The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka Read Free Page B

blast that blows up Lydiard Street, rattling bones and chilling you to the core. It is eye-popping, spirit-crushing cold. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the winds blow harder and colder in Ballarat than any other place in Victoria.
    I had left the cosy haven of the library to meet Anne Hall, the great-great-granddaughter of Anastasia Hayes, a Ballarat folk hero, reputed to have been one of three women to sew the Southern Cross flag. Anastasia, her husband Timothy and their five children arrived in Victoria in October 1852 aboard the Mobile , the same ship that was ferrying Charles Evans to his new homeland. Anne Hall and I had arranged to meet at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, where the Eureka Flag presently resides. I’d seen a million reproductions of the flag—I’d even bought my husband a souvenir Eureka Flag stubby holder—but this was my first visit to the real thing.
    Anne led me into the darkened room that is designated to and dominated by the flag. The flag is pinned behind glass, but somehow still shimmers as if rippling in a wayward breeze. It is bigger than I expected, much bigger. The room has a grave aura; it calls for quiet murmurs and reverence.
    Anne drew beside me as I stood gazing up at the giant blue and white standard. I can’t look at this without wondering which are her stitches , she whispered. Her eyes darted from star to star, resting on the patch before her, clearly possessed by her ancestor Anastasia.
    This was why I’d come to Ballarat today, an outsider and an ingénue. To be reminded, lest we forget, that what’s done is not done. Neither forgotten nor lost, beyond hope and redemption and promise. Not for Andrew Crowley or Anne Hall, or for the hundreds of descendants who band together as Eureka’s Children or the thousands of Australians who wear the image of the Eureka Flag on their hard hat or their bumper bar or their skin. For them, as for all of us, the past is a whisper away.
    I have never met Ellen Campbell, but letters pecked out on her ribbon typewriter, dotted with liquid-paper corrections, regularly arrive in my mailbox. I first contacted Ellen after I learned of the precious family jewel she keeps guarded in her home in rural New South Wales: the diary of her grandmother, Margaret Brown Howden Johnston.
    Newly married to Assistant Resident Gold Commissioner James Johnston and already pregnant with their first child, Margaret was living in the Government Camp in Ballarat during the time of the troubles. Later, when we had got to know each other better, Ellen sent me a photocopy of the diary. The real thing, rescued by her father from a backyard clean-up in the 1940s, never leaves her possession: I guard this jealously as it is very fragile . 7
    Margaret’s diary would become as valuable to my research as it is to Ellen’s family history. But it seems that not everyone has been as eager to embrace the Johnston legacy.
    I must say I feel a bit frustrated , Ellen wrote to me on 4 December 2004, as I would love to have been invited to celebrations conducted on 150th anniversary of Eureka—after all I am the granddaughter of the Ass. Gold Commissioner!!
    Ellen readily grasps the reason for her exclusion from the official festivities. Much emphasis on the diggers, of course. Just a thought! Have a Happy Christmas.

    When the American historian Marilyn Yalom wrote her masterful Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory, she had more than eighty contemporary accounts penned by women on which to draw. These women had ‘emerged from the Revolution with an urgent need to howl out their losses and cry for justice’, writes Yalom. ‘The more they had suffered, the more they felt compelled to chronicle the past.’
    Having sifted through hundreds of gold rush diaries, private reminiscences and published memoirs, I have no doubt the women of Eureka endured exquisite suffering. But I have not found one contemporary