What was a digger hunt

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Toggle navigation. Search Filter Limit to issues of this title. Search Advanced Search. Prev issue Next issue Browse issues. Prev page Next page Browse pages. Prev article Next article Browse articles. Close Please wait. Loading browse data By this time, a regiment of troopers, in full gallop, had besieged the whole Eureka, and the traps under their protection ventured among the holes.

An attempt to give an idea of such disgusting and contemptible campaigns for the search of licences is really odious to an honest man. Hence they looked upon the ragged muddy blue shirt as an object of their contempt. In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread, is then an infamy now-a-days! In that year the 35, miners in the Victorian goldfields were producing about five ounces of gold per head.

Many of the diggers were politically engaged — some had participated in the Chartist movement for political reform in Britain during the s and s while others had been involved in the anti-authoritarian revolutions that spread across Europe in The miners claimed the police were extorting money, accepting bribes and imprisoning people without due process. The proprietor, JF Bentley, was accused of the killing. A court of inquiry was held and Bentley was quickly exonerated. On the 17 October a large group of men and women gathered to discuss the case.

They decided to appeal the decision, but after the dispersal of the crowd, a small group decided to set fire to the Eureka Hotel.

Having done so, they were arrested by police. Over the next weeks the miners met and elected delegates who, on 27 November, approached the new Victorian Governor, Charles Hotham. He then despatched British soldiers of the 40th Regiment of Foot to Ballarat to reinforce the police and soldiers already stationed there.

Sensing a change in atmosphere, the diggers held another mass meeting on 29 November at Bakery Hill, there the newly created Eureka flag was unfurled. The police were unsettled by the hostility building among the diggers and decided to implement a licence hunt the next day.

At this meeting the charismatic Irishman Peter Lalor became the leader of the protest and led the diggers to the area around Eureka. Over the next two days, the men and women remained in and around the stockade, many performing military drills in preparation for possible conflict. This was too much for the Commissioner of the Ballarat goldfields, Robert Rede. He called for the police and army to destroy the stockade at first light on Sunday 3 December.

That morning almost mounted and foot troopers, and police attacked the stockade. Miners and their sympathisers begin a generalised tax strike. Throughout most of the goldfields, most diggers simply refused to pay the licence fee; there were still many small arms in circulation; and the troopers were reluctant to go on any more digger hunts. The digger hunt of 30 November was in fact the last digger hunt in Australian history.

The Treason Trials Under pressure from the public demonstrations, governor Hotham released most of the arrested stockaders. He also retained 13 stockaders under arrest, and prosecuted them for treason. The treason indictment read, in part: having devised and intended to deprive our said Lady the Queen of the kingly name of the Imperial Crown in Victoria, you did express and evince such treasonable intention by the four following overt acts: 1st — That you raised upon a pole, and collected round a certain standard, and did solemnly swear to defend each other… The Victorian state could not find a jury to convict the Eureka rebels.

In February , the first stockader to be put on trial was the black American, Joe Joseph. Joseph was carried through Melbourne by cheering crowds. In subsequent trials beginning in March , Melbourne juries acquitted all the other stockaders of all treason charges, despite police verbals and the evidence of grasses the trials flushed out many provocateurs and spies that had entered the stockade.

An Italian digger, Carboni Raphaello, was among the accused. Prosecution witnesses swore that he had burnt his licence on Bakery Hill. But with dramatic flourish he produced his licence in court. He was found not guilty. On the first anniversary of the Eureka battle, Carboni Raphaello published a readable eyewitness history of the event. In March , the Commissioners reported that the independent goldminers were economically doomed; their incomes were falling.

Gold production had peaked in By late goldminers were earning less, on average, than wage workers. Therefore the Commission recommended, and the state agreed, to reduce taxation and repression, and wait for falling returns to wipe out the independent diggers as a class. In November , two miners Humffray a Chartist and Lalor the stockade leader , won election unopposed to the Victorian Legislative Council, representing Ballarat.

An equally important, but less often mentioned, legal development occurred in Victorian law authorised the incorporation of the no-liability mining company, which would assist corporate capital to drive the independent miners out of goldmining.

Underground mining, to be economically viable, required steam power for lifting and pneumatic drills to drill ore and mechanised bellows. The no-liability mining company could raise the capital to finance this equipment.

Independent miners in small partnerships could not. Corporate capital, assisted by the state, was destined to squeeze out independent miners. In the late s the advocates of Australian federation constructed the notion that Eureka was a nationalist uprising. That idea would have surprised the rebels of They were looking for quick money and lower taxes, not nationhood. Not one rebel leader — such as Lalor, Carboni, Humffray, Vern — raised any slogans about nationhood.

The Ballarat Reform League does not seem to have issued any republican slogans, nor had any nationalist slogans. The diggers carried European political ideologies in their heads. Chartism was the most obvious. Irish Nationalism and Roman Catholicism was influential among the Irish miners, which probably explained why some listened to the counsel of the local Catholic priest to leave the stockade on the Saturday before the battle.

As for the Germans, not enough is known about them, unfortunately. In fact they were Irish, Canadians, Scots, with no record of ever praising this lump of land called Australia at Federation. They certainly expressed some class solidarity with each other, and some belief in political liberty — but these are ideas with no necessary connection with nationalism. It is true that an armed uprising did lead to expansion of the parliamentary franchise, and a relatively more representative form of government.

The Eureka stockade was part of a battle fought on all goldfields which achieved the relaxation of property qualifications for voters. Parliament should not be equated with democracy.

I would prefer to call Eureka the birth of parliamentarism in Australian. He said he supported freehold suffrage for property owners , not manhood suffrage. Do they mean chartism or communism or republicanism? However, there is no need to be surprised. People should not be accused of betrayal when they do not deliver what they never promised in the first place.

Lalor was trained as a civil engineer at Trinity. He was attracted by the get-rich-quick ideology of the gold rush. Violent methods should not be equated with radicalism. The diggers had a radical side they opposed the state and taxation , but they also had an ingrained conservative side they defended smallholding property and individual enterprise; they fear waged labour.

They were smallholders dreaming of becoming largeholders. Lalor was going for gold, and achieved his dream. Lalor defended his own class interests as he perceived them: get-rich-quick ambitions and enough wealth to never perform waged labour. He defended these interests with arms at Eureka.

He subsequently defended them with parliamentary methods. That is what parliamentary careers are for.

The rebellion was important, yes: the most important, no. The Eureka rebels were certainly more important than the Ned Kelly gang. A rebellion deserving of as much remembrance as Eureka, is the victory of the Victorian stonemasons, who won the 8-hour day in — the first such victory in the world. The class of independent goldminers that made the rebellion was, at that time, on the way to becoming extinct, squeezed out by mining corporations.

The future, economically speaking, belonged to corporate capital. Politically speaking, the future belonged to waged labour. Politics and Culture.