Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (6 page)

The Eureka Stockade Monument (erected in 1884), located within the Eureka Stockade Gardens, Ballarat. The inscription tablet (added in 1923) reads: ‘Sacred to the Memory of Those who fell on the memorable 3rd Dec, 1854, In resisting The Unconstitutional Proceedings of the Victorian Government.’
(State Library of Victoria)

The original Southern Cross flag (also known as ‘The Eureka flag’) on display at the Ballarat Art Gallery.
(Ballarat Art Gallery)

PROLOGUE

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

And give them title, knee and approbation

With senators on the bench . . .

William Shakespeare,
Timon of Athens,
Act IV, Scene III

In the time before Australia was Australia, all that we now see before us of our brown and pleasant land consisted of fragments of solidified crust, colliding and crumpling. Molten rock was hurled out across the constantly changing land surface, even as huge jets of steam burst forth into the atmosphere . . .

In the bowels of the earth, at extremely high temperatures, the most desirable element of all was dissolved in saline waters: gold. These waters, too compressed to turn into steam, also shot upwards ever upwards to the surface. Ever and always, that water streamed,
screamed,
along the path of least resistance, through whatever cracks, fissures and fault lines lay before it. And then, when the conditions were just right, in certain very rare and scattered parts of Australia, as the water cooled or indeed turned into steam, the dissolved gold was deposited as veins in the surrounding rock, such as quartz and slate. These veins could in turn be broken down by water, by ice, by geological and chemical processes, and by erosion over hundreds of millions of years, which could reduce whole thrusting mountains of rock into shattered, scattered fragments. Frequently the gold released from the veins settled as small specks in streams, mixing with sand and other mineral deposits. Sometimes it was left as whole nuggets just on or near the surface. In many places, ancient streams thick with such nuggets were later buried beneath brief volcanic outflows, and as the land continued to weather and change once more to cover those original streams, the gold was again buried deep beneath the surface of rich alluvial soil. In one particular spot, in the south-east corner of that emerging continent to be called Australia, the gold was laid thickly in a tight crisscross of streams on, around and beneath a curiously elongated, dome-like hill.

And there the gold lay for eons as plant life slowly began to appear, followed eventually by animals, birds, insects, fish and finally . . . people, as the land we know as Australia did indeed become exactly that.

To be sure, all that glittered was not gold, and in fact the gold glittered so little that the first of the continent’s indigenous people, who arrived some 60,000 years ago, knew little and cared less about it. Oh yes, they loved the land alright, but contrary to the later notion of owning the land, the Aborigines felt that the land owned them, or at least that they were an inseparable part of it. Of the things they saw around them, far more interesting were the animals, fish, birds and creatures that they knew had come from the Dreamtime, and many of them embodied the spirits of their ancient ancestors. Those flecks of lustre here and there that the natives may have occasionally seen on various pebbles as they crossed the creeks, and even the nuggets, were a little interesting because they shone so, but, as gold was of no practical use, it was not particularly valued. They pushed on, pursued the songlines of their existence, prospered, and, as they thinly populated the land, named particular features as they went.

The local Wathaurong clan called one such place – a wide valley nestled amidst soft, rolling hills, graced by bubbling creeks and shaded by a thick and fragrant cover of eucalyptus trees – ballaarat, a place to recline on your balla, your elbow. After all, this place where the flat met the bush by a curiously elongated hill that looked a little like an echidna was teeming with life. The food sources of kangaroos, wallabies, possums, echidnas, wombats and myriad others were never far away and the fresh water supply was constant – even at the height of the heat, after the flowers bloomed and before the snakes disappeared.

And yet one day, in the direction of the rising sun, a bizarrely white man by the name of Captain Cook had come with many other white men on a big ship they called
Endeavour
,
eventually stopping in a bay before departing again. For eighteen summers the Gadigal people around Botany Bay had thought that it had been no more than a strange visitation by their ancestors in a curious form and there would be no more of it. After all, they had all been raised on tribal stories of spirit-creatures that wandered the land and the sea performing fantastic acts before just as quickly disappearing, and these extraordinary white men in their big canoe fitted exactly into their Dreaming – it was just the first time they had seen those stories for themselves.

But return the men did, and far more powerfully and numerously than before.

In January of 1788, many more strange white men came under the command of one ‘Captain Phillip’, and this time they did not go away. They stayed. They cut down trees. They brought strange animals and plants – and terrible diseases – with them. They did not understand or respect that the tribes were of the land. In fact, they started chasing them off it, putting up fences and scouring all over, exploring, looking for whatever easy treasures there might be upon it that they could plunder.

———

And there was some real treasure there! In August 1788, the convict James Daley begged to report that he had discovered something very interesting on some of the land he had been tilling down by the harbour near Government House in the new town of Sydney, something that glittered . . . maybe even gold!

As good as his word, Daley produced from a matchbox what indeed looked to be tiny pieces of the precious metal. Now, he informed the Lieutenant-Governor, Major Robert Ross, with amazing presumption for one who had been transported to New South Wales for seven years for being a criminal, in return for his and a particular female convict’s freedom, together with their passage back to England on the next ship sailing, and a moderate amount of money . . . he was prepared to tell him where that gold was to be found. Upon the Lieutenant-Governor’s counteroffer, however, that Daley either tell him immediately or receive 100 lashes, the convict decided, upon consideration, to accept. Strangely, however, after arriving on the spot in the company of an officer and some soldiers, Daley ran off! And things became stranger still. For after arriving back in the camp early in the afternoon, he informed all and sundry that he had left the officer in possession of a goldmine, and after grabbing a few things from his tent, disappeared once more. Where to?

Exactly. As a white man in a land populated by blacks, there was really nowhere but the settlement to go to, and ‘the want of provisions soon brought him from his concealment’. And now, another officer put a different deal to him. Purposefully loading his gun, he invited the miscreant to confess where the ‘gold’ had come from. Again, Daley decided to accept.

For you see, he stammered, strictly speaking it was not really quite gold at all. He had simply filed down a yellow belt buckle and mixed it with some gold from a guinea.

And that was that. Far from his freedom and a trip home with his love, Daley received 100 lashes from a cat-o’-nine-tails for his trouble, as well as being obliged to ‘wear a canvas frock with the letter “R” cut and sewn upon it, to distinguish him more particularly from others as a rogue’. Tragically, four months later, ‘the poor wretch was executed for housebreaking’.

Not that any of the excitement halted, for even a moment, the spread of white people across the land, pushing the Aboriginal people out as they went.

———

Yet it wasn’t as if the white men didn’t have serious fights of their own, between themselves.

Some of the Irish convicts had been sent to the colonies specifically for their involvement in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, whereby the brave patriots had taken up such arms as they could get their hands on – mostly homemade pikes – and attempted to overthrow British rule from their lands. In the famed Battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June of that year, some 20,000 of them had clashed with the same number of heavily armed British troops at a place called Vinegar Hill in County Wexford, Ireland, and acquitted themselves superbly well. True, the rebels lost the battle, but the way they had wielded their mere pikes against the artillery and rifles of the occupiers would gladden Irish hearts for generations to come.

In fact, and this was the point, Australia had its own mini-version of just such an uprising, led by some of the veterans of that campaign – and using ‘Vinegar Hill’ for a password – with plans for 200 convicts at Castle Hill to meet up with around 1000 supporters from the Hawkesbury and march on Sydney to gain their freedom. The signal for the uprising to begin occurred on the unseasonably hot and humid evening of 4 March 1804, when a ‘vigorously rung bell’ set 200 rebels to rise as one and a hut at Castle Hill was set ablaze. Thereafter, the raging 200, initially wielding their pikes, set off.

After breaking into Government Farm’s armoury to steal guns and ammunition, they marched on Parramatta, raiding farm after farm along the way to get more weapons, shouting the cry of the insurgents in old Ireland six years earlier, ‘Death or Liberty!’, as they went. On the spot, the most notable veteran of the Irish Vinegar Hill battle who was among them, their leader Philip Cunningham, was unanimously voted by the other rebels as the ‘King of the Australian Empire’. In short order they had 180 muskets, swords and pistols between them, as well as – and this proved enormously significant – more alcohol than they could possibly drink, though they tried hard enough . . . Their freedom was
intoxicating
in every way.

That night, in his gracious Parramatta home, the Reverend Samuel Marsden – otherwise known as ‘the Flogging Parson’ – was enjoying dinner with his wife and children and their distinguished guest, none other than Elizabeth Macarthur (wife of soldier, pioneer and entrepreneur John Macarthur and the first soldier’s wife to arrive in New South Wales), when just after the clock on the mantelpiece had struck nine times their door was flung open. In an instant, a local settler, William Joyce, had burst into the room. As Mrs Macarthur would recall ever after, he was ‘pale and in violent agitation’.

‘Sir,’ Mr Joyce gasped, ‘come with me. And you, too, Madam.’

In shattered fragments, his story soon emerged. Only a short time earlier, the Irish convicts had raided his Seven Hills farm, dragged him from his bed and taken him hostage. It had only been
in extremis
that he had managed to escape. Behind him, even as he spoke, the testament to the truth of his words was seen by the glow in the night sky to their north. The ‘Croppies’, as the convicts were known, really
were
rising. Within minutes panic gripped all of Parramatta’s 1200 residents as the word spread. There was
menace
in that glow and the streets were now filled with settlers fleeing before the approaching mob of convicts. Run for your lives!

After a singularly anxious night, mercifully, the beat of a military drum was heard as dawn broke. Summoned from Sydney, the soldiers had marched through the night. Governor King had declared martial law and sent them out after the rebels!