![]() ![]() Eureka was also a key event in the development of an Australian identity. The upswell of democratic sentiment following Eureka led to political reforms that you can check out in our videos on the secret ballot and women’s suffrage. Lalor and Humffray were elected to Victoria’s Legislative Council. The rebels were acquitted of treason and the gold licence was replaced by a miners’ right, which allowed the diggers to mine, vote and occupy vacant land for a small annual fee. The Government may have won the battle, but it lost the war, as Victorians overwhelmingly supported the defeated miners. Two other rebel leaders escaped in dresses. Peter Lalor with an injured arm that would require amputation, escaped in the confusion. The Battle of the Eureka Stockade lasted only 15 minutes, with at least 22 diggers, including one woman, and six soldiers losing their lives. The 150 rebels were completely outgunned, particularly as some of their firearms were theatre props. It was undermanned as nobody anticipated an attack on the Lord’s Day. NARRATOR: In the early hours of Sunday, the 3rd of December 1854, almost 300 soldiers and police stormed the stockade. ![]() PETER: We swear by the Southern Cross, to truly stand by each other, and defend our rights and liberties. Lalor encouraged the miners to swear an oath. Lalor instructed blacksmiths to forge pikes, and chose Vinegar Hill, associated with Irish nationalist defeats in Ireland and Australia, as the rebels’ password. NARRATOR: The miners who wanted to fight back chose Lalor as their leader, took the flag to Eureka Flat and built a ramshackle stockade. The outraged miners regathered at Bakery Hill, where Peter Lalor, a young Irishman from a prominent nationalist family, stepped forward and said: Johnston responded with a massive digger hunt. ![]() Gold licences were burned, and the Southern Cross flag raised for the first time. Up to 15,000 people gathered at Bakery Hill on the 29th of November. Hotham responded by ordering an additional 150 British troops to Ballarat. The government’s anti-miner sentiment hardened when miners burned down the hotel, and under the leadership of John Humffray, demanded Governor Hotham release the Arsonists, end the gold licence, and introduce Chartist reforms, including voting rights for all men. The miners’ anti-government sentiment hardened when Ballarat’s magistrates cleared the owner of the Eureka Hotel of murdering a miner. If you wanted to stage a rebellion in Australia, you needed to invite a Johnston. The digger hunts were led by James Johnston, the nephew of George Johnston, who’d put down the Irish rebellion at Vinegar Hill in 1804 and led the Rum Rebellion against Governor Bligh in 1808. Licence fees funded the goldfields police, who staged digger hunts to arrest miners without licences. ![]() Wasn’t it a British principle that tax-payers should have the vote? Yet diggers had to pay for a gold licence, which was a tax. And women, well, they couldn’t vote at all. There was no land to buy on the goldfields, and only men who owned significant land, or paid significant rent for a home, could vote. The new arrivals found their democratic hopes dashed. Some were British democracy campaigners known as Chartists, or had joined the anti-government protests that swept across Europe in 1848. Many headed for the boomtown of Ballarat. In 1853 almost 78,000 migrants joined the Victorian gold rush. NARRATOR: Or maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. WOMAN: Eureka, the cradle of Australian tax avoidance where greedy foreigners gathered under a made-up flag to demand the right to dig up our gold without paying for it. MAN: Eureka, the cradle of Australian democracy where the common folk gathered under the Southern Cross to demand a fair go for all. ![]()
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