A FORGOTTEN REBELLION
The following Reuter’s telegram was published in the morning papers of the 12th February 1889: “Melbourne, February 11th. The death is announced of Mr. Peter Lalor, formerly Speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly.”
Some nine years ago, during the course of a visit to the Antipodes, I happened to spend some time in Her Majesty’s and Lord Normanby’s (the Vice-King of Victoria for the time being) loyal and prosperous city of Melbourne. One afternoon I strolled into the public gallery of the hall in the big pile at the head of Collins Street West, on the floor of which are held the momentous deliberations of that august assembly, the Lower House of the Victorian Legislature. Aloft on the daïs in his chair of state I beheld the Speaker of the Victorian Commons, a short, plump, one-armed gentleman in court dress; swarthy of feature, lips full, chin indicative of some power, with a bright, moist eye, and a countenance whose general expression was of unctuous contentment and sly humour. In answer to my question, my neighbour on the bench of the gallery informed me that the gentleman whom I was regarding with interest was the Hon. Peter Lalor, an Irishman of course—that his name betokened—a man held in high repute by his fellow-colonists, a scholar, an eloquent orator, and possessed of great political influence, which he always exerted in the furtherance of steady moderation and sound legislation. It occurred to me to inquire of my neighbour if he knew how Mr. Lalor came to be short of an arm, the reply to which question was that he believed he had lost it in some trouble on the gold-fields in the early days, the true story of which my informant had “never rightly learned.” Subsequently I frequently met Mr. Lalor, and conceived for him a great liking. We used to meet at a little evening club off Bourke Street, and the worthy Speaker, as often as not still in the old-fashioned single-breasted coat of the court dress which he had worn in the chair of the Legislative Assembly, smoked his pipe, drank his stiff nobbler of Irish whisky, sang his song, and told stories always droll and often very interesting, chiefly of his experiences on the gold-fields in the early “surface-diggings” days. But he never alluded to the way in which he had lost his arm, and it grew upon me in a gradual sort of way that the topic was one which he would prefer should not be introduced.
It is the strange truth that this douce elderly gentleman, this high functionary of the Colonial Legislature, was, in the year of grace 1854, the commander-in-chief of an armed force in a state of declared rebellion and fighting under an insurrectionary flag against an attack made upon it by regular troops in the service of Queen Victoria. It was in the far from bloodless combat of the “Eureka Stockade” that he had lost his arm—the loss caused by a hostile bullet; and but that, wounded as he was, he escaped and lay hidden while recovering from the amputation, he would have stood in the dock where many of his comrades did stand, undergoing his trial on the charge of high treason, as they actually underwent theirs.
I do not believe that in all the world, the United States of America not excepted, any community has ever progressed with a swiftness and expansion so phenomenal as has the colony which Her Gracious Majesty permitted to take her own name when she granted it a separate existence in November 1850. It had been but fifteen years earlier that the first settlers—the brothers Henty, one of whom died only a few years ago—came across Bass Straits from Van Diemen’s Land in their little Thistle. In 1837 the town of Melbourne was laid out, and one hundred allotments were then sold on what are now the principal streets. The aggregate sum which the hundred allotments fetched was £3410. Two summers ago the same allotments were carefully valued by experts, and it was calculated that, exclusive of the buildings erected on them, they could now be sold for nineteen and a half million pounds. This stupendous increment has accrued in half a century, but in effect the appreciation has almost wholly occurred during the last thirty-five years. Before 1851, when the gold discoveries were made, Victoria prospered in an easy gentle fashion. Its scanty population, outside its two petty towns, were wholly engaged in stock-raising; almost its sole exports were wool, hides, and tallow. The gold-find upset as by a whirlwind the lazy, primitive social system of the bucolic era. From all the ends of the earth, gentle and simple, honest man and knave, hurried swarming and jostling to the new El Dorado. Mr. Ruxton, one of the Colonial historians, omits to particularise the reputable elements of the immigration deluge, but in his caricatured Macaulay-ese, he zealously catalogues the detrimental and dangerous accessions. “From California,” he writes, “came wild men, the waifs of societies which had submitted to or practised lynch law. The social festers of France, Italy, and Germany shed exfoliations upon Australia. The rebellious element of Ireland was there. The disappointed crew who thought to frighten the British Isles from their propriety in 1848 were represented in some strength. The convict element of Australia completed the vile ingredients.” And yet it was wonderful how small was the actual crime of a serious character, when the utter disintegration of restraining institutions is taken into consideration. In January 1852, when daily shiploads of gold-mad immigrants were being thrown into Melbourne, only two of the city constables remained at their duty. The chief constable himself had to go on a beat. In the country the rural police to a man had forsaken their functions and made haste to the diggings. In the first rush the capital was all but depopulated of its manhood; there remained behind but the women and children, who had to shift for themselves. An advance of 50 per cent of salary did not avail to retain at their desks the officials in the public offices. Servants had gone. Gentlemen and ladies had to carry water from the river for household purposes, for the water-cart supply had been arrested by the departure of the carters. It was said that poor Mr. Latrobe himself, the amiable but weak Lieutenant-Governor, had to black his own boots and groom his own horse. In the wholesale absence of workmen no contract could be insisted on. The squatters shuddered, too, as the shearing season approached, knowing that all the shearers were digging or cradling in Forest Creek, or on Mount Alexander. It was then that Mr. Childers, who at the time was an immigration agent, made his famous bull: “Wages of wool-pressers, 7s. to 8s. a day; none to be had.” To such an extent did prices rise that there was the danger lest Government could not afford to supply food to prisoners in gaol. A contractor for gaol necessaries claimed and got 166 per cent over his prices of the year before, and, notwithstanding this stupendous increase, had to default. In April 1852 fifty ships were lying useless in Hobson’s Bay, deserted by their crews. Carriage from Melbourne to Castlemaine was at one time £100 per ton.
Diggers who had “struck it rich” came down to Melbourne for a spree, and it was a caution how they made the money fly. The barber I employed used to tell me how the lucky diggers would chuck him a sovereign for a shave, and scorn the idea of change. A rough fellow called a cab in Bourke Street and wanted to engage it for the day; the cabman replied that the charge would be seven pounds, which he supposed was more than the digger would care to pay. “What is the price of the outfit as it stands, yourself included?” demanded the latter, and forthwith bought the said “outfit” for £150. When a digger and the lady he proposed temporarily to marry went into the draper’s shop, the only question asked was whether the tradesman had no goods dearer than those he had shown. Ten-pound notes were quite extensively used as pipe-lights.
The additional expenditure entailed on the Colonial Government by the immense increase to the Colony’s population, by the enhanced cost of administration, and by the added charges for the maintenance of order, it was perfectly fair should be met by a tribute levied in some manner on the gold the quest for and the yield of which had occasioned the necessity. An export duty would have met the case with the minimum of expense in collection and of friction, but Latrobe and his advisers preferred the expedient of exacting from each individual miner a monthly fee for the license permitting him to dig.
While the gold-field population was small, the license system, although from the beginning hated as an oppressive exaction, did not excite active hostility. Every digger was bound to produce his license on demand; but the officer or trooper charged with the inquisition did not need to put it in force oftener than once a month in a community pretty well every member of which he knew by sight. But with the swarms of new-comers the facility for evasion and the difficulty of detection were alike increased. In the throng of thousands, the demand for production of the license might be repeated frequently, and give not wholly unreasonable umbrage to the busy digger. It naturally angered a man digging against time at the bottom of a hole, to have to scramble out and show his license; it angered him worse to be peremptorily sent for it to his tent if he had omitted to bring it along with him. And if the license could not be produced at all, the defaulter was summarily haled away to be dealt with according to the bye-laws. Men were to be seen standing chained in “the camp,” as the Gold Commissioner’s quarters were called, waiting for their punishment.
The license fee at first was £1:10s. a month. As expenses increased Mr. Latrobe notified its increase to double that amount. Neither sum hurt the lucky digger who was down among the nuggets; but the smaller tariff was a strain on the unsuccessful man, with food at famine prices and every necessary costing wellnigh its weight in gold. The doubled impost was declared a tyranny to be resisted; the lower one an injustice only tolerated on sufferance. Violent meetings were held at Forest Creek and elsewhere, at which the new tax was vigorously denounced; and poor Mr. Latrobe cancelled the order for it before it had come into effect. He could not help himself; had he been prepared to go to extremities, he had inadequate strength, with a handful of soldiers at his disposal, to enforce the enactment. But, spite of his temporising, a bitter feeling grew between the miners and the gold-field officials. The Commissioner at Forest Creek burned the tent of a camp trader, on a perjured charge of illicit spirit-selling brought by an informer. Then followed an excited public meeting, and the gold-field was placarded with notices: “Down with the troopers! Shoot them! Down with oppression! Diggers, avenge your wrongs! Cry ‘no quarter,’ and show no mercy!”