On December 1st, 1854, gold miners in the town of Ballarat burned their mining licences in protest at the unelected government of the colony of Victoria. It was a seminal moment in the history of modern Australia.
Beneath a battle flag of five stars emblazoned on a navy background, the miners' leader, Peter Lalor, declared: "We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other to defend our rights and liberties." "Amen", his supporters answered.
To the British authorities it was an act of sedition – and if this young rabble-rouser had a rebellious streak he hadn’t licked it off the stones.
Peter Lalor was born in Raheen, Co Laois, in 1827. His father, Patrick "Patt" Lalor, was an outspoken agitator against the collection of Church of Ireland tithes. His eldest brother, James Fintan Lalor, had been one of the leaders of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848.
In 1852 Peter Lalor was one of thousands of prospectors drawn to Ballarat by news of a gold rush. Victoria’s cash-strapped government required each miner to carry a licence – costing 30 shillings a month, or about a week’s pay – with him at all times. The police who enforced this law, many of them ex-convicts, carried out regular violent raids known as digger hunts. Even if a miner had left his licence in his tent at camp he was liable to be roughed up and hauled off to prison.
Tensions between miners and the authorities escalated in October 1854, when a Scottish miner named James Scobie was murdered. The miners responded by burning down the hotel in which the murder took place. At a mass meeting they demanded democratic reforms and the abolition of the miner's licence.
Elected their commander, Lalor ordered construction of a defensive fortification known as the Eureka stockade. As the miners armed themselves and braced for a confrontation, the 27-year-old wrote to his fiancee, Alicia Dunne, in Geelong, that "the diggers, in self-defence, have taken up arms . . . and I would be unworthy of you, and of your love, if I were base enough to desert them".
The British attack came at 3am on December 3rd. Only a hard core of about 120, mostly Irish miners, led by Lalor, were present at that hour. It was a massacre. About 30 miners were killed. Wounded in the arm, Lalor hid among the corpses before escaping. He found refuge in the home of a Catholic priest, where his arm had to be amputated. When he saw the doctor wince as he carried out this grisly task, Lalor is supposed to have barked, “Courage! Courage! Take it off!”
With a reward of £200 on his head, Lalor then travelled to Geelong, where he and Alicia married in secret. With public opinion firmly on his side, well-wishers raised enough money to buy the couple a 60-hectare estate near Ballarat.
In April 1855, a month after the reward against Lalor was revoked, 13 Eureka miners on trial for their lives in Melbourne were acquitted.
When democratic elections were finally held, in November, Lalor was elected unopposed to Victoria’s new parliament. In office he proved more conservative than his radical supporters might have hoped. He rose, ultimately, to the position of speaker of the legislative assembly of Victoria, a post he held for seven years. He died in 1889.
When Mark Twain visited, in 1895, he called the miners' fight at Ballarat "the finest thing in Australian history". Six years later, when Australia became an independent dominion within the British Empire, its new flag featured both the Union Jack and the Southern Cross, first raised by the diggers of the Eureka Stockade.
Today the Melbourne suburb of Lalor, one of the halls of residence at Federation University, and a street in Ballarat are all named in honour of the only Australian outlaw ever to go on to sit in parliament.
