REBELS - The Legacy of the Eureka Stockade
An article from The Age Newspaper by David Miller.
Originally published Australia Day 2004. Reproduced with kind permission of The Age.
Ballarat Reform League
At a meeting held on Bakery Hill, in the presence of about ten thousand men, on Saturday, November 11th, 1854, the following were adopted as the principles and objects of the "Ballaarat Reform League"
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Keeper of Public Records.
The Ballaarat Reform League Charter
BALLARAT REFORM LEAGUE By Professor John Molony
Background to unrest
Besides the unrest caused principally by the licence fee and the manner of its collection, there were elements of constitutional unrest with republican overtones among the diggers on the goldfields and in Melbourne itself. John Harrison came to the goldfields after a career as an English sea-captain and he received tumultuous applause when he said at a meeting in November 1852 that, if moral resistance proved ineffective in bringing about political changes in Victoria, no digger 'would hesitate to draw his sword in defence of his rights.' The diggers had not forgotten that the licence fee had been introduced through the use of the Royal Prerogative in 1851.
Throughout 1852 escaped convicts and ticket-of-leave men from Van Diemens Land had flocked to the Victorian goldfields and their presence was deeply resented in a colony that had not been directly involved with the convict system. A Convict Prevention Bill tried to put a stop to the perceived evil by imprisoning the men in question and was passed by the Victorian Legislative Council late in 1852.
To widespread outrage, the Victorian Act was rescinded in London and the outcry became greater when news came through that the ‘Royal Prerogative' had been used to grant conditional pardons to the imprisoned escapees. A meeting of about 15,000 people heard strong republican sentiments expressed and the use of the ‘Royal Prerogative' was rejected. David Blair, formerly a Chartist lecturer in England, said forcibly, ‘ the power of the Monarch was based on the opinion of the people, and on that alone.' Origins of the League
The Ballarat Reform League, known initially as the Diggers' Reform League, had assumed an embryonic form by October 1854, which indicates that its leaders, in a period of public calm, were already reacting to the maladministration apparent at Ballarat.
British Chartism
The background to the League was the British Chartist movement. Made up principally of artisans, labourers and small business owners, and supported by thousands of women, the Chartist movement wanted a thorough reform of the British political system and specified the steps towards reform in the ‘People's Charter' of 1838. It was a simple document asking for universal suffrage for adult men, annual parliaments, the payment of members, the abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament and the introduction of a secret ballot voting system.
The Chartists thus wanted an extension of the rights of citizenship and the development of a healthy democratic system in which all citizens could have a role.
The Chartist movement attracted a wide following and its third petition to Parliament in 1848 was signed by at least three million people. By that year those who wanted to continue to use constitutional means to effect reform split from those who, having judged such means as idle in the face of parliamentary intransigency, preferred to use some form of physical force to achieve their aims. As on several previous occasions, Parliament met the movement with brutal reprisals and the arrest of the leaders.
In the wake of 1848, 102 Chartists were transported to Van Diemens Land, but none of them was in Ballarat in 1854.
Chartists and the Ballarat Reform League
There were many Chartists who had come as free men to Australia in the gold rush years and their contribution to the formation of the Ballarat Reform League was crucial. John Basson Humffray, law clerk and a moral force Chartist from Wales, became the first secretary of the League. Thomas Kennedy, a Chartist of Scottish origin who had become a Baptist preacher was on the committee together with two former English Chartists, George Black, editor of the Diggers Advocate and Henry Holyoake. No Irish digger was directly involved with the League in its early days.
The Charter of Bakery Hill
The ultimate form of the Charter of Bakery Hill had already taken shape by early November 1854 in a memo presented to a government Board investigating the causes of unrest on Ballarat. On 11 November 1854, in the presence of 10,000 people, the final form of the Charter was adopted as the diggers' platform. Henry Seekamp, editor of the Ballarat Times, wrote that the League was ‘the germ of Australian independence' and that it would eventually become ‘an Australian Congress.'
The place chosen for the launch of the Charter was Bakery Hill, the ‘old spot' at which the diggers held their meetings and from which the diggers could look across the Yarrowee Creek below them to the government Camp on the opposite hill. The Aims of the League
The ‘political changes' the League saw as necessary were set down in the Charter. They were to be achieved over a period of time and they clearly reveal the Chartist origins of the Ballarat document. Their first proposal was for ‘full and fair representation', meaning that goldfield residents would be able to stand for parliament and vote in elections. The others were manhood suffrage, no property qualifications, payment for members and a short duration of Parliament.
On a more local level the League wanted the immediate ‘disbanding' of the Gold Commissioners and the ‘total abolition of the diggers' and storekeepers' licence tax.' They also intended to issue ‘cards of membership' of the League, divide Ballarat into districts within ‘a few days' and to commence ‘a thorough and organized agitation of the gold fields and the towns.' Whatever they made of the other matters set down in the Charter, Governor Hotham and Commissioner Rede were surely agitated when they heard of the immediate proposals of the League.
Republican elements
The major development of the Charter of Bakery Hill from that of the British Charter went to the heart of democracy and had clear republican overtones. The League was convinced that, although every citizen had an ‘inalienable right… to have a voice in making the laws he is called upon to obey', the goldfield communities had been ‘hitherto unrepresented' in Parliament and had been subjected to bad and unjust laws.
To that extent they had been ‘tyrannized over' so that they had a ‘duty as well as interest to resist and, if necessary to remove the irresponsible power which so tyrannizes over them'.
Not content with a mere statement of the principles that underpinned their proposed future actions, the makers of the Charter moved to the ultimate source of their discontent – the British monarchy. The League did not restrict its ambit to the diggers, but covered all Victorian citizens. Thus the Charter spoke directly to Queen Victoria who was warned that firm action would be taken unless ‘equal laws and equal rights' were ‘dealt out to the whole free community' of the colony named after her. Proposed Action – a republic
The Charter was a document drawn up by men who had not composed it light heartedly or on the spur of a passionate moment. They had thought through the meaning of their words and the implications to be drawn from them and there is no indication that they thought their demands were excessive or that the authorities had any right to reject them. They demanded the ‘full political rights of the people', short of which they would not be satisfied even if they had to take steps towards a republic.
Thus, the first action proposed by the League if the demands were not met was to separate Victoria from Great Britain. Separation as such need not have entailed a declaration of independence from the Crown, but the League did not hesitate to insist that it would take that step if ‘Queen Victoria continues to act upon the ill advice of dishonest ministers and insists upon indirectly dictating obnoxious laws for the colony, under the assumed authority of the Royal prerogative.'
The League reminded the monarch that there was another and higher source of power in a prerogative which was ‘the most royal of all'. That prerogative lay with ‘the people [who] are the only legitimate source of all political power.' They proposed to use that power if forced to do so and thus supersede the ‘Royal prerogative' of the monarch.
The ancient origins of civil rights
The Ballarat Chartists certainly knew that the principles they invoked were not mere creations of a passing moment. Aristotle explicitly held that citizenship involves an inalienable right to ‘have a voice in making the laws', which the Charter reiterates.
To the Greek thinker of the Fourth Century B.C., the citizen was not defined merely by his enjoyment of legal rights within a state, but by his sharing in both ‘the administration and in the offices of the state'. Furthermore, the concept of tyranny, defined as an unjust regime imposed by force on unwilling subjects, is also as old as Aristotle.
The people and political power
The other fundamental principle of the Charter holds that ‘the people are the only legitimate source of all political power'. This principle is firmly knit into the development of political thought in the West at least since the Corpus Iuris Civilis of Justinian in the Sixth Century. There are traces of the origins of modern democracy in the Corpus that regards the power of the emperor as deriving from the Roman people who granted him the exercise of their sovereign authority.
This ideal was temporarily lost with the development of the exclusive concept of the divine right of kings. Thomas Aquinas taught that the essential principle of authority resided in the people and Dante wrote, ‘representatives exist for citizens and kings for peoples'. English and American precedents John Locke held that the sovereign community, freely constituted by the people, was the depository of all authority, which they pass in trust to rulers. If the rulers act contrary to the trust granted to them, they lose their right to exercise authority and it returns to the people. Rousseau even held that sovereignty, meaning ‘the exercise of the people's will', is inalienable. In 1642 a London, Puritan lawyer, Henry Parker, declared that salus populi suprema lex [the well being of the people is the highest law] and that the Royal Prerogative is subservient to the good of the people who are ‘the Authors and ends of all power'.
Across the Atlantic in 1620, the pilgrim fathers from the Mayflower were content to blend the political theories of past centuries with the Old Testament when they decided to ‘combine together in one body and to submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree to make and choose'. They thereby sowed the seeds of American democracy which quickly grew into popular sovereignty in the Newport Declaration of 1641 and ‘The Concessions and Agreements' established through William Penn in 1677.
Tyrannical use of authority
The writers of the Charter of Bakery Hill in 1854 had therefore a long tradition from which they drew their belief that the Royal Prerogative must be exercised only for the common good of those who possessed such sovereignty in the first instance - the people. To them, its current exercise in Victoria was tyrannical. In this instance the explicit prerogative singled out by the Charter was the appointment of public authorities, including Governor Hotham and his ministers. Although undertaken on the advice of the British Prime Minister and Cabinet, such appointments were technically made under the prerogative of the Crown.
By logical extension, the authors of the Charter held that anything done by Queen Victoria's ministers was indirectly her responsibility in that their power came from her. The Charter made it plain that, at whatever cost, the diggers would take such steps as they deemed necessary to put a stop to the use of the Royal Prerogative in Victoria unless the radical changes seen as absolutely necessary took place.
The authorities were equally determined to ensure that no such eventuality would come to pass. To that end it was vital to prevent the Ballarat Reform League from meeting again.
Government provocation
Rede in Ballarat and Hotham in Melbourne darkened the events of the last days at Ballarat before Eureka with further government provocation. The governor refused to listen to the just demands of a digger deputation, which he met on 27 November 1854. He scarcely looked at the copy of the Charter they presented to him, preferring to write ‘Put away' on it. His response to the attempts at conciliation was to dispatch a strong force of 296 extra police and soldiers to Ballarat.
Although Rede now had 435 officers and men in his Camp, he was deeply troubled. Another monster meeting was scheduled for 29 November, which had as its purpose the attainment of the objects of the League and Rede decided to send along a magistrate and his customary spies to report to him anything said or done at the meeting of a seditious nature.
The Chartists desert their League
Again there were upwards of 10,000 present at Bakery Hill and it soon became clear that there was disunity among the leadership. Humffray, Black and Kennedy tried to find excuses for the behaviour of the governor, to continue negotiations with him and to request concessions rather than demand rights.
These proposals received a furious response from the great majority of the diggers who rejected as pointless Humffray's motion to again protest against the behaviour of the government and its use of military force. At that moment Humffray and those who stood for moral force lost their standing with the diggers. Their ideals were high and their sentiments were pure, but their ability to judge the times was deficient. They had formulated the Charter with its demands and warnings, but they had not weighed up the consequences were the government to refuse to negotiate.
They learnt little from the bitter experience of the British Chartists, but perhaps remembered how the hapless French Canadians had been put down in blood when they rebelled against the British less than 20 years before. When the time came at Ballarat, what other response from British authorities could the leaders at Ballarat realistically have expected?
Changes in leadership
The Chartists acted nobly by inspiring the diggers with democratic ideals and holding out the hope that they were capable of being achieved. Yet, in the end, the Chartists left the diggers in the hour of their greatest need when the movement for reform either had to cease or the leadership had to change. The leadership automatically fell to those among the diggers to whom moral force was powerless in the face of official intransigence combined with military might. Nevertheless, many of those who assumed the leadership under Peter Lalor were men of prudence, intelligence and education but, by the end of November 1854, they had been goaded beyond endurance. They were unaware that the government was deliberately provoking them to turn from moral to physical force.
The League dies in blood
At the great meeting on 29 November, Peter Lalor came forward for the first time. He sensed that the League's future was endangered and he was determined to prevent that eventuality. He moved a motion calling for a meeting at 2 pm on Sunday, 3 December at the Adelphi Theatre when a new committee would be formed composed of representatives for each fifty members of the League. The authorities were equally determined to ensure that the League would not meet again. Shortly after dawn on that fateful Sunday, the wounded Lalor was in danger of death. From among those who had proposed to attend the meeting of the League more than thirty diggers had shed their lifeblood beneath the Southern Cross.
Legacy of the League
The spirit of the Charter of Bakery Hill lived on long after the defeat at Eureka of 3 December 1854. It did so first in the trade union movement in which the diggers, transformed into miners when they became employees of the large companies on the goldfields, banded together in unions to the protect their rights and working conditions.
At Barcaldine in Queensland 1891 the shearers flew the Southern Cross as a symbol of their unity with the men of Eureka. In the 1890s, W. G. Spence, the Creswick miner leader who had witnessed the Eureka Stockade battle as a small boy, persuaded the miners' organizations to amalgamate with the shearers union and thus form the Australian Workers Union, which became the most significant union in Australia.
The Australian Labor Party then took shape as a direct result of the struggles of the trade unions in the 1890s against the forces of organized capital.
The influence of the Charter on the development of Australian democracy was decisive. The Constitutions of all the colonies in the Nineteenth Century, which later became the States that formed the Australian Commonwealth in 1901, contained the fundamental rights outlined in the Charter, as did the Constitution of the Commonwealth itself.
Whenever Australians to this day enjoy the rights and freedoms granted to them by their Constitutions, they can look back to Eureka, to the Ballarat Reform League and to the Charter of Bakery Hill as the wellsprings of their democracy.
John Molony,
Australian National University
References
- Hugh Anderson, (ed.), Eureka : Victorian Parliamentary Papers Votes and Proceedings 1854-1867, Red Rooster Press, Melbourne, 1999.
- John Molony, Eureka, Melbourne University Press, 2001.
- Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age, Melbourne University Press, 1963.
- Audrey Oldfield, The Great Republic of the Southern Seas Republicans in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Hale @ Iremonger, Sydney, 1999
- Hon Steve Bracks AC, Room for a View Opinion Piece
- John Ireland, Eureka in Sumary, 2003
- Dr Stuart Macintyre, Demanding Democracy, 2010
- Peter Tyan, David Madden, Macgregor Duncan & Andrew Leigh, Imagine Australia (Extract)
- Mark Twain, Follow the Equator