Australia’s Eureka Moment
Joel Bowman, surveying the scene from Mermaid Beach, Australia...
Welcome back to another Sunday Sesh, that time of the week when we gather at the virtual watering hole to take stock of positions, inventory munitions and test precognitions... all with the abiding help of a Bundaberg Rum & Ginger Beer, known in these parts as a Dark ‘n’ Stormy.
For those dear readers keeping tabs on individual freedoms and civil liberties around the world, it has been a worrying few years to say the least...
From the permission-based living measures introduced by tyrannical governments during The Covid™, to the looming specter of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the relentless mission creep of the transnational Climate Alarmagedon movement, individual rights have very much been on the back foot. That’s true here, in Australia, as it is elsewhere.
It’s been almost six years since we set foot on our native Terra Australis, owing in large part to the hysterical overreaction of the national and state governments in this country during The Lockdown Years.
Few nations on earth – with the possible exception of neighboring New Zealand and perhaps Communist China – enacted (and enforced) more rigid edicts, trespassed more overtly on individual rights and carried out a more extensive campaign of pandemic propaganda than did the Australian government. For almost two years – between March 2020 and February 2022 – the island nation remained cut off from the world, its drawbridges pulled up, its gates effectively closed even to Aussie passport holders (your editor included).
Long-suffering citizens of this Great Southern Land endured all manner of subjugation here at home – from mandates to curfews to onerous fines and quarantine restrictions – while friends and relatives abroad were left marooned, in many cases unable to return for births, weddings... and even last goodbyes.
Australians have long prided themselves on hailing from what is colloquially known as “The Lucky Country.” And certainly, the land “abounds in beauty, rich and rare,” as the national anthem duly celebrates. Few perhaps realize – and still less will like to hear – the origin of that familiar phrase, from Donald Horne’s 1964 classic of the same name...
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”
Despite its harsh words, Horne’s novel struck a chord with “ordinary people” Down Under at the time, selling a record 100,000 copies in its first year. (Let it not be said that Aussies don’t appreciate a bit of self-deprecating humor.)
Still, it remains a fact here, as elsewhere, that nations typically succeed despite the bumbling actions of their overzealous political class, not because of them. When we pointed out Australia’s abounding natural riches to a childhood mate recently, stating that it would take “a world class [expletive] to squander such a bounty,” we received a characteristically droll reply:
“Don’t worry, those bastard pollies [politicians] are doing their best.”
It was Alexis de Tocqueville who noted that the wealth of a nation does not depend on the fertility of its soul, but on the freedom of its inhabitants. Australia has a long and proud history of pioneering, independent frontiersmanship. That was tested during the pandemic... as it will be tested again.
Rather than looking to second-rate political leaders for solutions to complex problems, citizens here (as elsewhere) would do better to rely on the character of the “ordinary people,” in whom a proud and rebellious history resides. More, in today’s essay...
Australia’s Eureka Moment
By Joel Bowman
“This [Ballarat Reform League] is nothing more or less than the germ of Australian independence. The die is cast, and fate has cast upon the movement its indelible signature. No power on earth can now restrain the united might and headlong strides for freedom of the people of this country ... The League has undertaken a mighty task, fit only for a great people – that of changing the dynasty of the country.”
~ Henry Erle Seekamp, writing in his Ballarat Times newspaper, 18 November, 1854
What a brave band of men discovered at Eureka, a sleepy rural outpost in the southern state of Victoria, Australia, more than a century and a half ago, remains more valuable today than all the gold ever mined in those rich fields: Their freedom. The cost of not protecting that legacy now, when it is under direct and relentless attack, will ultimately be borne by those who let it pass from their hands.
Aussie school kids know the backstory well enough; or at least they ought to. Herewith, a pithy refresher...
Long before the “Lucky Country” dared even call itself a nation, an intrepid cadre of gold miners made a definitive stand in the small Victorian town of Ballarat. The proximate catalyst for their rebellion was the age-old issue of “taxation without representation,” most notably through the imposition of a compulsory miner’s license. In truth, however, discontent had long been simmering under the roughshod colonialist government, which often used its police and military forces to oppress dissent and enforce unjust laws.
[Bonus points for dear readers who recall that a similar roster of grievances had set the stage for the American War of Independence, fought against their common colonizing ancestor, but three-quarters of a century prior.]
Founded in 1853, the Ballarat Reform League encouraged acts of civil disobedience to protest the miner’s licenses and to bring to justice various other causes, including the murder of Scottish miner, James Scobie, and the wrongful imprisonment of three men accused of burning down the Bentley Hotel. When after a year the miner’s pacifist tactics had still not achieved the desired ends, the men knew what they must do: They elected a leader, Peter Lalor, erected a makeshift stockade, and took up arms against the government.
Liberty Down Under
The subsequent confrontation in Ballarat, known thereafter as the Eureka Rebellion, came to be synonymous with the birth of Australian democracy. Although the miners lost the battle on that particular day – December 3, 1854 – with perhaps 60 diggers breathing their last on Eureka soil, they won for their countrymen a legacy well worth defending; one rooted in liberty, independence and self-determination.
Of the surviving rebels, more than one hundred men and women were taken prisoner and marched off to nearby government camps, where martial law was imposed along with a strict curfew. Multiple independent reports from the camps tell of the brutality there, including the killing one night of a woman and her infant child-in-arms, along with several other men, during an episode of “indiscriminate shooting.”
Eventually, thirteen of the rebels were brought to trial at Victoria’s Supreme Court on counts of High Treason. By then word of the Eureka Rebellion had spread far and wide and a groundswell of public support had grown around their cause. Owing in no small part to this esprit de corps (and evidenced by the more than 10,000 people who thronged the pavement outside the courthouse), the defendants were each and all acquitted. Indeed, the jury took less than half an hour to return its “not guilty” verdict. In a display of civil unity, the freedmen were even carried aloft by their supporters, who marched in triumphant jubilation through the streets of Melbourne.
A Royal Commission into the whole affair returned harsh criticism of the government’s administration over the gold fields, particularly its handling of the Eureka Stockade. Among several of the recommendations enacted in the months that followed were; the abolition of the gold licenses (to be replaced with cheaper, fairer “miner’s rights”); the Legislative Council broadened to allow for representation in the major gold fields; the police presence, there and among the people, to be drastically drawn down. Reform momentum carried through to the Electoral Act of 1856, which granted suffrage to male colonists, an important first step toward the eventual representative democracy assumed as a birthright today.
In the aftermath of the Eureka rebellion, rebel leader Peter Lalor issued a statement to the colonists of Victoria, one worth remembering today.
“There are two things connected with the late (Eureka) outbreak which I deeply regret,” Lalor wrote, “The first is, that we shouldn't have been forced to take up arms at all; and the second is, that when we were compelled to take the field in our own defense, we were unable (through want of arms, ammunition and a little organization) to inflict on the real authors of the outbreak the punishment they so richly deserved.”
~ Peter Lalor, Australian patriot
Once again, dear readers are invited to draw the parallels between Mr. Lalor’s sentiments and those of another patriot, Mr. Thomas Jefferson who, in a famous 1787 letter to William Smith, wrote:
What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms [...] the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.
The Eureka Rebellion serves as a reminder that it is often in our darkest hours, when hope seems all but lost, that the finest among us step forward and, like Lalor and his brave band of patriots, demand their just liberties... by any and all means necessary.
Postscript: The day after the Eureka Rebellion – December 4, 1854 – newspaperman and owner of the Ballarat Times, Henry Erle Seekamp, was arrested in his office on charges of sedition.
A staunch supporter of the Ballarat Reform League, Seekamp had written and published a series of articles that were critical of the government’s actions, in particular the manner in which the police harassed the diggers on so-called “license hunts” and their official response to the murder of James Scobie.
Seekamp’s trial was the first related to the Eureka incident and the only one to return a guilty verdict. After a series of appeals, the journalist was sentenced to six months in prison, though he was released after serving three.
While in jail, Mr. Seekamp’s de facto wife, Clara Seekamp, took over the business, and in doing so became the first female editor of an Australian newspaper. Speaking of the Eureka Rebellion later in life she was quoted as saying, “If Peter Lalor was the sword of the movement, my husband was the pen.”
And now for then past week’s Notes…
We’re off to see our childhood mate belt out a few tunes at The Henchmen pub here in Mermaid Beach. Whatever you’re up to this weekend, we trust you’re in good cheer and great company.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. From tyranny to liberty… crony capitalist to free market… collectivist to individual… the tide is indeed turning around the world.
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I’m a 75yo whose maternal grandfather went to school with Will Rogers. And so a quote from Will: “if you think you had problems with taxation without representation; you ought to see the problems you have with taxation with representation.” Comment about 1930.
Great article Joel. As a fellow Aussie, living in Perth, I was seriously disturbed by our state & federal government’s reaction to covid, but even more disturbing was the spineless enthusiasm in which many west Australians embraced the closed border initiative, all in the name of being ‘safe’! Our country needs its mongrel back and wokeness abolished. It needs risk takers and people who are accountable for their actions, not entitled champaign socialists. I hope we see a massive pendulum soon, otherwise I may become your neighbor in Argentina!