The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka Read Free

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. 3
    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 . 4
    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