Philip Dorling April 9, 2013
Labor insiders, including Bob Hawke, kept US diplomats informed about the turmoil within Gough Whitlam's scandal-ridden government.
Dysfunctional times: The governor-general's secretary, David Smith, reads the proclamation of the double dissolution of Parliament.
Truth in politics can take quite some time to emerge. And sometimes it takes a little help from WikiLeaks. On February 27, 1976, opposition leader Gough Whitlam sat down in his Parliament House office with the United States ambassador to Australia, James Hargrove.
It was an awkward meeting. Dramatically dismissed as prime minister just three months before, Whitlam was in the midst of one of the worse weeks of his political career.
Two days earlier Whitlam had been hugely embarrassed by media reports he had been involved in secret efforts to secure a major political donation of about $US500,000 (about $2 million in today's money) from Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in Iraq.
Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Federal Labor had been desperate to raise money for its 1975 election campaign. The ALP hadn't received any money from Iraq because an intermediary had stolen the money that was transferred by Iraqi officials to an offshore account in Hong Kong.
However, news of the ''Iraqi money affair'' had been dramatically splashed across newspapers by journalist Laurie Oakes and News Ltd proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
Whitlam was under intense pressure. He initially denied involvement in the Iraqi fund-raising scheme and then shifted ground to minimise his role, claiming to have only learnt of key details after the event.
Financier Tirath Khemlani.
But 37 years later a secret US diplomatic cable, the contents of which are revealed here, tells a very different story.
Sitting in his office with the US ambassador, a dejected Whitlam made a confession he wasn't prepared to tell the Labor caucus, the media or the Australian Parliament and people.
''Whitlam explained in great detail his and ALP federal secretary David Combe's involvement in efforts to secure funds from Arab sources,'' Hargrove reported to Washington.
''The initial suggestion came from a left-wing leader of the Victorian ALP, Bill Hartley, and Whitlam was aware of it from the beginning.'' Whitlam specifically confirmed he was ''aware of the efforts to secure funds from Iraq''.
He said ALP president Bob Hawke, whom he described as ''a pro-Israeli fanatic'', had ''hit the roof'' when he learnt of the Iraqi fund-raising plan. Whitlam expected to be forced out of the leadership within the week.
''The most likely outcome now was that the federal executive of the ALP will force Combe to resign as federal secretary; then he, Whitlam, will resign as leader of the parliamentary ALP, although he does intend to serve out his present term in the House of Representatives,'' Hargrove wrote.
''Whitlam seems resigned to this and said he very much hoped that [Bill] Hayden, the former treasurer, would replace him as the ALP's leader.''
Against his own expectations, Whitlam narrowly survived the crisis. Hawke, who was eager to enter Federal Parliament and become Labor leader, overplayed his hand. So did Rupert Murdoch and prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who were working hand in glove in an effort to destroy Whitlam politically.
Whitlam's supporters in the Labor caucus rallied behind him and he remained opposition leader until another disastrous defeat at the 1977 federal election.
But it could have been a very different story if Whitlam had told the public what he privately admitted to the US ambassador.
Most likely, he would have been immediately forced to step down as Labor leader. Either Hayden or Hawke would have taken his place in1976 and Australian political history might well have taken a different path.
Ambassador Hargrove's report is but one of some 11,000 secret diplomatic cables sent by the US embassy in Canberra and consulates in Sydney and Melbourne between 1973 and 1976. These cables are part of a massive trove of more than 1.7 million electronic documents that were transferred by the Department of State to the US National Archives and Records Administration in 2006.
The sheer size of this archive has meant that although the records were declassified six years ago, this resource has been very largely neglected because there has not been an effective search engine to enable proper investigation.
But the WikiLeaks transparency group has now incorporated a copy of the entire electronic archive into a single, searchable database available to historians, journalists and other researchers.
The voluminous reporting of US diplomats provides many new insights into the turbulent years of the Whitlam Labor government.
The US embassy in Canberra reported in great detail as the Australian economy stagnated, inflation spiralled upward and a succession of political bungles and ministerial scandals beset the Labor government.
Although Labor won the May 1974 double dissolution election, some of Whitlam's closest confidants were quick to brief the embassy on growing paralysis and gloom within the government.
As early as August 1974 Whitlam adviser Peter Wilenski observed that the Prime Minister was "in a fatalistic mood, irritated by conflicting counsel, disposed to allow events to take their course and uncertain as to how to handle complex economic problems."
Senior public servants complained about chronic leaks of information to the media from ministers, ill-disciplined political staff and disgruntled bureaucrats.
One particularly sensitive leak of top secret ''code word'' intelligence information caused great concern.
Foreign Affairs secretary Alan Renouf blamed ministerial staff and called in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to investigate. However, Renouf told the US embassy that prosecution was ''virtually out of [the] question in view [of] ALP obsession with 'open government', likelihood of bad publicity and likelihood government would lose [the] suit anyway''.
By June 1975, the US embassy described the Whitlam government as ''tired, uncertain how to move in facing complex problems of inflation and unemployment, unsure of how to fit its long-promised programs for improved social services into an increasingly constrained national budget''.
The embassy correctly identified the Khemlani loans scandal and the resignation of minerals and energy minister Rex Connor as the trigger for the final political and constitutional crisis that engulfed the government.
However, despite much speculation, US diplomats appear to have been as surprised as most other observers when governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam as prime minister on November 11, 1975.
The cables also provide rich detail on internal Labor politics provided by the US embassy's numerous sources within the ALP and the wider Labor movement.
The embassy threw its net wide and spoke regularly to Labor MPs, ministerial staff members, party machine operatives and union officials. Most, though by no means all, were from Labor's right wing.
Many spoke freely about the failings of the Labor government and especially Whitlam. However, none was probably more valued than the ALP and ACTU president Bob Hawke, who conferred regularly with the US consulate in Melbourne.
Hawke was not shy of public criticism of Whitlam, sometimes calling the prime minister ''politically crazy''. However, nearly four decades later, Hawke's private observations still make fascinating reading.
A strong and emotional supporter of Israel, Hawke was especially concerned by Whitlam's pursuit of an ''even-handed'' Middle East policy designed to engage oil-rich Arab countries.
As early as November 1973, Hawke told US diplomats that he found Whitlam's approach to Israel and Middle East issues ''beyond belief''.
Whitlam was, Hawke said, ''difficult and very egocentric ('even for me')'' and ''resents anybody who get[s] publicity which tends to move the spotlight away from himself''. The US consulate (somewhat prudishly ) added that ''direct quotations in this report will be difficult as Hawke used short words of emphasis not suitable for [a] family newspaper.''
In subsequent discussions, Hawke repeatedly criticised what he called Whitlam's ''immoral, unethical and ungrateful'' attitude towards Israel.
He later told the US consulate he felt unable to approach the Jewish community for campaign funds because of ''Whitlam's 'unprintable' even-handed 'unprintable' Arab policy''.
Hawke was equally critical of the Labor government's economic mismanagement. In November 1974, he described Whitlam's actions as ''silly'' and said he ''bitterly resent[ed]'' having to deal with the prime minister's ''political inadequacy''.
In August 1975, as the government's prospects spiralled downward, Hawke told US diplomats that Whitlam simply did ''not understand [the] scope of [the] 'parliamentary disaster' which Labor 'surely faces at [the] next election' ''.
Hawke correctly anticipated that Labor would be forced to an early poll and defeated in December 1975. Hawke was thinking about ''rebuilding [the] party for [the] period beyond [the] next election''.
He also spoke of Labor's parlous financial position, reiterating that ''Whitlam stupidity'' had eroded donations ''especially [from] Jewish backers, badly bruised by Whitlam['s] Mid-East policy''.
Hawke did reverse his political assessment after the governor-general's dramatic dismissal of Whitlam, telling the US consulate he ''now thought [a] 'big win' for Labor was [a] good probability''.
But he acknowledged that Labor was ''hard pressed to expand relatively modest plans for [a] half-Senate election into a full-scale fight for the whole Parliament''.
In passing, he referred to newly appointed prime minister Fraser as a ''fascist'' and the governor-general as the ''Von-Hindenberg'' of Australia.
In the immediate aftermath of Labor's December 1975 election defeat, Hawke talked candidly to US diplomats about his own plans to succeed Whitlam as Labor leader.
The US consulate in Melbourne reported ''Hawke spent Sunday [the day after the election] with Whitlam, and found him very quiet. Almost at once [the] ex-prime minister asked Hawke if he was 'ready to move over'. Hawke said yes … Thereafter [they] did [a] whip-around of federal and state leaders and assured themselves they 'have [the] numbers' to get Hawke into [a] safe seat and into leadership. Exact timing is uncertain, but Hawke 'can go' as soon as he has ACTU succession secure. Whitlam will step aside any time thereafter, but definitely this year.''
But as another regular US embassy contact, NSW Labor president John Ducker later explained to the US consulate in Sydney, it proved ''a bad mistake'' for Whitlam and Hawke to tip their hand prematurely on Hawke succeeding Whitlam as Labor leader.
Hawke's opponents and Whitlam's supporters reacted against what they saw as a ''conspiracy for Whitlam to keep the seat warm and hand it over to Hawke'' and Whitlam was persuaded to stay on as leader.
Two months later, revelations about the Iraqi money scandal reignited Hawke's leadership hopes, but the embattled Whitlam still managed to survive by concealing the full extent of his involvement in the scandal from the Labor caucus and the public. Hawke would not enter Parliament for another three years and would not become Labor leader until 1983.
Perhaps the most striking thing in the US embassy's reports is the propensity for Labor politicians, party operatives and union leaders to speak to US diplomats in great detail and with much candour about internal Labor politics.
This is an enduring practice. US embassy cables leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010 revealed that senior NSW Labor Right faction leader, former senator Mark Arbib, was a ''protected'' US embassy source providing inside information and commentary on Labor politics.
Several other Labor MPS and party operatives were also identified as US embassy confidants. In the past three years the Gillard Labor government has been racked by persistent leadership tensions and infighting. It would be interesting to read what the US embassy's confidential Labor sources have been saying about all that.
Philip Dorling is a senior writer.
By Anthony Fyson | Published in History Today Volume: 54 Issue: 12
Anthony Fyson reads a letter from his great-grandfather, who as a young man was caught up in the Eureka Stockade, where gold-miners in Ballarat, Victoria, famously clashed with state troops, 150 years ago this month.
In December 1854, growing tension between the government of Victoria and the thousands who had flocked to the gold-fields near Melbourne over the previous three years flared into armed insurrection. Provoked by corrupt and insensitive policing, and harbouring long-standing grievances about extortionate mining licence fees and a restrictive system of land ownership, hundreds of miners burnt their permits and built a makeshift defensive stockade on the Eureka gold lead at Ballarat. The British colonial administration responded with overwhelming force. A brief but bloody assault led to some hundred casualties, including a likely total of thirty-five dead miners, in an act of repression commemorated in Australia to this day. Here is a contemporary account of what happened written by one miner, Alfred Madocks from Ipswich.
Madocks arrived in Victoria in May 1852. An adventurous young man twenty-one years old, he found the gold-rushes already in full swing and joined in with energy and enthusiasm, believing, like so many that one lucky strike would set him up for life. Melbourne’s population shrank as optimists and opportunists alike headed for the alluvial plains and craggy quartz hills inland from the city. Business and domestic life suffered for lack of staff and ships swung unattended at anchor in Port Phillip Bay. Seamen and people of all classes infected by the ‘gold fever’ set off with whatever equipment they could muster to seek their fortunes. Those who succeeded (sometimes with spectacular and well-publicised finds) sustained the enthusiasm of the rest. Shrewd traders went too, recognising the opportunities presented by the requirements of a migrant population in need of all manner of comestibles and creature comforts, however rudimentary.
Ballarat in 1854 boasted the richest alluvial goldfields ever discovered, and Madocks was drawn back time and again living in a tent city with thousands of others, or in a shack knocked together by himself and his mates. He worked on the goldfields – and eventually on a modestly productive gold-bearing quartz reef – until 1859, with intermittent periods of respite and odd-jobbing back in Melbourne. He wrote at irregular intervals to England, and twenty-three of his letters from Australia survive. Many of them are written in the paper-saving ‘crossed’ manner, which involved first writing normally across the page, then turning the paper through ninety degrees to allow a vertical layer of script, and occasionally the addition of some final ‘diagonal’ writing.
The Eureka letter is one such. Some 4,500 words long, it was addressed to Emily Gill, the girl Madocks had left behind in England. It was begun on December 19th, 1854, sixteen days after the Eureka engagement, and was completed in five instalments. He wrote from a timber hut, shared with mates, on or near Clayton’s Hill, Ballarat:
Dearest Emily
The excitement caused by the late unfortunate affair has prevented my answering your very kind letter which I received about November 2nd before this. I trust that you are safe and well as myself. I received your letter on my way to work the evening it being my watch below. I had the pleasure of reading it at fourteen feet below the surface among water, timber mine props, shovels, ropes, sperm candles, buckets, picks and so on and am sorry to say I made it very dirty.
I arrived here two and a half days after leaving Geelong and was at work next day and soon felt comfortable again. Since then I have bottomed two 140-foot shafts, worked out one (sharing 2 lb weight [of gold] among 12 men) and half worked out another, but little better. These are worse than good honest blanks because they take time and experience, and more than that prevent one perhaps from other chances which might make a fellow’s pile. Had it not been for the late disturbance we should have been halfway down with another by this time, but all work was suspended, the water rose in the shafts, and scores of rich claims were smothered. Our drives caved in and the bottom of the shaft burst. A sweet pretty job we had all last week. Even worse it is uncertain if we can repair it and the ground is not worth sinking a fresh shaft for. So much for civil war as regards personal interest. But we must not complain for we might have lost a number of our mess. As it was, one of our mates got shot and the poor fellow died next day. Another was taken prisoner and narrowly escaped getting lagged.
It may be that this brief account was the only reference that Madocks originally intended to make to the Eureka affair, since it is followed by a much longer report of the difficulties one of his uncles was experiencing on the gold-fields. Madocks was also a devout Nonconformist, was acutely conscious of his own failings and somewhat tearaway character, and was writing to a respectable lower-middle-class young lady in the hope of persuading her and her family that he would one day make her a suitable husband.
He may have had much to hide: oral family history (uncorroborated by firm evidence), has it that he was considerably more involved in the revolt than is stated anywhere in his letter. Many years after the stockade events, he confided to his daughter that he had shot and killed one of the few men who had died on the government side, a deed which lay heavily on his conscience for the rest of his life. Whatever the exact truth of that – and there are some plausible reasons for accepting it – the pressure for solidarity among the miners surely would have prevented Madocks from remaining entirely detached while his close mates were apparently so deeply involved.
The letter is untypical in the lengthy discussion it contains of news beyond the immediately domestic and personal. Although his first concern was probably to hide unwelcome information from his family and friends back in England, it would have been equally important not to reveal it in writing for fear of the letter falling into the hands of the Victorian authorities. Thirteen surviving ringleaders had been hauled off for trial in Melbourne after the engagement, but at the time Madocks was writing they were yet to go to court, and their sensational acquittals on the charge of high treason by a succession of juries did not occur until February and March 1855.
Despite these constraints Madocks seems to have had a change of mind after writing his first summary and decided to go into more detail, while taking care to distance himself from the events. So the unusual nature of the letter was established three days later, as he got on with penning a second instalment:
(22nd) I suppose by the time you receive this the Ballarat fracas or the ‘Eureka Massacre’ as our highly democratic Paper called it, will be known to your critics. They will have said their say about it of course, knowing as much again as us ‘Vagabonds’ who have witnessed both the affair and the long course of bad policy and mismanagement which originated it. I say this not because I by any means agreed with the miners here setting themselves up to subvert the present Government (for it must be obvious to all that although the country is at any time completely at the mercy of the People if they choose, a worse time than the present could not be) but because had there not been gross mismanagement it would never have occurred.
I will just state the whole affair briefly. A foolish Government when the diggings started made a law that no spirits should come on the mines (similar to the splendid American Maine Liquor Law) and this in a country where man nowhere forces his way through the trackless bush without leaving traces of the bottle in his path. It was evaded in every state and nothing weakens dependence in a young Government as the making of laws it cannot enforce. The only consequence was that men paid £1 or £1 l0s 0d for filthy poisonous stuff instead of about 8/- for a good article. After about two years of finding it sold at an average profit of 600 per cent by every store and petty Grog-shop-keeper on the mines, the Government swung to the opposite extreme and licenced large wooden Hotels on all parts of the diggings – about three times as many as could get a living. Thus instead of as before, when the miners had no regular places of rendezvous, they now had every opportunity of meeting and carrying on with impunity. I always like before giving any strong opinion on a subject to understand well not the after scenes but its origins and I now come to the origin of all this ‘shine’.
This matches in most particulars what is already known about the alcohol-related origins of the Eureka episode. It also suggests that in his mind, at any rate, the miners’ long-standing grievances about licence fees and land rights were no more than background to the real trigger of events. He is anxious to explain and to some extent justify what had happened. There were many points at which the build-up to the fighting could have been stopped, but to Madocks the main causes and effects are clear. He takes care to state his disapproval of the revolutionary aspirations of some of the leaders of the revolt, but is clearly also critical of government action.
What then follows, after another three-day pause in the concoction of the narrative, is a graphic description of the riotous attack on the Eureka Hotel of October 17th, 1854, which was a precursor of the main uprising. (This section was written on Christmas Day, when the miners always awarded themselves a holiday). The mob violence which Madocks records was, in his opinion, a direct reaction to the failings of the authorities then lodged at the government ‘Camp’ on the edge of the fledgling town. The police, military, magistrates and the Camp commander Robert Rede failed to proceed as the community thought they should against the murderers of one of the miners. The authorities responded to peaceful protests about unjust arrests with repressive patrols, usually carried out by ‘troopers’, as the armed mounted police were called. It was the troopers who would make unannounced forays into the diggings to check licences. Among them were transported convicts who had served out their time on Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). They were notoriously high-handed and aggressive, deliberately antagonizing a busy, if rough and ready, community, the majority of whose members were decent and law-abiding. Time was crucial to mining success, and it was no small matter to be summoned to make the lengthy climb out of a deep mineshaft to produce a piece of paper that the authorities might have already checked a number of times that month.
The third instalment begins:
(25th) The Eureka Hotel was the largest public house on the mines. From being in the vicinity of the Eureka lead, which was chiefly worked by the very worst men in the country (most of whom are from the counties of Clare and Tipperary), it was almost from the day of opening the scene of [violence] and robbery. Men had even been knocked down on the staircase, robbed and half-murdered. In spite of all remonstrance the Camp Office refused to notice these things, owing it was said to the Magistrate having an interest in the place. When the murder of Jas Scobie took place [on October 7th] (not 100 yds from the house) indignation was again raised. The proprietor Bentley and his wife were taken up on the charges and in spite of the clearest evidence and to the utter amazement of the Ballaratains, they were both acquitted. The most foul means had been used to smother the evidence.
Bills were posted round the diggings by the friends of deceased, calling a public meeting to find the murderer. All could see the consequences; the house was doomed to fall by the people. They met on the spot of the murder and but little oratory was necessary to excite the mob to fire the building, in spite of Officers, Troopers and Soldiers. It was a scene our shaft had run in and we could not get away [before] the fire commenced.
At this time Madocks had a share in at least one claim on the Eureka line, which at its closest ran within two or three hundred yards of where he may have been living. The Eureka Hotel seems to have been a little further away, on the early Melbourne Road, near where the Eureka Lead was joined from the north by the tributary Black Hill Lead. The stockade site was half a mile or so from the embryonic track running up Clayton’s Hill which Madocks gave as his address, but which may have been simply the location of the nearest store acting as a post office. Madocks elsewhere refers to the ‘bachelor hall’ he shared at the time, which had a separate bedroom and probably took the form of a timber ‘slab’ hut. But each claim they worked, whether near the Eureka Hotel or within the stockade area, would also have had some form of temporary, probably canvas, shelter on it.
The precise geography of the Eureka area in 1854 is unknown, not least because of the substantial transformation of the land surface brought about since by mining and subsequent building activities. Computer-aided research has recently confirmed that the nineteenth-century stockade monument is actually in the right place, though the exact extent of the ground enclosed remains uncertain. The general view is that its area was about one acre, though Madocks thinks it four times that size.
The description continues:
The Hotel itself was then just fire with a hot wind blowing the flames everywhere. Being of wood it burnt like a match. It was full at the time. Soldiers etc hurried out. Bedding, plate and furniture were thrown from the upper windows and piano, fiddles and pictures were smashed by the crowd below. I was sorry to find that they could not be kept from the drink of which there was a great store. Here was a fellow grasping a violincello and beating it against a smashed powder cask with a dozen more trying to get it from him. Here a drunken mob in all the variety of working costume battled with their fists. Now it was the piano – some thumping on the keys and others trying to capsize it. One big unshaven fellow fresh from work was trying at one end to produce an accompaniment to the first lines of ‘Sweet Alice Ben Bolt’ while at the other end another wielding an enormous shillelagh was with the aid of fearful oaths doing his heaviest to smash it. Another fellow climbing one of the lamp posts was placing in the broken frame of what an hour before had been one of the finest of public house lamps a specimen of earthenware which had just been thrown out of one of the servants bedchambers. Another with great gravity was earnestly endeavouring to fit a mounted trooper with a bellows in the shape of a battered tea urn. Meanwhile as about the most ridiculous scene of all a tall down-Easter was catering from the door with a box of cigars under his arm, distributing them with the polite question ‘Would you take a Birsley, Sir?’ In the rear of the premises was a scene for father – scores were leaping into the burning ruins, dragging out bottles of warm porter wine, etc and handing them round. Bentley escaped on horseback.
Next day some of the principal leaders were arrested. Meetings were called and the old licence question came up again. Many burnt them and all refused to pay any more. The very next morning as if on purpose to irritate the people out came the ‘traps’ for licence. They shot one man and took several prisoner. The natural indignation consequent on this wanton provocation was immediate. A rescue was talked of. Work was stopped. Soldiers and troopers drove back to the Camp. The diggers armed themselves and leaders were not wanting. More meetings were convened. Men drilled in companies night and day and soon, from the laudable and just object of rescuing the prisoners, a total subversion of the existing government was proposed.
This paragraph, which compresses a crucial six-week period of rising tension after the hotel fire, omits a great deal that Madocks must have known. A board of inquiry investigated the fire and heavily criticized the corrupt practices of Bentley’s magistrate friend D’ewes and a police officer. The colonial Governor Sir Charles Hotham promptly arranged to have them dismissed, but would not pardon three miners convicted of rioting. ‘Monster meetings’ were convened on Bakery Hill to protest against such perceived injustices and to promote the case for radical changes to the gold-fields administration. One, on November 11th, reportedly attended by 10,000 miners, launched the Ballarat Reform League, with a manifesto which was probably influenced by Chartist sympathisers known to be on the goldfields. It included demands for abolition of the licence fee and the gold commission, for full manhood suffrage and for fair representation in a parliament which imposed no property qualification on its members. Another meeting on the 29th resulted in a great crowd, enraged by news of the Governor’s rejection of the League’s demands, defiantly building a further bonfire of licences. The following day a smaller gathering swore allegiance to the miners’ flag, the Southern Cross, and that evening resolved to defend themselves against further licence hunts. Rede, meanwhile, kept himself informed of developments through spies and informants among the miners but became convinced, mistakenly, that an attack on the government Camp was imminent.
Madocks continues:
Many of the better disposed drew back and on Friday 1st December the insurgents foolishly threw up a stockade on the Eureka line, enclosing some four acres of ground on which were stores, tents, holes and all the motley assemblage of buildings which always surrounds the working end of a line. Here they remained on Saturday drawing supplies from stores and sending round detachments for arms etc. On Saturday night, instead of attacking the Camp which had been strongly barricaded, the greater part went into the forest to intercept a large body of soldiers reported to be en route here, leaving the Stockade in the charge of about 150 men, and these mostly pikemen.
The decision to intercept this force, removing most of the armed miners from the stockade, was not as irrational as it may seem, because the detachment was bringing field guns up from Melbourne, against which no defence of the stockade would have been possible. They had to be stopped in circumstances where the guns could not be deployed. In any case, licence hunts only took place during the day, so the miners apparently saw no pressing reason to stay overnight in the stockade.
At dawn of day on Sunday the fatal 3rd, the soldiers of the 12th and 40th attacked the Stockade and although those inside made a gallant resistance they were borne down by superior numbers and discipline. About 23 were killed and a great number wounded. The rest fled to the bush. Had the whole body been at quarters at the time the soldiers would have stood a poor chance. As it was several were killed and many wounded including several officers. Once in possession the soldiers bayonetted all who were not dead, fired the tents and stores and took off 150 prisoners.
That hated body of men, the troopers, committed acts of most wanton barbarity, murdering inoffensive people. (They had had none of the fighting being kept as a reserve). As an instance – one man living a long way from the scene and in bed with his wife was dragged from her arms and murdered in his tent, which they afterwards fired. They thus at one blow deprived her of her husband and everything she was possessed of. Some of these Gentlemen have since been picked off – they are all spotted and vengeance is not wanting.
The last sentence has an uncharacteristically vindictive ring. Could the pacific and pious Alfred Madocks have perpetrated such an act of revenge? The oral evidence suggests that the shooting he was involved in resulted from a close-quarters confrontation in which it was ‘him or the other chap’ – a common enough circumstance where attackers are storming low defences. However, it may be significant that the word ‘trooper’ rather than ‘soldier’ or ‘policeman’ has been handed down by word of mouth to describe the victim, most recently by Madocks’s grandson, who was unaware of the distinction between the categories of government militia at the time.
Madocks is correct in reporting that the troopers did not take part in the attack on the stockade, and that they did go on a murderous rampage afterwards. It is also certainly the case that in his letters Madocks reserves his highest moral tone for the situation of families and women on the diggings, so his indignation at what he witnessed is no surprise.
He was also a good shot. He was never without his five-shooting Colt revolver. He probably bought the firearm in England before setting sail and it served him well for killing kangaroo and other wildlife for the pot. It survives to the present day, the worn engraving on the chamber and deeply indented hammer testimony to its frequent use.
Crucially, however, Alfred Madocks offers no account of his whereabouts, nor any description of his actions, during the Eureka engagement itself, which only lasted a matter of minutes, or during its immediate aftermath when, with the rout complete, miners escaped as best they could or hid in the many mine workings within the stockade area. At least a hundred were taken prisoner, though most were released shortly afterwards unless any soldier or civilian would testify that they had taken an active part. The omission of any such personal account is intriguing. Madocks would have been far more likely to keep silent on a subject than to lie about it.
The attack on the stockade came just after dawn on a midsummer’s day, at about 4.45am. The only written evidence hinting that Madocks may have had more than a distant observer’s knowledge of what took place is to be found in the pages of a book he bought in Melbourne some three or four years later. The volume, a history of the state of Victoria to 1856, gives a fairly balanced account of the miners’ cause but absurdly eulogises the life and death of a Captain Wise, the senior soldier killed in the engagement. Madocks made a few marginal notes, one of them opposite a particularly fanciful description of Wise’s heroic demise and the retribution meted out to his killer. ‘Positively false – Patrick Murphy shot Wise,’ he wrote. An American called Ferguson later described how he was fighting alongside a certain Captain Burnette on the miners’ side and saw him shoot Wise, while others witnessed the black American John Joseph gun the officer down. They are all quite likely to be right, since the fighting was chaotic and Wise suffered multiple wounds, none instantly fatal, and was to survive for eighteen days after the battle.
The letter continues:
I was at the Stockade about seven o’clock. It was a lurid sight: dead bodies, arms of all descriptions, burning goods, wives and others mourning over the bodies of husbands or friends, all forming a scene which will be long remembered by hundreds. What must it have been like at Sebastopol? [The Crimean War was raging at the time]
Some of the leaders perished. The Commander in Chief Peter Lawler [Lalor] escaped. Many of the prisoners have since been [released] and some have been conveyed to Melbourne for trial. Martial Law was declared for a short time and reinforcements of men and artillery have been sent up. It has been a melancholy and unfortunate affair throughout but like most evils it will do good. The Licence Tax will have to be abolished and the lands thrown open.
It is only here that Madocks acknowledges directly the two long-standing political grievances that historians have held to have led to Eureka. He was right about the inevitability of reform, which the Eureka events certainly accelerated, though by how much is still disputed. He then reflects sadly on the condition of those attempting to get a living in Victoria:
Things in general are very bad in the Colony. Hundreds of poor deluded emigrants are wandering about the Towns unable to get employment. For a person who has made anything, he would be as well and do as well at home or in one of the other colonies. I know that should I next year be so lucky as to obtain a smile from fortune, who has hitherto looked so frowningly at me, I should soon leave here for ‘Home sweet home,’ for any old resident at Ballarat can now easily see that staying too long is as bad as not staying long enough. Of all those in Ballarat who are engaged in mining, there are not more than one third who intend stopping here any longer than they can help and most of these are married men. Most of the others have parents, wives, sweethearts or friends in some part of the world and stay hoping to join them soon.
The melancholy tone continues in the fifth and final instalment of the letter (the fourth is taken up with news about his friends):
(January 10th) I have resumed my pen. I think I never aim to finish my letter. You must excuse me for we have been working 36 hours out of 48 and though it will not do much more than pay expenses we are obliged to do it or lose the ground. But now the water has beat us after all, barely allowing us time to come up.
… What you have said about the diggings is very true except that for ‘exciting’ I should put ‘tempting’. From the experience I had in Town I decided on following mining once more as I could see that owing to the continual influx of immigrants wages would lower and that it would take two or three years to raise money enough to take me home with sufficient to go into anything whereas in mining I might if lucky make enough to give me a good start in something either here or at home. I trust it will not be very long for I know you are making many sacrifices for me.
[Emily did not accept the hint that their future together might be spent in Australia, though Alfred’s obvious liking for the country suggests that it would have suited him.]
... You talk of scrawls. When I compare your neatly written letter with my dirty, illegible, blotted, mistakeful, crossed, scrawl I am nearly too ashamed to send it or to write a shorter and clearer one. But the weather is so hot and my eyes get so weak from the mine and water down below and I have had so many different spells at this that you really must excuse it and must guess what you can’t make out.
... We have got two more claims on the Eureka and they show very well. As soon as we have drawn our timber out of our old shafts we are going on with them night and day and sincerely hope we may hit it this time. I have had a bad spell of luck but am nothing daunted.
… I have been reading this paradoxical letter and can’t make it out myself so I don’t know how you will manage it. I suppose the ‘Lady Hotham’ nugget will soon be famous. Some of my old mates were in that Party. They are lucky fellows – it is a splendid bit of Gold. I saw it the day after it was taken out.
The nugget in question was huge, weighing 1,177 ounces, and was named after the Governor’s wife. It turned up in the Canadian Lead a few yards south of Clayton’s Hill. By mentioning it, Madocks must have hoped to boost his beloved’s morale as well as his own, an exercise he found himself repeating in one form or another for a further five years. He ends on his customary note of piety:
I must now conclude and wish dearest love to yourself and friends and hoping that the New Year may bring blessings and prosperity to you and that the Almighty may protect you,
I remain, my ever dear Emily,
Your devoted Alfred
Alfred Madocks arrived back in England in December 1859 with about £1,500 profit from his gold-mining career. He trained as a brush-maker and set up a brush shop in the High Street at Chelmsford, Essex. He married Emily in 1861, but sixteen months later she died in childbirth. He never remarried, running his shop until his death in 1908.
- Anthony Fyson is a freelance writer and Alfred and Emily Madocks’s great-grandson. He is currently researching their story, using their many surviving letters.
* * *
Gold Mining
The earliest gold discoveries in Victoria were of water-worn nuggets scattered on flood plains and stream banks. Prospectors used ‘pans’ to ‘wash’ gold from the clays and gravels. Where the alluvium was deep, as at Ballarat, there could also be old stream channels (or ‘leads’) buried which often contained rich deposits. The difficulty lay in predicting the course of a subterranean stream-bed from the surface and then in staking a claim ahead of everyone else.
Each miner could claim a small patch of ground: in 1853 the maximum permitted area was 12 x 12ft per man. Narrow shafts were dangerously prone to flooding and collapse. The gold-bearing alluvium would be dug out and taken to the surface to be washed.
Gold was also found in the solid rock from which the alluvial gold had originally been eroded. Most such lodes were embedded, often invisibly, in the hard quartz, in veins formed during past geological eras as molten gold had intruded through cracks and fissures. Extraction was laborious, involving pick-axing and crushing tons of rock. The processes employed gave rise to lucrative technical specialisms and to the formation of ever larger mining companies.
Tony Stephens October 1, 2011
Working the land ... Joseph Lycett's c.1817 watercolour, Aborigines Using Fire to Hunt Kangaroos, depicts the innovative use of fire burning. Photo: National Library
Far from being hunters and gatherers, the first Australians may have managed the biggest farming estate on Earth, writes Tony Stephens.
THE still common assumption is that Aboriginal Australians in 1788 were simple hunter-gatherers who relied on chance for survival and moulded their lives to the country where they lived. Historian Bill Gammage might have driven the last nail into the coffin of this notion.
Rather, Gammage argues, the first Australians worked a complex system of land management, with fire their biggest ally, and drew on the life cycles of plants and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. They managed, he says, the biggest estate on Earth.
The publishers of his new book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, say it rewrites the history of the continent. It's a big claim. But not too big, Gammage says. ''When I look at the subject, I think, that's right. When I think it's my claim, I think people might regard me as a mug lair. But I believe the book will lead to a rethink of what the Aborigines did.''
Henry Reynolds, the historian who has written extensively on the effect of white settlement on indigenous Australians, says in a foreword: ''He [Gammage] establishes without question the scale of Aboriginal land management, the intelligence, skill and inherited knowledge which informed it.''
Gammage draws striking conclusions from more than a decade's research:
- The Aborigines of 1788 could not have survived recent bushfires that killed dozens of Australians and destroyed houses, flora and fauna. Uncontrolled fire could wipe out Aboriginal food. People had to prevent it or die. They worked hard to make fire work for them. They burnt off in patches, knowing the sensitivities of different plant species and that timing was crucial. Evidence strongly suggests that no devastating fires occurred.
- The Aborigines farmed as an activity rather than a lifestyle. They grew crops of tubers such as yams, grain such as native millet, macadamia nuts, fruits and berries. People reared dingoes, possums, emus and cassowaries, moved caterpillars to new breeding areas and carried fish stock across country.
- They knew that kangaroos preferred short grass, native bees preferred desert bloodwood, koalas tall eucalypts and rock wallabies thick growth. The Aborigines set templates to suit land, plants and animals. Explorers such as Eyre, Mitchell and Leichhardt noted how indigenous Australians fired grass to bring on short green pick to attract kangaroos and other animals. To do this they had to make sure the grass was nutritious and to provide shelter so that the kangaroos would not feel vulnerable.
- There is no such thing as pristine wilderness in Australia. More trees grow in areas now known as national parks than did in 1788.
Gammage, adjunct professor in the Australian National University's humanities research centre, is best known for his ground-breaking The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. His main sources for the new book are writing and art depicting land before Europeans changed it, anthropological and ecological accounts of Aboriginal societies, and the study of plant habitats. His huge bibliography include Abel Tasman in 1642, James Cook in 1770 and he credits researchers who sensed purpose in Aboriginal burning, including R.C.Ellis, Sylvia Hallam, Eric Rolls and Tim Flannery.
Some critics assume that early colonial artists romanticised their landscapes but Gammage says they were the photographers of their day and sought accuracy.
Joseph Lycett's painting, Aborigines Using Fire to Hunt Kangaroos (c.1817), depicts fire burning away from trees to a grassy area, driving kangaroos to the hunters' spears. By shaping the land carefully for grazing animals, the Aborigines paved the way for pastoral occupation.
''The more carefully they made the land, the more likely settlers were to take it,'' he writes. ''The Dreaming taught why the world must be maintained; the land taught how. One made land care compulsory, the other made it rewarding.''
Charles Darwin called indigenous Australians ''harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night and gaining their livelihood by hunting in the woods''. Gammage believes we have not learned enough from them: ''Europeans defined civilisation as being like them. They thought Aborigines didn't know anything.'' He writes: ''We have a continent to learn … we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.''
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage (Allen & Unwin, $49.99).
Copyright © 2011 Fairfax Media
Monday, 22 August 2011
From left, Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock were killed by firing squad; George Witton was given a life sentence
Harry "Breaker" Morant was a hard-drinking, charismatic Outback cowboy who wrote ballads about rural life and was famous for his horse-breaking skills. He was also, so history has it,a war criminal – one of three Australian soldiers sentenced to death for killing prisoners during the Boer War.
The story of their court-martial by the British was dramatised in the 1980 movie Breaker Morant, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Edward Woodward. When Cathy Morant, a distant cousin of the soldier, saw it, it confirmed her belief that the men were victims of a century-old miscarriage of justice.
Now she and the descendants of the other two soldiers, Peter Handcock and George Witton, have joined forces to seek a judicial inquiry into the case and, they hope, posthumous pardons. They believe that the men were unjustly convicted – they claimed to be acting under orders from Lord Kitchener, the commander of British forces in South Africa, not to take prisoners – and that the legal process was flawed.
In one of the most controversial episodes in Australian military history, Morant and Handcock were executed by firing squad in Pretoria in 1902, while George Witton's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. All three were volunteers, and had joined a mainly Australian regiment, the Bushveld Carbineers, raised to fight guerrilla commandos in the remote Spelonken region of Northern Transvaal.
Their defence for killing 12 Boers – that they were obeying shoot-to-kill orders from their superiors – was rejected at their trial. But James Unkles, an Australian military lawyer spearheading the campaign for a pardon, believes he has uncovered new evidence supporting their claim.
The documents, unearthed in British archives, include a legal opinion from that time, referring to "the idea that no prisoners were to be taken in the Spelonken", and the transcript of a British parliamentary debate where concerns were raised about military tactics in the war.
"This was well before the Nuremberg trials; these soldiers had every reason to believe that the orders they were given were in good faith, and they obeyed them in good faith," Mr Unkles said. "[They] were colonial volunteers ... not British officers educated in the finer points of the rules of engagement. Morant had been reprimanded [previously] for bringing in prisoners, and he finally got to the point where he obeyed the orders."
Morant volunteered to fight in an Imperial war far from home when Australia was still a collection of British colonies. An English migrant who became an Australian folk hero, he worked on Outback cattle stations before going out to South Africa. He gained the reputation of a womanising charmer, and his bush poetry was published in a national magazine, The Bulletin.
The killings of unarmed prisoners took place over four days, and followed the death of the men's commanding officer, Captain Frederick Hunt, during an assault on a Boer stronghold. Hunt was a close friend of Morant's, and the latter was reportedly enraged by accounts that his body had been mutilated. His last words, as he faced the firing squad, were: "Shoot straight, you bastards!"
Kept in solitary confinement for three months, the soldiers were not able to consult their lawyer until the night before the court-martial. All three were denied the opportunity to appeal. Their relatives, including Handcock's widow and three children, found out what had happened from the newspapers.
Last year Britain rejected a petition for pardons, so the men's descendants have now turned to the Australian government, which is considering whether to order a judicial review.
Peter Handcock, the great-grandson of the soldier, says he and his father want "some kind of resolution, even if it turns out that they were guilty after all". Handcock's execution greatly affected his son, Peter's grandfather, "a very troubled person" who lost contact with all his siblings, he said.
"My Dad tells me that it was the cause of great shame for the family, and that it was never spoken about. He didn't know about it himself until he signed up for World War II, 40-odd years later"
Mr Unkles says he has identified 10 legal grounds on which the soldiers – the only Australians ever executed for war crimes – were denied natural justice. He believes they were "scapegoated" for political motives: to cover up the orders allegedly issued by Kitchener, and to accelerate peace talks with the Boers. "For political reasons, three Australians were made to take the rap for senior officers."
Cathy Morant, who calls the court-martial "a sham", said: "I want it recorded in the annals that these accusations [of murder] were unfounded, and for future generations to regard them as the heroes that I think they were, not the villains that they're being portrayed as."
As well as the movie, the saga inspired a play and a string of books, including Scapegoats of the Empire, written by Witton, who had been released after three years following a petition by 80,000 Australians to King Edward VII.
The Australian Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, is expected to decide soon whether to grant a judicial inquiry. If the request is rejected, Mr Unkles plans to seek leave to appeal in the British High Court.
However, descendants of the Boer prisoners are opposed to a pardon, and historians such as Craig Wilcox, an Australian academic, dispute the existence of shoot-to-kill orders. Mr Wilcox wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that "the secret orders they claimed to have followed ... are surely mythical, a fabrication by desperate men in the dock".
Was Breaker Morant the victim of a British cover-up? - Australasia, World - The Independent
