Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (83 page)

For the moment Lalor stays hidden but, in the light of the acquittals and the complete vindication of everything that he and his fellow diggers had fought for, the one-armed, one-time rebel leader eventually writes a statement for
The Argus.
Published on 10 April 1855, it includes words that Fintan Lalor himself would surely have been proud to pen . . .

‘From the steps now being taken by the Government, I have no doubt but that we shall have many measures of useful reform carried into effect. Why were not these measures adopted before? Why did not the Government take steps to alter the land system, to amend the mode of collecting the gold revenue, and to place the administration of justice in the hands of honest men before this bloody tragedy took place? Is it to prove to us that a British Government can never bring forth a measure of reform without having first prepared a font of human blood in which to baptise that offspring of their generous love? Or is it to convince the world that, where a large standing army exists, the Demon of Despotism will have frequently offered at his shrine the mangled bodies of murdered men?

‘Whatever may have been the object of our rulers in adopting the line of policy they have pursued, the result has been deplorable, and such, I hope, as a civilised people will never again have to witness.’

5 May 1855, an auspicious day on the diggings of Ballarat

After a preliminary release of land the year before, some more prize land near Ballarat goes on sale at a public auction, allowing diggers and others a choice of lots of varying sizes to buy and have title to – some of it close to Ballarat. One particularly coveted bit of terrain boasts 160 acres of fertile fields at Glendaruel, just 20 miles north-west of the diggings, and the bidding is intense.

In the end, though, the man who wins it is a strapping fellow with a roundish face and beard who looks to be in his late 20s, standing at the back of the auction room with a coat curiously draped across his left shoulder.

The auctioneer knocks the land down to him and then says, ‘Yours, sir. What is your name, please?’

‘My name, sir,’ says he, ‘is Peter Lalor.’

As one the room gasps and peers more closely, and it is indeed him! And he has the money to pay for it, too. Knowing Lalor’s intent, many of his friends on Ballarat have gathered together to raise money to get him back on his two feet again, and have put together over £1000 for him to buy this land. It is Lalor’s aim to try his luck raising crops and cattle – incapacitated as he now is, further gold-digging is out of the question, even if he wanted to. So grateful are the mass of diggers that even more money is now being raised to pay for a house to be built on that land and to establish the farm.

No move is made to arrest Lalor. Even though there officially remains a £200 reward on his head, it is tacitly understood, by the authorities at least, that there is to be no more pursuing those involved with the Eureka Stockade. In fact, four days after Lalor reappears in public, the government announces that the mooted reforms will indeed be made, and also makes a proclamation revoking the rewards that had been offered for the likes of Friedrich Vern, George Black and Peter Lalor. With 13 acquittals from 13 imprisoned, there is no point, nor strength left, to try the 14th, 15th and 16th, even if the government could find them.

For everything, but everything, is now changing rapidly.

———

On 12 June, the
Goldfields Act 1855
–
incorporating most of the Commission of Inquiry proposals – is passed. The whole system of license fees and collection is abolished, and, as had been suggested by the Commission, is replaced by the Miner’s Right, which for an annual £1 fee gives the diggers the right to dig for gold, to vote for their eight members of the Legislative Council, and to build a home and develop a garden on a piece of land known as a ‘Residence Area’. It is in this manner that the country towns of Central Victoria – stable, urban environments – suddenly spring up.

As to the judicial power previously borne by the Gold Commissioners as mini-dictators, that now passes to local courts presided over by men who have been elected by the diggers themselves,
a la
the American system. And who should be one of the ten such magistrates so elected for the first time, on 14 July 1855?

It is none other than Raffaello Carboni, gone in the space of just a few short months from being in the dock as an accused prisoner to now presiding over the entire court from the big chair behind the magisterial bench. On the first day that the Italian turns up to the courthouse, he pauses beneath the shady gum tree outside and recognises it as the same spot where, on the night of 30 November the year before, he, George Black and Father Smyth had tried to convince Commissioner Rede to do everything possible to prevent bloodshed. A shadow of sorrow and regret passes over him, as it always does when he thinks of those terrible events, followed by cold rage. If only the three men could have succeeded . . .

Yet, as 1855 progresses, this newfound thing beneath the Southern Cross called ‘democracy’ still has some way to go to demonstrate its true wonders. This includes Henry Seekamp being released from gaol three months early, on 28 June, a month after Governor Hotham had been presented with a monster petition signed by 30,000 people. In the meantime, the first two men proposed by Ballarat to represent them in Victoria’s Legislative Council this year are John Basson Humffray and . . . Peter Lalor!

Lalor’s election manifesto is clear.

‘I am in favour of such a system of law reform,’ he states, ‘as will enable the poor man to obtain equal justice with the rich one, which at present I believe to be impossible.’

Both men stand unopposed and, on 10 November 1855, before the crowd gathered at the Ballarat Local Court, they are formally elected to take their place in the newly enlarged Legislative Council as two of the eight representatives from five electorates of the goldfields.

In his acceptance speech, after being cheered as wildly to the echo as he is to the podium, Lalor is typically eloquent.

‘Gentlemen and fellow diggers,’ he begins, ‘not twelve months ago a reward was offered by Government for my apprehension, and now by your suffrage I am going into the Legislative Council to meet that Government, and depend upon it I shall not shrink from my duty . . .

‘I wish briefly to allude to the affair of the “Eureka Stockade” – not that I intend to vindicate the course of action, for I am free to confess that it was a rash act; nevertheless the most honourable man might have acted under similar circumstances as I did then. You are my witnesses that I never harangued the diggers to take up arms against the Government, and therefore, never would I have entertained the idea of becoming their commander-in-chief any more than I do this day expect to be made the Governor of Victoria. On the Thursday, I was present at the meeting, and one of my mates, James Brown, who was killed in that sad affair, asked me to get up, and having so done I could not conscientiously turn back having once put my hand to the plough – that hand which Signor Raffaello has said, “was never polluted by treachery or cowardice” – I could not, would not, retreat. It has been said that nothing was ever yet obtained by physical force, but there is something to be learnt from past historical events . . .

‘When King John granted to England that memorable institution the great Magna Carta, it was to the Barons of England, with arms in their hands, and not to the petition of the people . . .

‘And I will affirm,’ he continues, ‘that, if Sir Charles Hotham had ruled in Victoria in accordance with the principles of the British Constitution, the diggers of Ballarat would not have taken up arms – the Eureka Stockade would never have been erected, and, instead of standing here a mutilated man, should now be an unknown, but a happy digger . . .’

More thunderous applause.

And so it is that Peter Lalor, who is also soon to be a father – for he had married Alicia on 10 July 1855 at St Mary’s Church, Geelong, and she had all but instantly fallen pregnant – heads off to take his place in the very chamber that only a year earlier he had led the revolt against.

On Tuesday, 27 November 1855, just three days shy of a year after he had led 500 rebels in raising their right hand to the Southern Cross to swear their solemn oath – and 343 days after having a reward placed on his head for having done exactly that – Peter Lalor raises his right hand once more, to swear an entirely different kind of oath. In the august chambers of the Victorian Legislative Council, under full magisterial sail, he is ushered forward by none other than John Pascoe Fawkner, to swear an oath to take his own place there.

‘I, Peter Lalor, do sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as lawful Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of this Colony of Victoria. So help me God.’ The transformation from one swearing to the other is, of course, breathtaking.

And yet, in that last year, Lalor has not changed – his new homeland has, because of the very action he and his fellow rebels had taken.

And it would never be the same again . . .

EPILOGUE

Stand up my young Australian, in the brave light of the sun, and hear how Freedom’s battle was in the old days lost
–
and won,

‘Ere the year was over; Freedom rolled in like a flood,

They gave us all we asked for – when we asked for it in blood.

Victor Daley, late 19th-century Irish-Australian poet

Democracy is much more than a system. It is an ideal and a spirit born day by day in those who believe in it. Eureka had its brief and bloody day 150 years ago. Eureka lives on in the heart and will of every Australian who understands, believes in and acts on the principle that the people are ‘the only legitimate source of all political power’.

Author John Molony in his ‘Eureka and the Prerogative of the People’ – a paper presented as a lecture in the Senate Occasional Lecture Series at Parliament House on 23 April 2004, in the year of the 150th anniversary of the battle

Just 18 months after Sir Charles Hotham made his grand entrance to Victoria with more pomp and pageantry than he had ever previously been accorded in his life, and certainly as much as the colony had ever been able to muster, on the last day of 1855 he prepared to make his exit in rather less-exalted circumstances.

Isolated, discredited and
tired,
he had written and dispatched his letter of resignation the month before, and it had been his intention to return to England. Yet, just in the week before Christmas, he had fallen ill after catching a chill at the opening of the Melbourne gas-works and steadily deteriorated from there with what was thought to be a combination of influenza, dysentery, epilepsy and perhaps even a stroke.

At 11 o’clock that oppressively hot morning, lying in a mess of his own making, he fell into a coma so deep that he could see eternity from there. At 12.30 pm he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was just 49 years old.

In the Legislative Council on 10 January 1836, it was none other than the colony’s most famous politician, John Pascoe Fawkner, who rose to propose a motion that the Council accord a sum ‘not exceeding £1500 to defray the expenses of the public funeral of the late Governor, and to erect a monument over his tomb – the design for the monument to be subjected to the approval of the widow’.

Acknowledging that the memory of Sir Charles was not universally revered, Fawkner added generously that he, at least, believed that the public was satisfied that at all times Sir Charles wished to do right, even if ‘his want of knowledge of the constitutional forms of Government prevented him giving that satisfaction which otherwise he would have done’.

Peter Lalor, however, sitting in that same august chamber, would have none of it.

‘While I am willing to accede to the proposition of £500 for the funeral,’ he said, ‘I am unwilling to sanction the expense of erecting a monument over Sir Charles Hotham. I do not wish to offend the living or insult the character of the dead, but I must say that there is a sufficient monument already existing in the graves of the thirty individuals slain at Ballarat. These tombs form a standing monument . . .’

Lalor was supported in this contention by his fellow member of the Legislative Council, John Basson Humffray, and though they were making what was surely no more than a fair point, Fawkner proved to be on the winning side of the argument and the motion was passed.

Sir Charles Hotham was buried in Melbourne General Cemetery, and an impressive monument now lies above his grave, bearing the relatively neutral inscription:

To THE MEMORY OF SIR CHARLES HOTHAM CAPTAIN IN THE ROYAL Navy and one of Her Majesty’s naval aides de camp Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Military Order of The Bath and the first Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of Victoria.

As we have seen, while travelling to Australia aboard
Scindian
in the middle of 1852, Peter Lalor had told his shipmate William Craig that, ‘I intend to have a voice in its government before two years are over . . . and I intend to sit in the Victorian Parliament after I find out where improvements are needed.’ Despite having led Australia’s most famous revolt in the interceding period, Peter Lalor very nearly kept to that timetable, and his nomination to the Legislative Council was no more than the bare beginning of a very long and successful political career. His voice would be heard for decades afterwards in the Victorian parliament, just as it was once heard when standing on a stump, exhorting his fellow diggers to ‘stand truly by each other and to fight to defend our rights and liberties . . .’

Lalor remained as the Member for Ballarat in the Legislative Council until March 1856, and then in November of that year, once the new
Electoral Act
was passed, he moved to the newly established Legislative Assembly – a body that the diggers who held Miner’s Rights had the franchise for – representing Ballarat’s seat of North Grenville.