Introduction
DUST AND RATTLING BONES
The ground is hard and dry. The dirt yields grudgingly as the gravedigger thrusts his shovel in. The summer sun blazes down, making thirsty work of a job that is grim enough without the intense heat. The crowd will be here soon, and there are still holes to dig. The gravedigger continues to jab and hack at the earth, grunting, choking on the dust; choking back the tears that threaten to join the course of his dripping sweat. It’s lucky his hands are already callused.
Back down at the Eureka Lead, the people are gathering to perform their mournful task. They emerge solemnly from their tents, patting down rumpled clothes, straightening hats and bonnets, dusting off jackets and shawls usually kept for Sundays and subscription balls. They round up stray children, tether dogs and talk in muted whispers. When will these hot north winds ease? You’d think there’d be a change in the weather by now.
It’s Monday morning, 4 December 1854. The township of Ballarat and its goldfields have woken to a strange dawn. A Monday morning on the richest auriferous basin in the world would ordinarily see a robust start to an energetic week. There are thirty-two thousand people on the Ballarat diggings, and none of them idle. Miners from every continent on the globe working their claims. Cartloads of goods arriving from Melbourne and Geelong to fill the stores with food and merchandise. Restaurants preparing victuals, grog shops dispensing their illicit wares, theatres preparing sets and wardrobes for the evening’s farce or melodrama, newcomers erecting their tents and unloading their drays in wide-eyed fascination, children dodging and weaving through the tightly packed tents, campfires and washing lines. Everywhere the sights and sounds of a colonial frontier society going about its daily business, the din ferocious.
But this Monday morning is silent. Yesterday an inferno tore through the early hours of the still, moonlit morning, shattering the habitual rhythm of industry and domesticity.
It was a true Australian night, miner H. R. Nicholls later recalled of the Saturday evening that had just passed, not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the stringy-bark trees…the whole air was full of that fine haze…a haze which slightly veils but does not conceal, lending a ghostly yet beautiful appearance to all around.1
What happened next has been taught to Australian school children for generations.
At 3am on Sunday 3 December 1854, a band of British troops and police stormed the rough barricades recently erected by a mob of armed miners. A few days earlier, the diggers had burned their mining licences in protest against the tyrannical rule of local authorities and pledged, in the words of their hastily appointed leader, Peter Lalor, to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties. The simple fortification of timber slabs, barrels and upturned carts was intended to protect unlic-ensed miners from arrest.
In the twenty-minute armed conflict that followed the surprise military attack, at least four soldiers and twenty-seven civilians were killed. The rebel stronghold was taken, and their blue and white flag—bearing the symbol of the Southern Cross—hauled to the ground. Following the short-lived battle, authorities continued to harass people within close proximity to the barricades, fearing that renegades might be hiding in surrounding tents. Homes and businesses were torched, suspected rebels and their protectors were pursued and cut down, hundreds were arrested.
This event we have come to know as the Eureka Stockade.
Charles Evans was a twenty-six-year-old printer from Shropshire, England, who had kept a daily diary since arriving on the Ballarat goldfield in November 1853. He recorded what he saw on that shell-shocked Monday morning, when he too crept from his tent into the light of an altered reality. Amid the smouldering ruins of the Eureka goldfield, the bodies of those killed in and around the Stockade were being ceremoniously transported by horse-drawn carts to the nearby burial ground. This is what Evans wrote:
I have witnessed today, I think, some of the most melancholy spectacles. A number of poor, brave fellows who fell in yesterday’s cowardly massacre were buried…One of the coffins trimmed with white and followed by a respectable and sorrowing group was the body of a woman who was mercilessly butchered by a mounted trooper while she was pleading for the life of her husband. The mind recoils with horror and disgust from the thought that an Englishman can be found capable of an act so monstrous and cruel.
Without the eyewitness account of Charles Evans, a young man whose moral universe had just been tipped upside down, we would never have known about the death of this woman.
For the name of the miner’s wife with the white-trimmed coffin was not recorded in the official government lists of those killed and wounded at Eureka. It was not included on Peter Lalor’s famous published list of heroes. Nor has it crawled down the haphazard wire of folk history. There are no inquest files. No newspaper reports. You certainly won’t find it inscribed on the monument to the sacred memory of those who fell in resisting the unconstitutional proceedings of the Victorian government that looms over the Old Ballarat Cemetery. Nor do we know if this woman was defending the barricade or just a helpless onlooker, her tent randomly encircled by the hasty demarcation of the rebels’ cordon.
There are no clues in the speeches delivered in Ballarat on the anniversary of the Stockade in 1856, when speakers eulogised the day the first blood was shed for Australian liberty. At that service, five hundred people met on the Stockade site to remember the cause for which [the patriots] bled. Leading citizen Dr Hambrook urged the crowd to remember those who left the bosom of their families, the comfort of the domestic hearth, to live among strangers—dependent on their own manly energies for subsistence, ruled over by men increasing these sufferings and privations by arbitrary laws…goaded into resistance.
Hambrook concluded: They would have been less than men if they had continued tamely to have submitted to it. In that idea of manly defiance against oppression germinated the robust beanstalk that is the Eureka myth. Its tendrils have wound through every milestone moment in Eureka pageantry ever since. In countless books, poems, paintings, films and curricula, the Eureka Stockade has been portrayed as an essentially masculine episode in which male passions were inflamed, male blood was shed and, ultimately, manhood suffrage won.
Yet suddenly, one simple line in a young man’s journal helps us to imagine the Eureka Stockade as a place populated by more than just a rabble of zealous male miners and their red-coated tormentors. Instead of an archetypal David and Goliath battle where, as the usually balanced historian Geoffrey Serle put it in 1954, ‘the wavering Eureka men were compelled to write history with their blood’, we are back in the land of the mortals.
We may never know her name, but the woman captured by Charles Evans’ pen was not destined to lie mute in her rocky grave.
✶
It was another woman’s story that first brought me to Eureka. Catherine Bentley was a reluctant guide, her story a simple and a sad one; so well worn it was hardly worth telling. An Irish girl emigrates to Australia during the gold rush, marries an ex-convict, makes a fortune and loses the lot.
In 1854, when Catherine Bentley was the landlady of the Eureka Hotel, Ballarat, she was briefly the protagonist in a drama that attracted the attention of the times. Celebrity being a fickle creature even in 1854, her hour upon that stage passed quickly and she bowed out of the limelight seemingly without a trace.
But as I was to discover, the road to and from Eureka is littered with the documentary fallout from her heady rise and spectacular fall.
I first made Catherine’s acquaintance when I was researching the history of women as hotel keepers in Australia. Female publicans have always been close to Australia’s cultural, social, economic and political epicentre. My research about Ann Jones, the owner of the Glenrowan Inn, where Ned Kelly made his last stand, led me to look for other female publicans tangled up in Australia’s iconic events. Reading C. H. Curry’s 1954 staple The Irish at Eureka introduced me to Catherine. Here I found an account of the murder of the Scottish miner James Scobie outside the Eureka Hotel on the night of 7 October 1854, and the presumed involvement of the landlord James Bentley, two male associates and his wife. The wife remained anonymous in Curry’s tale, but evidently aspersions were cast upon her good name and character by the drunken Scobie, and this was the singular motivation for the crime. I learned that Mrs Bentley was acquitted of a charge of murder for the miner’s death, while her husband and the other men were convicted of manslaughter.
Tantalised by this chimeric glimpse of a female publican in the dock for murder, I set out to discover more about the exonerated Mrs Bentley. I read numerous secondary accounts of the Scobie murder and subsequent inquest in Ballarat; the torching of the Eureka Hotel by a riotous mob, indignant that official corruption had perverted the course of justice by absolving James Bentley; and the subsequent Melbourne trial in front of Justice Redmond Barry, the man who later sentenced Ned Kelly to death. But I could find no further details about the publican’s wife, and so my initial foray into Eureka ended.
Later, through months of intense investigation of primary sources, I ascertained that twenty-two-year-old Catherine Bentley was just one of the 5165 women in Ballarat in December 1854. Her two-year-old son, Tommy, was one of 6365 children. Fully one-quarter of the adult population of Ballarat was female. Together, women and children accounted for thirty-two per cent of the entire Victorian goldfields population, and thirty-six per cent of Ballarat’s restless, resourceful community. Moreover, Catherine was seven months pregnant with her second child when her hotel was burned down by the mob. Young, recently married, pregnant and now impoverished, Catherine fitted Ballarat’s dominant demographic to a tee. I also discovered this: Catherine was neither a silent witness nor a shrinking violet. There she is, in the letters and petitions she wrote, the court appearances she made, the births and deaths of babies she certified: the evidentiary fragments of an embattled woman dealt a perpetual raw deal.
And I realised I wasn’t the only person trying to breathe life back into Catherine’s deflated story.
Andrew Crowley is a man with a mission. His task is to recoup the £30,000 compensation his great-great-grandmother, Catherine Bentley, claimed in 1855 after her hotel was burned down while under the stewardship of the Victorian police. Andrew estimates that sum to be worth two million dollars today. His legal brief, which he has prepared and is pursuing himself, is as thick as a phone book. Some would call him a crank, a serial pest. The Victorian Government has long considered him a vexatious litigant and dismissed his claims.
To Andrew and his father Frank, the money would make a difference. But it is the Bentley family honour that they hope to resurrect. The Eureka era is not over as most believe, Andrew maintains, and it won’t be until the Bentleys are cleared once and for all time…it means our family’s lives past and present vindicated! A few hours into our interview, Andrew broke down as he told me how important it was to Catherine that the truth be told.
And then he handed me a note written in Catherine’s hand, dated 10 April 1892, sixteen years to the day after her husband James Bentley had taken his own life. It was one of those moments when the historian realises that the past really isn’t past.