Frank McNally on gold-digging, rebellion, and working your way around Australia

Today is the 160th anniversary of an event sometimes called “Australia’s 1916”. It was a rebellion by gold miners, many of them Irish, at a place called Eureka in the town of Ballarat, Victoria. And if it foreshadowed 1916 in being a military-defeat-turned-moral-victory, it also had echoes of an earlier conflict back home. The rebels’ password was “Vinegar Hill”.

The event and its era are commemorated today at an open-air museum in Ballarat, which recreates conditions in the decade following the discovery of gold there in 1851.

It’s a fine attraction, by all accounts: well worth the hefty admission of Aus$49.50 (about €34).

I’d like to confirm its excellence from personal experience. But I can’t because, despite having been in Ballarat once, a quarter of a century ago, and getting a lift to the museum from a friend who declared it a must-see, I never quite made it inside.

The problem was financial embarrassment. I was two months into a year-long sojourn in Oz at the time. And despite being supplemented by part-time work in Perth, the minimal savings I had brought with me from grim 1980s Ireland were already all but gone.

Visitor

After taking the Greyhound bus east, a 36-hour journey, I was now staying for a few days with my only contact in Australia: a Tipperary woman who had recently married a sheep farmer from rural Victoria.

The plan was to lie low, and spend as little as possible, until I could get another job. But one day my friend was driving into Ballarat for something, so she suggested I come along and visit the museum. I could hardly say no: if I admitted having the extent of my impecuniosity, she might have been even more nervous about how long I was planning to stay with her.

So I played along while she dropped me at the museum. Then, as soon as her car disappeared in one direction, I hotfooted in the other, and spent the afternoon in Ballarat library instead.

If my hostess found me a bit encyclopaedic on the subject of Eureka later, she never let on.

The immediate cause of the rebellion of December 3rd, 1854, as all encyclopaedias agree, was exorbitant mining licences levied by the colonies’ overlords. But just as in Boston 80 years earlier, the bigger issue was taxation-without-representation.

Although defeated in the short-term, with more than 20 dead, the rebels won political reforms, specifically the vote. Their leader, Laois-born Peter Lalor, would survive his wounds to become, three decades later, speaker of the Victorian assembly.

Mark Twain

Another notable gold miner, Mark Twain, said of Eureka: “It may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution – small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression . . . It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honourable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.”

I notice that among the events marking the anniversary was a dinner last month in Melbourne’s Celtic Club, a venue I did visit, and frequently, when moving to that city shortly after Ballarat.

It was a good place to hear about any jobs that were going, and also to catch up with events from home.

In those pre-internet days, you still depended on day-old Irish newspapers, hot off the plane.

I remember there was a rule at the club banning all conversation about either politics or religion. This was a departure from its earliest history, in the late 1880s, when it had been the “Celtic Home Rule Club”.

But after the Parnell split (which reached Melbourne and forced a change of premises), members soon decided that being secular and non-political was the only safe course.

So nobody at the Celtic Club asked which foot you dug with when I was there. And in fact, digging in general was an activity in decline. During the gold-rush years, finds had included the “Welcome” nugget: weighing 69kg and almost pure. By the time I visited Victoria, however, the big bits were few and far between.

Even Ballarat had been reduced to extracting gold from those lower-grade deposits known as “tourists”.

As for me, in Melbourne, I had to settle for working shifts in a zinc smelter. @FrankmcnallyIT