The Battle of the Eureka Stockade was fought in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, on 3 December 1854, between gold miners and the colonial forces of Australia. It was the culmination of the 1851–1854 Eureka Rebellion during the Victorian gold rush. The fighting resulted in at least 27 deaths and many injuries, the majority of casualties being rebels. The miners had various grievances, chiefly the cost of mining permits and the officious way the system was enforced.
The colony of Victoria was created on 1 July 1851, gaining autonomy within the British Empire after a decade of de facto independence from New South Wales. The Victorian constitution was awaiting a ratification by the Imperial parliament. An election for a provisional legislative council was held, with the chamber having 20 elected and ten appointed members subject to property-based franchise and membership requirements.
Gold prospectors were offered 200 guineas for making discoveries within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne. In August 1851, the news was received worldwide that, on top of several earlier finds, Thomas Hiscock, outside of Buninyong in central Victoria, had found still more deposits. As gold fever took hold, the colony's population increased from 77,000 in 1851 to 198,496 in 1853. Among this number was "a heavy sprinkling of ex-convicts, gamblers, thieves, rogues and vagabonds of all kinds".
The local authorities soon found themselves with fewer police officers and lacking the infrastructure needed to support the expansion of the mining industry. The number of public servants, factory and farm workers leaving for the goldfields to seek their fortune led to a chronic labour shortage that needed to be resolved. The response was a universal mining tax based on time stayed, rather than what was seen as the more equitable option, being an export duty levied only on gold found, meaning it was always designed to make life unprofitable for most prospectors.
Licence inspections, known as "digger hunts", were treated as a great sport and "carried out in the style of an English fox-hunt" by mounted officials who received a fifty per cent commission from any fines imposed. Many recruits were former prisoners from Tasmania and prone to brutal means, having been sentenced to serve in the military. Miners were often arrested for not carrying licences on their person because of the typically wet and dirty conditions in the mines, then subjected to such indignities as being chained to trees and logs overnight.
In the years leading up to the Eureka Stockade, several mass public meetings were held to address the miners' grievances. The Bendigo Petition received over 5,000 signatures and was presented to Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe by a miner's delegation in August 1853. There were also delegations received by the Ballarat gold commissioner Robert William Rede and La Trobe's successor Charles Hotham in October and November 1854. The ever-present "physical force" faction of the mining tax protest movement gained the ascendancy over those who advocated "moral force", including John Basson Humffray, after a judicial enquiry into the murder of miner James Scobie outside the Eureka Hotel. There was no finding of guilt regarding the owner, James Bently, who was deeply suspected of involvement, with the case being presided over by a police magistrate accused of having a conflict of interest.
Then, there was an uproar over the arrest of Catholic Father Smyth's disabled Armenian servant Johannes Gregorious. He was subjected to police brutality and false arrest for licence evasion, even though it was revealed he was exempt from the requirement. Gregorious was instead convicted of assaulting a constable and fined 5 pounds, despite the court hearing testimony to the contrary. The discontent began to spiral out of control when a mob of many thousands of aggrieved miners burned the Eureka Hotel on 17 October 1854.
On 28 November 1854, there was a skirmish as the approaching 12th (East Suffolk) Regiment of Foot had their wagon train looted in the vicinity of the Eureka lead, where the rebels ultimately made their stand. The next day, the Eureka Flag appeared on the platform for the first time. Mining licences were burnt at the final fiery mass meeting of the Ballarat Reform League – the miners' lobby. The league's founding charter proclaims that "it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called upon to obey" and "taxation without representation is tyranny", in the language of the United States Declaration of Independence.
On 30 November 1854, there was further rioting where missiles were once again directed at military and law enforcement by the protesting miners who had henceforth refused to cooperate with licence inspections en masse. That afternoon there was a paramilitary display on Bakery Hill. The oath-swearing ceremony took place whilst the insurgents were gathered around the Eureka Flag, and military companies were then formed. In the preceding weeks, the men of violence had already been aiming musket balls at the barely fortified government camp during the night.
Captain John Thomas led the attack on the Eureka Stockade, with Captain Charles Pasley as his second in command. The government forces at the Ballarat camp were under the immediate command of resident gold commissioner Robert Rede. Overall command was exercised by the executive lieutenant governor Sir Charles Hotham and the high commander of the British colonial forces in Australia, Major General Sir Robert Nickle.
The police inspector at Ballarat was Henry Foster. Other notable Victorian police commanders at the Eureka Stockade include sub-inspectors Ladislaus Kossak, Samuel Furnell, Thomas Langley, and Hussey Chomley.
It appears that the terms "captain" and "lieutenant" were used interchangeably within the Eureka Stockade garrison. The front cover of Raffaello Carboni's 1855 The Eureka Stockade features a rendition of the Eureka Flag with diamond-shaped stars and the words "When Ballarat unfurled the Southern Cross, the bearer was Toronto's Captain Ross". Yet Peter Lalor's casualty list records "Lieutenant Ross" as "wounded and since dead". It appears that Frederick Vern was also more commonly known as a rebel "colonel" instead.
A number of people who played key roles in the Eureka Rebellion and were defending the Eureka Stockade at some point lived in tents situated outside the stockade and were on assignment or otherwise absent when the surprise attack took place on Sunday morning, 3 December 1854.
Colonels, captains and lieutenants
Fortification of the Eureka lead
Following the oath swearing and Eureka Flag raising ceremony on Bakery Hill, about 1,000 rebels marched in double file to the Eureka lead where the Eureka Stockade was constructed over the next few days. It consisted of pit props held together as spikes by rope and overturned horse carts. Raffaello Carboni described it in his 1855 memoirs as being "higgledy piggledy". It encompassed an area said to be one acre (about 4,000 m²); however, that is difficult to reconcile with other estimates that have the dimensions of the stockade as being around 100 feet (30 m) x 200 feet (61 m), less than half that size. Contemporaneous representations vary and render the stockade as either rectangular or semi-circular. Testimony was heard at the high treason trials for the Eureka rebels that the stockade was four to seven feet high in places and was unable to be negotiated on horseback without being reduced.
Hotham feared that the goldfield's terrain would greatly favour the rebel snipers. Rede would instead order an early morning surprise attack on the rebel camp. Carboni details the rebel dispositions along:
The shepherds' holes inside the lower part of the stockade had been turned into rifle-pits, and were now occupied by Californians of the I.C. Rangers' Brigade, some twenty or thirty in all, who had kept watch at the 'outposts' during the night.