The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (58 page)

At Eureka, the self-appointed leadership of the young solidarity movement met in the home-cum-store of Anne and Martin Diamond. A veritable United Nations of malcontents: Lalor, Carboni (who was needed to translate orders to the non-English-speaking rebels), Irishmen Patrick Curtain, John Manning, Patrick Howard and Timothy Hayes, Englishman George Black, Scotsman Thomas Kennedy, Frederick Vern the Hanoverian, Canadian Henry Ross, American James McGill, who was a close friend of Sarah Hanmer, and Edward Thonen, a thirty-year-old Jewish ‘lemonade seller' from Prussia. John Basson Humffray abstained from the group, citing his infinite preference for moral force over physical force, and watched his former shipmates, Anne and Martin, give shelter to the rebels. Charles Evans sided with Humffray, the man with whom he'd walked to Ballarat, over Hayes, the man with whom he'd sailed to Victoria. By temperament, Evans was a cautious observer. Kennedy, by contrast, had told a cheering crowd at Bakery Hill monster meeting that
mere persuasion is all a humbug; nothing succeeds like a lick in the lug
.
⁴⁹

The new group who met at the Diamonds' store constituted themselves as a ‘council of war for the defence', though there was, at present, no territory to defend. Lalor was elected ‘commander-in-chief ' and began to organise drilling squads to protect the unlicensed diggers. For here was the root of the problem: the thousands of miners who had burned their licences in the fires of protest were now, technically, unauthorised to be on the diggings and could be fined or arrested for breach of the law. The Gravel Pits incident that morning had shown that the government would pursue its prerogative without mercy. Lalor concluded that the miners must
resist force by force
. But how to symbolise that resistance? A flag was one thing. It could stir hearts, but it could not shelter bodies.

When French revolutionaries proclaimed their democratic rights, they blockaded the streets of Paris. They set up rough barriers, cordoned off territory: drew a line. Men and women stationed themselves behind those barricades in a show of communal militancy. ‘The barricade', writes historian David Barry, ‘emerged on a large scale as a weapon of rebellion…in July 1830, creating a new mode of defensive neighbourhood action in which women, with their strong involvement in community networks, could profitably participate.'

French revolutionaries carried pikes, waved banners and shouted slogans. Their activities were confrontational and highly visible, like a frilled-neck lizard throwing out a collar of spines to shock enemies with its potency: an animal act of defensiveness. But it was a primal knee-jerk with a very human twist. As Barry tells us, men of Paris welcomed women behind the barricades because ‘their presence was seen as a means of deterring the authorities from reacting with force'. There might not be safety in numbers, the freedom fighters reasoned, but there was surely safety in the company of women. No civilised government would deliberately fire on civilian women and children.

In the Diamonds' store that afternoon, the war chiefs decided to throw up a hasty barricade. There needed to be a neighbourhood refuge, an unassailable place of shelter, to
defend and protect
from arrest those diggers who had burned their licences—but how to cordon off such a zone? There were no European-style streets to speak of on the diggings, only rough transport thoroughfares lined by tent dwellings, stores and shanties. The streets were porous. A crowd (or an army) could leak out into the gaps between the canvas shelters. There was no physical structure to contain them, no wall of buildings. This being Australia, and the frontier, there was simply too much space. So the barricade would have to be self-contained, would have to close in on itself. The line would have to be a circle.

Thus an area around the Diamonds' store was immediately barricaded. It was all hands on deck, with any form of timber serving to construct a crude fortification: overturned carts, empty barrels and crates, felled trees, the thick slabs used to line shafts. Made in haste and with scavenged resources, the barrier was brutally uneven, only waist high in some sections, over six feet in others. Some sections were held together with ropes, some fixed into the ground; some slabs were given picket-like points, other links in the chain were the mounds of earth disgorged from a deep sinking.

The territory it marked was at the southern end of the Eureka line, on a gentle slope running up to the Melbourne Road, only a few hundred yards from the charred remains of Bentley's Hotel. The ground in this area was studded with tents and sinking holes. In all, about an acre of ground was enclosed. The barricade surrounded at least ten tents, the Diamonds' immediate neighbours. These tents were the homes and businesses of diggers and their families; men and women randomly, fatally, thrust centre stage. As Anne Diamond would later testify, her tent was
half in and half out
of the ramshackle cordon.
⁵⁰
The ring was not even closed. It was a broken circle from the start, more of a wobbly parallelogram really, with its rear wall comprising the scrub of Brown Hill. At the heart of the enclosed turf, a flagpole was erected and the Australian Flag hoisted to stake the claim. The Eureka Stockade, as it would come to be known, made a mighty fine amphitheatre but a lousy bulwark.
⁵¹
The cornered lizard bared its frills.

With teams of diggers drilling on the flat ground beside their new stringybark citadel, Lalor led his war council back up to Bakery Hill. The Southern Cross was once more unfurled. Though the new stronghold at Eureka could be glimpsed from the Camp, this rise was more prominent. It would attract the attention of potential recruits as well as the wide-eyed glare of the Camp. A division of Americans, calling themselves the Independent Californian Rangers, fell in behind Captain Ross. Vern rallied a troop of continental freedom fighters. There is no evidence of any Chinese being recruited into the stoush, but it is not impossible that someone like John Aloo, who ran a popular restaurant on the diggings, acted as an interpreter, just as Carboni did for the Italians, French and Prussians. Local Indigenous inhabitants were present at the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion, public meetings; they may have been at Bakery Hill too.

This was the pointy end of a momentous day, and those still standing beneath the flag that was flapping wildly in the hot late afternoon wind were here to pledge allegiance to a cause that had turned abruptly. What had started as a lawful outpouring of communal grievance was now a calculated show of armed resistance. The stage was set, a director appointed, the actors assembled, and now the players must speak. Lalor kneeled. He removed his hat and raised his hand towards the flag:
We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties
.
⁵²
A chorus of five hundred true believers chanted
Amen
.

The curtain now falls on Bakery Hill, and the players move back down to Eureka. They bring the flag with them. This time, it will not return.

As the storm clouds built on that afternoon of Thursday 30 November, Police Constable Henry Goodenough, a government spy, relayed a rumour that the Camp would be attacked at 4am. Henry's twenty-six-year-old wife Elizabeth and their six-month-old baby Mary Anne had no doubt been sent away from the Camp with Maggie Johnston and the other government wives as part of Captain Thomas's defence plan. Goodenough prowled the diggers' meetings dressed in miners garb, shouting oaths and pretending to be drunk. Either he was a bad actor or he really was intoxicated. At one gathering Raffaello Carboni gave the blathering oaf a sturdy kick in the privates to silence him. When
Judas Iscariot Goodenough
, as Carboni later called him, planted the story of the Camp's imminent attack, there was every reason to storm the citadel. The eight men arrested at the Gravel Pits that morning were considered political prisoners, just as Fletcher, McIntyre and Westoby had been.
We shall be ready to receive them
, wrote Captain Pasley.
I am more convinced than ever that…sedition must be put down by force…before many days have passed, it will be necessary for us to sweep the whole goldfield
.
⁵³
Had somebody instructed Goodenough to orchestrate a crisis, if none truly existed?

That evening the barometric pressure finally plummeted. A violent thunderstorm shook the night sky. It rained for three hours solid, great lashings of fat summer rain. During the whole night, the
police troopers were exposed to the downpour
, waiting beside their horses, saddled and ready for action. Fortifications had been made to the mess house, Dr David Williams' house, the Camp hospital, Rede and Johnston's quarters (
a particularly exposed locality
) and the military barracks. It was the job of the police to guard these vulnerable targets. So the exhausted and no doubt frightened young men
lay wrapped in their cloaks on the saturated ground
or crouching under their horses for shelter. To kill time, recounted Samuel Huyghue, the lads sat
spinning yarns of former service in the field
. For some, there would have been an element of truth to their tales. For most, the one-upmanship was pure bravado.

Meanwhile, Robert Rede, dry and fortified in his quarters, scratched out a letter to Melbourne by candlelight.
The absolute necessity of putting down all meetings Public/Private I think should now be apparent
, he wrote,
for the abolition of the Licence Fee is merely a watchword.
Rede had a plan—that the whole of the goldfield be put under martial law and Hotham issue a proclamation to the effect that he would stop the agitation at all costs—but the former medical student showed less bluster than the boy soldiers. Like the diggers being magnetically drawn to Bakery Hill, Rede turned to Hotham for leadership. It would have cost his pride to write,
I must also earnestly require some instructions for my future guidance
.
⁵⁴

Lalor gave Rede an out. Late that night, with the dust settled by hours of soaking rain, Lalor decided to send a deputation to speak to Rede in a gentlemanly manner. The go-betweens would negotiate for the release of the prisoners. He chose George Black, who so recently had been on a similar mission to see Hotham, Raffaello Carboni, and the Catholic priest Father Smyth. When the trio reached the Yarrowee River below the Camp, the police stopped them. Only Smyth was allowed to proceed. He was taken directly to Rede. Flanked by his deputies, Rede accompanied Smyth back to where Black and Carboni waited in the company of the police.