Banking Under Difficulties/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
Riots at Ballarat.
The principal, indeed the only trustworthy and impartial source of information with respect to these riots, is the history of Mr. Westgarth. It is impossible to write clearly and correctly about the great event of 1854 in Victoria without using his work. The writer takes this opportunity of acknowledging his indebtedness to such a high-class authority.
“The Ballarat outbreak is a solitary incident in Australian history. It serves to show the danger of inattention to premonitory symptoms on the part of Governments, and it may also illustrate what senseless things the people may be hurried into doing in moments of excitement. The commission wished to close this unpleasant page of the colony’s affairs, and so end at once a subject that had occurred under very exceptional circumstances, and was not likely ever to occur again. A general amnesty of the past was therefore urged upon the Government. But the Government judging its duties differently, put the parties who had been arrested on their trial for high treason. The disadvantage of this extreme measure was that, under what the French would call the extenuating facts of the case, the rioters became objects of public sympathy. In the opinion of not a few they were patriots who contended against an irresponsible and tyrannical Government. They were acquitted by the jury, as had been very generally anticipated, and they were afterwards fêted by a section of the people—a proceeding well nigh as culpable and unreflecting as the outbreak itself. The rioting, after all, ended satisfactorily, and even with a reaction of more than usual loyalty.
“There are popular prejudices, which, in a society like that of the colony, are sometimes all the more irrepressible and injurious with the political and social importance of the masses that hold these prejudices. The antipathy of the mining population to the Chinese is a case in point. The presence of large numbers of this race in the colony is, at best, a very doubtful benefit, notwithstanding that they eat rice and increase trade, and that a trader should respect all customers. The Government, agreeing in the doubts of the case, has had checked the large and threatening immigration by means of heavy fines, or head-money imposed on the ships that brought the Chinese; and this procedure has been followed by South Australia and New South Wales. Nevertheless, the well-known dusky faces peered forth in the thousands over each of the goldfields, and, as the angry and impatient miners alleged, were perpetually in their way, gleaning up everything in their wake upon the diggings. An outbreak somewhere seemed inevitable, and it took place at last, upon the Buckland River, on the 4th July, 1857. The occasion was an anti-Chinese demonstration, got up by a public meeting of the colonists of the district, with the view of protesting against the ‘Chinese inroad’ amongst the Europeans. Many prominent residents took part in the business, and resolutions were passed to the effect that this swarming of the Chinese amongst the colonists was an intolerable nuisance that must result in the one or the other race quitting the locality. Debasing practices were alluded to as prevailing among the Chinamen, as well as the prospect of their ‘using up’ all the goldfields. The Government were condemned for having allowed so many of them to come into the country; and the resolutions concluded with an intimation that if the Government would not rid them of the Chinamen, the Bucklanders might do that for themselves. These resolutions were no sooner passed, and the meeting thereupon dissolved, than a cry was made for immediate action. A party of miners (at first small, but gradually expanding as it moved along), started at once for the Chinese quarter of the diggings. Here all was speedily confusion, dismay, and rout. Bedding and other baggages were hastily strapped up and mounted on the backs of the flying Chinamen. Twice they faced about upon the comparative handful of their enemy. One small but active fellow was observed to be conspicuously energetic in his efforts to rally his countrymen. He was a hero, and deserved a crown even at the hands of his cowardly assailants; all to no purpose. A vanguard of a dozen or so of white barbarians, once and again, set the whole mass on the move; and the line of flight, strewn with all sorts of castaway effects, resembled the route of a defeated army. It is only just to the general body of the Buckland miners to state that a number of them strove most creditably to protect the Chinamen from this disgraceful attack, more especially, as they saw that many of the poor timid creatures were shamefully handled, while scandalous robberies were being committed upon their property. A great deal of bedding was thrown into the river, which was then running in a full stream, and all the Chinese tents as well as a recently erected “Joss house,” were committed to the flames. The Government took prompt measures to protect the Chinamen, and to recompense them for their losses. There has been no further outbreak of this kind in Victoria, but New South Wales was subsequently the scene of one.
“Let us now turn to the consideration of the goldfields, where about this time an incident of a rather alarming appearance occurred. This was the civil outbreak that happened at the great goldfields of Ballarat towards the end of the year 1854. The goldfields by this time comprised by far the most important interest in the colony, more than half the population being connected with them. A growl of complaint from this miscellaneous mass of people had scarcely ever ceased to be emitted from the first, and this ominous noise had been gradually increasing in loudness and sharpness under an accumulating variety of evils. Some of these evils, so far at least as the authorities were concerned, were irremediable—such as the discomfort of digging life, and the precariousness of its results—both of these adverse features having been aggravated by the circumstance of a scanty rainfall in the year 1854, when the yield of gold was in consequence small. Other evils seemed to admit of remedy, and the colonial Government received plentiful blame at the hands of the diggings community in regard to them. There was, indeed, much substantial grounds for these complaints. A vast irregular society had been suddenly called up throughout the colony, and the Government, somewhat perplexed how to deal with it, had been fain to let the difficulty solve itself by doing nothing, that is to say, although they had appointed paid officers and paid magistrates, who went through a round of duties, and with special strictness—that of collecting the gold mining license of 30s. monthly, as well as other Government dues—yet they had never taken any steps to make the goldfields population socially and politically a part of the colony. There were no arrangements for a mining franchise and a goldfields representation, and no social status, even by the simple and usual expedient of graduating the people to the Government by enrolling the more respectable of the great mining community as local justices of the peace. This state of things had lasted three years, and it was generally aggravated by the vain efforts of the colonists to induce the hesitating Government to sell adequate quantities of the public lands. Many a digger longed for a few adjacent acres, on which he might rear a home and plant a garden or potato-field of his own, and for such a rare luxury he would willingly have exchanged the tin pannikin or pickle-bottle full of gold that lay concealed in a corner of his tent, and that represented the last six months of his mining toils.
“Discontent centered itself in the question of the monthly license fee, as it was a subject on which a demonstration could be most effectually made. The Government had tried some palliatives in the license difficulty, and by allowing a discount on pre-payments for longer terms than a month had hoped to supersede many of the collector’s visits, and so diminish the occasions for the hostile manifestations. These efforts had not been successful.
“The Ballarat riot took its more immediate rise from one of the ‘raids’ upon the diggers for the obnoxious license money. Upon the first serious threatenings of disturbance, a party of military were sent up from Melbourne, who on arrival were confronted by a stockade, erected by the rioters on the famous Bakery Hill. At early dawn of the 3rd of December, 1854, this place was stormed and taken, not without loss of life on both sides, and thus this very exceptional and unhappy occurrence came to an end.
“The new Governor, Sir Charles Hotham, had arrived about six months previously, and he was not long in discovering that he had fallen heir to a considerable amount of trouble. Aware of the serious aspects of the Ballarat case, and of the goldfields generally, he had already, some weeks before the outbreak, projected the appointment of a commission for the purpose of inquiring into and reporting on the state of the mining district. This commission had hardly been constituted ere the intelligence of the outbreak reached Melbourne, and showed to its members the seriousness of their duties and the urgency for the commencement of their Inquiries. The commission proceeded at once to the scene of the trouble, and were engaged at the mines for several weeks in the months of December and January, 1854-5, during which time they visited Ballarat and Creswick, Castlemaine (the capital of the Mount Alexander country), and Sandhurst, that of the Bendigo district.
“The commission was well received at the mines, more especially as the recent outbreak had already produced a favourable reaction among the great body of the miners, who disapproved of carrying opposition to the Government to the unwarrantable lengths of the Ballarat climax; and who, indeed, were anxious to explain so unusual a mistake of their countrymen by attributing the more extreme counsels to several impetuous foreigners, chiefly Germans, whose notions about distinction of constitutional and unconstitutional opposition to a Government were of rather a confused description. The commission produced a lengthened report, in which the whole system of goldfields management was proposed to be reconstituted. The miners’ earnings were found to be, on an average, rather smaller than those of other branches of colonial labour—a circumstance not favourable to the persistent maintenance of a heavy license fee of practically very unequal incidence. The report recommended the abolition of this fee, and in its place the imposition of a moderate export duty on gold. The issue of a miner’s right was suggested at a cost to each miner of £1 per year, and conferring upon him both the mining privileges and the franchise. The commission recommended local elective mining courts and benches of the regularly paid magistrates. The title of ‘Commissioner’ to the head official of each goldfield—a name now associated with the wranglings of the past, was proposed to be changed to the old English mining title, ‘Warden,’ and the warden was to hold his relations direct with the Executive instead of continuing in the secondary official position under the squatting commissioners which had hitherto been the lot of the goldfields department, The Commission’s various recommendations were in the main carried out by the Government, and assisted by more auspicious years of digging that followed 1854, they inaugurated quite a new era for the important interests they affected. The goldfields population have since proved as loyal as the rest of the colony. If there have been a few rowdy incidents at elections, and on other exciting occasions, they may be accepted as a kind of local holiday-making to the rough industry of these busy localities, the more excusable, as they have seldom disturbed or disgraced the Government. The new regulations which were based upon the Commission’s report have since been in the main adopted in New South Wales, and still later in British Columbia and New Zealand.
“A measure of great political importance was involved in one of these regulations. The system of the miner’s right was tantamount in reality to the introduction of the principle of a manhood suffrage—a principle which was then conceded only to the special and difficult case of the mining population, but which between two and three years afterwards was formally adopted for the whole colony upon the concession of self-government.
“The more intelligent of the miners were constituted local justices of the peace; arrangements were made by which the mining districts elected their representatives to the Colonial Legislature; and above all, they found their leisure hours amply absorbed by attending to the new elective local boards, ordained for the purpose of framing the gold mining regulations. A general goldfields’ legislative measure, on which these local proceedings were based, was drawn up and passed in the year 1855. Three years afterwards this Act was further amended and enlarged, and a Minister of Mines was added to the Executive. We may add, however, that in 1868 another Government commission paid a visit of inspection and inquiry to the goldfields which resulted in a very elaborate report, suggesting further adaptations and reforms, chiefly in the direction of increased local legislation to meet the expanding wants and advancing interests of gold mining.”
