Today is the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, the only armed uprising in Australian history – at least, that’s the way it’s always put, because the national consciousness readily allows for ignoring any efforts by Aborigines to stem their demise at the hands of the Europeans, both with arms, although hugely inequal, in hand.
In 1854, hundreds of miners gathered at Ballarat and took an oath beneath an improvised flag, a blue background with silver cross tipped by stars resembling the Southern Cross constellation (this flag, which may have been inspired by the Quebecois flag) is often advocated by Australian republicans as a fitting emblem for a state freed of monarchy): “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly to each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”
The password used by those manning the Stockade was “Vinegar Hill,” a reference to an earlier armed uprising, by Irish convicts, in New South Wales in 1804.
About 25,000 miners had arrived in the goldfields from around the world, and were subjected to inequitable and exploitative government regulations, primarily a licensing fee that was payable regardless of the miners’ success. This caused great resentment, particularly as it was enforced, rather than agreed upon by the British rulers and the miners themselves. The Victorian governor – the queen’s representative in Australia – imposed stringent license checks twice a week. It is very easy to see both colonial presumption and racism as his motivators.
The “diggers” objected to the governor’s predations, and also to widespread corruption in officialdom – the usual colonial graft and favoritism. Dissatisfaction boiled over when a miner, a drunk Scotsman, was beaten to death by a group led by a publican who was in deep with the local magistrate in Ballarat, the town at the center of the mining district.
The publican’s connections spared him being charged, so miners burned his pub down.
On November 11, some 10,000 miners met and demanded the release of three of their number who had been charged with the arson, and imprisoned. They also demanded the vote for all males, and the abolition of the gold license. On November 29, even more miners met, and agreed, under the Southern Cross flag, to burn their licenses.
The Gold Commissioner ordered a license check the next day. Miners responded with a second mass burning of licenses. Peter Lalor then led the miners to an area named Eureka due to gold discoveries there, and built their stockade, a wooden barricade that enclosed about one acre. Over the next two days, they armed themselves with firearms and pikes.
They objected, then, to petty officialdom, and the lack of agency. (Ironic, given how much Australia is, today, ruled by all kinds of petty regulations, to which Australians on the whole bow without so much as a whimper.)
At dawn on Sunday, December 3, 1854, British Regiment detachments reinforced by Victoria Police mounted and foot police attacked the enclosure, at the order of the Gold Commissioner, Robert Rede.
The troops and police found the stockade lightly manned, as it was a Sunday. The Stockade was taken within 20 minutes. Twenty-two miners and five troos were killed. Lalor escaped, wounded, but 120 men were captured at the Stockade. Of these, only 13 were tried. In a rousing act of juror activism, Melbourne juries the next February refused to convict them.
Martial law was imposed, but three months later, the government agreed to the diggers’ demands. They were given the vote, and the license fee was slashed. Peter Lalor became the first Member of the Legislative Council for the seat of Ballarat.

Celebrations are marking the sesquicentenary. Not surprisingly, romanticization and smug nationalism predominates over any remnant of the militancy that motivated the miners.
Eighteen months or so ago, when the conservative Howard government joined the cowardly butchery of the Iraqi population with less than 10% approval of the Australian electorate, there was little but a whimper from voters.
Twenty-nine years ago, when Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam was forced from office in a parliamentary coup, he offered to stand on the steps of parliament house and rage against the heinous acts, but his colleagues whimpered away, and the voters soon followed suit.
The recent fourth election win by Howard’s mongrels is attributed to the economic stability that Australia has enjoyed for a few years. The conservatives appealed to Australians’ greed - which even the government is happy to acknowledge, as long as greed is stated as “the economic wellbeing of Australian families...” As in the US, the complicity of the voters, re-electing a mob who have obviously and even proudly lied and cheated their way for 8 years in power, is attributed to “fear” – fear of the unknown next stages of “global terrorism” (as if the worst of it is not being committed by the US and its pathetic allies). But in reality, I think the real motivating force is not fear, or even greed, but really a lamentable lack of imagination. The bourgeois hoardes of the American-led coalition simply cannot conceive of safety and wellbeing as anything but military and economic. Forget values, forget creativity and social expansion. Those are no longer the wages of economic success and plain good fortune; they are instead now branded as indulgences by the decadent, unpatriotic left.
Eureka, indeed!