The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (67 page)

On 8 September, Fanny Smith wrote this. It is an important enough document to be quoted in full:

My Dear Sir—Will you be good enough to inform me if ladies holding the ‘miner's right' are eligible to be elected as members of the Local Court? I have read the Gold Fields Act 18 Vic No 37, and find it silent as to sex. The point has been disputed, and I have thought of asking the opinion of Mr Chairman Daly, but I am told that he has stated he sees no objection to lady members, provided they possess the necessary qualification—are proposed, seconded and elected. Your opinion will be anxiously waited for by myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat.
¹⁵

Fanny's letter gives us many vital clues as to the political literacy and vigour of Ballarat's women. She is versed in the relevant legislation and the critical processes, she is using Chairman Daly's alleged support as a wedge, and she is letting it be known that she is not a lone voice, but simply the vocal tip of a looming iceberg of female ambition. Indeed, in February 1856, the
ARGUS
cautioned the
leaders of the ‘women's rights' movement
against their
somewhat injudicious proceedings
.
¹⁶

The miner's right had been the most tangible outcome of the Ballarat troubles. The newly constituted local mining courts, empowered to resolve mining and partnership disputes, were widely seen as a victory for self-rule. The miner's right was the gateway to participation: the ‘necessary qualification' for voting or standing for office. Geoffrey Blainey has characterised the miner's right as ‘probably the high tide of Australian democracy'.
¹⁷
And Fanny Smith was correct: there was nothing in the legislation to bar women from holding a miner's right. Indeed many women elected to purchase one to stake a claim on the land or were obliged to purchase one if they mined independently of husbands or ran their own businesses on the diggings, which many did.
¹⁸
But did the legislature anticipate that possession of the miner's right would also constitute legal sanction for women's participation in the other democratic functions promised by the municipal franchise?

Fanny Smith never got a straight answer on the issue of representation in the local courts. But her possum-stirring had an immediate effect. On 12 September 1856, another letter to the editor was published in the
BALLARAT TIMES
, by someone claiming to be putting herself up as a candidate in the imminent elections for state parliament for the seat of North Grant. Her platform?
All the crazy ideas going around
, including universal suffrage:

Women's right: I am for their having the same rights as a man, and to allow them to go into the House and to the Bar; for I am sure there is many an old woman in both positions already.
¹⁹

The later suffragists would, of course, become familiar with this form of mockery.

The same issue of the
BALLARAT TIMES
reported that twenty-six-year-old Thomas Loader would contest the seat of North Grant against sitting member J. B. Humffray in the 1856 Victorian Legislative Assembly election. There were clearly enough ambitious ladies in Ballarat to convince a young man to stake his political future on the improvement of their legal status. Although Loader did not expressly advocate the female franchise, his policy on law reform included
rights of women
and
simplification of divorce law…questions I have strong opinions upon the necessity of immediately reforming.
No other popular candidate in the 1856 election included such a radical policy as women's rights in their platform. At the election, however, Humffray won by an overwhelming majority. Thomas Loader may have seen that there were special circumstances in gold rush Victoria that made certain social reforms, including women's rights, ‘peculiarly requisite'. But even by 1856, he was swimming against the tide.

Small and scattered as they are, these nuggets of evidence that women's political citizenship was being advocated in Australia as early as 1856 are significant. They place the genesis of women's rights activism in that gold rush community of adventurers, risk-takers, speculators and freedom fighters who struggled for the more famous civic liberties often said to be at the heart of Australia's democratic tradition.

For Victoria's women, the window of golden opportunity that opened during the social flux and political tumult of the mid- to late 1850s was firmly slammed shut by the
Electoral Law Consolidation Act
of 1865, which finally inserted the word ‘male' before the word ‘person' in the voting qualification, thus ensuring that manhood suffrage was just that. By the time ‘universal suffrage' became a hot political topic in the late 1860s, it was taken for granted that it was the rights and entitlements of property, not gender, that were at stake.

The baton of manhood suffrage—and its attendant values of independence, responsibility and human dignity—thus passed, in legend at least, from Eureka's miners to the shearers to the union movement to the labour movement to today's activists and idealists. The dynamic yet still disenfranchised proto-feminist women's rights movement of the 1850s dropped unceremoniously from public view.

To top it all off, by the time of the Ballarat Christmas Races of 1856, there was no longer a Ladies Purse.

1856 was also a watershed year for Eureka remembrance. On the eve of the second anniversary of the battle/riots/uprising/massacre (for all these terms were by now used interchangeably), a crowd of three hundred miners gathered
on the ground
and passed a resolution:

that Wednesday 3rd of December, being the anniversary of the massacre of the Ballarat Patriots, be observed as a general holiday, in commemoration of the men who so nobly sacrificed their lives in resisting injustice and tyranny.

At 2pm the following day, a group of five hundred mourners met on the stockade site. Each wore a black gauze scarf tied around the left arm. Miner John Lynch read an oration, exhorting the crowd to:
Be true men all you men, like those we celebrate
. The mourners then formed a solemn procession to the cemetery. It was here that Dr Hambrook—who had not been anywhere near Ballarat two years prior—delivered his rousing graveside address, the eulogy that opened this book.

Morning dawns upon the land for whose happiness and independence the patriots bled
, Hambrook boomed.

Combine together for the common weal—maintain the right—protect the weak—give your determined opposition to injustice in every shape, and let others in future ages have the opportunity of pointing to this colony, and saying—‘The men of Victoria were true to themselves'.

And with that, Eureka drifted into something more like a disturbed dream than an actual historical reality.

By 3 December 1857 there was no half-holiday. No crowds. No black armbands and but one reference in the
BALLARAT TIMES
to the events of three years hence:
happily, those dark and dismal days are past forever
.

By 1858:
the stockade, with all the strong feelings then called up, is forgotten, save by a few
. Five Germans and two newspaper reporters were
all who met to do honour to the memory of the men who fell four years ago.
One reporter concluded,
The thought of races or apathy triumph over sympathy.

So, yes: Geoffrey Blainey was spot-on when he said that Eureka is like a great neon sign with messages that flick on and off, selling different lessons to different customers according to the fashion of the day. It has been that way since 1856, when the second anniversary was used to underscore the colony's transformation from the wild and delirious nature of the ‘early days' to the beginnings of a settled society. In the transition from rough to respectable, men's transgressions were celebrated. Miners became patriots, while women were erased from the frontline of the frontier.

But that's only part of the story. By 1884, pioneer women had fought back with the declarations that opened this book: the Lady Who Was There and the Female of '54 wanted that light to shine on them for one brief moment of historical remembrance. And then at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka in 1904, when the old survivors were gathered together in the flash of the photographer's gaze, Jane Cuming took a front-row seat. The women of Eureka have always been there.

In her firecracker leader of New Year's Day 1855, Clara Seekamp took the temperature of her community and predicted a patriotic fever that would burn low but would not completely die.

What is this country else but Australia? Is it any more England than it is Ireland or Scotland, France or America, Italy or Germany? Is the population, wealth, intelligence, enterprise and learning wholly and solely English? No, the population of Australia is not English, but Australian. Whoever works towards the development of its resources and its wealth is no longer a foreigner but an Australian, a title fully as good, if not better, than that of any inhabitants of any of the geographical dominions in the world. The latest immigrant is the youngest Australian.

It is one of the mental traps of historical imagination to conjure all people in the past as old. But make no mistake: Eureka was a youth movement. The inhabitants of Ballarat, like the youth of a century later, believed that the times they were a'changing. And like today's backpackers, the gold rush generation was transient, expansive, adventurous: in search of experience, questing for something more authentic, more precious than they could find at home, something that would transcend the familiar boundaries of custom and caste.

But there is a difference too: where today's backpackers might search for metaphysical transcendence, the 1850s gold seekers were fortune hunters. They took risks calculated to bring economic prosperity, not personal enrichment. Few had a return ticket or a line of credit. In this, they were more like refugees than tourists. And for them, independence was a political concept as much as a personal goal, quite distinct from the individualism that would drive later youth movements. Yet the conflict at Eureka was inter-generational as much as it was intra-imperial. New expectations for who people could be and what they were worth collided with old structures for measuring value. The currency was liberty and, as with any liberation narrative, those with the prerogative of privilege resisted the incursion of those with a claim to entitlement.

Two months after Clara Seekamp issued her New Year's missive, Karl Marx, writing in the German-language newspaper
NEUE ODER-ZEITUNG
, characterised the Eureka Stockade outbreak as being but
the symptom of a general revolutionary movement in Victoria.
If there was a revolution at Eureka, it was not a political but a sociological one. The mining community of Ballarat did not intend to overthrow the British Crown, any more than it wanted to create an equal distribution of wealth or a global map without colour lines. Any republican feelings were as nascent as the proto-feminist sentiments that were stirred up, but ultimately buried, in the topsy-turvy whirlwind of gold rush flux.