The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (61 page)

The exchange of fire went on for no more than fifteen minutes, until soldiers from the 40th Regiment strode over a low section of the barricade and the miners knew the jig was up. It was now a hand-to-hand fight between trained members of the British army and an undermanned team of zealous amateurs, their ardent wives and screaming children.
The entrenchment was then carried
, reported Captain Thomas,
and taken by the point of bayonet, the insurgents retreating. I ordered the firing to cease.
¹²

It's what happened after the surrender that really matters. It's what happened after the firing ceased that made contemporary observers call the Eureka clash a
massacre
, not a battle.

With the barricade breached and adrenaline surging, the lid was finally lifted off the simmering cauldron of military and police discipline. What bubbled over was a lethal stew of hunger, discomfort, exhaustion, boredom, insult, exasperation, sexual depravity, braggadocio, spite, homesickness, terror and relief. Charles Schulze, who operated a bakery on Bakery Hill and was an eyewitness to the violent outpouring of rancour that followed the rebels' surrender, could see what the weeks of Joe-ing had produced.
Jaded, tired, not allowed to return the insult
, he wrote,
you can imagine. That when the time came, they revenged themselves to the fullest extent
.
¹³

It was the bayonets not the bullets that did the damage. Mayhem and carnage reigned, as the crazed soldiers and police thrust their blades into dead, dying and wounded miners. Gold lust gave way to blood lust as the Eureka line became a killing field.
It was a trooper that did it
, Anne Diamond later testified.
I know that my husband got three hurts from a sword on the back; he fell on his face and he got three cuts of a sword and a stab of a bayonet.
¹⁴
Anne and her husband were fleeing from the Stockade when Martin was shot.
They treated the dead bodies very badly
, Anne reported twenty-two days after Martin's death.
The woman that laid him out could prove that
.

Some soldiers hacked at the bodies of those strewn on the ground. Others surrounded tents and sliced and jabbed at the bullet-riddled canvas. Ostensibly, they were on the hunt for prisoners; no insurgent should be allowed to escape. In effect, as the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
railed on 5 December,
those perfectly innocent of rebellious notions were murdered, fired at and horribly mangled by the troopers
. Outnumbered and trapped, many insurgents were literally butchered. One eyewitness later reported that:

every body had a plurality of mortal wounds: the corpses of the slain had been hacked by the mounted troopers out of sheer brutality…It was a needless massacre. Not even at the siege of Sebastopol did British soldiers kill enemies who lay wounded and defenceless.
¹⁵

The residents of the Stockade could not believe their eyes.

Those who were able began to run towards Brown Hill, at the rear of the Stockade where the palisade did not quite join. The scrub was thick and the ground broken, impeding the troopers' mounts. Brown Hill would shelter outlaws for weeks to come. Others jumped down mine shafts, heedless of deep water. Their bloated bodies were fished out days later. Some fled into neighbouring tents, where they clambered up sod chimneys or shimmied under cots. Some of the wounded within the Stockade found themselves cloaked by the shuddering bodies of women, pretending to mourn their dead in order that the soldiers would pass without further recrimination. Bridget Hynes threw herself over an injured man and cried,
He is dead! He is dead!
so that the troopers would not run him through. Bridget was two months pregnant with her first child, a honeymoon conception under a happier full moon. Peter Lalor, who had been shot in the shoulder, was dragged under a ledge and safely concealed. Henry Ross, mortally wounded, was not so lucky. At least he was spared the pain of seeing the
chaste
flag that he had sired dragged down from its mast by Constable John King and paraded before his fellow policemen as a trophy of war.

Officers remained silent as boy soldiers taunted and assaulted bystanders. The bodies of the dead were heaped together face up: mouths gaping, eyes fixed.
Several of them were still heaving
, an eyewitness reported to the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
,
and at every rise of their breasts, the blood spouted out of their wounds, or just bubbled out and trickled away
.
¹⁶
The victims of the frantic attack were not only the deceased. Standing by, tragically alive to the moment, were
poor women crying for absent husbands and children frightened into quietness.
Other women had bolted from their tents, leaving their husbands behind. Mary Curtain rushed out of her store in her nightgown with fifteen-month-old Mary Agnes in tow. Mary was eight months pregnant.
Such was the terror and hurry with which my family fled
, husband Patrick Curtain later claimed,
that they left behind them even their every day dress
.
¹⁷
Another man woke on hearing the shots. He went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers. Seeing what was happening, he shouted at a trooper
For God's sake don't kill my wife and children. He was shot dead on his own threshold.
¹⁸

What more humiliating way to surrender? A dawn raid. On a Sunday. The miners caught with their pants down on their own doorsteps. Who would be swaggering now?

If the soldiers and police were perturbed by the presence of families in their frenzied midst, most did not show it.
A poor woman and her children
, reported a stunned
GEELONG ADVERTISER
correspondent,

were standing outside a tent. She said that the troopers had surrounded the tent, and pierced it with their swords. She, her husband, and her children were ordered out by the troopers, and were inspected in their night clothes outside, while the troopers searched the tent.
¹⁹

Some troopers demonstrated more compunction. Charles Ferguson, one of McGill's Californian Rangers, saw a woman come running out of her tent in her nightdress. She ran over to some soldiers who had captured her husband. She begged them to release him
but she was only pushed around roughly by the soldiers, when at last the commanding officer rode up and ordered them to deliver to the woman her husband.
Ferguson had the highest praise for this chivalrous fellow:
That was a manly officer
.

Not so fortunate was Rebecca Noonan. Thirty-two-year-old Rebecca ran a store one hundred yards from the stockade. Her husband Michael was a miner. The couple, natives of County Clare, had five children. As the family was attempting to escape from their burning tent, Michael was stopped by police and arrested. Michael pleaded that he was
a peaceable and loyal
subject of Her Majesty and [his] Excellency's Government
, but was taken into custody regardless. Rebecca remonstrated. She was then
brutally assaulted by the foot police and her life threatened
.
²⁰
Rebecca was four months pregnant.

Mary Faulds' predicament was extreme. When soldiers burst into her tent in the stockade she was lying on the ground, wedged between two cots with a blanket covering her, labouring to bring her baby into this mad world. The soldiers turned around and left her to her fear and anguish. Mary's baby Adeliza was born later that day.
²¹
Other women performed feats of remarkable courage. Richard Wilson fled his shop, leaving his wife Elizabeth behind. A miner raced up to her and said,
Look Ma'am, where can I hide?
She replied,
Right where you stand
. And with that she lifted her dress, pushed the man to the floor, stepped over him and swathed him in her hoop skirts.
²²

Women's clothing was in high demand. Frederick Vern, who had not been in the Stockade at the time of the attack, escaped Ballarat disguised as a woman. Captain James McGill also parted with his sex for a short season. He fled into the bush, where he was later met by Sarah Hanmer, who provided him with dress, shawl and bonnet—either her own or costumes from the theatre—and food for his journey into hiding.
²³

Other women risked their own safety to aid the wounded and dying. A defenceless man was cut and slashed on his body and head near the tent of Dr Leman, close to the stockade. Mrs Leman heard the man's cries and left the cover of her tent to assist him.
The cruel sight drew an expression of horror from her
, reported an onlooker,
which reaching the ears of one of the butchers he turned around and deliberately fired at her
.
²⁴
The shot missed and the soldier fired again as Emma Leman fled back into her tent.

The man Mrs Leman risked her life to help was twenty-three-year-old English miner Henry Powell. He had come from Creswick the previous day to visit William Cox, who lived with his wife Eliza on the Eureka, only a short distance from the stockade. Eliza was forty-four years old, the same age as Ellen Young, and had only been in the colony eight months. She had five children and Powell was keen on the eldest daughter, twenty-four-year-old Fanny. If Henry had come to ask for Fanny's hand, his timing was fatal. When he emerged from the Coxes' tent on Sunday morning, he was confronted by Arthur Akhurst, clerk of the police court, who promptly dashed the innocent Powell over the head with his sword and told him he was a prisoner. As Powell lay dazed and bleeding on the ground, Akhurst cut him several more times and fired at him, then mounted troopers arrived and trampled him with their horses. William Cox was arrested. He asked for a moment to put on his clothes but, according to Eliza who stood by,
they said no you bugger come along
.
²⁵

William Cox was corralled with the other 114 prisoners taken to the Camp. One of those arrested was Raffaello Carboni, who had been asleep in his tent at the time of the attack. Carboni was
dragged out, and hobbled to a dozen more prisoners outside, and we were marched to the Camp
. Another was Timothy Hayes, who was also at home with his family when the stockade was taken. He was making his way to the stockade to assist the wounded when he was arrested. On seeing the mounted troops leading her handcuffed husband back to the Camp, Anastasia rushed headlong between the horses and bawled out Timothy's captors.
If I had been a man
, she spat,
I wouldn't have been taken by so few as these.
²⁶
It's hard to know at whom the insult was directed.

The shameful fact was that the stockade was a shambles. It was a piece of theatre that broke loose from its script of cat-and-mouse local politics—the persecutors and the persecuted, hunters and the hunted—and spilled human blood. The weapons were real and the stakes were high: no less than manly honour and duty were on the line. Peter Lalor himself had admitted that he
would be unworthy of being called a man…were I base enough to desert my companions in danger.
But the very men who had been goaded into resistance, rendered impotent by a legal system that denied them rights and a taxation system that made them paupers, disappointed by a land that promised reward for honest toil but delivered instead disease, death and penury, hacking away at barren rock while their womenfolk found fertile ground for their skills and labour—these men could not even defend their wives and families from danger, let alone their companions, when push came to deadly shove. It was the final indignity.

The Ballarat miners had come to Victoria to be independent and free men, proud and virtuous colonists.
Modern Argonauts
.
Young Hercules
, as guidebook author Samuel Mossman had promised. Most had failed to feed, clothe or adequately house the families they brought with them or those they quickly started. And, finally, there was nothing heroic about watching your women be assaulted while standing in the dawn light in your drawers.