Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (76 page)

First up are those men against whom only trifling charges are recorded, for which there is little hard evidence. One of these is John Lynch. Charged with sedition – encouraging one’s fellow subjects to rebel against royal authority – he pleads not guilty. In response, there is a stirring among the posse of witnesses, some whispering, but no-one offers to step forward to the witness box. Lynch is just taking this as a good omen when a trooper of sneeringly superior mien and sparkling epaulettes struts forth and offers to give testimony, almost as if he would like to do the Bench a favour.

Upon questioning, however – Lynch and many other prisoners are defended by Ballarat barrister Joseph Henry Dunne, whose pro bono offer has been gratefully accepted by all – the trooper proves to have scant recollection of what he had seen Lynch doing, beyond the fact that he had been responsible for mischief.

‘The more they tried to get something definite out of him,’ Lynch would later recount, ‘the less he yielded. At last he became quite confused, and was ordered out of the box: no other appeared. Then that terrible record, the police charge-sheet, was appealed to. No entry appearing there against my name, solemnly the magical word “discharged” was pronounced, and in a couple of seconds I found myself outside in the midst of a congratulating crowd.’

For Raffaello Carboni, it is perhaps a measure of how eager the authorities are to indict him that in going through this process he finds himself chained to the one man who seems universally reviled by all the authorities: the so-called ‘nigger-rebel’ from America, John Joseph.

The only good thing is that the whole process does not take long. As Carboni and Joseph stand manacled before the bench, the Italian is staggered to find that several government witnesses – none of whom he recognises – do hereby solemnly swear that he was inside the Stockade on the morning in question, that he had attacked them with pikes and that he had been captured
in
the Stockade.

The outraged Italian swears in vain that none of these things is true, and that he can prove that they are not true. However, when he insists that both Dr Carr and Captain Charles Carter of the foot police, the officer who had first arrested him
outside
the Stockade, could definitively establish that the charges are false, neither man can be found. The only witnesses are for the prosecution, who take the sacred oath on the Bible and testify with ‘savage eagerness’.

Most devastating is the evidence of Henry Goodenough, who testifies that the Italian ‘Charles Rafaello’ was not only the captain of a company of 25 men armed with swords and knives, but that he had publically exhorted those men – and all other men – to
use
their weapons. Why, on Thursday, 30 November, Goodenough had personally heard the prisoner urge from the platform, ‘Gentlemen soldiers, those that cannot provide themselves with firearms, let them provide themselves with a piece of steel, if it is only six inches long, attached to a pole, and that will pierce the tyrant’s heart.’ And he had seen Carboni marching them back and forth, drilling them. Other witnesses back him up.

Carboni is shocked and appalled. ‘I shall not prostitute my intelligence and comment on the “evidence” against me,’ he would later recount, ‘from a gang of bloodthirsty mercenary spies’.

He doesn’t need to.

For the evidence, such as it is presented, is overwhelming, and at the end the verdict comes down hard as the magistrates commit Raffaello Carboni to stand trial. John Joseph is, of course, similarly charged, as is John Manning shortly afterwards. When the lawyer for the Australian rebel Thomas Dignum tries to deny that he was the one with pike in hand who had struck a Redcoat, Trooper William Revell steps forward and says, ‘I cannot be mistaken in the identity of prisoner Thomas Dignum, for I cut him on the head. He has a cut on his head now.’ All look to the prisoner’s head, and there is no doubting the still-angry wound. Dignum declines to make a statement in his own defence, and the verdict comes down against him, also.

Oddly, of the 125 diggers who had been rounded up on the Sunday, after three days of such court processes there are just 13 left who are committed for trial – perhaps because, under Hotham’s express instruction, ‘the magistrates were instructed to limit the commitments to those against whom the proof of participation was of the clearest kind’. They are all to stand trial for High Treason under the legislation introduced in Great Britain following the Chartist uprising six years earlier – the
Treason Felony Act 1848.
These charges are laid despite the fact that Sir Charles Hotham’s own high legal counsel has tendered the view that it will be very difficult to make the charge stick, as it was no more than ‘the expression of seditious opinions in which a considerable portion of the public coincide’.

Sir Charles decides to ignore that and does not interfere with the Attorney-General’s determination to prosecute, come what may. Given the number of deaths and the outcry against his government, he feels it is important that the men who have instigated this bloodshed are found guilty of a major crime and punished accordingly. Yes, before the week is out he will announce the establishment of a Goldfields Commission of Enquiry to investigate the events on the Eureka and the management of the Victorian goldfields in general, and he will also gladly accept the resignation of John Foster as Colonial Secretary, but he is never in any doubt – at least not publicly – where the blame lies. It lies with the diggers, most particularly the ‘foreigners . . . found amongst the most active’.

———

As to the authorities at Ballarat, it has not taken them long to realise that, while they have most of the ringleaders and troublemakers, there are three key ones who are missing: Vern, Lalor and Black. (The authorities don’t appear to know there are two Blacks who have been heavily involved, including Lalor’s Secretary of War, but George Black is the one they are after.) At least there is some good news: it is soon reported that, ‘Lawler the chief is dead’, though this is as yet unconfirmed.

On this afternoon, Assistant Military Secretary William Wallace of the Grenadier Guards writes to the Colonial Secretary in Melbourne, informing him, ‘The man Vern is said to be the mainspring of this discontent; and Sir Robert Nickle having received information that he was located near Buninyong with three hundred men, his company of picked Riflemen, sent a mounted force yesterday; but he had left that, the day before.’

Inspector Gordon Evans, meanwhile, writes to the Chief Commissioner of Police, Charles MacMahon, on the same day, saying, ‘Lawler and Black who are known to be two of the principal ringleaders are not yet arrested. I have sent out men in disguise to all parts of the District and I hope soon to be able to arrest them.’ It is no time to be a one-armed bandit in Ballarat, and Lalor continues to lie low. As to George Black, he has long ago made good his escape and is now heading for Melbourne, while Alfred Black seems to have disappeared.

Saturday, 9 December, Castlemaine agitates

It has been going on all week. Word spreads all over the diggings: a
massacre
at Eureka. The Redcoats killed dozens of them and threw the rest into the lockup! Meetings were held and resolutions passed as the diggers expressed their solidarity with their brothers on Ballarat and their anger at the authorities who did this.

And yet there is also something beyond the anger and solidarity – there is a desire to continue the political fight that the diggers of Eureka died for, a desire to show that the government might have won the week before with bullets and bayonets, but the fight for tomorrow goes on. And on this day at Castlemaine it has all come together. No fewer than 20,000 diggers gather to hear the likes of prominent Chartist William Dixon Campbell Denovan give a horrific account of the ‘massacre’ and exhort that, in regard to those who died, ‘Might their names descend to posterity among the heroes of Australia!’

Together, the diggers roar their unanimous endorsement for this and other motions that had been passed at Bendigo the week before, including: ‘That, as all men are born free and equal, this meeting demands the right to a voice in the framing and making of the laws which they are called upon to obey, [and] . . . will not accept as a gift that which is their inherent right . . . will have nothing short of their full and fair share in the representation of the country.’

Indeed, all the resolutions are received with enormous cheering – most particularly including the one which states ‘that the present pernicious land system should, without delay, be abrogated’ – until they get to the last one, for which the diggers remove their hats and bow their heads.

‘That this meeting from their very souls sympathise with the true men of the people who are unjustly imprisoned for taking part in the late outbreak and also desire to publicly express their esteem for the memory of the brave men who have fallen in battle, and that to [show] their respect every digger and their friends do wear tomorrow (Sunday) a band of black crepe on his hat and in their public and private devotions remember the widows and orphans of the dead warriors.’

Sunday afternoon, 10-11 December 1854, down in the dumps in the Camp lockup

In the cells, Timothy Hayes is struggling. He is a man of rather aristocratic bearing, with clothes well above the cut of the average digger, so the comedown of being in the lockup with common criminals – for the usual run-of-the mill murderers and the like are also in there with the Eureka prisoners – has been a far greater fall for him than for others. He misses his wife and children terribly, and his discomfort has been compounded by the fact that his plump body is now covered in maddening lice.

Has Hayes been brought low enough?

One of the guards thinks not and decides that it is henceforth to be the job of Hayes to daily empty the slops bucket in which the men void themselves, Hayes agrees to do it once, but that is enough. Yes, he has been brought low, but decidedly not
that
low. The guard is infuriated, but given that Hayes is already in gaol, there is not a whole lot more that he can do, so the prisoner is allowed to record a rare win.

What is certain, though, is that he is a man with a great deal to live for.

The sun is just beginning to mercifully sink below the brown hills that lie beside Ballarat on this stiflingly hot Sunday afternoon that has sapped the energy from all and sundry when Sergeant Harris informs the Chairman of the so-called ‘Ballarat Reform League’ that he has visitors. It proves to be Hayes’s wife, Anastasia – a vision of fresh loveliness and unbowed strength – and his six children, one of whom is presently suckling at his mother’s breast as she holds him in the crook of her arm. There is a warmth to her, a care for her husband and children, that deeply moves the other prisoners.

Like men dying of thirst in the desert suddenly hit by the remembrance of things past, both the prisoners and many of the guards now gaze mutely and longingly on this splendid portrait of a family, a real
family.

Anastasia has brought a pile of freshly laundered clothes, neatly bundled together with a small basket of supplies so he can look like what he is – an innocent gentlemen – as he heads off to trial in Melbourne in a matter of days. She assures him that she will be there for him, now and always, and he is seen to straighten his back and even muster a wan smile. And now his children crowd around him. He gathers up one toddler daughter to embrace her, and she immediately tries to climb up on his shoulders. The eldest, a 12-year-old lad, valiantly holds back his tears – his father would want him to be strong – but soon he gives up the struggle. After kissing his father’s left hand, he proceeds to cover it in tears. It is all Timothy Hayes can do not to cover his son in the same – never has he been brought so low.

At least Hayes remains relatively robust. The same, alas, cannot be said for poor Henry Powell out on the diggings, who has been suffering terribly since that horrifying Sunday morning. His deep wounds simply have not healed, and he grows worse by the day.

Apart from getting well, what he most wants is justice, so he sends a friend to the Camp, begging that a magistrate take down his statement of what occurred. But this magistrate must come quickly, he insists, because Powell is ‘in immediate danger’.

Police Inspector Gordon Evans is quickly dispatched with some colleagues, and the scene they find is a troubling one. Poor Henry Powell is seriously ill and lying on a filthy bunk in the tent of the same Mr Cox who he had originally come to visit. Drifting in and out of lucidity – he is sometimes coherent for as long as 90 seconds at a time – his agonised statement is carefully taken down: the attempted arrest, the blow to the head, the trampling and beating, and how ‘the troopers rode over me, the blow was struck with something like a knife about three and a half inches long’.

Only a short time later, at ten o’clock, Henry Powell dies.

While those who know and love Henry well are, of course, grief-stricken, the one bit of solace is that at the inquest the following day – a well-run, proper inquest, far removed from the debacle surrounding poor James Scobie – ‘Arthur Purcell Akehurst’ is found to have a case to answer and is committed to trial for the ‘willful murder’ of the late Henry Powell, buried this very day. The jury even notes, ‘[We] view with extreme horror, the brutal conduct of the mounted police, in firing and cutting down the unarmed and innocent persons of both sexes, at a distance from the scene of the disturbance . . .’

The deeply stunned Akehurst is immediately arrested, placed under guard and sent to Melbourne to await trial.

Elsewhere, most of the legal focus remains on capturing those ringleaders at the Stockade who have so far escaped justice, and it is on this 11th day of December that the government announces a reward of no less than £500 for anyone who can capture the man described as the mastermind – none other than Friedrich Vern! Capturing the Hanoverian is particularly urgent, as one of the rumours circulating is that Vern is ‘erecting another Stockade in the Warrenheip forest’. The word goes out: the Commander-in-Chief of the ‘forces of the Republic of Victoria’ must be captured, and quickly, for he is nothing less than ‘their generalissimo . . . a man of considerable talent, daring and impetuous’.