Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution (84 page)

Despite his role at Eureka, Lalor did not prove to be the voice of ‘the common man’ that many had expected him to be.

In late 1856, Peter Lalor voted in favour of reforms to the
Electoral Act
that included continuing to allow plural voting (giving a man as many votes as he has properties valued at £50 in different districts), while placing a six-month residency restriction on the Legislative Assembly franchise! His apparent turncoat attitude caused bitter scorn to be heaped upon him from all quarters, most particularly from his constituents on Ballarat, who had put him into parliament in the first place. They now found – at least those itinerants without property – that they were threatened with continued disenfranchisement.

In the words of one of Lalor’s fellow rebels at Eureka, John Lynch, referring to the property qualification for the franchise and Lalor’s support for it, ‘This relic of effete feudalism, brought in as a ruling factor in future legislation, was more than true democracy could bear, and a howl of indignation admonished him of the revulsion setting in. The semi-Chartist, revolutionary Chief, the radical reformer thus suddenly metamorphosed into a smug Tory, was surely a spectacle to make good men weep.’

Lalor stuck to his guns regardless – as he was always wont to do – maintaining that those itinerants who did not put down roots in a community should not have a say in how it is run. Still not content with that – but upping the ante, as was also his instinct – Lalor then went on to speak in favour of a nominee Upper House.

What on earth was going on?

So great was the outcry, with a ‘Lalor Resignation Committee’ being formed and a petition with over 2000 signatures upon it calling upon him to stand down circulating widely, that Lalor felt obliged to publicly respond. In an open letter in
The Argus
to ‘The Electors of North Grenville’, he attacked in turn those constituents and journalists who had claimed that he had gone from ultra-democrat before his election to base Tory now – and so was no longer worthy of the people’s trust.

‘I would ask these gentlemen,’ he wrote, ‘what they mean by the term “democracy”. Do they mean Chartism or communism or republicanism? If so, I never was, I am not now, nor do I ever intend to be, a democrat. But if a democrat means opposition to a tyrannical press, a tyrannical people or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been, I am still, and will ever remain a democrat.’

The feeling against Lalor was so strong that at a meeting back in Ballarat in January 1857 there was such uproar – and even a threat of violence – that Lalor told the baying crowd straight: ‘If anything can disgrace human nature it is the tyranny of a mob towards the man who has suffered for them. You may murder me, but you can’t frighten me!’

Though mercifully no murder took place, there seemed little doubt that Lalor would be murdered at the coming polls if he stood for re-election for this particular seat, and so he wisely swapped to the electorate of South Grant. He continued to be elected there for almost all of the next three decades, losing just one election in 1871 before retaking it at the next poll.

Outside parliament, however, controversy still attended him, and never more so than when, in December 1873, in his role as the director of the Lothair goldmine at Clunes, he attempted to break a union strike lasting 14 weeks – the issue was the miners wanting to knock off the working week by midday on Saturday – by reportedly hiring Chinese labourers from Creswick to do the work instead.

As noted by author Geoff Hocking, ‘On 9 December 1873, the miners barricaded the Ballarat and Clunes roads and pelted the Chinese with stones and bricks in a scene reminiscent of the entry of the 40th Regiment to the Eureka lead twenty years earlier.’ As it turned out, the miners were victorious on both counts. They succeeded in keeping the Chinese workers out of town and mine management backed down – the miners were granted a shorter working week.

Oddly, none of the controversy affected Lalor’s parliamentary career, and just two years later he rose to the position of Minister of Trade and Customs and Postmaster-General before becoming the Speaker of the House in 1880, a position he held through three successive parliaments throughout the 1880s. So highly esteemed was he that on two occasions he was offered a knighthood by the very Queen he had once been accused of committing High Treason against, but twice he did refuse the Queenly crown.

Throughout the decades his one unshifting rock of support was his wife, Alicia, and their family of three children, though tragedy befell them in August of 1885 when their third child, Annie, died at her parents’ home of consumption, aged just 29. Alicia Lalor herself became ill shortly afterwards, dying in May 1887 at 55, to be laid in the grave alongside her beloved Annie.

‘She died on the 14th as she had lived,’ Peter Lalor wrote sorrowfully to Alicia’s sister, Anne, in Ireland, ‘in perfect sanctity.’

Suffering from diabetes himself, Lalor resigned as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly on 27 September 1887 and went on medical leave soon afterwards, hoping that a trip to California might help revive him.

It didn’t. After returning to Melbourne he became progressively more frail and finally arrived at the house that held his death bed in early 1889 – the home of his son, Dr Joseph Lalor, in Church St, Richmond.

‘‘Tis better as it is now,’ Lalor said as he lay dying, looking back on his colourful life, and of course focusing on its most colourful episode. ‘We not only got what we fought for, but a little more. It is sweet and pleasant to die for one’s country, but it is sweeter to live and see the principles for which you have risked your life triumphant. I can look back calmly on those days. We were driven to do what we did by petty malice and spite.’

He died at the age of 62 on 9 February 1889.

One who mourned him was his then five-year-old grandson Peter, who was destined to die as a Captain of G Company, 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, on the first day of the landing at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915. The official history of his battalion recorded that he ‘rallied his men and, waving his arms, shouted, “Come on, the 12th”,’ just before the fatal bullet hit, depriving the 12th of ‘one of its most gallant and capable officers’.

In a tight piece of Australian historical symmetry, further legend has it that he died holding the sword his grandfather had brandished at Eureka. Many years later
The Sydney Morning Herald
would report that ‘contrary to regulations, he smuggled the famous sword in his kit. At the landing on Gallipoli, Captain Lalor unsheathed it and charged up the hill against the Turks. He was found dead at one of the foremost points reached by the Australians. Around him were the bodies of 10 dead Turks.’ In 1945, according to a contemporary newspaper story, ‘Australian authorities in London asked the co-operation of the Turkish Government in finding the sword and the Turks showed great interest in the search, but it has now been given up without result.’

As to John Basson Humffray, as the member for Grenville and the Minister of Mines for the first couple of years in the Richard Heales government, he remained in parliament until defeated in 1864. He was re-elected in 1868 and then defeated twice, in 1871 and 1874, at which point he retired from politics.

After losing a great deal of money in failed mining speculations, Humffray lived out the rest of his days quietly in Ballarat, relying a great deal on charity, and died on 18 March 1891, aged 66. At his request, his modest grave – which soon enough fell into disrepair – is located in Old Ballarat Cemetery, no more than a stone’s throw from many of the graves of the rebels who had died in the Stockade 40 years earlier.

Many other key characters in the saga of the Eureka Stockade did not match Lalor and Humffray’s long and productive lives, most particularly the perceived villains . . .

The one-time proprietor of the Eureka Hotel, James Bentley, came to a bad end. After being released from Pentridge Prison on 18 March 1856, his capital was gone, as were his job prospects. All that was left was, effectively, the bottle. Finally, on 10 April 1873, while living in Ballarat Street, Carlton, he took his own life by poisoning himself with laudanum. The investigating constable was told by Catherine Bentley, ‘My husband has never been quite right since he lost his property at the Ballarat Riots. He has never recovered from the effects of it, and for the last two years he has never ceased to talk about it. He has been low spirited . . .’

He was just 54 when laid beneath the sod.

As E. B. Withers, one of the first of the Eureka writers, rather poignantly commented, ‘Let us hope that Scobie’s ghost, so romantically referred to by one of the Eureka orators one day, is at rest with his revenge now.’

In another touch of odd historical synchronicity, the man whose corruption had helped to facilitate the Bentleys’ fall, John Dewes, met a similar fate. After losing his commission in 1854, Dewes was not long in leaving Australia and soon took up a position as Acting Postmaster of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada, before suddenly disappearing in October 1861, owing money all over town and taking with him around £600 in post office funds.

He reappeared in England, but in April 1862 it was reported by the
British Colonist
that he had committed suicide, ‘blowing out his brains, at Homburg, a watering place in Germany . . . Mr Dewes, it will be remembered, was a defaulter to the Government and fled from the Colony about eight months ago to avoid a criminal prosecution.’

The troubled Dr Alfred Carr, whose loyalty to the cause of the digger was never sure, also came to an unhappy end. Upon his return to England for a holiday in March 1855, Dr Carr was devastated to have it reported in
The Liverpool Times
that he was ‘one of the Ballarat rioters who had turned approver, and so escaped the just punishment that was due to him’. At Dr Carr’s highly anguished insistence, the editor published an unqualified apology, but was subsequently sued for libel anyway.

In 1857, by which time Dr Carr had returned to Australia, he had become so mentally ill that he was placed in the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, where his condition deteriorated to the point that he was described as the most dangerous man there. He was eventually confined to a small cell in a straitjacket before being transferred to the infamous Ararat Asylum where – in that curious cosmic quirk that sometimes keeps the most deeply unhappy alive for the longest time, while taking the happiest at a young age – he stayed for many decades until he at last mercifully died on 26 June 1894, aged 78.

In Bendigo, on 24 July 1858, John Joseph, the black American who had been the first to be put on trial for treason after Eureka, aged just 41, suddenly succumbed to a heart condition and is now buried in an unmarked grave in White Hills Cemetery. (This is not right, in my view. The final resting place of such a significant man in Australian history should at least be honoured with a tombstone or plaque. The Embassy of the United States, in Canberra, is looking to rectify that.)

After his acquittal, the one-time Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League, Timothy Hayes, returned to his family in Ballarat and soon took up a post as town inspector of Ballarat East, overseeing new constructions and the like, before becoming a special constable – with the role of helping to maintain the peace! And yet, restless and unhappy, he decided that perhaps the Americas might be a better place for him and departed, sadly without his wife, Anastasia, or their children. After working in Chile and Brazil, Hayes drifted north to San Francisco, where he settled for a time, working as a military engineer, helping to construct military field works. He drifted back to Melbourne in 1866, where he remained, still separated from his family. He died on 31 August 1873.

Anastasia continued to raise their children alone, working and living in Ballarat as a schoolteacher, right to the end. She died in her home, alone, on 6 April 1892, at the age of 74. (I weep!)

Henry Seekamp’s time in prison did nothing to curb his volatile ways. When the great Irish-born dancer and courtesan Lola Montez visited Ballarat in February 1856, he took an extremely dim view of her dancing, which he thought crossed the border from exotic to erotic, and penned his vitriolic views for
The Ballarat Times.
Lola Montez took an even dimmer view of these views being so publicly expressed and, after lying in wait for him, famously took to him with a horsewhip in the main street. Seekamp whipped her back and the result was a sensational public scandal, with the two accusing each other in the courts of assault and libel.

The cases were dismissed, though Seekamp lost in the court of public opinion. In October of that same year, he and his wife, Clara, sold their paper and moved north to Sydney, before going further afield to Queensland. It was there, at the Drummond diggings, Clermont, on 19 January 1864, that Henry Seekamp – still only 35 years old – died of ‘natural causes accelerated by intemperance’.

Clara, though ten years his senior, lived another 44 years and died in Melbourne on 22 January 1908, at the age of 87.

And Raffaello Carboni?

The Eureka Stockade was but one fascinating episode in his supremely peripatetic life. After penning a colourful book on the whole episode, which he released on the first anniversary of the attack, Carboni left Australia just six weeks later, on 18 January 1856 – his ticket purchased with some gold he had mercifully found at Ballarat – as the only passenger on
Empress Eugenie.
(This, of course, was the ship that had brought the second division of the 12th Regiment to Melbourne in November 1854.) After spending time in India and the Middle East, including such holy places as Jerusalem and Bethlehem, he returned to Italy in time to again fight for Garibaldi in his campaign for the unification of Italy. Thereafter, Carboni settled in Naples and continued writing everything from plays to libretti – though none of them ever made it to the stage. His most appreciated writings were to his friend, Peter Lalor, in faraway Melbourne.