The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [140]
Lalor later recalled that moment: “I looked around me; I saw brave and honest men, who had come thousands of miles to labor for independence. I knew that hundreds were in great poverty, who would possess wealth and happiness if allowed to cultivate the wilderness which surrounded us. The grievances under which we had long suffered, and the brutal attack of the day, flashed across my mind; and, with the burning feeling of an injured man, I mounted the stump and proclaimed ‘Liberty.’”34
They were all caught up in it. As much as Agnes wanted to escape with her family, most women on the goldfields knew one another, so Agnes wanted to help if she could. The worried mother watched the freedom fighters piece together their best defenses. For two days straight, a thousand inspired diggers worked to erect a stockade on the Eureka field. “The roughly circular encampment was about an acre in area and barricaded on three sides by a rude construction of pit logs thrown together in a higgledy-piggledy manner. . . .”35 By Saturday evening, their work was done.
Since the start of the month, there were no new incidents, two days thankfully without bloodshed. Saturday evening as campfires blazed, Agnes put her children to bed with a sigh of relief, looking forward to Sunday’s peace. It was not to be so.
At dawn’s break on Sunday, December 3, 1854, every available soldier fastened his bayonet and marched toward the thinly manned stockade on Bakery Hill. Their attack was a complete surprise. Drowsy rebels awoke to the sentries’ shocked cries, barely grabbing their guns before bullets flew over their heads. The battle was short and fierce. Three hundred soldiers had attacked the stockade, killing twenty-two prospectors and taking one hundred prisoners. Six soldiers lost their lives. A few women joined the rebellion and challenged the troops directly. In an act of defiance and protection, Bridget Hynes and several other women ran onto the battlefield, putting their bodies over the wounded and preventing soldiers bent on revenge from bayoneting them to death.
Nineteen-year-old Bridget Callinan, originally from County Clare, Ireland, helped rescue her two wounded brothers, Patrick and Michael. As the troops began to murder the wounded and burn the hospital tents, Bridget confronted the armed soldiers and created a diversion that allowed her two brothers to escape with the help of her cousins. Michael had received two bullets in his thigh, and Patrick suffered two bayonet wounds.36
Just as the tensions came to a head, Agnes’s sons William and George Henry were nowhere to be found, out on an errand when the shooting began. Young William later related a “very vivid recollection of the Eureka Stockade riots, and had the unpleasant experience of seeing a man shot down by his and his brother’s side at a time they had been sent on a message.” Needless to say, the young boys “took to their heels and did not draw breath till they were safely home.”37 Out of her mind with worry when the gunfire ensued, Agnes’s frantic screams subsided when she saw her two winded lads running back toward the camp. A battlefield was no place for children.
On this Sunday, even her church was unsafe. Largely made up of Scots, the Presbyterian ministry was harboring a severely wounded Peter Lalor, and women from her congregation were helping to save his life and amputate his shattered arm. Both political hero and hopeless romantic, the insurgent was known for having walked the hundred-mile roundtrip journey from Ballarat to Geelong to see his beloved fiancée, Alicia Dunne. With a huge price on his head after the Eureka battle, the fiery Irishman was smuggled from the Presbyterian Church back to Alicia’s Geelong home. When amnesty was declared and Lalor’s wounds healed, grateful diggers elected him to Victoria’s first legislative assembly.
What started as a dispute over licensing fees became a protest for human