Remembering Eureka

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'd been overseas for about a year. I was missing home, missing Australia. A Southern Cross tattoo – yeah, I thought: that's what I need. So I got the ink. That was 12 years ago, when Eureka symbolised independence, the underdog, and something uniquely Australian.

That was then.

These days it is associated with white people throwing beer bottles at brown people on Cronulla beach.

Sigh.

For all that, it had been awhile since I'd dwelt on the meaning of the Eureka Stockade and its flag. Up until, that is, when I picked up a copy of Peter FitzSimons' new book, Eureka: the Unfinished Revolution.

The book warms up slowly as FitzSimons lays out the preconditions to the uprising on the goldfields: a handful of squatters taking up nearly all land in Victoria (by virtue of nothing other than being there first). The development of the colony through the weak, incompetent leadership of the first Lieutenant-General of Victoria – Charles La Trobe, and then his successor Charles Hotham - a strict military man totally unsuited to this new, wild Australian culture.

That was the thing about Australia: the people who travelled here were of a different breed. Yes, there were the British who established the colony and yes, there were the convicts transported in the ships. But as for the rest – some were escaping political oppression, (particularly in Ireland); many were looking for adventure; and more wished to escape the socio-economic constraints of the UK and Europe – the stifling social order, the limited economic opportunities for those not born into wealth.

To be blunt, it also takes strength of character to make that journey: to pack up one's family, to head across the oceans in a perilous journey, to play dice with fate. That takes courage.

The book really heats up as the diggers on the goldfields walk a path of inevitability that leads to the ill-fated rebellion at the Eureka Stockade. For sprinkled into this antiauthoritarian brew that was shaping the Australian character was another explosive ingredient: gold.

Lots of it. Just sitting there, on the ground or just below, in large fields all around Victoria. And gold meant economic independence. It meant the people that found it – the ex-convicts, the chancers, the dreamers, and the adventurers – were empowered. It meant they had enough wealth to be free of the need to be employed by the squatters (the so-called 'Bunyip aristocracy') or to be required to abide by the class rules of the English.

This gold meant that the political ambitions of our society of malcontents became turbocharged. It turned the social order upside down. As one squatter complained, "outsiders cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent."

Yet the Government did not miss its chance to extract payment from the goldfield diggers through a blanket licencing scheme. Indeed, the miners were contributing the majority of taxes into the Government's coffers. The book cites some compelling statistics. Two years before the Eureka rebellion, the few hundred squatters - who owned nearly all of the land in Victoria - paid 20,000 pounds a year in taxes. The diggers, on the other hand, paid over half a million. And the license fee only paid for an 8 by 8 square feet of land, whether or not there was any gold on it.

More: of the 250,000 living in Victoria at that time, only 4000 had the vote. Those were the owners of large land-holdings. Those 4000 provided almost nothing to the government's revenue, and yet sat in the parliament and established laws to their own benefit.

So the problem in Australia, in its essence, was the same that had been at the core of the American Revolution: no taxation without representation.

Certainly, this wasn't about the franchise for women. Not yet. This would not come until 1894 in South Australia (second in the world after New Zealand). Here's a fact I wasn't aware of until recently – women in Switzerland didn't get the vote until 1971. Hmm, interesting. So now with cuckoo clocks, yodelling and hiding gold for the Nazis, I've found another reason not to like the Swiss.

In Saudi Arabia, by the way, women still don't have the vote.

Anyway, this growing desire for representation on the part of the diggers inevitably came into conflict with the authorities of the day. The Government would not countenance expanding the right to vote. While the gold miners wanted a school for their kids or a road to Melbourne that wasn't a muddy track, the government instead spent the revenue on more police to harass the diggers and more military to back the police.

As John F. Kennedy said, "those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable." The political and social conditions of the day would not allow a peaceful resolution. There was no natural evolution of this political conflict that would play out in the favour of the people. Miners holding hands and singing "Imagine" or placing flowers down the barrel of a musket weren't going to change the social order.

What was needed was a short, sharp shock. This the Eureka Stockade delivered.

The battle itself, well, we all know the story. It was a massacre. A brief and bloody victory for the colonial Government. What was new to me, as the book reveals, was how close the rebels were to winning. If they were better disciplined, better prepared, the trajectory of Australian history may have been remarkably different.

But this is immaterial: for the public of the day it looked like slaughter. Instead of an honourable battle, it became an immoral massacre.

Public sentiment turned against the Government. The demands of the rebellion were only strengthened. After the attempt by the Government to charge thirteen rebels with treason failed – and those acquitted were held up as heroes by the population – the moral and political position of the administration collapsed.

Just about every political and economic claim made by the rebels was met. The odious licenses were abolished, the right to vote was dramatically expanded, and more land was opened up for the average person to acquire. The Eureka movement was remarkably progressive for its time, and the political aftermath left Victoria (and indeed Australia) a more progressive place.

In reading Eureka, I wondered to what extent it reflected on the nation we are today. There are the obvious parallels of course: our ongoing affinity with the underdog, our cultural tilting towards egalitarianism, the tall poppy syndrome, all of these are evident in the history of Eureka. But these are all clichés now (if nonetheless still true).

What struck me is how the story sheds some light on why we are a nation of gamblers. Eureka helps explain why Australia has a horse race as a national holiday and we spend more than any other nation on the punt. Taking risks is in our blood, our genetic code. Giving it all up for a dream of striking the mother lode on the gold fields is a gamble.

Yet so is getting on a boat and taking a chance on a brave new world, as those first settlers did. That too, could be said of those who came here in the decades and centuries following Eureka – a desire for freedom, courage, and the willingness to take a big risk for a big reward.

From what I can see, Eureka: the Unfinished Revolution goes through an exacting analysis of often obscure historical evidence to profile the main characters of the rebellion – their passions and peccadillos, their courage and cowardice. It gives life to a now-familiar tale with vivid descriptions of a young and wild Australia, bringing colour, moment and context to an important moment in Australia history.

After I finished reading I thought: I bloody well hope Eureka Flag is saved from the poisonous grasp of the extremes of Australian politics. It's an important symbol. And as a bonus I'd get my tattoo back.