Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (48 page)

Whatever His Excellency decides, Rede affirms, in signing off, that he will remain Sir Charles’s ‘most obedient servant’.

Saturday afternoon, 11 November 1854, atop Bakery Hill, the dogs of war are heard to bark

Roll up! Roll up!

For though the gathering on Bakery Hill ten days before had been far from the mother of all meetings, it had at least been the mother of this monster. Bands play and flags of many nationalities are raised as, again, 10,000 diggers turn up to express their displeasure with the Government and solidarity with those who are trying to do something about it.

Only minutes after the formalities begin, Timothy Hayes, with his ‘pleasing deportment, suave manners and good address’, is unanimously voted to the chair, while John Basson Humffray – the secretary to the committee established to raise funds for the trial of McIntyre, Fletcher and Westerby – rises to his feet and clears his throat. As soon as he notes how low the funds are for their defence, the hat is immediately passed round and £45 6 pence is immediately collected.

As the sun beats down, the oratory heats up as speaker after speaker denounces the authorities and a veritable sea of hands is raised in total support of four proposed resolutions.

The first calls for the removal of a corrupt member of the police, Sergeant Major Milne, a move entirely endorsed by
The Ballarat Times
,
while it also notes that Milne is ‘but the tool – the machine in the hands of the government that employs him’. (Milne is hated nearly as much as Assistant-Commissioner David Armstrong, of brass riding crop infamy, who last year had left the goldfields boasting of the £15,000 he made in bribes and extortion.)

The second resolution condemns the insolent language used by the authorities for ‘their unwarrantable assertions regarding the veracity of the diggers and the respectability of the representatives of the public press on the goldfields and their
sneering
contempt at an appeal for an investigation into the malpractices of the corrupt camp at Ballarat’.

As eloquent as ever, John Humffray introduces the third resolution, regarding formation of the Ballarat Reform League, explaining to his audience in his melodic voice the principles, articles and doctrines of this League, ‘which if approved, means we could act in concurrence with, and hold out the right hand of fellowship to all on the goldfields’.

Thus, this most important resolution is proposed by Humffray: ‘That this meeting having heard . . . the draft prospectus of the Ballarat Reform League approve of and adopt the same, and hereby pledge themselves to support the Committee in carrying out its principles and attaining its objects – which are the full political rights of the people.’

George Black, the strapping six-foot editor of
The Diggers’ Advocate
,
takes up the torch of justice in seconding Humffray’s motion, telling the assembled throng that ‘our business is now to proceed to the shortest way to our rights . . . The authorities are now afraid of the diggers . . . Humanity has been insulted, now is the time to rise and act; to demand our rights; and the Governor if pressed, will yield’.

He is every bit as eloquent as Humffray and when the motion is put and passed unanimously, the declaration is made that the Ballarat Reform League is formed, whereupon it is christened with three cheers for Mr Humffray and one cheer more for the League, which goes on for a great deal of time.

The fourth resolution expresses the meeting’s total lack of confidence in the honesty of the Legislative Council, and pledges ‘to use every constitutional means to have them removed from the offices they disgrace’.

In seconding this resolution with typical ardour, Thomas Kennedy is once again in full cry: ‘The day is come when we must speak of eternal brotherhood, and he who will not fall in with us, let him go away over the ocean.’
(
Cheers
)
‘Go to the Queen of England, a simple-minded mother far away from these her children and ask if the child sucks too long it will not injure both one and the other . . .

‘When next we meet we must have
done
something – we must have the lands opened, the franchise and representation and our license fee abolished, and the diggers must all look upon each other as brothers.’
(
Cheers
)

And now another digger addresses the meeting, taking direct aim at the Lieutenant-Governor, noting, as reported by
The Argus
,
that ‘Sir Charles was a sailor, so was he, but he was not on board his frigate now. The diggers had made Victoria what it was, and were not to be put down. The ice was broken now. Sir Charles’s motto was “Lead on”, let theirs be “No surrender”.’
(
Loud cheers
)

Delighting in it all, notes the correspondent for
The Argus
,
is the newly installed Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Timothy Hayes – watched proudly from the front row by his wife, Anastasia, with her babe in arms – who steps forward: ‘If their rights were not granted he would then say “To your Tents, O Israel” and he would if forced even go so far as to invoke the God of Battle.’

The stage is set.

Prepare the bass drums for thunder.

None of this, of course, is secret and all of the proceedings are closely watched by mounted troopers on the fringes of the crowd. Notes are taken and everything is reported carefully back to Commissioner Rede, including the highly troubling ‘principles and objects’ of this newly formed Ballarat Reform League:

That it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called upon to obey – that taxation without representation is tyranny.

That, being as the people have been hitherto unrepresented in the Legislative Council of the Colony of Victoria, they have been tyrannised over, and it becomes their duty as well as interest to resist, and if necessary to remove the irresponsible power which so tyrannises over them.

It is the object of the ‘League’ to place the power in the hands of responsible representatives of the people to frame wholesome laws and carry on an honest Government.

That it is not the wish of the ‘League’ to effect an immediate separation of this Colony from the parent country, if equal laws and equal rights are dealt out to the whole free community. But that if Queen Victoria continues to act upon the ill advice of the dishonest ministers and insists upon indirectly dictating obnoxious laws for the Colony under the assumed authority of the Royal Prerogative the Reform League will endeavour to supersede such Royal Prerogative by asserting that of the People which is the most Royal of all Prerogatives, as the people are the only legitimate source of all political power.

Political changes contemplated by the Reform League:

1. A full and fair representation

2. Manhood suffrage

3. No property qualification of Members for the Legislative Council

4. Payment of Members

5. Short duration of Parliament

Immediate objects of the Reform League – An immediate change in the management of the Goldfields, by disbanding the Commissioners.

The total abolition of the Diggers’ and Storekeepers’ license tax, and a thorough and organised agitation of the Goldfields and the Towns.

There is no disguising the fact that there is barely the thinness of a cigarette paper’s difference between the resolutions of the Ballarat Reform League in 1854 and the Chartists of England in 1848 – and the previous two decades. The Chartists had been ruthlessly crushed back home, but now those aims have flowered in Australia and are being publicly expressed once more. This time, however, it is being expressed by a hardy group of men who swear that they won’t back down.

‘The agitators,’ Thomas Pierson confides in his diary, ‘seem determined to make Australia free.’

For all that, one who is not impressed is Raffaello Carboni: ‘What was the freight per ton, of this sort of worn-out twaddle imported from old England?’

Although the majority of the men at the meeting have voted to support the executive of the Ballarat Reform League, there remains a growing feeling among some of them, of whom Carboni is but one, that while the aims of the League are admirable, the chances that the Government will actually care about something so benign as speeches and resolutions are lower than the red belly of a black snake. Against that, there is no doubt that the League has the full support of
The Ballarat Times
behind it, as Henry Seekamp soars to the heights of his prose when writing about it:

There is something strange, and to the government of this country, something not quite comprehensible, in this League. For the first time in the southern hemisphere, a Reform League is to be inaugurated. There is something ominous in this; the word ‘League,’ in a time of such feverish excitement as the present, is big with immense purport. Indeed, it would ill become the Times to mince in matter of such weighty importance. This League is not more or less than the germ of Australian independence. The die is cast, and fate has stamped upon the movement its indelible signature. No power on earth can restrain the united might and headlong strides for freedom of the people of this country, and we are lost in amazement while contemplating the dazzling panorama of the Australian future. We salute the League and tender our hopes and prayers for its prosperity. The League has undertaken a mighty task, fit only for a great people – that of changing the dynasty of the country.

Not surprisingly, those who lead that dynasty are far from impressed at such advocacy, and Commissioner Rede has no sooner read it than he encloses the article with another, even more outrageous article in the same edition – one asserting the people are ‘the only legitimate source of all political power’ – in a satchel of official papers to be sent to Lieutenant-Governor Hotham in Melbourne, recommending that Henry Seekamp be charged with sedition. After all, the
Treason Felony Act 1848
,
which had been brought in after the clash with the Chartists in Great Britain that year, makes it a serious offence to ‘imagine, invent, devise, or intend to deprive or depose our most Gracious Lady the Queen, Her Heirs or Successors, from the Style, Honour, or Royal Name of the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom . . . by publishing any Printing or Writing’ and, in Rede’s view, Seekamp has at least done that.

While these men of the goldfields may be rebels, they are a very particular kind of rebel, as attested to by the correspondent of
The Argus
:

These Ballarat diggers are most extraordinary rebels. It struck me to remark particularly, and to enquire as to their conduct and observance of the Sabbath. Truly they have few advantages, precious little of the gospel offered to them, little either of education given; no wonder, indeed, if they were vagabonds. But, as far as I could hear or see, the greatest possible order and sobriety, the utmost observance possible, I may say, of the Sabbath, has characterised their proceedings. Clean and neat in their diggers’ best costume, they promenade over these vast goldfields, their wives and children in their best frocks too; but anything more calm or becoming or regardful of the day could hardly be witnessed in the best towns of even Christian Britain. How delightful would it not be to rule such men well!

At this point, however, Lieutenant-Governor Hotham and his leading officials, such as Commissioner Rede, are not finding it delightful at all. Notwithstanding His Excellency’s previous blandishments in Geelong that ‘all power proceeds from the people’, he had never meant it like this!

The notion proposed by the Ballarat Reform League, that authority for power could come
up
from the people and not
down
from Her Majesty the Queen – and that it is therefore the people’s right to remove whatever authority they don’t agree with – is truly dangerous, bordering on revolutionary. That much is highlighted by the threat to ‘effect an immediate separation of this Colony from the parent country’ if their demands are not met.

Simply ignoring such demands and trusting that as moral-force Chartists the men will not take violent action is not enough. The movement itself must be stopped, and yet, for the moment, Robert Rede is not sure how to do it. It is obvious that the Camp urgently needs more troops than the 450 it already has, but after that? Rede’s mood changes by the hour, vacillating between wanting to send the troops in to crush the rebels and coming up with something to placate them.

———

Another week, another devastating financial report. This one received by Lieutenant-Governor Hotham details that the projected deficit for 1854 is –
dot three, carry one, subtract two
– £2,226,616, 5s. To run the colony (including vast expenditure on new public works), the Government is already spending money it simply doesn’t have and, more than ever, the urgent need is to get the miners to make up the difference. Sir Charles has tried other methods, like imposing a levy of £10 on every Chinese male who arrived at Port Phillip – no-one is more foreign than them, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t like it – but it came to nothing. The canny Chinese had simply gone on to Adelaide and walked overland from there. Which leaves Sir Charles where he started.

This movement against paying license fees must be
crushed
.

For Governor Hotham, mere military might is not enough. He also wants a well-oiled intelligence system to gather as much information as possible about what the ‘enemy’ is up to at all times. This is one of the many reasons that in the second week of November he summons Commissioner Rede to Melbourne to ensure that everything possible is being done to place their own men among the diggers – in the very garb of the diggers, pretending to
be
diggers. Rede has already been instructed to have observers and magistrates at every public meeting to write shorthand reports on everything that is said, but he also must ensure that things outside of public meetings are being recorded as well. What is happening? What are the diggers saying? What is their likely next move?