Remembering Eureka

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).