mrs Massey and her friends went to see off the troops. At the docks, she expected to find doleful faces, but was flabbergasted at the celebratory atmosphere.

I think I never saw a more joyous party. They reminded me of happy schoolboys bound for some party of pleasure, yet kept in unwilling restraint by the eye of the master…many were bestriding the guns, and otherwise testifying their satisfaction at the prospect of a fight.

Happy schoolboys. Unwilling restraint. The prospect of a fight.

Arriving at the barracks, Mrs Massey found an altogether different scene.

The women and children, who had turned out to see the departure of their husbands and fathers, were weeping and bewailing their sad lot in not being allowed to follow them, and kind people were doing their best to console, seemingly to no purpose, these disconsolate ones.

The only solace, surmised Mrs Massey, was that the regimental wives didn't have
poverty to bear as well as loneliness
. But for some in the embrace of Her Majesty's service, there would never be compensation for the eternal grief about to descend.

Thursday 28 November was Thanksgiving. Turkey Day. Always keen to celebrate their nation's holidays, the American community on the diggings prepared to feast. Expat Yankees drank bourbon and sang patriotic songs, in each other's tents or at a grand ball. A lavish dinner was staged at Brandt and Hirschler's Victoria Hotel at Red Hill. The proprietors had
gone the whole hog
, providing
a perfect legion of delicacies
for the seventy men who dined from 8pm to 2am.
²⁷
A band played ‘The Star Spangled Banner', ‘God Save the Queen' and ‘La Marseillaise'. James Tarleton accepted an invitation to attend. So did Robert Rede, who welcomed the occasion to cement good relations with Ballarat's most prominent Americans.

Popular discontent was at its apex. In every quarter—the pub, the field, the store, the campfire, the theatre, the church—people stopped
to discuss the theory of political relationships
, as the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
put it. Thomas Pierson was more specific. At the daily stump meetings being held, people
speak openly in unmeasured terms against that old scamp the Governor and nearly all in office. [They] urge people to declare Independence
. One speaker Pierson heard said if all the people would just assert their rights and claim
a Republican Government,
then we could
stand here as Proud as any of the sons of America.
The agitators, noted Pierson,
seem determined to make Australia free
.

To Rede and his fellow upholders of Australia's peculiar ancien régime of squattocracy and imperial monarchy, such talk did not come cheap. Another monster meeting at Bakery Hill had been placarded for tomorrow, the 29th, and it was rumoured that a formal declaration of independence would be made. On the goldfields, Yankee-style freedom signalled frontier lawlessness: Lynch Law, the law of the bowie knife.

A recent incident in Ballarat had confirmed what a Yankee justice system might look like. In August, American digger Robert Clarke was playing cards at the Albion Hotel with three cronies. They were playing for ‘nobblers' (shots of spirits). Clarke refused to follow suit in one trick, causing a dispute with a digger called Van Winkler, who accused Clarke of cheating. Clarke backed down, but in the following hand threatened to blow out the brains of any man who disrupted the play. Van Winkler told Clarke that
a man that sat down to play on his friends and could not play without cheating was no man at all
. Clarke pulled out his pistol and fired. The bullet missed Van Winkler, whistled through a canvas wall and killed Kosman Berand, who was asleep in a cot. Mrs O'Kell, the landlady, whipped out her own pistol, while the diggers and musicians in the hotel wrestled Clarke to the ground.

On 28 October, Clarke was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years on the road.
²⁸
If it had happened on the American frontier, Clarke would have wiped the blood from the cards and continued his hand as the musicians picked up the tune and Berand was dragged out to the pigs. The American frontier was Robert Rede's idea of hell.

Lone ranger vigilance committees were one thing, but republican yearnings were quite another. There had always been a concern among some British bystanders at how quickly Victoria was becoming
Americanized
. It was a love–hate relationship. In George Francis Train's assessment, the colonial government admired the indomitable energy, entrepreneurial ingenuity,
can-do spirit
and brash confidence of the American immigrants, but was less comfortable with the fact that Americans had
no truck with ‘the word'
. The American disrespect for constituted authority seemed to be rubbing off on the digging body as a whole, especially as the authorities did nothing to win back the people's regard. After the Eureka Hotel blaze, George Francis Train wrote in his
BOSTON GLOBE
column,
Give the colonists their own way, and they will remain loyal—cross their path and they will have a flag of their own
.

George Francis Train predicted an inexorable flourishing of republican sentiment in the months ahead, a colonial rite of passage that he expressed in particularly gendered terms:

Grant all the diggers ask, and they will not be satisfied. Abolish the licence fee, unlock the lands, give them universal suffrage, retrench government expenses, and it will not save the ultimate independence of the colony…Victoria's history is quickly written. The girl is hardly marriageable, yet her freedom is close at hand.

Witnesses revealed that there had been speakers at the Eureka Hotel riot urging the people
to drive off all the Government officers, send the Government home and to declare their Independence
, as Thomas Pierson recorded after he left the fracas. W. H. Foster, a civil servant on the diggings and a cousin of Charles La Trobe, wrote home in a letter to his parents in December 1854 that the licence tax issue was simply a convenient smokescreen for the Americans who were
here in great numbers…with a view to institute independence
.
²⁹
Hotham himself admitted to Sir George Grey that Victoria
possesses wealth, strength and competency to hold its position unaided by the Mother Country
.
³⁰
Are we to run the risk of the colony
walking alone?
he asked. Fewer than eighty years had passed since the American Revolution. In collective memory, the thought of colonists defeating redcoats was anything but ancient history.

Rede knew that his attendance at the Americans' Thanksgiving dinner was politic to say the least. He needed to curtail, not strengthen, the influence of the Americans over Ballarat's public culture. But he also needed to be respectful of Yankee traditions and of their consul, James Tarleton. James and his wife had lived with George Francis and Winnie Davis Train when they first arrived in Melbourne. Train was Melbourne's leading merchant and transport magnate, and a foreign correspondent. It required an adroit act of diplomacy to negotiate this thorny terrain.

Rede's first act—although obeisance was not his favourite pastime—was to bow graciously to Tarleton, who was, after all, the guest of honour. Tarleton, for his part, used the occasion to proclaim the loyalty of the Americans to the laws of their adopted land. He urged his countrymen to refrain from entering into the present agitations. Such entreaties were heartily welcomed by the crowd, who represented the upper echelons of Ballarat society, men like Dr Charles Kenworthy and Dr William Otway, who both ran successful medical practices in town and on the diggings. Following Hotham's instructions, Rede had sent government spies onto the diggings. One spy had delivered him a long list of names of people who had
pledged themselves to attack the camp and drive the officials off the Gold Field
.
³¹
One of the spies was said to be Dr Kenworthy.
³²
There was a reason this dinner was being held at Brandt and Hirschler's, and not at the Adelphi.

If Rede and Kenworthy were planning a little reconnoitre over whiskey and rye, their liaison was cut short. During the toasts, Rede was suddenly called away. There had been a skirmish on the Melbourne Road and troops from the Camp were being dispatched to respond.

A company of the 12th Regiment was marching into town, part of Hotham's next wave of fortification for the Camp. This particular small contingent was essentially a guard detail for several wagons full of ammunition and baggage: the real manpower would come later that night, with the arrival of the regimental units waved off by Mrs Massey. By the first day of summer, there would be a total of 546 officers and soldiers stationed at Ballarat, almost five times more than had been on the ground over winter.

As the ammunition-bearing battalion crossed Eureka, it was ambushed by a group of diggers lurking in the shadows. Incoming soldiers had become used to hostile welcoming committees of men, women and children hooting, jeering and throwing stones at them as they hup-two'd their way to the Camp. But this time a violent scuffle broke out in which the wagons were overturned, a drummer boy was shot in the thigh, an old American carrier was severely injured and several horses were wounded. Onlookers predicted fatalities. Resident Commissioner Robert Rede never got the chance to make his toast to the Queen. He left the Americans to their yankee doodle dandying, not quite convinced that Tarleton's righteous words would be mirrored in noble action.

While the Americans gave thanks and Rede tried to unpick the tangled web of Ballarat's allegiances, preparations were being made on the Flat for another monster meeting. Relations between the Camp and the diggers had broken down completely after the reform league's unsuccessful attempt to intercede on behalf of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby. Some diggers had started to burn their licences as a symbolic protest against the constituted authorities. Tent and store robberies were now occurring nightly. Horse stealing had become so common that horses without stabling were considered useless. A fierce dog was worth a king's ransom. Security measures were directed exclusively towards the Camp, and the police were now vastly outnumbered by the military, further eroding any skerrick of prestige they may have enjoyed with the community.