The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [139]
An anxious Agnes saw smoke rising above her town. Ever since her family set up camp, a palpable tension ran through the diggings. Scobie’s murder had escalated the strife, and now that Bentley was under protection at the Commissioners Camp, the government’s collusion against justice seemed all the more apparent. The vastly outnumbered soldiers desperately reinforced the camp’s defenses as angry protesters marched through the streets of Ballarat.
The fire at the Eureka Hotel set in motion a flurry of activity, as cooler heads tried to avoid the rising inevitability of bloody confrontation. Within days, miners formed the Diggers Right Society. In November, the hastily formed Ballarat Reform League sent delegates to Melbourne with a new of list of demands for diggers’ rights. While the delegates awaited the governor’s response, a duplicitous Hotham dispatched an additional 450 troops to Ballarat. On Tuesday, November 28, a long line of crimson-jacketed soldiers marched into town. Panicked miners ran in every direction and loaded their guns. Agnes called for her children and gathered them safely inside.
News of the approaching soldiers, bayonets gleaming in the sun, spread like wildfire. The swelling crowd of shocked townsfolk greeted them with pelting stones and shouts of derision. Attempting to block the column’s advance, the gathering mob overturned carts. In the confusion, shots were fired and critically wounded the regiment’s drummer boy.31 The soldiers retaliated by drawing their swords. Shots and screams rang out across the hills and gullies surrounding Ballarat, and a bolt of terror tore through a terrified mother of five.
The next day, Wednesday, ten thousand miners met at Bakery Hill. Defying Britain’s rule, they raised a new flag for the first time. Three courageous women stitched the blue-and-white flag that represented the Southern Cross, ornamented with white stars against an off-white background. One was a freed convict from Van Diemen’s Land named Anastasia Eustes Withers. A dressmaker from London, she was transported for stealing five shawls. Together with a woman also named Anastasia, Anastasia Hayes, and a very pregnant Anne Duke, she left her mark of protest against the rule of the Crown.32
Peter Lalor, an upper-class Irish activist and one of the Ballarat Reform League founders, addressed the large, restless crowd. He was perhaps a natural for the role; his brother, James Fintan Lalor, had been involved in the Young Ireland uprising in 1848, and his father served in the British House of Commons. Six-foot-tall, twenty-five-year-old Peter ended his speech with calls for lighting a huge bonfire. Diggers defiantly tossed their licenses into the flames.
It was the last day of the month, November 30, 1854. Governor appointee Robert Rede, Ballarat’s Gold Commissioner, knew what had happened the previous night on Bakery Hill. With the backing of additional troops, Rede was confident a show of force would quash the uprising. Knowing that many miners had burned their licenses the night before, he ordered a license hunt with soldiers in full force, provoking more confrontations between diggers and soldiers.
Rede continued the hunt throughout the morning. By noon, he rode to the gravel pits and demanded that diggers present their licenses. Shots were fired, and miners rushed up the gully shouting their outrage. Rede ordered the troops to turn their guns on the gathering mob. Facing the tight line of muskets, they began to disperse.
Later in the day, a large crowd began to congregate on Bakery Hill. “At a meeting at 4 pm on November 30th, 1854, Peter Lalor stepped up on a tree stump beneath the billowing Southern Cross flag, and into his place in Australian history. The diggers knelt, as one, on the dusty ground, placed their hands