We Are the Rebels (27 page)

Peter Lalor had been shot in the shoulder; he was dragged under a ledge and safely
concealed.

Henry Ross, fatally wounded, was not so lucky. At least he was spared the pain of
seeing the beloved Southern Cross flag dragged down from its mast by Constable John
King and paraded before his fellow policemen as a trophy of war.

The army officers remained silent as boy soldiers taunted and assaulted bystanders.
The bodies of the dead were
heaped together face up: mouths gaping, eyes fixed.
Several
of them were still heaving
, reported an eyewitness to the Geelong Advertiser,
and
at every rise of their breasts, the blood spouted out of their wounds, or just bubbled
out and trickled away
.

They were not the only victims of the frantic attack. Standing by, tragically alive
to the moment, were
poor women crying for absent husbands and children frightened
into quietness.
Other women had bolted from their tents, leaving their husbands
behind.

Mary Curtain rushed out of her store in her nightgown with fifteen-month-old Mary
Agnes in tow. Mary was eight months pregnant.
Such was the terror and hurry with
which my family fled
, her husband Patrick Curtain later claimed,
that they left behind
them even their every day dress
.

Another man woke on hearing the shots. He went out of his tent in his shirt and long
underwear. Seeing what was happening he shouted at a trooper,
For God's sake don't
kill my wife and children
, and
was shot dead on his own threshold
.

Could there be a more humiliating way to surrender? A dawn raid. On a Sunday. The
miners caught with their pants down on their own doorsteps. Who would be swaggering
now?

WHERE CAN I HIDE?

If the soldiers and police were troubled by the presence of families in their frenzied
midst, most did not show it.
A poor woman and her children
, reported a stunned Geelong
Advertiser correspondent,

were standing outside a tent. She said that the troopers had surrounded the tent,
and pierced it with their swords. She, her husband, and her children were ordered
out by the troopers, and were inspected in their night clothes outside, while the
troopers searched the tent.

Some troopers demonstrated more restraint. Charles Ferguson, one of McGill's California
Rangers, saw a woman come running out of her tent in her nightdress. She ran over
to some soldiers who had captured her husband. She begged them to release him
but
she was only pushed around roughly by the soldiers, when at last the commanding officer
rode up and ordered them to deliver to the woman her husband.
Ferguson had the highest
praise for this chivalrous fellow:
a manly officer
.

Rebecca Noonan, who ran a store a hundred metres from the Stockade, was not so fortunate.
She and her husband Michael and their five children were attempting to escape from
their besieged tent when Michael was stopped by police and arrested. He pleaded that
he was
a peaceable and loyal subject of Her Majesty and
[his]
Excellency's Government
,
but was taken into custody regardless. Rebecca protested, and was then
brutally assaulted
by the foot police and her life threatened
. She was four months pregnant.

When the soldiers burst into Mary Faulds' tent she was in labour: lying on the ground,
wedged between two cots with a blanket covering her. The soldiers turned around and
left her to her fear and anguish. Her baby Adeliza was born later that day.

Other women risked their own safety to aid the wounded and dying. Elizabeth Wilson
stayed put when her husband fled. When a miner raced up to her and said,
Look Ma'am,
where can I hide?
she replied,
Right where you stand
. And with that she lifted her
dress, pushed the man to the floor, stepped over him and swathed him in her hoop
skirts.

(Women's clothing was in high demand. Frederick Vern, who had not been in the Stockade
at the time of the attack, escaped Ballarat disguised as a woman. Captain James McGill
fled into the bush, where he was later met by Sarah Hanmer, who provided him with
dress, shawl and bonnet—either her own or costumes from the theatre—and food for
his journey into hiding.)

A defenceless man was cut and slashed on his body and head near the tent of Dr Leman,
close to the Stockade. Mrs Leman heard the man's cries and left the cover of her
tent to assist him.
The cruel sight drew an expression of horror from her
, reported
an onlooker
which reaching the ears of one of the butchers he turned around and deliberately
fired at her
. The shot missed and the soldier fired again as Emma Leman fled back
into her tent, playing hide-and-seek with oblivion.

THE FINAL INDIGNITY

Raffaello Carboni had been asleep in his tent at the time of the attack. He was arrested
along with 113 others:
dragged out, and hobbled to a dozen more prisoners outside,
and we were marched to the Camp
.

Timothy Hayes, also at home with his family when the Stockade was taken, was on his
way there to assist the wounded when he was arrested. Anastasia saw the mounted troops
leading her husband back to the Camp in handcuffs, and rushed headlong between the
horses to bawl them out.
If I had been a man
, she spat,
I wouldn't have been taken
by so few as these.
The insult covered pretty much everyone in the vicinity, including
her husband.

The shameful fact was that the Stockade was a shambles.

The weapons were deadly and the stakes were high: no less than manly honour and duty
were on the line. Peter Lalor himself had admitted that he
would be unworthy of being
called a man…were I base enough to desert my companions in danger.
But when push
came to shove, the very men who had been goaded into resistance—

rendered impotent by a legal system that denied them rights, and a taxation system
that made them paupers,

disappointed by a land that promised reward for honest toil but delivered instead
disease, death and poverty,

hacking futilely at solid rock while their womenfolk made good money with their skills
and labour

—these men could not even defend their wives and families from danger, let alone
their companions.

It was the final indignity.

The Ballarat miners had come to Victoria to be free men, independent, upright and
proud. Most had failed to feed, clothe or adequately house the families they brought
with them, or those they quickly started.

And, really, there was nothing heroic about watching your women being assaulted while
you stood in the dawn light in your underwear.

BURN BABY BURN

From the Camp, Samuel Huyghue listened to the
deep reverberations
of musketry
telling
us that there was a real collision at last
, followed by a ghostly silence. Then he
could see only
sheets of smoke and flame
.

After the bayonets, Captain Carter had ordered all of the tents in and around the
Stockade to be burnt to the ground—firstly to root out any insurgent hiding there.
Secondly, because nothing instils terror like fire.

Using a pot of burning tar, the troopers and soldiers set about torching every tent
on the ground.
There was no system to regulate our search
, one police officer later
testified. Another admitted that the police had no idea whether the occupants were
in the tents before they set fire to them.

In the Stockade, some of the blazing tents contained the bodies of the wounded or
dead. Two men who burned to death in their tent had either passed out or were still
asleep. The sight of their charred remains was so sickening that even the soldiers
had to turn away.

Patrick Curtain had managed to escape the Stockade without injury. He went to find
his wife and daughter and delivered them to friends.
On my return after leaving my
family in safety at a distance
, he later wrote in an unsuccessful claim for compensation,
I found my store all in flames without a chance of saving anything
.

There was a knock at Bridget Shanahan's door. Timothy had not returned. He may still
have been hiding in the dunny. A trooper and a foot soldier barged in.
Shoot that
woman
, ordered the trooper. The soldier begged,
Spare the woman.
The trooper hesitated.
Well, get out of this place
, he finally said,
the place is going to be burnt woman
.
The men set fire to the tent, but Bridget managed to put it out before much was destroyed.

The ring of fire extended out in terrifying ripples. Most of the surrounding tents
were diggers' homes, stores and small grog shops.
Some of these
, marvelled Huyghue,
were actually defended by their occupants while burning, and several contained women
and children who were with difficulty rescued from the flames.

The Curtains and Shanahans were inside the Stockade; they might have expected some
reprisal. But John Sheehan's tent was outside the barricade and, being
strictly honest
sober and industrious
and having
no part directly or indirectly
in the uprising,
he did not anticipate the troops' vengeance. Sheehan's wife and children were huddled
inside their tent when it was set alight.

On the other side of the ledger: according to Samuel Huyghue, Lalor owed his escape
to the fact that the soldier who
saw him fall was
fully engrossed…in rescuing an
old Scotchwoman and her family of children from her burning tent, a task of considerable
difficulty which evoked an expression of fervid gratitude from the relieved parent
.
The woman quickly snatched a piece of paper from the smouldering wreck of her home
and asked her rescuer to write his name so she could remember
to whom she owed what
doubtless seemed to her an act of remarkable generosity
.

As the night drew to an end, the reality of the situation became clear. It was not
a bad dream. There was no silver lining.
Stragglers from the neighborhood of the
Stockade
, wrote eyewitness John Fraser,
some of them in a state of the greatest terror
and excitement, came hurrying along close to the tents.
An Irishman approached Fraser
for a drink of water. He had his wife and three little children with him.