The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (45 page)

I had great difficulty with the woman, I asked her what money she had on her person, she produced twenty two pound notes six shillings…she then handed me a roll of notes, which she took from one of her stockings, saying take that you ‘Bugger'.

After she'd unburdened her smalls of their booty, Eliza Smith was found to have been carrying £262 on her person.

Eliza was brought to Melbourne to be tried, and was convicted of receiving: a lesser crime than that for which her companions were sentenced to seven years. It was Eliza who persuaded Quin to turn Queen's witness, urging him to do so
for the sake of [his] wife and children
. But not even Eliza's defence counsel, Adam Loftus Lynn, thought her a saint. He described her to the jury
as not being constant as Penelope to her dear lord
, of whom she
took French leave
. The implication was that Eliza was in need of fast money to fund an escape from her husband, a mitigating rationale for her crime.

The
BALLARAT TIMES
was utterly uninterested in the morals or motives of the offenders. There was only one victim in this crime, and that was the careworn community of Ballarat. In a stinging editorial on 4 November, Henry Seekamp accused the town fathers of sowing the seeds of disaster with their own ineptitude.

Had it been originally the intention of the managers in town to have their property stolen, they could not have selected a site more favourable to the exercise of the distinguished art, or science, of ‘sticking up'.

Seekamp was not the only one to point out that the Bank's position behind the township, practically in the bush, was not conducive to public faith in the building as a financial institution. Of the bank's site, the
ARGUS
said
it really almost speaks out, and says, come and rob me, as much as a big nugget lying on the road-side would invite a traveller
.
²⁶
To add insult, the building was a flimsy box,
resembling as much as possible the zinc lining of some packing-case, with a hole knocked through the bottom to serve as a door
. It was the people, as usual, who had lost their savings due to the dim-witted authorities.

The Bank of Victoria robbery had demonstrated that gold was not safe as houses, or at least not safe
in
houses. But nor, it seemed, was it secure in men's hands. On 3 October, George Dunmore Lang, son of Reverend John Dunmore Lang of Sydney, resigned his position as the manager of the Ballarat branch of the Bank of New South Wales. He was given a farewell dinner by Ballarat's leading merchants and storekeepers, who presented him with a gold cup and their best wishes. In August, George had written a letter to his mother in Sydney. He proudly reported that the bank was in
a most flourishing state
. He then confided that he was arranging to start a private bank with five others. The Bank of New South Wales may have been bursting with deposits, but it did not amply reward its employees. But George could dream of opening his own bank only because he had in fact been amply rewarding himself; two months after his resignation George was convicted of embezzling more than £10,000. The press left Lang alone, perhaps out of courtesy for his well-respected father, or perhaps there wasn't much column space to spare in October.

But it soon became known that under Lang the Bank of New South Wales had allowed James Bentley to overdraw his account by £2000. The bank did not generally trade in loans—only deposits and gold purchases—but made an exception for Bentley because of his
flourishing circumstances
and superior collateral.
²⁷
It was also discovered that Lang had recently purchased a gold-broking business from one James Burchall, who had suddenly fled after his name was raised in relation to the Bank of Victoria robbery. Burchall had also tried to cash promissory notes in favour of John D'Ewes, signed by a local hotel landlord, presumably Bentley. As Eureka historian Ian MacFarlane has written, ‘like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, the murky financial dealing of the Ballarat officials seemed to extend everywhere'.
²⁸

Commissioner Rede read the verdict into the Scobie enquiry on Saturday 14 October. The court and its verandah were filled to overflowing. Hot winds from the arid north whipped up clouds of dust. People choked on their own breath, just as they gagged over the greatest miscarriage of justice yet witnessed in a town that thought matters could get no worse. A wealthy and influential man, allowed to walk away scot-free from a crime that he had patently committed.
Herculean though the task may appear
, roared the
TIMES
in its edition that evening,
we intend to cleanse the
Augean Stable of the Ballarat Camp, and purify its fetid atmosphere of those putrescent particles which offend the senses, by a rigid but wholesome exposure before the bar of public opinion
. Thomas Pierson feared for the publican's safety. Such was the hostility towards not only the magistrates and commissioners but Bentley himself that
I should not wonder if his whole house was razed to the ground
, Pierson wrote in his diary that night.

Bentley's exoneration was a scandal. A public demonstration was called for the following Tuesday, 17 October. Notices were posted. The grapevine sent out its tendrils of insinuation. The meeting would be held within spitting distance of the Eureka Hotel, on the site of Scobie's murder. Thomas Pierson was there, and twenty-seven-year-old Catholic woman Elizabeth Rowlands, cradling her six-month-old baby Mary Ann. They were joined by thousands of others.
²⁹
Pierson says 10,000 in his diary; a subsequent parliamentary enquiry reckoned 5000.
³⁰
A few mounted troopers hung back warily. Speakers came before the crowd to decry the outrage of Bentley's acquittal and the incompetence—nay, impudence—of the Camp.

The decision was a perversion of justice resulting from entrenched venality. The Eureka Hotel was a safe house for murderers and thieves,
connived at by the authorities
. Bentley kept his clientele drunk, all the better for pickpockets to rob them. D'Ewes interfered with all aspects of the goldfields management, from licensing to land sales. Johnston had a share in Brandt's Victoria Hotel. Most of the Camp's higher officials were nothing more than land speculators. Rede was a puppet, a fool. The bench had no impartiality, no transparency. The Camp was a kind of legal store,
where justice was bought and sold
. Where was British liberty? Were the diggers slaves or serfs? Why, the Russians treated their people better than the diggers of Ballarat. On the accusations went, constricting the emotional helix of a blustery spring morning.
³¹

At 10am, Police Inspector Gordon Evans sent a garrison of his men to the Eureka Hotel. Led by Maurice Ximines, the men snuck into the hotel, unseen by the crowd. Bentley had asked the police to watch over his property. He had received threats that the people intended to
hang him by the lamp post
. Bentley also had a pregnant young wife, a toddler and a hotel full of employees and guests, not to mention a mountain of private property, to protect. By this stage, the crowd had begun to bay for his blood.
The cries of the mob were for Bentley
, Ximines later testified.

At some point, the mood of the crowd changed. The sun was beating down. The wind was gusting strong. A peaceful public assembly began to turn ugly.
Symptoms of riot began to show themselves
, wrote Thomas Pierson back in his tent that night. He left, and watched the rest of the calamitous proceedings from a safe vantage point at a distance from the crowd. The multitude became a mob, moving with a vicious urgency towards the hotel.

James Bentley, convinced he was going to be lynched, fled on horseback to the Camp. On the way, he passed Charles Evans.
I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man's face,
Evans wrote in his diary. Ellen Young saw him too,
without hat or coat his white shirt sleeves tucked up
,
a trooper closely following
. Ellen thought it was
a race in fun
. She turned to her next-door neighbour and said
white shirt will win
. But this was no game. Was Bentley on a mission to call for more protection? Was he saving his own neck? Or trying to create a diversion, thinking that the mob might change course and follow him, like a swarm of angry bees?

But it was not only the publican's scalp the crowd wanted: a miner name John Westoby stepped in front of the hotel.
I propose that this house belong to the diggers
, he proclaimed, to wild cheering.

It's a telling line. Here was the first instance during this watershed spring when Ballarat's digging community overtly defined itself as a collective. Now it took Ellen Young's literary lead:
we (the people) demand…
The time had come for the body politic of Ballarat to take matters of justice into its own hands.

‘Public punishment', writes British historian Bernard Capp (in his study of the way that aggrieved communities in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century wielded shaming rituals against perceived enemies), ‘symbolised the community's collective repudiation of the offence and its reassertion of traditional values'. Jeering, hooting, burning effigies and smashing windows were all activities that could be ritually performed by the whole community, including women and children, as a way to maintain a moral order. This is sometimes called charivari or ‘rough music': a terrifying dirge tuned to righteous mob indignation, intended to punish transgression. It was all about loss of face in a society predicated on face-to-face contact.

The rough music accompanying James Bentley in his flight to the Camp from his overrun hotel underscores a central paradox in Ballarat's looming political crisis. Those who immigrated in their thousands to the Victorian goldfields aspired to something different from what they knew, and particularly from the hierarchies of Home. Yet they also expected that the substructure—the traditional values and social assurance of law, order and justice—would stay the same.

Westoby's proposition tapped directly into one of the chief moral concerns of the diggers: the dignity of providing a permanent and prosperous home for their families. How better to cut a man down to size than to invade his castle? Shame him in front of his wife and child. Show him to be no better than the rest of the dispossessed, disempowered crowd outside his painted door. They would seize the high ground, both morally and literally. Bentley's Hill would be no more. Let his house belong to the diggers. Not an egalitarian gesture of sharing property, but a cutthroat ritual of exclusion.

The same people who had only moments before decried the arbitrary flouting of due process and the flagrant cruelty of its custodians now turned itself to retributive justice. And so, in the words of Samuel Huyghue,
the match was applied to the train of long gathering discontent
.

Riots are the kissing cousin of charivari. Add alcohol and soaring temperatures to a public display of disaffection, and it doesn't take much for things to get perilously out of hand. The mob was a feature of pre-modern societies; authorities held a traditional fear and loathing for irate crowds as riots waiting to happen: embryonic uprisings. ‘Neither mindless nor revolutionary', writes Bernard Capp, ‘riots were an attempt by the disenfranchised to connect with the political and administrative structures of the state'.

Once the crowd had surrounded the Eureka Hotel and its half-acre of funhouses, stables and storage facilities, Robert Rede was called from the Camp. Rede attempted to quell the mob's fury. He stood up on a window ledge. He called for order. He was hooted and jeered, pelted with bottles, bricks, stones and eggs. Someone threw a rock at a window. One report says a little girl cast the first stone; another says it was a teenage lad. It is of no consequence. Once the glass shattered, so did the last of the crowd's equilibrium. That very morning, the final touches to the hotel's major construction works had been completed. Within minutes, the crowd had set upon the process of disassembling all the Bentleys had taken months to build: ripping at boards, smashing windows, throwing stones at lamps. The edifice of Bentley's success was demolished.