The Eureka Stockade

"The morning was fine, The sun brightly did shine,
The diggers were working away
When the inspector of traps said, 'Now, my fine chaps,
We'll go license-hunting today.'"

Australia was the site of many gold rushes in the 1850s, and the Australian government tried to control and regulate the miners by requiring "licenses" -- the possession of a certificate, which had to be renewed regularly, entitling the miner to work on his particular small bit of dirt. (And they were definitely small!) Of course, if the government was going to require licenses, it had to enforce the requirement, giving rise to the song above ("Where's Your License," by Charles R. Thatcher) -- and, of course to the government official known as the license-hunter.

The miners show more resented the need for licenses, which were fairly expensive, and they didn't like wasting time being inspected. From the beginning, they came up with tricks to try to dodge the requirements.

In 1854, the miners organized for (in effect) more lax enforcement, and set up a sort of rebellion: They had a fortress (the Eureka Stockade) and even a flag (the blue Southern Cross flag shown on many editions of this book). But they didn't have many weapons, and they had a lot of miners who liked stealing off for a drink or several. One day, when the pubs were full and the stockade relatively empty, the militia moved in and broke up the miners' organization. More than a few miners ended up on trial for rebellion.

The saga of the Eureka Stockade has become the stuff of Australian folklore, but the historical record is relatively thin. That is what makes this book valuable: Raffaello Carboni, although Italian by origin, became an Australian miner, and his skill with languages caused him to become one of the inner circle. After the Stockade was raided, he was imprisoned and tried; he was eventually released, but he claimed his health was permanently affected. His account is the fullest by an actual participant in the Eureka protest.

Unfortunately, his book is often almost incoherent. Not, as some have claimed, because there was anything wrong with his English; Carboni was entirely fluent, even eloquent at times. He just wasn't a very organized thinker, and he had a hard time separating his personal experience from the experience of the miners as a whole. Reading the book, I was frequently lost and frequently bored. It's just not much of a read.

But it is a vital source (e.g. every more recent book I've read seems to accept Carboni's calculation of casualties from the assault on the stockade). If you want to understand the Eureka Stockade story -- indeed, to understand Australian gold mining in the 1850s -- you need this book. But you should probably read another account first so that you'll have some idea of what was actually going on. show less

A hugely vital work, covering one of the most important events in white Australia's first century, written - of course - by an immigrant, in this case an Italian. The book was written and published within a year of the famous uprising, so bears the twin hallmarks of first-hand accounts but also inevitable biases. An engaging and necessary work for those interested in history. Carboni's language is that of an immigrant still dealing with a new language, but his every paragraph feels lived-in. More for passionate readers of the subject, admittedly.

Ballarat; Eureka Stockade; Victoria -History