The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (69 page)

Charles Evans
and his brother George established Evans Brothers Printers, Stationers and Booksellers, carving out a longstanding place in the commercial and cultural life of Ballarat. In 1859, Evans Brothers made the highly symbolic move from the flats of Main Road, East Ballarat, to the elevated Lydiard Street in the township. In 1858, twenty-eight-year-old Charles married a seventeen-year-old Scottish girl, Catherine McCallum. They had twelve children together. In the 1870s, Evans Brothers expanded its operations to a Melbourne office. Charles Evans died in 1881 in Emerald Hill (later called South Melbourne), just two months after the birth of his youngest child. He was fifty-four years old. George Evans had died two years earlier, of excessive drinking, also in his fifty-fourth year.

After selling the Adelphi Theatre in early 1855,
Sarah Hanmer
moved between the goldfields and Melbourne, with her daughter Julia in tow, playing to delighted audiences in headlining performances. Sarah was issued a publicans licence for the Ballarat Races of 4 December 1856. She prospered financially and owned properties in Ballarat, for which she collected rents through a broker. In November 1858, Sarah was sued by her rent collector, Mr Baker, in a libel case that kept Ballarat entertained for weeks. In court Sarah was variously described as
an actress who had made money
and
an actress who dealt in mining transactions
. The court found in Baker's favour, but only awarded him forty shillings (he had claimed £500). By 1864, Sarah had moved to Brisbane and started a new Adelphi Company. On New Year's Eve that year, she gave a benefit concert under the patronage of the governor, Sir G. F. Bowen. Sarah Ann Hanmer, widow of Henry Augustus Leicester Hanmer, Surgeon (sic), died in Adelaide of
fungus
on 9 August 1867, aged forty-six.

Julia Hanmer
married William Henry Surplice in Ballarat on 8 December 1856. She was sixteen years old. William, the government surveyor, was thirty-two. On her marriage certificate, Julia is identified as Julia Ford and names her father as Frederick Ford, accountant. Her mother, Sarah, was present at the wedding in the Church of England schoolhouse. The business of Surplice and Sons, run by William Sr and Alfred Surplice, sold provisions to the military at the Government Camp in January 1855. Julia and William Henry had seven children, the first six of whom were born in Ballarat and the last in Sydney after the family moved to New South Wales in the mid-1870s. Julia and William lived in Suva, Fiji, for many years. Julia died in 1920, aged eighty, and is buried in the Waverley Cemetery.

Catherine Bentley
may have been Eureka's longest-term victim. Her second child, Louisa, was born in February 1855, while James Bentley was incarcerated for murder. By late 1855, now raising two young children alone, Catherine had been brought up on sly-grogging charges in Maryborough. She repeatedly petitioned parliament for compensation for the loss of her hotel and land in Ballarat but to no avail. James was released three years into his sentence and bonded to remain in the Darebin Creek area of what was then outer Melbourne. Their daughter Matilda was born in March 1857.

By early 1859, when daughter Christina was born, the family were living in Newbridge, where Catherine was running a store. At the age of fifteen months, Christina ran out onto the street in front of the store and was hit by a horse and cart, her brains dashed out on the ground. She died in Catherine's arms. Four months later, baby Albert was born in Kingarra, only to die thirteen months later of diphtheria. The Bentleys' sixth child, Ada, was born in 1863. James Bentley committed suicide by laudanum poisoning in Ballarat Street, Carlton, in April 1873. At his inquest, Catherine testified that
my husband has never been quite right since he lost his property at the Ballarat Riots, he has never recovered from the effects of it, for the last two years he has never ceased to talk about it. He has been low spirited with despondency about his
family—over their prospects
. Certainly the Bentleys never returned to the position of affluence and influence they held in 1854.

The effects of inter-generational trauma continued: Louisa Bentley had two children out of wedlock by the time she was twenty; Matilda Bentley had seven children before her death at the age of thirty-one; Ada died in 1934 in a mental asylum. Catherine Bentley remarried, to a farmer named Andrew Mayo, and moved to Neerim South. Catherine Sherwin Bentley Mayo died of apoplexy on 14 December 1906 at the age of seventy-five. She is buried in the Church of England section of the Neerim Cemetery.

Corporal John Neill of the 40th Regiment and his wife,
Ellen
Neill,
remained in the Ballarat district for the rest of their trauma-scarred lives. John was discharged as medically unfit on 31 January 1856, after a previous court martial and demotion for drunkenness. On 19 March 1857, three-year-old Fanny Neill died. Three weeks later, her sixteen-month-old sister Agnes followed. John and Ellen's daughters are buried in the Ballarat Old Cemetery. Their gravestone enshrined John Neill as
Corporal in Her Majesty's 40th Regiment
, despite his recent discharge. Ellen Neill died in 1894, one year prior to her husband, at their home in Creswick. Her obituary in the
CRESWICK ADVERTISER
remembered Ellen thus:
Although favoured with a classical education she was in no way pretentious, and was respected by all who knew her
.

It was
Elizabeth Rowland
's first child, born in 1854, who she took to the Camp when she bought herself a licence on 2 December. She and husband Thomas had eight more, the last born in 1876, when Elizabeth was forty-nine years old. The family lived out their days at Ballarat. Elizabeth died in 1914, aged eighty-seven.

After her husband was released from prison in June 1855,
Clara
Seekamp
stepped down from her role as publisher of the
BALLARAT TIMES
. Clara's petition for Henry's early release had been successful but, following the trials and tribulations of 1854–5, culminating in cradling the crumbling head of a victim of the Main Street fire, he was fragile and unwell. In July 1856, following the courtroom dramas with Lola Montez, Henry Seekamp was successfully sued for libel by Lola's solicitor. Seekamp had called Mr Lewis
a dirty, pettifogging Jew informer
. Henry was ordered to pay Lewis £100. In October 1856, the Seekamps sold the
BALLARAT TIMES
due to Henry's
shattered health
. Business had also been affected when the government widened the Melbourne Road, removing five of the Seekamps' six houses and creating a twelve-foot-high cutting outside the
TIMES
office.

In 1857, Clara was reunited with her seven-year-old daughter, Clara Maria Du Val, who had sailed from Ireland to join her twin brother, Francis, and older brother, Oliver, in the Seekamps' Bakery Hill home. After Clara's years of petitioning the government, in October 1861 a select committee finally awarded her £500 compensation for loss of business income, property value and amenity associated with the road widening. She had wanted £3000. Asked by the select committee why her husband wasn't fronting the case, Clara replied that while her husband believed in writing letters, she preferred direct action. She summed up her circumstances like this:
We looked on the loss of business as the greatest grievance of all, and though we thought we could turn the ground into money, we were deprived of doing so.

By 1862, Henry had moved to Brisbane, where he was offering French lessons as
Mons. Henri Seekamp, formerly Professor in the Institut Chatelain, Paris
. He died on the Clermont diggings in Queensland of
Natural causes accelerated by Intemperance
in January 1864, aged thirty-five. Clara moved to Melbourne with her children. In 1873, she wrote to the Victorian Press Association requesting pecuniary assistance. In 1868, eighteen-year-old Clara Maria died of diphtheria at their home in St Kilda. Son Oliver died in 1884 of lead poisoning, aged forty-two. Clara Maria Lodge Du Val Seekamp lived to the age of eighty-nine, and died of senile debility and heart failure in the Pascoe Vale home of her son Francis. Clara's death certificate describes her profession as
housewife
.

3 December
1855
,
the first anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, was a day of torrential rain and flooding. The downpour came after three days of
burning north winds.
Most establishments on Main Road were flooded; the concert hall at the Star Hotel was swept away. These weather conditions inaugurated a tradition of the heavens opening over Victoria on 3 December. Inclement weather also marred celebrations on 3 December 1884, 1904 and 1954.

Other characters
Caroline Chisholm
continued to be an outspoken advocate of democratic reform, championing the twin causes of unlocking the lands and universal suffrage. In 1866 she returned to England, where she died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1877.

Bridget Callinan
, who distracted the troopers while her injured brothers escaped the stockade, died in 1897 from pneumonia, aged seventy-two. She lived in the Ballarat district her whole life and is buried in the Old Ballarat Cemetery. She never married.

Mary Ann Welch
who, along with her son Bernard, testified against Catherine and James Bentley, died of a lung abscess at Ballarat on 11 November 1860. She was forty-five years old. In the eight short years after Mary Ann sailed from England, she had cared for her seven children while her husband went to the goldfields, lost her only daughter soon after arrival, moved the remaining six children to Ballarat where her husband had established a storekeeping business, witnessed a murder, watched her home burn down in mass riots, acted as star witness at a notorious show trial in Melbourne, given birth to two more children and watched those children die before their first birthdays. Nine months after the death of their last baby brother, Mary Ann's remaining six sons were motherless.

Dr Alfred Carr
, who performed the autopsy on James Scobie in the Eureka Hotel on 7 October 1854 and assisted the wounded after the stockade, returned to England to be reunited with his wife Louisa and two sons in March 1855. He was thirty-four. There he became
medically depressed
after the death of his mother. He returned to Melbourne in 1857, petitioned the government for compensation for medical services rendered at Eureka, and was committed to the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum on the grounds of
monomania
: what we would now call paranoia. As a patient, Carr campaigned against the brutal treatment of patients at Yarra Bend. He wrote home to Louisa,
Keep up your spirits and do not despair. Once out of this I do not think they will ever again succeed in getting me into an asylum again.
After years in and out of institutions, he was interred at the Ararat Asylum in 1887. His entry record notes that Carr was
full of delusional ideas as to identity, power and position
. Carr died as an inmate at Ararat in 1894.

Assistant Commissioner
Amos
and his family perished on the steamship
London
when it sank in the Bay of Biscay on its way to Melbourne in 1866. Two hundred and twenty lives were lost.

Fanny Davis
, the exquisite chronicler of life on board the
Conway
, married miner George Jones in 1862, four years after her arrival in Melbourne. They were married at the Wesleyan Church in Ballarat. Fanny had six children in nine years, all born in Buninyong. All survived infancy. Fanny died in 1882 in East Ballarat, aged fifty-two.

Jane Swan
's family settled in Collingwood, where her father, Edward, worked in his trade as a painter and glazier. Her mother, Isabella, had two more children in Victoria: Ernest in 1857 and Isabella in 1859. Jane married William Davison the same year. Jane had three children: Isabella in 1860, Jane in 1861 and Charles in 1862. She died in childbirth with Charles. She was twenty-three. Jane's mother, Isabella, died in 1909 at the age of ninety-two.

Louisa Timewell
and her young family disembarked in Melbourne in October 1852. Shortly after their arrival, Louisa contracted colonial fever and died. Her baby Kate was too young to grieve. Louisa's ship diary was sent back ‘home'. The ship on which it was conveyed was wrecked. Some of the ship's mail was recovered from the wreck, and the sodden diary was returned to one of Louisa's sisters. Eventually, it found its way to Kate, who had married in 1869 and, by 1887, had eleven children of her own. The first seven were boys; the eighth a girl, Louisa. All eleven of the children survived childhood. Kate's elder sister Mary Louisa was not so lucky: six of her eight children died before their first birthdays.

Sarah Ann Raws
stayed on in Victoria when the rest of her family returned to Lancashire in 1858. Twenty-year-old Sarah had married John Tomlinson, who she'd met while her family was at the diggings. The couple operated a butcher shop at Nuggety, near Maldon, where they had eight children. Later they took up land at Thyra, where they grew cereal crops and had two more children. When Sarah died she was remembered for her
nobility of character, justice and goodness.

Solomon
and
Ada Belinfante
bore twelve children, six of whom predeceased them. Their first three children—Rebecca, Raphael and Anna—all died before 1875, while Annie and Septimus both died in 1875, the year the last Belinfante child, Philip, was born. He died the following year. Solomon began his life in Melbourne as a garment trader, but by the time of Philip's birth he was a prosperous commercial broker. The family lived in Victoria Street, Collingwood. Solomon died in 1884 and Ada died in 1917. Two of their children died in 1954, the centenary of Eureka: Louis, aged ninety-four, and Amy, who never married, aged eighty-nine.

Eliza
and
John Perrin
were eventually reunited. They operated a butchers shop together in Bungaree. Eliza's cousin never came to Australia.