Dean Mighell
I've been attending the Eureka celebrations in Ballarat for many years. Historians and academics — and even left-wing activists, some of them in the trade union movement — often argue about the aims and motives of the miners who built the stockade.
Too often, armchair critics seem to forget that in taking up arms against an army of redcoats these miners faced either death or hanging for treason. These were men with strong views about justice. So too were the women who sewed the Southern Cross flag at night under candlelight and discussed the licence issue and the vote with husbands and brothers committed to human rights and democracy.
The Electrical Trades Union (ETU) is very proud that two of its members, Fintan Lalor and Glenn Withers, are direct descendants of the Eureka rebels. Fintan is the great-great-grandson of Eureka leader Peter Lalor. He's named after James Fintan Lalor, Peter Lalor's brother. James was an Irish political activist who was jailed for his political beliefs. Glenn Withers is the great-great-great-grandson of Anastasia Withers, one of three women who sewed the Eureka flag.
Peter Lalor came from a political family deeply engaged in the Irish land wars of the 1840s. Raffaello Carboni, Frederick Vern, Timothy Hayes and their comrades were unflinching political activists. Conservative politicians and reactionary historians, the same mob who scoff at the idea of an Indigenous stolen generation or the proposition that blacks were massacred by white invaders, won't have a bar of Eureka. It's far too political for their purposes. That's why Prime Minister John Howard has shunned the celebrations and refuses to talk about the rebellion. It's time trade unionists and activists helped Eureka take its rightful place in our history.
Just because the miners were violently opposed to the gold licence fee doesn't mean they were self-serving small capitalists. Whatever we think of capitalism in 2004, it was an unforgiving beast 150 years ago. The Great Starvation (famine) in Ireland had caused millions to either die or emigrate, and the world was a grim place.
Although Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was hardly compulsory reading on the goldfields and there was no broad working-class or political movement in Melbourne or Ballarat. We need to put the miners' politics in the context of the times. Even so, in 1855 Marx described the rebellion as "an economic crisis, with the ruling British monopolies trying to shift the burden on to the working people". It's no wonder Howard won't talk about Eureka.
The miners didn't just argue against the licence fee. They cried out for political reform. And even if the constitutional changes that would give people the vote were already in train, they wanted it sooner rather than later, and without restriction. The Ballarat Reform League, formed at Bakery Hill on November 11, 1854, espoused all the political principles of the Chartist movement. It might not have been revolution, but it was radical for the times.
The campaign against the licence hunts bears so many similarities to our opposition to the Howard government's building industry taskforce. The ETU wouldn't mind a Carboni, Vern or Lalor in the workplace when the stooges turn up!
In his book The Eureka Stockade, miner Raffaelo Carboni wrote: "The maiden appearance of our standard, in the midst of armed men, sturdy, self-overworking diggers of all languages and colours, was a fascinating object to behold. There is no flag in old Europe half so beautiful as the Southern Cross of Ballarat."
There was nothing jingoistic about the flag. The miners might not have been "workers of the world" uniting to crush capitalism, but nationality was not a barrier to unity. Among the dead miners were men from Ireland, England, Scotland, Prussia, Goulbourn in NSW, Canada and Nova Scotia. Eureka was a melting pot for political unrest from all around the world.
At the ETU we subscribe to the catch cry, "Touch one, touch all". Above our Queensberry Street office and on our shirts and letterheads we proudly display the flag of the Southern Cross, made famous at Eureka. For the ETU it's a symbol of independence and our commitment to a fair go.
The miners at Eureka refused to cower when it came to a fair go. And like us they wanted more. They wanted political reform and control of their affairs. That's why our union is inspired by the stand they took. On December 2, 150 years after the miners bedded down in the stockade, the ETU will be hosting a night of stories and music at Eureka. We'll try to imagine what it must have been like knowing troopers, armed and mercenary, might storm the stockade when day broke. And in the morning we'll remember the more than 30 diggers who lost their lives fighting against a corrupt and elitist goldfield administration.
[Dean Mighell is the ETU branch secretary.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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