The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (68 page)

More widespread was the desire to replace static power relations with a fluid, mobile social hierarchy based on merit rather than birth, breeding, rank, marriage or conventional sex roles. In this, the gold rush generation largely succeeded. A study of the life trajectories of gold rush immigrants reveals that most ultimately fulfilled their objective. They mightn't have struck it rich, but they built businesses, farms, families, towns and, ultimately, a nation. But this was all to come.

Karl Marx might more accurately have observed that the goldfields society was straining under the weight of its own internal contradictions. On the diggings, unsullied egalitarian urges vied with the tried and true reality of ethnic, racial and class schism. The land was vast and ‘empty', but the places of habitation were cramped and squalid. The practical need for co-operation wrestled with the base drives of competition. Men could not move up and women would not stay down. Idealism and energy collided with brutality and death. And new beginnings ended abruptly in old sufferings. The certainty, as Clara Seekamp correctly foretold, was that these ambiguities and tensions would be Australia's own story, to tentatively assert or flagrantly deny.

EPILOGUE

Main characters
Martha Clendinning
remained a keystone of the Ballarat establishment during her husband's long tenure as Ballarat's district coroner. When their only child, Margaret, married Ballarat's former resident commissioner, Robert Rede, in 1873, the wedding arrangements filled the social pages of the local papers. Dr George Clendinning, sixteen years his wife's senior, died in 1876. Martha moved to Toorak, where she wrote her memoirs, and lived until 1908. She was eighty-six years old. She was buried in Ballarat, not far from the place where she ran her first store.

Soon after Eureka,
Robert Rede
was transferred from his position as resident gold commissioner of Ballarat to sheriff of Geelong. In 1859, when Rede was forty-four years old, he married nineteen-year-old Isabella Strachan, the daughter of a member of the Legislative Council. They had a son, Robert, in 1861. The following year Isabella died of liver and kidney disease. In 1868, the widowed Rede returned to Ballarat as the town's sheriff. Four years later he fell madly in love with Margaret Clendinning, thirty-three years his junior. He wrote passionate love letters to Margaret and sent her pressed flowers in tiny envelopes, revealing another side of a man who had become renowned for his cold-hearted treatment of the Ballarat miners. They were married in January 1873. Robert Rede died at his home in Toorak in 1904, one year shy of his ninetieth birthday. Fairlie Rede, the youngest of Robert and Margaret Rede's six children, died in 1968. She has a hybrid tea rose named after her.

After appointing herself the Ballarat poetess in 1854,
Ellen
Young
retired from public life to support her husband Frederick's career. Frederick gave up gold mining and returned to his profession as a chemist, becoming the first mayor for East Ballarat in 1862. Ellen appeared in print only one more time. In 1864 she wrote to the
BALLARAT STAR
to defend herself against insinuations made by Charles Dyte, who was also elected to the East Ballarat Council. Ten years after Eureka, Ellen reminded readers that she had
pleaded the cause of the oppressed from lawless law
and by doing so had won
the general acknowledged esteem of this community
. Frederick died in 1868, aged fifty-six, of apoplexy. Ellen died in 1872, aged sixty-two, of diarrhoea. They are buried in the Church of England section of the Ballarat Cemetery.

Peter Lalor
remained in hiding until a general amnesty towards all Eureka participants was declared following the unsuccessful state trials in May and June 1855. He married Alicia Dunne on 10 July 1855 at St Mary's Catholic Church in Geelong. They had three children, the eldest of whom, Ann, was born in 1856. As an elected member of the Legislative Assembly, Lalor became known as a turncoat conservative and capitalist mine owner. Daughter Ann died of pulmonary phthisis in 1885 in the family's East Melbourne mansion and Alicia died in 1887. Peter followed two years later.

The marriage of
Anastasia
and
Timothy Hayes
did not survive the cauldron of the Eureka years. Perhaps his fiery wife's jibe, used in evidence against Timothy in his treason trial, was the last straw. Timothy abandoned his family and travelled to South America and the United States. Anastasia, left alone to raise their six children, continued working at St Alipius School but fell out with the Catholic Church after agitating for fair pay and a living allowance. According to Anne Hall, Anastasia's family was brought up to believe their father was a coward; subsequent generations inherited Anastasia's bitterness at being deserted by her husband and exploited by her church. Sharp of mind and tongue to the last, Anastasia Hayes died in Ballarat in 1892, aged seventy-four.

Brave
Catherine McLister
dared to expose the intimate underbelly of the Government Camp but she had a weak physical constitution and died in childbirth on 4 March 1858 at the age of thirty-two. The official cause of death was
phthisis
, more commonly known as consumption. Her baby son, James, lived for ten days, dying of
debility
in the Geelong home of his father, Robert McLister, whose profession was by then listed as
gold digger
.

The man who shew too much, Police Inspector
Gordon Evans
, was transferred from Ballarat to Carlsruhe soon after Eureka. In May 1855, he married Lucy Ann Govett, a squatter's daughter from Van Diemen's Land, ten years his junior. They had eleven children. Evans died of a stroke in South Melbourne in 1885, aged fifty-nine. His death certificate lists his occupation as
share-broker
.

Sixteen-year-old
Anne Duke
gave birth to her first child, John, on the road between Ballarat and Bendigo, ten days after the storming of the Eureka Stockade. She and her husband George had eleven more children, most born in Woodend, where the family settled into a life of farming and breeding. Anne died in 1914, aged seventy-six. Her husband died four years later. Their youngest child, Annie, lived until 1948, only six years shy of witnessing the centenary of the Eureka Stockade.

James
and
Margaret Johnston
left the Ballarat Government Camp on 4 March 1855. Their first child, Sophia, was born on 30 April, six weeks premature. On Sophia's birth certificate, former Assistant Gold Commissioner James Johnston is listed as a farmer. The couple went on to have fourteen more children, the youngest twin boys. In the 1890s, their eldest son, James, murdered his wife and children and attempted to kill himself. He was tried and hanged for his crime. Margaret Brown Howden Johnston died on 13 July 1888 at Buninyong, aged fifty-five. The cause of death was
exhaustion
. The eldest of her children was thirty-three, the twins thirteen. An 1855 dictionary of medical terms defines
exhaustion
as
loss of strength, occasioned by excessive evacuations, great fatigue, privation of food or by disease
. Giving birth to fifteen children in twenty years may well count as the
excessive evacuation
of human bodies. Margaret was buried in the Ballarat Cemetery with Presbyterian rites.

Frances
and
Thomas Pierson
did not return to America. Nor did they have any more children in Victoria. Frances died in 1865, aged forty-five. The following year, her son Mason married Elizabeth Markham at Buninyong. They had four daughters: Frances Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Mary and Elizabeth. When Mason's wife died, he married her sister Annie Markham, with whom he had another daughter, Frances May. Thomas Pierson died in 1881, aged sixty-eight, and Mason died in 1910, aged seventy-three.

Lady Jane Sarah Hotham
returned to England on 20 January 1856. From the Hood family's home at Cricket St Thomas, she personally oversaw the design and construction of the memorial tomb to her husband, Sir Charles Hotham, which stands tall in the Melbourne General Cemetery. She spared no expense on the monument, using her own funds to supplement the controversial £1500 pledged by the Victorian Legislative Council to defray funeral and burial expenses. Jane wanted the sculptural decoration of the monument to closely resemble the native foliage of Australia, suggesting an affinity with the land that transcended the tragedy of her time in the colony. The monument was not fully installed until September 1858.

On 30 August 1860, at the age of forty-three, Jane married William Armytage, a captain of the Royal Navy. Together they went on the Atlantic Telegraph Expedition in 1866, and travelled extensively abroad, including a time in Malta in 1871. Jane continued to be known as Lady Hotham after her marriage to Captain Armytage, and kept up her court appearances. She divided her time between London and Devon. Armytage died in 1881. Lady Jane Sarah Hood Holbech Hotham Armytage died on 28 April 1907, aged ninety. She outlived three husbands, her sovereign Queen Victoria and the colonial rule of Australia.

Eliza Darcy
married Patrick Howard at Ballarat's St Alipius Church in August 1855. Their first child, Mary Ann, was born in 1856 and died six months later. Over the next twenty-four years, the couple had eleven more children. The Howard family remained closely aligned with the Darcy family, farming in the Birregurra area. Eliza Darcy died in Geelong in 1920, aged eighty-four. Leo Howard, who died in 2010 aged ninety-three, was the son of Eliza and Patrick's second-youngest child, Daniel, born in 1880—and the father of famed Australian musicians Shane, Marcia and Damian Howard. Ella Hancock, Eliza and Patrick's granddaughter from their youngest child Alicia, is the oldest living Eureka descendant, aged ninety-seven in 2013.

Merchant and journalist
George Francis Train
, who dubbed the Eureka Stockade
Australia's Bunker Hill
, returned to the United States in November 1855. Here he was reunited with his wife, Willie Davis, and met their baby daughter. Willie had returned to New York in 1854 while pregnant, as George wanted his first child to be born in America so that he was eligible to become president. Train became a global transport magnate and himself ran for President of the United States as an independent candidate in 1872. He and Willie separated the same year. Train was the major financier of
THE REVOLUTION
, a newspaper published by women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He died, eccentric and alone, in New York City in 1904, aged seventy-five. Train is reputed to have been the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days
.

Stephen and
Jane Cuming
, who sheltered Peter Lalor after his escape from the stockade, remained in Ballarat for the rest of their lives. They built a house on the site of their original house on Pennyweight Hill, where they mined and later grew fruit and vegetables. Jane and Stephen's daughter Martineau, who was six years old at Eureka, married Simon Andrew and later lived in Clunes at the time of the mining riots against the use of Chinese scab labour by the Lothair Mine, part-owned by Peter Lalor. Stephen Cuming died at the age of seventy-eight in 1898. Jane survived him by thirteen years, long enough to be present at the fiftieth anniversary of Eureka. She died at the age of eighty-eight, telling her great-granddaughter that for all the difficulties of life on the goldfields,
she felt freer than in Cornwall.
Martineau died in the Pennyweight Hill house in 1930.

Thomas and
Bridget Hynes
(née Nolan), who were married at St Alipius just two months before Eureka, had their first child, Kate, in 1855. After profits from shallow alluvial mining bottomed out in Ballarat, the family settled at Cardigan, where they farmed and ran a dairy. They had ten more children, all of whom lived to adulthood, before migrating overland to Terrick Terrick near Gunbower Island. Bridget's younger brother, Michael Nolan, gave up mining for shearing and later selected land in South Gippsland. He is remembered as a pioneer of Leongatha. Five of Bridget and Tom's sons and one of their daughters also settled in the Leongatha–Tarwin Valley district. Tom Hynes died in 1897 and Bridget in 1910, aged seventy-seven. Both are buried in the Leongatha Cemetery.