The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (37 page)

The flood of license fees created a bonanza for colonial authorities. In Bendigo alone, permits jumped from six thousand to more than twenty thousand a month by the end of 1852.
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Soon after their arrival, Ludlow’s family watched the tent city’s population explode. A torrent of cash filled the coffers of Victoria’s newly formed government. Instead of using it for sorely needed improvements in roads, hospitals, and schools, the government betrayed the miners’ trust with incompetence and corruption. Fee collection often amounted to little more than thinly disguised extortion for personal gain. When the widely reviled Governor La Trobe was finally removed from office and returned to England in May 1854, one-quarter of the money deposited in the treasury was nowhere to be found.
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The goldfields also attracted many who did not hold “Mother England” in high esteem, especially a huge contingent of displaced and mistreated Irish, many of whom were political activists. Chartists—members of a working-class labor movement started in Great Britain—joined freedom-loving Yanks who held no regard for the empire’s rules. In addition, a growing number of anarchists and dissenters joined large gatherings at the diggings to promote radical ideas of equality and rights for all. The goldfields lay ripe for firebrands, as the sparks of liberty found easy tinder in the frustrated miners.

Bendigo became a hotbed of dissension. The Anti-Gold Licence Association was formed in 1853, representing twenty-three thousand diggers and their families. Isaac and John likely joined massive rallies where they flew the diggers’ flag, depicting the scales of justice and other symbols of democracy. Displaying the flag, leaders presented Governor La Trobe with the Bendigo Petition, stretching ninety feet long and holding five thousand signatures. It demanded reduced mining fees, the right for new colonists to own property, and the elimination of soldiers as fee collectors.

La Trobe ignored the petition, and tensions escalated. Drawing a line in the sand, diggers took matters into their own hands. In united protest, they agreed to pay no more than ten shillings when their licenses came up for renewal in a few days. As a sign of solidarity, miners tied red ribbons to their hats and sent a message to the gold commissioners. The Red Ribbon Rebellion was born, and the “wearing of the ribbon became so common that supplies of red flannel, a popular material used in the making of diggers’ shirts, all but dried up.”
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During the standoff, a few men were arrested when they refused to pay the full license fee. Instantly, diggers armed with pistols, picks, and rifles marched to the Commissioners Camp to set their mates free. Following the miners’ unexpected show of force, La Trobe and the legislature quickly capitulated, reducing the license fee to £1 a month, £2 for two months, or £8 a year.
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The Bendigo association had won a partial victory for all the diggers, but there were still many who were not satisfied.

By the time Agnes and William moved to Ballarat, they found themselves at the flashpoint of an escalating clash between the diggers’ movement and Victoria’s new governor, Charles Hotham. Miners had cheered his arrival earlier in the year, holding out hope that he’d see things their way. Hotham, however, considered the miners dupes, who were manipulated by foreign agitators, especially the Irish. He also faced a huge deficit and needed license fees to help bring it under control. The miners’ initial euphoria over Governor Hotham dissipated quickly.

New to office, Hotham imposed twice-weekly license checks, fueling deeper resentment among the diggers. In Ballarat, their frustration compounded when Scottish miner James Scobie was brutally kicked to death by James Bentley, owner of the Eureka Hotel. Diggers were outraged when Bentley was acquitted after a cursory investigation by a local magistrate known to be corrupt. An angry mob formed and set fire to the Eureka Hotel on October 17, 1854.

An anxious Agnes saw smoke rising above her town. Ever since her family set up camp, a palpable tension ran through the diggings. Scobie’s murder had escalated the strife, and now that Bentley was under protection at the Commissioners Camp, the government’s collusion against justice seemed all the more apparent. The vastly outnumbered soldiers desperately reinforced the camp’s defenses as angry protesters marched through the streets of Ballarat.

The fire at the Eureka Hotel set in motion a flurry of activity, as cooler heads tried to avoid the rising inevitability of bloody confrontation. Within days, miners formed the Diggers Right Society. In November, the hastily formed Ballarat Reform League sent delegates to Melbourne with a new of list of demands for diggers’ rights. While the delegates awaited the governor’s response, a duplicitous Hotham dispatched an additional 450 troops to Ballarat. On Tuesday, November 28, a long line of crimson-jacketed soldiers marched into town. Panicked miners ran in every direction and loaded their guns. Agnes called for her children and gathered them safely inside.

News of the approaching soldiers, bayonets gleaming in the sun, spread like wildfire. The swelling crowd of shocked townsfolk greeted them with pelting stones and shouts of derision. Attempting to block the column’s advance, the gathering mob overturned carts. In the confusion, shots were fired and critically wounded the regiment’s drummer boy.
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The soldiers retaliated by drawing their swords. Shots and screams rang out across the hills and gullies surrounding Ballarat, and a bolt of terror tore through a terrified mother of five.

The next day, Wednesday, ten thousand miners met at Bakery Hill. Defying Britain’s rule, they raised a new flag for the first time. Three courageous women stitched the blue-and-white flag that represented the Southern Cross, ornamented with white stars against an off-white background. One was a freed convict from Van Diemen’s Land named Anastasia Eustes Withers. A dressmaker from London, she was transported for stealing five shawls. Together with a woman also named Anastasia, Anastasia Hayes, and a very pregnant Anne Duke, she left her mark of protest against the rule of the Crown.
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Peter Lalor, an upper-class Irish activist and one of the Ballarat Reform League founders, addressed the large, restless crowd. He was perhaps a natural for the role; his brother, James Fintan Lalor, had been involved in the Young Ireland uprising in 1848, and his father served in the British House of Commons. Six-foot-tall, twenty-five-year-old Peter ended his speech with calls for lighting a huge bonfire. Diggers defiantly tossed their licenses into the flames.

It was the last day of the month, November 30, 1854. Governor appointee Robert Rede, Ballarat’s Gold Commissioner, knew what had happened the previous night on Bakery Hill. With the backing of additional troops, Rede was confident a show of force would quash the uprising. Knowing that many miners had burned their licenses the night before, he ordered a license hunt with soldiers in full force, provoking more confrontations between diggers and soldiers.

Rede continued the hunt throughout the morning. By noon, he rode to the gravel pits and demanded that diggers present their licenses. Shots were fired, and miners rushed up the gully shouting their outrage. Rede ordered the troops to turn their guns on the gathering mob. Facing the tight line of muskets, they began to disperse.

Later in the day, a large crowd began to congregate on Bakery Hill. “At a meeting at 4 pm on November 30th, 1854, Peter Lalor stepped up on a tree stump beneath the billowing Southern Cross flag, and into his place in Australian history. The diggers knelt, as one, on the dusty ground, placed their hands over their hearts and chanted together the diggers oath: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and defend our rights and our liberties.’”
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Lalor later recalled that moment: “I looked around me; I saw brave and honest men, who had come thousands of miles to labor for independence. I knew that hundreds were in great poverty, who would possess wealth and happiness if allowed to cultivate the wilderness which surrounded us. The grievances under which we had long suffered, and the brutal attack of the day, flashed across my mind; and, with the burning feeling of an injured man, I mounted the stump and proclaimed ‘Liberty.’”
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They were all caught up in it. As much as Agnes wanted to escape with her family, most women on the goldfields knew one another, so Agnes wanted to help if she could. The worried mother watched the freedom fighters piece together their best defenses. For two days straight, a thousand inspired diggers worked to erect a stockade on the Eureka field. “The roughly circular encampment was about an acre in area and barricaded on three sides by a rude construction of pit logs thrown together in a higgledy-piggledy manner. . . .”
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By Saturday evening, their work was done.

Since the start of the month, there were no new incidents, two days thankfully without bloodshed. Saturday evening as campfires blazed, Agnes put her children to bed with a sigh of relief, looking forward to Sunday’s peace. It was not to be so.

At dawn’s break on Sunday, December 3, 1854, every available soldier fastened his bayonet and marched toward the thinly manned stockade on Bakery Hill. Their attack was a complete surprise. Drowsy rebels awoke to the sentries’ shocked cries, barely grabbing their guns before bullets flew over their heads. The battle was short and fierce. Three hundred soldiers had attacked the stockade, killing twenty-two prospectors and taking one hundred prisoners. Six soldiers lost their lives. A few women joined the rebellion and challenged the troops directly. In an act of defiance and protection, Bridget Hynes and several other women ran onto the battlefield, putting their bodies over the wounded and preventing soldiers bent on revenge from bayoneting them to death.

Nineteen-year-old Bridget Callinan, originally from County Clare, Ireland, helped rescue her two wounded brothers, Patrick and Michael. As the troops began to murder the wounded and burn the hospital tents, Bridget confronted the armed soldiers and created a diversion that allowed her two brothers to escape with the help of her cousins. Michael had received two bullets in his thigh, and Patrick suffered two bayonet wounds.
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Just as the tensions came to a head, Agnes’s sons William and George Henry were nowhere to be found, out on an errand when the shooting began. Young William later related a “very vivid recollection of the Eureka Stockade riots, and had the unpleasant experience of seeing a man shot down by his and his brother’s side at a time they had been sent on a message.” Needless to say, the young boys “took to their heels and did not draw breath till they were safely home.”
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Out of her mind with worry when the gunfire ensued, Agnes’s frantic screams subsided when she saw her two winded lads running back toward the camp. A battlefield was no place for children.

On this Sunday, even her church was unsafe. Largely made up of Scots, the Presbyterian ministry was harboring a severely wounded Peter Lalor, and women from her congregation were helping to save his life and amputate his shattered arm. Both political hero and hopeless romantic, the insurgent was known for having walked the hundred-mile roundtrip journey from Ballarat to Geelong to see his beloved fiancée, Alicia Dunne. With a huge price on his head after the Eureka battle, the fiery Irishman was smuggled from the Presbyterian Church back to Alicia’s Geelong home. When amnesty was declared and Lalor’s wounds healed, grateful diggers elected him to Victoria’s first legislative assembly.

What started as a dispute over licensing fees became a protest for human rights. Within a year, nearly all the miners’ demands were met, including suffrage for men, abolition of property requirements for membership in Parliament, equal electoral districts, and the abolition of diggers’ licenses. The “Gold Licence” rules were replaced by “a Miner’s Right for an annual fee of £1, and an export levy on gold. This Right gave the diggers title deed to their claims, allowing them to establish permanent dwellings, and a permanent sense of community. Commissioners were replaced with mining wardens and military rule was abolished on the goldfields forever.”
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The Eureka uprising ended with the trial of the century. Charges of treason against the protesters carried a death penalty, but no jury would bring a guilty verdict. Every deliberation brought unexpected acquittals for those taken prisoner. Huge crowds gathered around the courthouse and cheered exultantly. One by one, rebels were acquitted and paraded through the streets, as ten thousand miners carried the exonerated on chairs above their heads. The first of those acquitted was John Joseph, a black American from New York, a man the United States had left to fend for himself after the embassy helped free the four white Americans arrested at the Eureka Rebellion.

A few years after the trial, Agnes, William, and the children headed north with their gold safely hidden in the wee ones’ “nappies.”
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Invigorated by newly won freedoms, they raised their tent poles and began mining the fields at Campbell’s Creek. By this time, most gold deposits accessible to single prospectors had been harvested, so it was much more difficult to make a go of it alone. Larger deep-shaft mines like the “Hercules,” the “New Moon,” and the “Deborah” took over the mining fields.
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Mullock (waste) heaps and towering structures with poppet legs now dominated the skyline across Victoria’s central plains. Within a short time, the wandering Roberts contingent packed up and went on the move again. This time, they were hunting for “red gold.”