Karen Fletcher
In September 1851, a year after the colony of Victoria was formed, 75-year-old John Dunlop found gold under the wattle trees at Ballarat.
By then the Australian colonies were already alight with gold fever. Earlier that year an extensive goldfield was discovered at Bathurst, NSW. Shepherds deserted their flocks, bank tellers their counters and servants their masters to take to the diggings at a rate that greatly alarmed the British authorities. Gold held the promise of release from wage slavery and, like office workers queuing for a lotto ticket, labourers throughout the colony, and indeed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, California, France, Italy, Canada and later China, queued for transportation to the Australian goldfields.
In a letter to his friend Karl Marx on September 23, 1851, Friedrich Engels remarked that the scale of the Australian gold strikes had the potential to turn the world upside down. Certainly for the fine English gentlefolk of the colonies it must have seemed as though that had already happened.
Moral sermons from church men about the evils of easy money, grog and dissolution appeared to have no impact on the grubby diggers that began to appear, drunk and rich, in previously exclusive and refined establishments of Sydney and Melbourne.
But the excitement posed more serious threats to the British colonists. The radicals and republicans of Sydney and Melbourne had already begun to talk of forging a new, independent nation from the newly found riches. Convict transportation, already in steep decline, was brought to a halt by the phenomenon — the British government loath to send criminals, for free, to make their fortune in Australia.
On August 16, 1951, Charles La Trobe, lieutenant-governor of Victoria, declared that gold in its natural place of deposit belonged to the Crown, and no person should dig for it or disturb the soil until duly licensed by Her Majesty's government at a cost of 30 shillings a month.
From their inception the licence fees were hated, and resisted, by diggers. Many refused to pay and in the early years of the gold rush there were many skirmishes and outbreaks. Each of these had its impact on colonial rule, but it was the rebellion at the Eureka gold strike in Ballarat that has gone down in history as shaking that rule to its core.
By 1854, three years after the first strikes, the colonial authorities were struggling to find the funds to build roads. Victoria was in deep deficit and Melbourne was a disease-ridden cesspit in serious need of infrastructure. The new governor, Sir Charles Hotham, saw the enforcement of the dwindling licence fee as the solution to his financial problems.
But the diggers were also struggling. In Ballarat the surface and alluvial gold was long gone and the diggers had become miners, toiling down 30 to 50 metre wet shafts. In other fields, individual digs had been replaced by company mines operated by machinery and waged workers, but in Ballarat they were holding on — fiercely protecting their individual dreams of emancipation from wage slavery.
In September 1854 Hotham's troops — or "traps" — were ordered to check licences twice a week and to use force, if necessary, to compel obedience. In Ballarat the military took up digger-hunting as a sport, dragging filthy toiling men from the bottom of their holes to produce sodden licences and carting them off to prison if they couldn't show one. Between September and October, tensions between the government and mining camps in Ballarat mounted sharply. In early October open rebellion fomented over a wrongful arrest during a licence hunt, the acquittal of a publican who killed a digger and the arrest of three diggers who burned the publican's hotel, the Eureka, in retaliation.
On October 22, more than 10,000 miners gathered at Bakery Hill, directly opposite the government camp, to air their grievances. On November 11, a mass meeting launched the Ballarat Reform League, under the leadership of two Englishmen, a Welshman and a Scot, all Chartists (an English working class movement that was active between 1838 and 1858). The league's program, of course, included abolition of the hated licence fee, but it also included the Chartist demands for the right to vote, and to stand for election to parliament, for men without property.
The league sent three delegates to meet with Governor Hotham and negotiate over the arrested diggers, the licence fees and the colony's constitution. While they were away some women sewed a giant, blue flag embroidered with the Southern Cross — the league's new flag. When the delegation returned on November 29 to report to the assembled thousands that Hotham had dismissed the league's demands, the new flag flew behind them. The diggers burned their licences on a huge bonfire, pledging never to pay licence fees again.
The following day, local Gold Commissioner Robert Rede ordered a brutal licence raid and his soldiers drew their swords and fixed their bayonets. By 5pm, men, women and children had gathered at their usual meeting place on Bakery Hill and heard a rousing speech by a young Irishman, Peter Lalor, well-acquainted with armed struggle against the British (his brother died fighting for an Irish republic) who urged them to build a circular encampment on the hill — a "stockade" — and to form themselves into fighting units to defend it and themselves. At his urging they swore allegiance to their new flag: "We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties." They elected Lalor their leader.
On December 1-2, the diggers — mainly English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Canadian and Californian Yankee — built their stockade from slabs of wood that had propped mine shafts and armed themselves with rifles.
At dawn on December 3 troops and mounted police descended upon the stockade, burning tents and shooting indiscriminately. Twenty-four diggers and five soldiers were killed and 114 prisoners were taken. Peter Lalor was shot in the arm and the limb was later crudely amputated whilst he was on the run from police. Hotham congratulated his forces for their work and ordered them to continue to round up other rebel leaders from the digger camps. The stockade was levelled and the diggers dispersed.
But Hotham's victory was short lived. When news of the massacre reached Melbourne the population divided sharply: for and against the diggers. Hotham organised a public meeting on December 5 to explain the necessity for the carnage, but he was jeered, ridiculed and howled down.
The next day an open-air demonstration of 6000 passed motions blaming the Ballarat outbreak on "the coercion of a military force" and licence hunting, martial law and military despotism and declared that "the people of Melbourne ... cannot, without betraying the interests of liberty ... support the measures of the government". Other demonstrations of support for the diggers were held in Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.
According to the Age newspaper, in January 1855 Melbourne faced civil war. "Expressions of loyalty ... on the part of those whose stake in the property of the country must so strongly predispose them against any violent political disorder ... weighs as nothing against the overwhelming expressions of contempt towards the authorities, of sympathy for the diggers ... and ... the open assertion of republican principles, and the confident anticipation of speedy freedom and independence for the Australian colonies which one hears frequently expressed."
Hotham charged the Eureka rebels with treason, punishable by death, but a demonstration of 3000 outside St Pauls in January — the first of many — passed resolutions demanding an amnesty and the crowd called for Hotham to be "sent home".
The government delayed the trials for a month, hoping to exhaust the popular movement, but public support only grew. Leading lawyers defended the rebels for free and they became popular heroes. In the face of overwhelming support for the rebels the prosecution barely presented a case and, one by one, the diggers were acquitted. Hotham was also forced to withdraw the price on the heads of the rebel leaders still in hiding, such as Peter Lalor.
The government struggled to find tolerable concessions that might assuage the public unrest. An export tax on gold was introduced to replace the hated licence fees. The Miners Right was established, allowing diggers the right to mine and to vote, for an annual fee of £1 per year. Courts of Mines, elected by holders of the Miners Right, replaced the reviled gold commissioners and their troops. Draft constitutions for "responsible government" (ie. governments responsible to Britain) had already been drafted by the squatters and merchants who sat in the colonial legislative councils and pledged their allegiance to the British Crown. In 1856, two years after the Eureka rebellion, one such constitution was adopted in Victoria.
The concessions were carefully crafted to address the demands of the goldfields reform movement that had so infected the population of the colonies, whilst maintaining the sovereignty of the British Crown and legal advantage for the landholding squatters and the developing commercial class.
The diggers' hero, Peter Lalor, was elected to parliament to represent the miners' camps of Ballarat. In that role he proved himself a less-than-radical leader, preferring to protect the property he acquired in the aftermath of Eureka. In time he abandoned almost all allegiance to the Eureka charter and to his digger constituents and ended up in the pockets of big mining corporations. It was those corporations that, in the end, drove the diggers from their camps and either on to wages in the mines or back to the cities and towns.
Lalor's defection from the labourer's camp was not the only dark portent of things to come in the Australian workers' movement. Desperate to hold on to their dreams of wealth and freedom from wage slavery, the diggers turned, not against the corporations whose machines were rapidly ripping the remaining gold from the ground, nor the squatter pastoralists who were firmly locking up huge tracts of land, but rather against an influx of Chinese diggers fleeing an economic crisis in Quantong Province.
In 1861 the Eureka flag flew at Young, in NSW, over a massacre of Chinese by European diggers on the Lambing Flat goldfield. Seizing on a handy scapegoat, the colonial governments passed laws limiting the immigration of Chinese and, in time, the Eureka flag became a symbol of the White Australia policy, a device that has proved useful ever since to distract working people from the real causes of their misery.
But, despite these defeats, the Eureka rebellion and its symbols retain something of their original meaning and power. To commemorate Eureka is to celebrate the capacity of ordinary people to organise and resist, to break unjust laws and to demand their rights, by force if necessary.
In 1854, inspired by the diggers, the people of Victoria found the confidence to fundamentally challenge their government — and that is the precious spirit of Eureka that is worth celebrating.
From Green Left Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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