The Eureka Stockade — 1854, the Diggers’ Rebellion (Victoria)

Before dawn on Sunday, December 3, 1854, on the goldfields at Ballarat in the colony of Victoria, a force of British soldiers and mounted police rushed a rough timber barricade thrown up by gold miners on the Eureka lead. Inside, perhaps 120 sleeping or half-awake diggers had sworn an oath under a blue flag bearing the white stars of the Southern Cross. The fight lasted fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. When the smoke cleared, around twenty-two diggers and roughly six soldiers were dead or dying, the flag had been torn down and trampled, and a brief, doomed rebellion was over.

The Eureka Stockade was the only armed uprising on Australian soil to grow into a national legend. It was not, on its face, a fight about gold. It was a fight about the £1-a-month mining licence the diggers had to buy whether or not they found a single speck, about the brutal and corrupt “licence hunts” by which police checked for it, and about the fact that working men who paid heavy fees had no vote, no land rights, and no voice in how Victoria was governed.

The diggers lost the battle and won the argument. Thirteen men were charged with high treason; juries acquitted every one of them. Within months the hated licence was abolished, replaced by a cheap Miner’s Right that carried the vote with it, and ordinary diggers won representation in the colony’s parliament. The rebellion’s leader, an Irishman named Peter Lalor who lost an arm in the fighting, went on to sit in that parliament and rise to Speaker of the Legislative Assembly.

All of this happened on Wadawurrung Country. Ballarat — from a Wadawurrung word often rendered “balla arat,” resting or camping place — was the land of the Wadawurrung people, who had lived there for thousands of years before the diggers tore the gullies apart. The rush that produced Eureka also stripped that land, fouled its waterways, and pushed its first owners to the margins of the camps that grew up on their country. Eureka is rightly remembered as a milestone of Australian democracy; it sat, like every goldfield, on ground taken from people who got no licence, no vote, and no monument.