The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka Read Free Page A

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. 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. 5 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! 6 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.

    Ballarat winters are miserable. Anyone who has stood outside the majestic Craig’s Royal Hotel in June knows the icy