The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (57 page)

There is little doubt that it was women who sewed the flag. Kristin Phillips has confirmed that the flag was made using traditional women's sewing skills: flat felled seams done by hand.
⁴²
Val D'Angri, the Ballarat craftswoman employed in 1973 to restore the flag for presentation at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, found original pins in the seams that were a common component of a mid-nineteenth-century woman's sewing kit. The ‘men's flag story', as relayed by J. W. Wilson, is crucially undermined by two factors: the flag is not made of bunting, and it could not have been made in less than forty-eight hours. Kristin Phillips reckons that it would have taken many hands, gathered around the perimeter of the flag, to construct the flag with any haste. (It took Val D'Angri seventy-five hours to hand sew a reproduction flag.)

Anastasia and her compatriots were probably the
English ladies
that the German Frederick Vern refers to. Vern certainly had no political motivation to attribute the Australian Flag's origin to women. Yet whether the seamstresses were
English
is debatable. Did the Hanoverian consider that white women from the British Isles all looked the same? Anastasia Hayes, as we know, was Irish, born in Kilkenny and reared through a famine, although she and Timothy had lived in England prior to emigrating. Their daughter Anastasia was baptised in Stafford in 1850. As the wife of the chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Anastasia Sr was certainly close to the action. Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke, heavily pregnant with her first child in the summer of 1854, was also Irish, but she had arrived in Victoria with her family when she was four years old and her accent may have receded. Anastasia Withers, née Splain, was the only ethnic
Englishwoman
among the group widely accepted as the flag's makers. Born in Bristol in 1825, she was transported to Tasmania for the theft of five shawls in 1843. There she married Samuel Withers in 1849 and had two children. The couple was one of the earliest arrivals on the Victorian goldfields. By the time they were digging at Ballarat in November 1854, Anastasia Withers had three children under five and another on the way. There is every reason to think that Eliza Darcy was also part of the team of workers, as her ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter, Ella Hancock, will tell you today.

Between the women who probably came together under cover of darkness to sew the rebel flag, there were at least nine children and two pregnancies. There is no faulting their dedication. Or maybe, if you are going to be up half the night with sleepless infants, you might as well do something that will be recorded in the pages of history.

On the evening of 29 November, Captain Pasley, one of the military commanders now stationed at Ballarat, wrote to Hotham. The meeting at Bakery Hill had
passed off very quietly
, he reported, with speeches less inflammatory than previous public demonstrations.
It is therefore, I think, clearly necessary
, Pasley wrote,

that some steps should be taken to bring the matter to a crisis, and to teach those persons (forming, no doubt, the great majority of the mining population) who are not seditiously disposed, that it is in their interest to give practical proofs of their allegiance.
⁴³

Such persons, he hoped, would not only discourage the rebellious portion of the community but also actively interfere to prevent their further activities. With the appearance of the Australian Flag, community unrest had suddenly been branded seditious.

It was somewhat disingenuous for Pasley to suggest that the rebels were in the minority. Up to fifteen thousand people had assembled at Bakery Hill that day. By the end of November there were 32,000 people at Ballarat: 23,000 men, 4200 women and 4300 children. Almost half of the total population was prepared to walk off the job and attend a protest meeting. Just imagine if that sort of percentage of citizens—say half of Melbourne's current population of five million—turned up to any public meeting on climate change, maternity leave, nuclear disarmament, Aboriginal land rights, bank fees, the trains not running on time—anything. It would be political chaos.

Faced with this sort of numerical opposition, the authorities of Ballarat were now itching for the simplicity of a violent collision in order to assert their supremacy. Their power and legitimacy were being questioned daily by everyone from Ellen Young, the
BALLARAT TIMES
and the conscientiously objecting unlicensed diggers on the outside, to Catherine McLister and the grumbling foot police on the inside. A rebellion would sort the loyal wheat from the mutinous chaff, and the Camp would be the omnipotent threshing machine. The line would be nothing more or less than the law. Which side are you on?

Each man felt something would happen before the day was over.
So wrote Alexander Dick on the morning of Thursday 30 November, as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gravel Pits. The heat was intense; the day overcast, windy, foul. The young Scotsman looked down on the usual comings and goings of a busy working goldfield. The noise and clamour. The shouts from holes and the creak of turning windlasses. Tents and flags flapping, children darting about. Shops trading. The workplace and the home fused in a perfect pre-industrial spectacle of manual labour.

And then, a torrent of foot and mounted police suddenly descended from the Camp to the Gravel Pits. A massive licence hunt began, led by James Johnston, on the very morning after so many diggers had burned their licences in the flames of communal resistance. It was a test of the rebellious miners' pledge to defend the unlicensed among them. It was a demonstration of strength from the Camp to put to rights the power inversion that had followed the burning of Bentley's Hotel. It was an arm-wrestle to see who, when push came to shove, would gain the upper hand; a mighty rout of deliberately unlicensed diggers by an unprecedented show of force.

There was
a tremendous uproar
. All the inhabitants of the Gravel Pits scattered among the mounds of earth and tents.
Joe! Joe! Joe!
The cry went down the line. It was mayhem, as the mounted police began to gallop among the tents. The soldiers made a sweep of the flat, with cavalry on both flanks and in the centre, clearing off all the occupants of claims to the high road beyond the lead, below Bakery Hill. Police fired shots into a crowded area,
among tents where women and children were congregated in large numbers
.
⁴⁴

The confused crowd scattered like tumbleweeds in the hot wind, seeking shelter in the lee of neighbouring tents. Troopers were dragged down from their horses
like mere stuffed effigies of men
. Police were pelted with mud, stones and broken bottles. Robert Rede stampeded in and hurriedly mouthed the Riot Act. He had been criticised for not taking such action at the Eureka Hotel riot. Now he read the Act so quickly—
with telegraphic speed
—that in one journalist's opinion
the consequent proceedings were illegal
.
⁴⁵

Elizabeth Rowlands looked on.
I was present
, she later wrote,
when the proclamation was read when the soldiers dropped on their knee and presented guns at us and told the crowd to disperse and my word they did disperse
.
⁴⁶
Miners jumped down holes. Women and children melted into tents. A bugle sounded. The military marched down the hill, forming a line on the grass under the southward plateau of the Camp.
A very picturesque array
, thought Samuel Huyghue, the line of cavalry in their bright red uniforms, their brass buttons flashing in the sunlight, set against the
verdure of the grass
which had not yet lost its
winter hue
. Eight men were arrested for riotous behaviour but there were no serious injuries. First honours to the Camp.

No one at the Gravel Pits went back to work that day. As news of the chaos and random firing on the crowd, including turning weapons on women and children, spread to other parts of the field, sympathetic diggers downed tools to seek information and digest rumours.
Work is knocked off
, wrote one official to Hotham,

and the whole population is talking over events of the morning…The opinions of most disinterested persons here is [the actions of the Camp] are alike unwise and indicative of a wish on the part of the authorities here to hurry on a collision.
⁴⁷

Even upright Martha Clendinning, a self-appointed member
of the peace portion of the residents
, thought that ordering licence hunts after the Bakery Hill meeting was
an incredible act of folly
. If James Johnston was going to step up digger hunts, which had already become an almost daily humiliation, and diggers were continuing to burn their licences in solidarity with the cause of freedom from the oppressive goldfields regime, then what were the
interested
persons to do?

From all directions on the diggings, people started in the direction of Bakery Hill. The Australian Flag was once again flying there. The people turned their eyes to the five shimmering stars, guiding their footsteps towards a just course. This would be an unplacarded meeting—no notice, no agenda, no stage, no prepared speeches. Whatever grievances had caused those assembled to lose faith in the government—hunger, grief, shame, disappointment, harassment, indignity, humiliation, powerlessness—the object now was self-defence. The leaders of Ballarat had shown they would fire upon a civilian crowd. If the people's call was sticks and stones, the Camp's response would be lead and steel. This was not a tune to which Australia's home-grown sons and daughters, or its ambitious immigrants, had ever expected to dance. This was the way masters treated servants, dogs and blacks—not free-born Britons and self-governing Yankees.

Gathered now at Bakery Hill, under the starry banner, the people looked for direction. Who would guide this exodus, deliver them from tyranny, lead them out of slavery? From the crowd stepped a twenty-seven-year-old Irishman. Peter Lalor was raised in a political family. His eldest brother had fought in the Young Irish movement in that fiery year of 1848. The Lalors had known the oppression and hypocrisy of the Union Jack. They believed in home rule. As landed gentry, the family had used its political nous to stand up for the rights of Irish peasants. Patrick Lalor, Peter's father, was an MP representing Queens County. Trained as a civil engineer and excited by the prospect of a golden frontier, Peter Lalor came to Victoria with his brother Richard and sisters Margaret and Maria in 1852. At Ballarat, he became Timothy Hayes' mining partner. With his fiancée Alicia Dunne working as a teacher in Geelong, Lalor looked to Anastasia Hayes and her brood of children for his de facto domestic life.

On 30 November this tall, charismatic, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man stepped out of the crowd and said one word. He said it with feeling.
Liberty!
Mrs Ann Shann, twenty-four-year-old wife of digger John Shann, was there. She later vividly remembered the moment when Lalor
was chosen leader of the diggers, and it was decided to drill and oppose the police and military by force.
⁴⁸
Mrs Shann joined with other diggers, their wives and children as the assembled group of a thousand marched en masse from Bakery Hill to Eureka. The Eureka was further from the Camp, and, as a flat, not a rise, more protected. They took the flag with them.