The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (65 page)

The miners were not disloyal to their sovereign, but rather had lost any shred of respect for the minions who served her. They did not want to change the system of government; they wanted to be included in it. At no time did they riot against or launch an assault on authorities. They were not insurgents. They were not revolutionaries. For the most part, they were British subjects denied the basic civilities of British justice. They were ethnic insiders being treated like outsiders. They rebelled against an unpopular and viciously policed poll tax when all peaceful means of protest had been rebuffed. They fought back when attacked by the military in a pre-emptive strike that was intended to restore the authority of a government that taxed but would not listen, a goldfields regime that postulated but would not protect, and an imperialist agenda that had promised so much but delivered precious little.

They sewed a flag and built a fence.

Flailing desperately to conjure a worthy enemy following bloody Sunday, Governor Hotham quickly determined that only
foreigners
could be responsible for such outrageous acts of perfidy. No one was fooled, least of all when Hotham declared an amnesty for any Americans involved in the affray. The Americans had been the only ones who, perhaps, truly did foresee a republican future and for whom insurrection against redcoats had already proved a successful political strategy. Clara Seekamp certainly was not duped by Hotham's scapegoating tactic. In her leader on New Year's Day 1855, she called Hotham to account:

Who are the foreigners? Where are the foreigners? What is it that constitutes a foreigner?…Poor Governor Hotham! Could you not have found some other more truthful excuse for all the illegal and even murderous excesses committed by your soldiery and butchers?…Why did you disregard our memorials and entreaties, our prayers and our cries for justice and protection against your unjust stewards here, until the people, sickened by hope deferred, and maddened by continued and increased acts of oppression, were driven to take up arms in self defence?

That Clara's action—offering a political analysis of the Eureka Stockade—was genuinely revolutionary is evident in the general response. William Westgarth, opening his copy of the
BALLARAT TIMES
on New Year's Day, did not fail to notice the breathtaking hubris of its emancipated editor. The
TIMES
was
at war with the authorities local and general
, he surmised before adding smugly,
we amused ourselves with the violent style of the ‘leaders'
. Tickled by his own sparkling wit, Westgarth made a pun of a woman aspiring to editorial governance. He forgot, perhaps, that with no representation in the legislature, the diggers could only make their voice heard through the press. In Ballarat, the only press was the
BALLARAT TIMES
, whose usual leader-writer was presently in prison on charges of sedition, with his wife stepping to the breach.

There is no extant copy of edition 46, but Clara was evidently still chafing at the bit. The
BALLARAT TIMES
contains…a manifesto from Mrs Seekamp
, wrote a journalist at the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
(soon syndicated throughout the country),
as startling in its tone, and as energetic in its language, italics, and capitals, and the free use of the words ‘sedition', ‘liberty', ‘oppression' etc as a Russian ukase would be.
The reporter had a novel solution to this remarkable situation:

I only hope that Sir William a'Beckett will at once perceive that a lenient sentence upon Mr Seekamp and a quick return to his editorial duties, will relieve, at all events, the gold field of Ballarat from the dangerous influence of a free press petticoat government.

The Ballarat troubles had been caused, in part, by lack of judicial transparency and unchecked miscarriages of justice, yet the (pro-democracy)
ADVERTISER
's reporter was prepared to suggest that Attorney General William a'Beckett exercise his discretion to restore the status of the press as a bastion of masculine authority. He was not alone. Charles Thatcher, the famous goldfields balladeer, also had something to say about Clara's editorial style. In his popular ditty ‘Ballarat Comic Alphabet', penned in 1855, Thatcher devoted ‘S' to the imprisoned Seekamp:

S is for Seekamp who I trust will be

Released upon my life

It will but save us from the trash

Inserted by his wife
²

The anomaly of Clara's pre-eminence at the masthead of the
TIMES
only served to affirm the general state of affairs that Thatcher lamented in other of his verses.
The gals that come out to Australia to roam/Have much higher notions than when they're at home,
he sang in ‘London and the Diggings'.
³
Having women call the political race was clearly too big a hurdle for most people.

Nonetheless, Clara Seekamp and Ellen Young were not the only women to use the press as a route to the political influence otherwise denied them. On 7 December, Caroline Chisholm wrote a letter to the editor of the
ARGUS
. Vitriol was not her style.
Any thoughtful person who calmly views our present condition, either commercially or politically
, she wrote, would see the problem was underutilisation of
the rich and beautiful land God has given us
. With remarkable prescience, Chisholm concluded that
we are a nation of consumers instead of producers
. Pre-figuring the mining magnates of over a century later, she counselled Governor Hotham to
stop taxing and start ploughing
, a plea that echoed one of the miners' key grievances: unlock the lands!

In the weeks directly following the Stockade clash, miners formed yet another quixotic expectation: that justice would be done. By 15 December, there were calls for the exhumation of the bodies that had been swiftly buried in makeshift graves. The date is important. On 9 December, Henry Powell—the unarmed miner outside the Stockade who had been
dreadfully mangled
by a policeman despite the protests of Eliza Cox—died of his wounds. The following day, an inquest was held. The finding of the inquest, published on the 13th, was that the mounted police were culpable of
firing at and cutting down the unarmed and innocent persons of both sexes
. Powell's was the only coronial investigation of any death that occurred during or after the Eureka clash. Subsequent to his burial, the Ballarat correspondent for the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
predicted that all the bodies lately buried would be exhumed and inquests held
. It is said by those who are learned in law
, the
ADVERTISER
suggested,
that all those killed on
the 3rd and who had died subsequently of their wounds should have been subject to Coroner's inquests
. Digging up the bodies would require political courage. It would also need a community determined to maintain its rage.

Charles Evans, for one, could not believe that the government would get off lightly. Surely the men who had perpetrated atrocities on blameless victims would be held to account by virtue of both natural and British justice. His diary entries keenly demonstrate his horror and disbelief at how far the British officials had strayed from their national and racial superiority as agents of civility and progress.

There were others eager to bear witness to the moral and jurisprudential implications of the slaughter, afraid that time would veil the unsightly wounds. On 15 December, an anonymous poem was published in the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
. ‘The Mounted Butchers' aimed for documentary relevance.

There go the ‘Troopers' that slaughtered our men,

When all fight and resistance was o'er:…

By firing the tents, and cutting men down:

And mangling and maiming the dead

They barely upheld the old British Crown,

That our fathers had fought for and bled.

Women and children escaped not their fire…

Like demons they rode and vented their ire,

When the ‘Red Coats' the skirmish had won.

The anonymous poet confirmed publicly what Charles Evans had scribbled privately in his diary:
The brave noble hearts did not turn their swords on armed men, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men.

Yet ultimately, local indignation could not be sustained.

When the dust settled, Henry Powell's would be the only inquest. The bodies remained in the ground. Only one man, Powell's killer, would be brought before the courts. But before that, smelling danger, the red-coated rats abandoned Hotham's ship in droves. Three soldiers deserted the 12th Regiment in November 1854. Nineteen more followed in December 1854 and January 1855. A further thirteen deserted in the early months of 1855. In total, thirty-five out of sixty-five soldiers of Ballarat's 12th Regiment deserted. In 1855, 165 soldiers in Victoria threw back the Queen's shilling, the highest recorded desertion rate in Victoria's history.
⁴

Diggers and Redcoats alike had fought well and fierce
, recorded Corporal John Neill after the stockade fight.
⁵
But some casualties were more equal than others. It was six months before death certificates were issued for miners who lost their lives at Eureka: a bulk lot issued by the Ballarat registrar on 20 June, identifying sixteen men who died of
gunshot wound
on 3 December 1854. Yet there was a paper trail of evidence and a mother lode of popular memory to inscribe the reality that at least a dozen more people, both women and men, had been the victims of government brutality on that fateful day.

Now fast forward one year to 3 December 1855. The trials of thirteen miners for treason had dissolved in farce, making a laughing stock of the government. No jury would convict their peers of a capital offence for which there was not a shred of evidence, save, perhaps, a mangled blue and white flag pilfered by one of the troopers in the ashes of the Stockade, and later returned to him by the Crown—more as souvenir than state secret.

Only one blow from the prosecution landed, and it was no more than an oblique backhander, intended to strike at the potency of the miners' worrisome popularity among city dwellers. Timothy Hayes was the butt of the joke: Lieutenant T. Bailey Richards of the 40th Regiment swore on oath that he arrested the Ballarat Reform League leader walking unarmed outside the Stockade after the battle. He then regaled the court with the tale of Anastasia's insult:
His wife came up afterwards and said are you taken, he said yes, she then said to him ‘if I had been a man I would not have been taken by so few as these'.
⁶
Laughter in the court at the Punch and Judy show, the spectacle of an untamed shrew more powerful than her mate.

By the time the courts ejected the last of the prisoners, the goldfields commission had also tabled its report. It ranked the miners' grievances in this order: the licence fee (
or more properly the unseemly violence often necessary for its due collection
); the
land grievance
; and
the want of political rights and recognised status
rendering the mining population
an entirely non-privileged body… without gradations of public rank
. The editor of the
GEELONG ADVERTISER
offered his own summary of events:

Denuded of the rights of citizenship, and tabooed, regarded as inferiors, and forced to submit to insolence, annoyance, direct insult and a long course of petty oppression, without means of address,

the miners had no option but to act. Their treatment had been
repugnant to British experience and derogatory to the manly feeling of independence.
⁷

The commission's recommendations for alleviating these complaints were quickly adopted. The
mining royalty
was replaced with a miner's right. For £1 per year, it entitled miners to fossick for minerals, gave them access to a plot of land on which they could make capital improvements, and enfranchised them to vote in and seek representation on both a new local mining court system and the Victorian legislature. Women could purchase a miner's right, but were excluded from its political spoils. (Victorian women would not win the state franchise for another fifty-three years.)