The Battle of the Eureka Stockade was fought in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, on 3 December 1854, between gold miners and the colonial forces of Australia. It was the culmination of the 1851–1854 Eureka Rebellion during the Victorian gold rush. The fighting resulted in at least 27 deaths and many injuries, the majority of casualties being rebels. The miners had various grievances, chiefly the cost of mining permits and the officious way the system was enforced.
Background
The colony of Victoria was created on 1 July 1851, gaining autonomy within the British Empire after a decade of de facto independence from New South Wales. The Victorian constitution was awaiting a ratification by the Imperial parliament. An election for a provisional legislative council was held, with the chamber having 20 elected and ten appointed members subject to property-based franchise and membership requirements.
Gold prospectors were offered 200 guineas for making discoveries within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne. In August 1851, the news was received worldwide that, on top of several earlier finds, Thomas Hiscock, outside of Buninyong in central Victoria, had found still more deposits. As gold fever took hold, the colony's population increased from 77,000 in 1851 to 198,496 in 1853. Among this number was "a heavy sprinkling of ex-convicts, gamblers, thieves, rogues and vagabonds of all kinds".
The local authorities soon found themselves with fewer police officers and lacking the infrastructure needed to support the expansion of the mining industry. The number of public servants, factory and farm workers leaving for the goldfields to seek their fortune led to a chronic labour shortage that needed to be resolved. The response was a universal mining tax based on time stayed, rather than what was seen as the more equitable option, being an export duty levied only on gold found, meaning it was always designed to make life unprofitable for most prospectors.
Licence inspections, known as "digger hunts", were treated as a great sport and "carried out in the style of an English fox-hunt" by mounted officials who received a fifty per cent commission from any fines imposed. Many recruits were former prisoners from Tasmania and prone to brutal means, having been sentenced to serve in the military. Miners were often arrested for not carrying licences on their person because of the typically wet and dirty conditions in the mines, then subjected to such indignities as being chained to trees and logs overnight.
In the years leading up to the Eureka Stockade, several mass public meetings were held to address the miners' grievances. The Bendigo Petition received over 5,000 signatures and was presented to Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe by a miner's delegation in August 1853. There were also delegations received by the Ballarat gold commissioner Robert William Rede and La Trobe's successor Charles Hotham in October and November 1854. The ever-present "physical force" faction of the mining tax protest movement gained the ascendancy over those who advocated "moral force", including John Basson Humffray, after a judicial enquiry into the murder of miner James Scobie outside the Eureka Hotel. There was no finding of guilt regarding the owner, James Bently, who was deeply suspected of involvement, with the case being presided over by a police magistrate accused of having a conflict of interest.
Then, there was an uproar over the arrest of Catholic Father Smyth's disabled Armenian servant Johannes Gregorious. He was subjected to police brutality and false arrest for licence evasion, even though it was revealed he was exempt from the requirement. Gregorious was instead convicted of assaulting a constable and fined 5 pounds, despite the court hearing testimony to the contrary. The discontent began to spiral out of control when a mob of many thousands of aggrieved miners burned the Eureka Hotel on 17 October 1854.
On 28 November 1854, there was a skirmish as the approaching 12th (East Suffolk) Regiment of Foot had their wagon train looted in the vicinity of the Eureka lead, where the rebels ultimately made their stand. The next day, the Eureka Flag appeared on the platform for the first time. Mining licences were burnt at the final fiery mass meeting of the Ballarat Reform League – the miners' lobby. The league's founding charter proclaims that "it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called upon to obey" and "taxation without representation is tyranny", in the language of the United States Declaration of Independence.
On 30 November 1854, there was further rioting where missiles were once again directed at military and law enforcement by the protesting miners who had henceforth refused to cooperate with licence inspections en masse. That afternoon there was a paramilitary display on Bakery Hill. The oath-swearing ceremony took place whilst the insurgents were gathered around the Eureka Flag, and military companies were then formed. In the preceding weeks, the men of violence had already been aiming musket balls at the barely fortified government camp during the night.
British army commanders
Captain John Thomas led the attack on the Eureka Stockade, with Captain Charles Pasley as his second in command. The government forces at the Ballarat camp were under the immediate command of resident gold commissioner Robert Rede. Overall command was exercised by the executive lieutenant governor Sir Charles Hotham and the high commander of the British colonial forces in Australia, Major General Sir Robert Nickle.
Victorian police commanders
The police inspector at Ballarat was Henry Foster. Other notable Victorian police commanders at the Eureka Stockade include sub-inspectors Ladislaus Kossak, Samuel Furnell, Thomas Langley, and Hussey Chomley.
Rebel commanders
It appears that the terms "captain" and "lieutenant" were used interchangeably within the Eureka Stockade garrison. The front cover of Raffaello Carboni's 1855 The Eureka Stockade features a rendition of the Eureka Flag with diamond-shaped stars and the words "When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross, the bearer was Toronto's Captain Ross". Yet Peter Lalor's casualty list records "Lieutenant Ross" as "wounded and since dead". It appears that Frederick Vern was also more commonly known as a rebel "colonel" instead.
A number of people who played key roles in the Eureka Rebellion and were defending the Eureka Stockade at some point lived in tents situated outside the stockade and were on assignment or otherwise absent when the surprise attack took place on Sunday morning, 3 December 1854.
Fortification of the Eureka lead
Following the oath swearing and Eureka Flag raising ceremony on Bakery Hill, about 1,000 rebels marched in double file to the Eureka lead where the Eureka Stockade was constructed over the next few days. It consisted of pit props held together as spikes by rope and overturned horse carts. Raffaello Carboni described it in his 1855 memoirs as being "higgledy piggledy". It encompassed an area said to be one acre (about 4,000 m²); however, that is difficult to reconcile with other estimates that have the dimensions of the stockade as being around 100 feet (30 m) x 200 feet (61 m), less than half that size. Contemporaneous representations vary and render the stockade as either rectangular or semi-circular. Testimony was heard at the high treason trials for the Eureka rebels that the stockade was four to seven feet high in places and was unable to be negotiated on horseback without being reduced.
Hotham feared that the goldfield's terrain would greatly favour the rebel snipers. Rede would instead order an early morning surprise attack on the rebel camp. Carboni details the rebel dispositions along:
The shepherds' holes inside the lower part of the stockade had been turned into rifle-pits, and were now occupied by Californians of the I.C. Rangers' Brigade, some twenty or thirty in all, who had kept watch at the 'outposts' during the night.
The location of the stockade has been described by Eureka man John Lynch as "appalling from a defensive point of view" as it was situated on "a gentle slope, which exposed a sizeable portion of its interior to fire from nearby high ground".
In the early hours of 1 December, the rebels were observed to be massing on Bakery Hill, but a government raiding party found the area vacated. The riot act was read to a mob that had gathered around Bath's Hotel, with mounted police breaking up the unlawful assembly. A three-man miner's delegation met with Commissioner Rede to present a peace proposal; however, Rede was suspicious of the chartist undercurrent of the anti-mining tax movement and rejected the proposals as being the way forward.
The rebels sent out scouts and established picket lines in order to have advance warning of Rede's movements and a request for reinforcements to the other mining settlements. The "moral force" faction had withdrawn from the protest movement as the men of violence moved into the ascendancy. The rebels continued to fortify their position as 300-400 men arrived from Creswick's Creek, and Carboni recalls they were: "dirty and ragged, and proved the greatest nuisance. One of them, Michael Tuohy, behaved valiantly". Once foraging parties were organised, there was a rebel garrison of around 200 men. Amid the Saturday night revelry, low munitions, and major desertions, Lalor ordered that any man attempting to leave the stockade be shot.
Vinegar Hill blunder: Irish dimension factors in dwindling numbers at stockade
The Argus newspaper of 4 December 1854 reported that the Union Jack "had" to be hoisted underneath the Eureka Flag at the stockade and that both flags were in possession of the foot police. Among those willing to credit the first report of the battle as being true and correct it has been theorised that the hoisting of a Union Jack at the stockade was possibly an 11th-hour response to the divided loyalties among the heterogeneous rebel force which was in the process of melting away.
At one point, up to 1,500 of 17,280 men in Ballarat were garrisoning the stockade, with as few as 120 taking part in the battle. Lalor's choice of Vinegar Hill as the password the night before the battle did not resonate with the non-Irish members of the protest movement and has been cited as the main reason why support for the armed rebellion collapsed. Support for the Eureka Rebellion fell away among those who were otherwise disposed to resist the military as word spread that the question of Irish home rule had become involved. There were miners from Bendigo, Forrest Creek, and Creswick who were converging on Ballarat to join the rebel garrison. The latter contingent was said to number a thousand men, "but when the news circulated that Irish independence had crept into the movement, almost all turned back". FitzSimons points out that although the number of reinforcements converging on Ballarat was probably closer to 500, there is no doubt that as a result of the choice of password "the Stockade is denied many strong-armed men because of the feeling that the Irish have taken over". Withers states that:
Lalor, it is said, gave 'Vinegar Hill' as the night's pass-word, but neither he nor his adherents expected that the fatal action of Sunday was coming, and some of his followers, incited by the sinister omen of the pass-word, abandoned that night what they saw was a badly organised and not very hopeful movement.
In his memoirs, Lynch states: "On the afternoon of Saturday we had a force of seven hundred men on whom we thought we could rely". However, there was a false alarm from the picket line during the night. The subsequent roll call revealed there had been a sizable desertion that Lynch says "ought to have been seriously considered, but it was not".
It is certain that Irish-born people were strongly represented at the Eureka Stockade. Most of the rebels inside the stockade at the time of the battle were Irish, and the area where the defensive position was established was overwhelmingly populated by Irish miners. Blainey has advanced the view that the white cross of the Eureka Flag is "really an Irish cross rather than being [a] configuration of the Southern Cross".