Victoria's Southern Cross

DESCRIPTION: "When Ballaarat/Ballard unfurled the 'Southern Cross,' Of joy a shout ascended to the heavens...." "For brave Lalor Was found 'all there,' WIth dauntless dare, His men inspiring." Hearers should "be faithful to the standard, for victory or death"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1855 (the Eureka Stockade, according to Ingleton)
KEYWORDS: patriotic
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1854 - The Eureka Stockade Revolt
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
ADDITIONAL: Geoffrey C. Ingleton, _True Patriots All: or News from Early Australia as told in A Collection of Broadsides_ ("Garnered and Decorated" by Ingleton), Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1988, p. 256, 'Victoria's Southern Cross" (1 text, tune referenced)
Raffaello Carboni, _The Eureka Stockade_, 1855 (see Bibliography), chapter XXXVII ("Lalor Stump, Bakery Hill"), p. 67 in the Melbourne University Press edition, "(Brave LALOR was found all there)" (1 excerpt); chapter LXXXII ("Victoria's 'Southern Cross'"), pp.144-145 in the Melbourne Edition (1 text)
Roud #24819
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The 'Standard Bearer'" (tune)
NOTES [1220 words]: Ingleton gives no real explanation of this, but the previous page is a wanted poster announcing a £400 Reward. It says, "Whereas Two Persons of the Names of Lawlor & Black, LATE OF BALLAARAT, Did on or about the 13th day of November last, at that place, use certain TREASONABLE AND SEDITIOUS LANGUAGE, And incite Men to take up Arms, with a view to make war against Our Sovereign Lady the Queen."
Apparently this arises out of the controversy over licenses to dig for gold in Australia (for which see "Where's Your License?"). There was a sort of revolt over the issue in 1854. It started on October 6, 1854, when the body of a murdered man named James Scobie was found in the Ballarat goldfields. Three people were charged with the murder, including the owner of the Eureka Hotel and his wife. They were acquitted. This seems fair; there wasn't much evidence -- Carboni, pp. 26-27, says that Scobie and his companion, a man named Martin, were very drunk when they were assailed, and although Martin survived, he can't have had much idea what actually happened. But although proof was lacking, the diggers felt the defendants had bribed their way out of conviction and burned the hotel (Clark, p. 138).
What began as a demand to punish Bentley, the hotel owner, turned into a series of mass meetings demanding redress of grievances -- first the high price of licenses (on November 29, 1864, many of the protesters burned their licences), then even more radical demands. (The goldfields were running out, so the price of the licenses was becoming more of a burden; Macintyre, p. 88.) It ended up turning into a demand for a more representative parliament (Clark, p. 139).
"In the last weeks of 1854 the Ballarat Reform League began to organize revolt. Led by an educated, middle-class Irishman, Peter Lalor, the diggers took up arms and built a stockade [at Eureka] just outside Ballarat on a hillside commanding the road to Melbourne. The stockade's defenders then proclaimed the Republic of Victoria, hoisted a blue-and-white Southern Cross flag, and swore by it 'to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend [their] rights and liberties" (Ward, p. 56). Macintyre, p. 88, believes there were about a thousand of them.
Carboni describes these events, and the flag: "The flag is silk, blue ground, with a large silver cross, similar to the one in our southern firmament; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural" (Carboni, p. 68). He also describes the attempts to find arms: the men did their best to procure firearms, and failing that, had a blacksmith forging pikes (Carboni, p. 78. Hadn't anyone learned by then that, if you were forging pikes, you'd already lost?)
But, Ward says, "Thirst was their undoing." Most of the diggers regularly left the stockade for local hotels. (Ironic that Lalor had earlier ordered grog-sellers out of the camp; Carboni, p. 89.) That was the situation on the night of December 2/3, 1854; in the mid-morning there were only about 150 men at the Eureka Stockade. On Sunday, December 3, a local crown officer demanded the surrender of the stockade, and when it was not given, attacked at about 4:30 a.m. (Clark, p. 139; Ward, p. 56). The notes in the Melbourne University edition of Carboni, p. 96, say that there were 276 attacking soldiers under 12 officers, as opposed to not many more than 100 diggers with firearms.
It took less than half an hour. According to Clark, p. 139, 25 of the diggers were killed and 30 wounded; the troops suffered one officer and three men killed, plus 11 soldiers wounded. Ward, pp. 56-57, claims 22 diggers and six soldiers were killed or mortally wounded (Learmonth, p. 178, agrees with these figures, and Macintyre, p. 88, also says that 22 diggers were killed; Murphy, p. 110 says that five soldiers and about thirty miners were lost); the dead diggers came from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Australia, and perhaps other places. These figures may be based on Carboni, p. 137, who lists 14 killed and eight mortally wounded, with full names for six, partial names for three, no names for three. He also lists 12 who were injured but recovered, which is surely too low; presumably most of the wounded tried not to be identified. Although the dead came from all over, I can't help but note that, of the seventeen whose places of origin are known, ten were from Ireland.
"The leader of the diggers, Peter Lalor, having lost an arm in the fighting, hid for a season to escape the vengeance of the authorities and reappeared years later as a conservative in the Victorian legislative assembly" (Clark, p. 140).
Thirteen men were put on trial for treason, but happily the juries refused to convict (Ward, p. 57).
Murphy, p. 111, says, that a liberal view "has enshrined Eureka as a victory of radical elements over a conservative authority. It has claimed a legendary status, a protest for the democratic and independent struggle against an oppressive and imperial overlordship. The latter interpretation places great store on the supposed revolutionary element in Eureka and has influenced the formation of such groups as the Eureka Youth League. The flag designed at the time has become the symbol of pro-republican causes." But Murphy thinks "Hindsight has conferred on Eureka a revolutionary character that was largely absent at the time."
Much later, in 1923, a memorial was put up at the Eureka Stockade, although it was a little ambivalent about which side it rooted for; it memorializes both diggers and soldiers (Ward, p. 57). Macintyre, p. 88, says that the protests caused many political reforms, though no one else seems to mention them.... But the Eureka Stockade is still remembered in Australia as a protest for liberty, and people still write songs about it today.
According to Learmonth, p. 300, Lalor (1827-1889) was born in Tinakill, Ireland, and came to Australia in 1852. He served as Speaker of the Legislative Council 1880-1887.
There are at least four books about the event:
* Rafaello Carboni, The Eureka Stockade: the consequences of some pirates wanting on the Quarterdeck of a Rebellion (by one of the participants); republished 1942, and by Melbourne University Press with a new preface in 1963, and again by Dodo Press in 2007, among many other editions. It's a difficult book; Carboni was an Italian who knew many languages but had some trouble with English. It's not that he wasn't fluent; he was -- but he was enthusiastic and extremely disorderly, and there is no index and the chapter headings are all in Latin! So it's hard to find anything.
* Richard Butler, Eureka Stockade, Angus & Robertson, 1983 (this appears to be historical fiction which later was made into a movie)
* Geoff Hocking, Eureka Stockade : A Pictorial History The Events Leading to the Attack in the Pre-dawn of 3 December 1854, Five Mile Press, 2004
* Gregory Blake, Eureka Stockade: A ferocious and bloody battle, Big Sky Publishing, 2016
There are at least a couple of biographies of Lalor:
Les Blake, Peter Lalor, The Man from Eureka, Neptune Press, 1979.
Clive Turnbull, Eureka: The Story or Peter Lalor, Hawthorn Press, 1946
There was also a play (by Leslie Haylen?), "Blood on the Wattle."
Obviously this song was written by someone on the loyalist side who had delusions of being a poet. - RBW
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