Eureka

Molony, John

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522849622
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863413
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Before dawn on 3 December 1854, colonial troopers at Ballarat attacked a group of gold miners who had thrown up a stockade in defiance and defence. Some diggers had guns, but many were unarmed; some twenty of them were killed, along with four troopers.
In the decades that followed, the truth of what happened that morning became obscured by partisans on both sides. For many years the Eureka Stockade was regarded as a shameful event and almost forgotten; more recently, it has been celebrated as a righteous stand against injustice.
John Molony's Eureka vividly recreates the story of Eureka and unravels the myths that have come to surround it.
This new edition of Molony's classic work, now beautifully illustrated with historic Eureka images, will be welcomed by everyone with an interest in the history of Australian democracy.

1 Bought at a Price

The WHITE MAN took up the districts called Ballarat in the late 1830s. He came with flocks and herds from Corio Bay and settled peacefully on those new parts. To his coming, the warriors of the Kulin tribe, who had hunted across those lands since the legendary forming of its hills, offered no resistance. The newcomers bore respectable names—Learmonth, Yuille, Anderson, Creswick, Hepburn, Archibald and Waldie—and there is no evidence that they did physical violence to the black man. In ages past the Kulin had named that place Ballarat, which is said to mean, in their language, a good place to rest. There, among the lush grasslands and the folded hills and by the sides of the creeks, the Kulin had rested long. Once they departed, they were seen no more.

The 1840s saw the consolidation of the squatter’s hold on the land, the gradual prosperity of his flocks and the erection of his dwelling places. With no roads and few tracks to make the passage easy, the intrepid had to find their way on foot, in carts or on horseback. The pinnacle of giddiness was reached in the person of Captain Ross, whose fancy it was to walk in Highland costume all the way back to the town called Melbourne that was springing up by the Yarra. Mrs Andrew Scott, a lady of great stamina, was the first white woman to cross that country; it is recorded that in 1840 she was driven across the bed of Lake Burrumbeet, just west of Ballarat, for, when the rains did not come, even the lakes dried and cracked, the wild turkeys vanished and the sheep were parched.

Near Ballarat, and looking down on its valley from the south, stood Mount Buninyong. This natural prominence could be seen by travellers coming from Corio Bay or Port Phillip Bay. Its base became a stopping place with a few dwellings and two hotels, one of which was kept by Mother Jamieson. It also boasted a store, a medical practitioner and finally a Presbyterian minister named Hastie who, in 1848, opened a boarding school. From Buninyong the track wound down to the valley below where a quiet creek, called by the Kulin ‘Yarrowee’, coursed placidly. All manner of game abounded there. The kangaroo, emu and dingo shared the waterholes with cattle and sheep, while, back where the ranges began, the wombat lumbered. On a flat place by the creek thin stands of white gum stood, cattle and horses grazed and men passed, but no one knew in those days what lay beneath the earth. The squatters pushed on and on, down across those vast plains that led beyond Mount Elephant, west to the Grampians and through the Pyrenees and north onto the Loddon and Avoca rivers. Memories of places in Scotland, Ireland and parts of Europe faded but their names lived on in those parts.1

The squatters were sustained in their rush across the land by an insatiable desire to possess it, and by the promise of ever-swelling profits from their flocks. The urge to be landed men, on a scale which their forebears in the British Isles had never dreamed, caused some squatters to fall out with each other. The brothers Learmonth, Henry Anderson and William Yuille set forth from near Geelong in the summer of 1837-38, and came one night to a range of hills where a hot wind blew from the vast deserts of the distant north. Finding no water, they camped on a hill and their distress was such that they named the place Mount Misery. Returning south, they came to Ballarat where the fertility was so great that grass was growing by the Yarrowee, even in those months of high summer. Each of them wanted it for his own. A little later Anderson and Yuille, having gathered all they owned at Geelong, went back to Ballarat following the course of the Leigh River on its east side. They arrived to find the Learmonths with their sheep and drays coming onto the same land from the other side. Each party, having arrived on the ground, laid claim to it. They fell to dispute, but only the obtuse could imagine that there was not land aplenty for them all. The Learmonths went back down the Leigh, Anderson took up land to the east, while Ballarat and the parts thereabout became the resting place of Yuille.2

It was a place of immense solitude. Here and there the bush was broken by a shepherd’s hut, there were no fences and the pastoral workers had to live long periods alone. They were the remnants of that ‘nomad tribe’ who had peopled the new land and given to it a legacy and a legend blended from mateship, rejection of authority, a fondness for strong drink and scant interest in material possessions. Like the sheep they tended, the shepherds walked upon the land and did not possess it, nor had they the desire so to do. They moved from place to place, rarely settling for any time because, as men without women, their ties to stability were fragile. Not for them an interest in the political movements of their day, even when they heard echoes of that drive towards independence for Port Phillip led by their masters and the business interests of Melbourne. To the nomads it mattered little who held sway in the cities. Conflict and struggle for them meant the constant effort to overcome the harshness of the land and its climate. In the manner of those original inhabitants, the black men with whom they sometimes clashed, victory for the nomads entailed forbearance, adaptation and a readiness to move on to another station, another hut, another flock; they were shepherds and they went with their sheep.

Their masters, the squatters, knew only one law and its limits were wide: in Australia Felix they had agreed not to settle within three miles of each other and to share the land in between. This gave a run of about 6,000 acres, which was merely nominal, for the new lands were vast and the squatters roamed freely over them. In 1836 Governor Bourke had tried to restrain the squatters by imposing an annual licence fee of £10 and setting up land commissioners to regulate their operations. Fyans and Powlett were their names, but they did little to disturb the occupancy of the squatters who struggled through the years to make permanent their hold on the land. In the end they won out against that lion-hearted champion of the rights of the Crown, Governor George Gipps, who went home in 1846 and died defeated.

Nonetheless, both Bourke and Gipps had sown a seed by their insistence on the inalienable right of the British Crown to the lands of Australia with all that lay beneath them. From time to time in those years men who walked on various parts of those lands (and shepherds always walked) chanced to catch the gleam of a metal, which close inspection revealed to be gold. They disposed of it as best they could and said nothing, for it was by law the property of the Crown. Furthermore, they made no concerted searches lest they attract attention; were more gold to be had, it awaited another day, undetected. The added trappings of a licence fee to depasture cattle and to walk sheep on the land, together with the presence of a commissioner who had the alleged right to grant or refuse the licence and to remove unauthorized persons, reinforced the conviction that the citizens of the Crown had no right to the land beyond the use of its grasses, rivers and waterholes. But such niceties seemed of little moment in those days when, in Port Phillip at least, the great enterprise of opening the land was under way. The impetus for the new development took place across the Pacific when, in 1849, gold was found in California.

When word of those discoveries reached the world, men journeyed from many parts to join in the search. Some went with nothing, others with a little; some possessed the skills of the craftsman, some those of the professions, while others were unskilled except, perhaps, in survival. Scarcely any of them knew anything of this new method of gaining wealth, but such a skill could be acquired in a matter of hours. Willpower, moderate strength and rudimentary equipment were the basic necessities, while the outcome itself was largely dependent upon luck. And so began the world’s greatest lottery. It was also the world’s greatest leveller, for in this matter there was no question of man and master. The German labourer could claim his hundred square feet next to the London lawyer and go away a man of wealth, while the Londoner remained penniless. The rudimentary codes hammered out in California were designed and enforced to ensure that there was equality of opportunity for all. This was the fundamental law of the goldfields, though it did not embrace the Chinese who were not regarded as equals but as ‘burlesques on humanity’.3

It happened as cause and effect that, as in California so in Australia, gold was found. On 8 April 1851 a colonial youth who bore the name John Hardman Australia Lister looked down from his horse on a spot where two creeks joined about thirty miles from the town of Bathurst in New South Wales. He turned to his mates, William and James Tom, and pointed to something that glittered. A nugget ‘was held above the ground, a portion of it being wrapped around the root of a tree’.4 Those young colonials did not figure, however, in the events that quickly followed. Edmund Hammond Hargraves, an astute publicist who never found payable gold, but who knew only that what he had seen happen in California had also to happen in Australia, took the limelight and the reward. Hargraves spoke everywhere of gold in the hills, and in a short while ‘a large concourse of persons’ was proceeding to the localities in question. Some people, such as Major-General Stewart, who urged the quick importation of an infantry regiment to keep order, and Hugh Hamilton, who wrote from Bathurst fearing that ‘all the horrors of California will be here immediately’, reacted with alarm.

In Sydney other matters seemed more urgent and none more so than the ‘political abortion’ by which the Port Phillip District was rendered separate from the mother colony and called Victoria. The Act of 1850 which caused such rejoicing in Melbourne brought bitterness in Sydney, because it had not advanced one whit the right to self-government. For a decade and more New South Wales had struggled to throw off its birth stains and prove itself capable of the satisfactory management of its own affairs, while remaining a loyal and integral part of the Empire. The men in Westminster had not been moved by these efforts, but what had happened in the hills out of Bathurst would ensure, within five years, that self-government became a reality. Meanwhile, it was up to the cool heads in Sydney to make certain that the opening up of the goldfields did not upset the even tenor of progress. They had past experience upon which to draw for fields had previously been opened up when the squatters had moved across the land. It seemed that no better way could be found to control these new exploiters than to charge them a licence fee and appoint gold commissioners to watch over them. That this newly contrived system worked in New South Wales is to say no more than that the old colony never knew what a gold rush really was. The forces of law and order had long been established there and the machinery of bureaucracy was able to handle with moderate ease the gradual opening up of the goldfields. In the south, on those lands of Australia Felix, much was different. Victoria was a wailing infant, ill-prepared for anything except prudent and placid progress from the cradle. The one element needed was time, which was never granted. The other lay hidden in stupendous abundance. It was gold.5

Since 1839 the source of authority in Port Phillip was its Superintendent, Charles Joseph La Trobe. Son of a Moravian missionary, he was born in London in 1801. In his youth he was regarded as ‘a complete virtuoso’ with a thousand irons in the fire, but he found time to woo a Swiss girl, Sophie de Montmollin, whose country home was situated at the foot of a hill called Jolimont. They married at Berne in 1835. La Trobe was a traveller, a writer whose work was widely praised, an indefatigable observer of education in the West Indies for Lord Melbourne’s government, a man in whom there was neither bias nor prejudice, but much dignity and above all a sense of duty. Selected as the first Superintendent of Port Phillip, he sailed from England in early 1839 with his wife and a one-year-old daughter, and took with him the equipment necessary to build his home. The Port Phillip Patriot was not far from the truth when it trumpeted ‘He has come to found a mighty empire’. In its flocks and herds, but above all in the metal beneath its earth, the makings were there for Port Phillip to surpass some empires, in wealth at least.6

Under the prudent eye of La Trobe, Port Phillip prospered and by 1850 the population had grown to almost 80,000. In more recent years the main concern was that a revival of transportation would taint the new society, which prided itself in having always been free from the evils of convictism. In August 1849 the last act in that drama of human misery concluded when La Trobe sent the convict vessel Randolf packing from the bay. November in the following year brought the news of separation from New South Wales, the naming of Victoria, the promotion of La Trobe to Lieutenant-Governor and the culmination of the hopes of all those who had judged their affairs to be mismanaged by their subservience to the Legislative Council in Sydney. The new year of 1851 brought formal separation, but it bore its other worries with the ravages of Black Thursday when, on 6 February, Victoria burst into a conflagration that caused damage of incalculable consequences but of estimable cost to the infant colony: in the Western Port district alone £10,000 was lost in government property. The same commissioner who wrote the news to La Trobe of fires burning far and wide also wrote of another sadness, for it was his considered opinion that ‘in two or three generations it would be difficult to perceive any traces of the Aboriginal population of this Province’. A few weeks later came the news of the gold discoveries in New South Wales and the labour force of Victoria, already insufficient, was further diminished by the exodus of fortune seekers to fields like Ophir.7

In this atmosphere of gloom the mechanics of representative government were set up in Melbourne. The new Legislative Council was to consist of thirty members, twenty of whom were to be elected. However, as Melbourne itself was to elect only three, power was to remain in the hands of those who held the land—the pastoralists. A higher rung in the ladder was held by La Trobe because he had the right to nominate the other ten members who were to include his high officials, and also to appoint an Executive Council of up to four persons with whom he was to exercise his authority. Above them all stood the Colonial Office, and there were men in that place whom years of experience had taught the wisdom of one basic yardstick: a good colony kept out of debt and a good governor ensured that it did. It may have seemed that the finding of gold would be a splendid thing, but no one had questioned its cost to government. La Trobe knew in early 1851 that public expenditure in Victoria was creeping towards £100,000 per annum, about a quarter of which was spent on maintaining a police force. No one, perhaps fortunately, then knew that within two years the police force alone would cost over £300,000.

There had been frequent reports of finding gold in Port Phillip prior to 1851. Some were factual, others fanciful, but the news from New South Wales made it imperative that gold be found if it truly existed in the new colony. While the economic urgency was forceful, there was a moral imperative operative also, for Victoria was determined not to lag behind the mother colony—in gold, or in anything else. A committee of Melbourne businessmen offered a reward of 200 guineas to the discoverer of a genuine and worthwhile goldfield. They need not have bothered. It was already known that about a hundred miles north-west of the city a shepherd lad named Chapman had discovered gold to a wondrous extent in early 1849. At least it was there in such quantity as to permit him to come down to a Melbourne jeweller and put thirty-eight ounces of the stuff before Mr Brentani’s astonished eyes. But Chapman disappeared, and it was 29 June 1851 before James Esmond, an ex-Californian like Hargraves, found gold at Clunes only a few miles to the east of Chapman’s find. In an inverted boomerang of hills bounded by the Goulburn River on the east and the Grampian Mountains on the west, gold in quantities vaster than any the world had known lay awaiting the digger.

Whether men set out from Melbourne or Geelong to the new field, it was necessary for them to pass through the township of Buninyong, twenty-five miles to the south of Clunes. Surprisingly no real rush took place at Clunes and only about 300 diggers went there. In early August the blacksmith at Buninyong, Thomas Hiscock, found gold in a gully which was given his name, and which for a few weeks attracted the diggers, though it was not very productive. The important thing was that between the gully and Clunes lay Ballarat and, despite the fact that it was a cold winter with snow on the hills, there was much coming and going as men with supplies and their precious but rudimentary cradles made their way between the two places. No one will ever now know with certainty who it was who literally almost stumbled over gold at the resting place of Ballarat. There were many claimants, and rightly so, for the discovery of one of the world’s richest goldfields brought fame. It was late in August 1851 when John Regan and an old man of seventy-five, John Dunlop, discovered gold there, but many others were doing the same thing almost at the same time. The gold was found on the land taken up by Yuille in the quietness of 1838, and it is understandable that the place was quickly named Golden Point.8 But its hour of solitude was over.

The men who mined for gold in those early days in Victoria were moved by an almost insatiable lust, similar to that which had driven the squatters in a now distant and virgin past. Wealth was there for the taking but, like the grasses, it was quickly swallowed up. Unlike the grasses, however, the wealth was not renewable. Men had to rush quickly to a locality once word came that gold was there; as quickly again they rushed from it once it had rendered up its readily available wealth. Such men were impatient, scratching only at the surface of the land, washing away the dirt and dross, pocketing the little nuggets and specks and declaring themselves satisfied or disappointed according to their luck. It scarcely mattered if they had to relinquish a field, because Victoria’s surface lands were studded with gold, and month by month new finds were made, new rushes began and a vast movement was started as men passed frantically on foot or in primitive vehicles from place to place.

At Ballarat the diggers soon realized that a certain amount of labour was required to extract the gold, although initially it was common to find half-an-ounce each day near the surface. In mid-September 1851 the Cavanagh brothers arrived and extracted 60 lbs of gold. It had taken them a mere two days at Golden Point to acquire this quantity, but one of them had experience of California. He knew that it was necessary to dig to a depth of perhaps thirty feet to find rich gold which had been washed to the bottom of a former str...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Preface to the First Edition
• 1 Bought at a Price
• 2 The Actors Assemble
• 3 A Change of Governors
• 4 First Death at Eureka
• 5 From Camp to Garrison
• 6 The Harassment of Hotham
• 7 Bakery Hill
• 8 Last Words
• 9 The Monster Meeting
• 10 The End of an Era
• 11 Stockade
• 12 Night of a Young Moon
• 13 A Flag Unfurled
• 14 High Treason
• 15 The Making of a Legend
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Conversions
• Index