We Are the Rebels (21 page)

The commissioners' job was to establish two things. First, was there any reason to
think that the magistrates who found James Bentley innocent of Scobie's murder were
influenced by
improper motives
? And second, had the officers of the Camp generally
conducted themselves so
as to inspire respect and confidence amongst the population
?

When the enquiry was completed, the answers were NO and YES. Not popular news. But
at least James and Catherine Bentley were to be retried before a proper judge in
Melbourne—Justice Redmond Barry, no less. As another sop to the offended diggers,
John D'Ewes and Milne, the unpopular policeman who had arrested Frank Carey, were
relieved of their duties. Still this did not satisfy the irate residents of
Ballarat,
who thought James Johnston, Robert Rede and Gordon Evans should have copped a punishment
as well.

The second half of Hotham's plan was about as effective as the first. The arrival
of the extra troops meant squashing more stinky little sardines into an already overpacked
tin.

Every corner of the Camp is taken up in attempting to accommodate the men and horses
now poured in on us
, wrote the Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser,
the men are stored away anywhere under cover and the horses are tied to a fence.
Neither the men nor the officers pull well together.

The fear of attack, underpinned by Captain Thomas's new plan of defence, meant that
soldiers and police were on 24-hour patrols: overworked and losing sleep. From the
outside, it seemed like the tightrope was about to snap.

On 2 November, a fight broke out in the Camp between the police and the military.
The rumour spread that a group of soldiers had assaulted some police and the whole
thing had been hushed up. Nine days later, a soldier resident at the Camp wrote
an anonymous letter to the editor of the Ballarat Times. He complained of the conditions
endured by his company on their recent march from Melbourne to Ballarat. His detachment
was on short rations, receiving only a pound of bread and a pound of meat daily.
They
were forced to spend two nights on the road without a tent or any bedding
as
if to inure us to the anticipated campaign with the diggers
. With the
inadequate
remuneration
of only two shillings a day,
the soldier is unjustly dealt with
, complained
the man.

But who did he think might read the paper and champion the soldiers' cause? The military
leadership? The diggers, who were so intent on their own just treatment and might
extend some brotherly love? Or his fellow soldiers, who might unite in a little rebellion
of their own?

WE, THE PEOPLE

While the Camp was busy chewing off its own leg, the diggers were getting organised.
A few minutes are quite sufficient at any time to get a crowd together
, noted the
Geelong Advertiser: it was a mood of urgency and apprehension that now gripped Ballarat.

On 1 November, five thousand people gathered on the Gravel Pits and passed a resolution
to form a league with diggers from other goldfields. The object of the league would
be the
attainment of the moral and social rights of the diggers
. A German band played.
Diggers gave speeches for over four hours.

The Camp was under arms this whole time, with sentries posted from dusk to dawn.

The Gravel Pits meeting proved to be a warm-up for events
that would now tumble like
dominoes towards a catastrophic resolution.

On 11 November 1854, a scorching hot Saturday, ten thousand people met at Bakery
Hill to witness the foundation of the Ballarat Reform League. Canadian miner-turned-carrier
Alpheus Boynton was there. He noted in his diary the
talented men
who put down picks
and pans and
took their stand upon the platform, not to fire the people with a rebellious
spirit but a spirit of resistance to oppression, to claim their rights as men.

The Ballarat Reform League united the smaller groups that had been popping up over
the previous weeks: an Irish union here, a German
bund
there. The Reform League elected
its office bearers: English Chartists John Basson Humffray as president and George
Black as secretary. Irishman Timothy Hayes, husband of Anastasia, was appointed as
chairman. Humffray and the Hanoverian miner Frederick Vern addressed the meeting.
They drafted a document—the Ballarat Reform League Charter—that put in writing the
chief grievances and goals of the League.

A manifesto of democratic principles, the Charter's primary tenets were:

free and fair representation in parliament; manhood suffrage; the removal of property
qualifications for members of the Legislative Council; salaries for members of Parliament;
fixed parliamentary terms.

These were the moral rights the diggers cried out for—dignity, fairness and justice—translated
into political demands.

The Bakery Hill meeting of 11 November is now widely seen as the first formal step
on the march to Australian parliamentary democracy. In 2006, the ‘Diggers Charter'
was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World register of significant
historical
documents. Yet oddly enough, the Ballarat Times makes only brief mention of this
monster meeting in its edition of 18 November.

It must never be forgotten in the future of this great country
,
wrote Henry Seekamp,
that on Saturday, November 11 1854, on Bakery Hill, and in the presence of about
ten thousand men, was first proposed and unanimously adopted, the draft prospectus
of Australian Independence
.

A lengthy letter to the editor from Ellen Young takes up the rest of the edition.

(It is possible that this edition of the Ballarat Times may in fact have been edited
and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her influence to propel Ellen's unfeminine
outspokenness into the public eye. When Henry later faced trial for sedition, the
editions of the newspaper in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and
2 December. Henry argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management
of the paper at that time.)

The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the League that day were not, of
course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young
who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat's only
newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection
on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:

However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the
universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped
off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh
Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just
magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the
free subjects of a great nation.

Not ‘request'. Not ‘humbly pray'.
Demand
. Others had publicly spoken of
cleaning
out
but none had gone so far as
lopping off
. And it is not Black, not Hayes, Humffray
or Vern, who commit their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous,
but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity.

The novelty was apparent to Ellen herself.
Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist
on the above demands?

NO ADMISSION

Clara Seekamp and Ellen Young may have been driving the agitation, but that didn't
mean they were allowed to join the movement.

The Ballarat Reform League charged a shilling to join, and thereafter a subscription
of sixpence per week. Significantly, the membership excluded women. It's not clear
exactly who wrote the association's rules, but the effect was to turn Ellen's
people
into men only.

This was not unheard of. The British Chartist movement had gone through a similar
trajectory, with their early goal of political equality—votes for all—giving way
to a model that demanded the vote for a male head of household supporting a dependent
wife. It was a backward step that the unbiddable women of Ballarat strenuously resisted.

Raffaello Carboni alerts us to this drama playing out
off-stage at Bakery Hill:
Bakery
reformers leagued together on its hill [No admission for the ladies at present]
.

Why would Carboni specifically note the omission of women from the membership of
the Ballarat Reform League? Surely, in 1854, it would simply be assumed that women
were to be excluded? And what about that phrase
at present
? Carboni's implication
seems to be that women may not be eligible
now
, but it is not out of the question
that they will be eligible in the future.

Was this because certain women were requesting, maybe even demanding, inclusion?
Arguing that it was only a matter of time before women would find themselves on
an equal footing with their male co-conspirators?

They were, after all, writing newspaper editorials, organising petitions, starting
businesses, buying property, financially supporting families, working beside their
husbands on the fields, owning shares in mining ventures, speaking their minds freely,
making ample use of the judicial system to assert their rights, drinking, fornicating
and otherwise behaving like perfect men.

So which ladies might have been pressing for political inclusion? Ellen Young? Anastasia
Hayes, who later took on the Catholic Church over the issue of fair wages? Mrs Rowlands,
who attended the monster meetings? Sarah Hanmer, who was contributing more coin to
the Diggers Defence Fund than anyone else in Ballarat? Christina McIntyre, whose
wrongfully accused husband was up on charges of arson? Fanny Smith, who in 1856 would
agitate for universal municipal representation on behalf of
myself and many other
ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat
?

It is clear that women's rights were part of the conversation:
that at least some
of the goldfields stirrers envisioned something more than just
manhood
suffrage
when they made their political wishlists.

During the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion of August 1853, William Dexter took the stage
to argue for
women having votes as well as men
. (William's wife, Caroline, would
bring her bloomer costume and lectures on women's rights to Melbourne in January
1855.)

A young man named Thomas Loader stood against John Basson Humffray in the 1856 elections
for the seat of North Grant, covering East Ballarat and the Eureka Lead. Loader's
policies included
rights of women
although he declined to commit himself on the
question of suffrage. (He lost anyway.)

The Australian people would have to wait quite a while, however, for such revolutionary
ideas to bear fruit. It was another 48 years before the passage of the
Commonwealth
Franchise Act
in 1902 gave (white) women full political equality with men: the right
to vote and to stand for election to parliament.