 |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||
The Eureka Stockade was a miners' revolt in 1854 in Victoria, Australia against the officials supervising the gold-mining regions of Ballarat. It is to Australian history what the storming of the Bastille is to French history and the Battle of the Alamo is to Texas history. Although the revolt failed, it was a watershed event in Australian politics, and is often characterised incorrectly as the nation's "Birth of Democracy."
The Australian colony of Victoria was declared separate from New South Wales on 1 July, 1851, and for the first three years of its existence was a peaceful and sparsely populated region of farmers and graziers. This tranquility was irrevocably disrupted in 1850 with the discovery of substantial gold fields all across the colony. The result was a rapid and massive influx of fortune-hunting immigrants.
The roots of the Eureka Stockade uprising lay in the inability of a fledgling colonial government to cope with the new demographics of the colony. From being the administrative body of the "rural aristocracy," the government suddenly found itself unprepared to take charge of an unruly population of itinerants. Its response was to impose an unofficial martial law, enforced by the hurriedly assembled and quasi-military "Gold Commission." That many of the newly-arrived miners regarded the Victorian authorities as close associates of the "English" authorities was the first portent of conflict.
Within a short time, the easy surface gold had been exhausted, and gold could be found only by digging for the deep lead — the veins of gold buried beneath metres of clay and rock. By 1854, the fields of Ballarat were occupied by 25,000 or more miners, mostly from Ireland, but also from other parts of Britain, Europe, China and North America (many had come to Australia from the California gold rush). The hills were soon devoid of trees to provide timber for the deep shafts being dug — an environmental disaster from which the area has never fully recovered.
Authority in the camps was held by the Resident Gold Commissioner, Robert Rede, and enforced by a military garrison. The main mechanism of government revenue was the "Miner's Licence," a short term lease of a "claim," a 3.6 square metre plot of land. The monthly fee for this licence was 30 shillings — a huge fee for the time — and was payable whether or not any gold had actually been found. This raised the ire of the miners, as did the weekly "licence hunts" where the military police searched for and arrested anyone lacking proof of a licence.
In September 1854, prompted primarily by budget shortfalls resulting chiefly from the cost of maintaining a private army, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Armenian, wrongfully charged with assaulting an officer. This angered the miners for two reasons. First it was seen as racial victimisation (though not expressed in such 20th-century terms). This alone would probably not have been enough to motivate the miners (not renowned for their racial tolerance), but they did identify with the Armenian as a fellow "digger," a term used by the miners to describe their lack of privilege. More importantly, the man arrested was also the servant of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Smyth, and this was interpreted as a religious affront by the large Irish component of the miner population, who already held deep resentments against the British for religious and nationalistic oppression.
Civil and non-violent protests began to grow as a result of these perceived injustices:
The Ballarat Reform League used the British Chartist movement's principles to set their goals. The meeting passed a resolution "that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey that taxation without representation is tyranny". The meeting also decided to secede from Britain if the situation did not improve.
The demands of the Ballarat Reform League encompassed:
Throughout the following weeks, the League sought to negotiate with Commissioner Rede and Governor Hotham, both on the specific matters relating to Bentley and the men being tried for the burning of the Eureka hotel, and on the broader issues of abolition of the licence, universal suffrage and democratic representation of the gold fields, and disbanding of the Gold Commission.
Commissioner Rede's response to these disputes was perhaps an ill-judged one, but stemmed from his military background and has been attributed by many historians (most notably Manning Clark) to his belief in his right to exert empirical authority over the "rabble." Rather than hear the grievances, Rede increased the police presence in the gold fields and summoned reinforcements from Melbourne.
On Monday November 27 1854 a delegation from the Ballarat Reform League: John Humffrey, George Black and Thomas Kennedy; met with Governor Hotham. They attempted to negotiate the release of the miners arrested after the attack on Eureka Hotel, and presented the demands for universal suffrage as well as abolition of the miners and storekeepers licenses. The only concession Hotham was willing to make was one digger's representative elected to the Legislative Council. The delegation rejected this, and returned to Ballarat empty handed.
The results of the meeting with Governor Hotham were reported back to a meeting of about 12,000 'diggers' on November 29 at Bakery Hill. A confrontation appeared unavoidable.
On 28 November, the reinforcements marching from Melbourne were attacked by a mob. A number were injured and a drummer boy was allegedly killed. At a meeting the following day (29 November) the Reform League relayed to the miners its failure to achieve any success in negotiations with the authorities. The miners resolved to openly resist the authorities and burn the hated licences.
Most notably the Eureka Flag, a blue flag designed by a Canadian miner, "Captain" Henry Ross, and bearing nothing but the Southern Cross, was flown for the first (recorded) time. As a gesture of defiance, it deliberately excluded the British Union Flag, which appears on the official flag of Australia. This flag is now housed at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery.
Rede responded by ordering a large contingent of police to conduct a licence search on 20 November. Although eight defaulters were arrested, most of the military resources available had to be summoned to extricate the arresting officers from the angry mob that had assembled.
This raid prompted a breakdown in the leadership of the Reform League, and in the rising tide of anger and resentment amongst the miners a more militant leader, Peter Lalor, took control. In swift fashion a military structure was assembled. Brigades were formed and captains were appointed. Licences were burned, the rebel "Eureka" flag was unfurled and oaths of allegiance were sworn. An encampment at the Eureka Flat was set up and by Friday, 1 December, a stockade had been hastily constructed from timber and overturned carts. The miners vowed to defend themselves from licence hunts and harassment by the authorities.
Although the scene was set for a military engagement, Rede did nothing, and as a result the passion and vehemence of many of the miners faded. By late in the evening of Saturday, 2 December, a number of miners had returned to their personal camps and were getting on with the business of mining or traditional Saturday night carousing. A small contingent of two or three hundred miners remained at the stockade.
Rede's inaction thus far did not reflect his true intent, and at 3 am on Sunday, 3 December, 1854, a party of 276 police and military personnel under the command of Captain J.W. Thomas approached the Eureka Stockade and a battle ensued.
There is no agreement as to which side fired first, but what was clear was that the battle was fierce, brief, and terribly one-sided. The ramshackle army of miners was hopelessly outclassed by a military regiment and was quickly routed. According to Lalor's report, fourteen miners died inside the stockade and an additional eight died later from injuries they sustained. A further dozen were wounded but recovered. Among the soldiers and military police, records indicate six were killed, including one Captain Wise. Many miners fled, and a substantial number of survivors were arrested. Martial law was imposed, and all armed resistance collapsed.
For a few weeks it appeared that the status quo had been restored, and Rede ruled the camps with an iron fist. However, in Melbourne, and to a lesser extent Sydney, there was tremendous public outcry over the military actions. Newspapers characterised it as a brutal overuse of force in a situation brought about by the actions of government officials in the first place, and public condemnation became insurmountable. Thirteen miners were tried for treason early in 1855, but all were rapidly acquitted to great public acclaim. Rede himself was quietly removed from the camps and reassigned to an insignificant position in rural Victoria.
A Commission of Enquiry into the affair was organised, and was scathing in its assessment of all aspects of the administration of the gold fields, and particularly the Eureka Stockade affair. The gold licences were abolished, and replaced by an inexpensive annual miner's licence and an export fee based on the value of the gold. Mining wardens replaced the gold commissioners, and police numbers were cut drastically. The pace of reform was so rapid that within a year, the rebel leader Peter Lalor was representing Ballarat in the new Legislative Council, and a few years later was elected Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria.
Over the next thirty years, the Eureka Stockade event was forgotten, so successfully that the precise location of the insurrection remains uncertain. All of the materials used to build the stockade were rapidly removed to be used for the mines, and the entire area itself was so extensively worked that the original landscape was unrecognisable. However the event itself returned to the national consciousness and became a rallying cry as the call for federation and nationhood gained momentum in the 1880s.
The Eureka Stockade (or more accurately, the driving force of public opinion that followed) has been characterised incorrectly as the "Birth of Democracy" within Australia. Its precise significance is uncertain; it has been variously mythologised by the political left as a revolt of free men against imperial tyranny and of labour against a privileged ruling class, and by the political right as a revolt of independent free enterprise against burdensome taxation, as an expression of multicultural republicanism, and so on.
The affair continues to echo throughout Australian politics to the present day, and the call to replace the existing Australian flag with the Eureka flag has been raised on many occasions by various groups within the country. While there is no doubt that the Eureka Stockade was one of the most significant events in Australian history, what the precise nature of what that significance actually is will probably be argued for some time.
|
||||
| View Live Article | This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License | |
||
