The morning was spent returning the caravan to a pristine state, almost as it looked one year ago except for a couple of tiny worn marks on the leather upholstery. Chris drew on his skills as a professional painter to undertake nearly all the cleaning; I drew on my experience as an appreciator of his efforts. I was worn out by lunch time, he not so. It would have been easy to have spent the rest of the day sitting about camp unmotivated to go out and explore.
We decided however to set off for the Eureka Stockade if nothing more, this one of the jewels in Ballarat’s historical tourist attractions. And so here is a quick run-down of the local history, again:
The first non-indigenous settlers in the Ballarat district were a co-operative party of squatters from Geelong, who arrived in 1837 seeking grazing land for sheep. Within the year, there were several pastoralists in the area who had taken up runs. By 1846, there were five million sheep in the Port Philip area, now known as Victoria.
As I have already written, gold was discovered here in 1851, and between that year and 1854, the population on the diggings rose from 6,000 to 25,000, and the area became a sea of tents and rough dwellings. Even in the beginning with the huge avalanche of arrivals, the need for law and order was paramount, and so the government settled on the idea of a licence fee which would in theory, cover the cost of administering the goldfields, and also as a deterrent to those considering leaving their jobs in other parts of the colony to join the mad rush. In October 1854, it was set at thirty shillings, more than a week’s wage and payable whether the digger found gold or not. The goldfields police were ruthless in enforcing this, thus creating much ill feeling.
Within a month, the miners had had enough, met and agreed to action; they met at Bakery Hill in Ballarat, burnt their licences and raised the Eureka Flag (the ragged remnants of which are now kept in a “shrine” in the Art Gallery, in much the same way the original documented Treaty of Waitangi is) in protest at the unfair conditions.
For protection, the miners barricaded themselves into a hastily erected stockade armed with a few guns and pikes. But 300 soldiers and troopers attacked the stockade on 3 December, killing twenty eight miners and wounding many more; a massacre. There was of course public outrage and so this was the beginning of a more democratic legislative assembly in Victoria. The Eureka Rebellion was the birth of democracy in Australia.
By 1855, Ballarat’s alluvial gold was all mined out and efforts turned to digging for deep leads. Diggers worked in more co-operative groups or small companies were formed to undertake the purchase of mining machinery and operate on a more industrial level. However many of those same diggers remained working away, and among them were large groups of Chinese referred to in earlier blogs, who had trudged up from South Australia. They were treated abominably, expected to pay much more than their European colleagues and in 1858 had their own modest rebellion. With faith in the changes that the Eureka Rebellion had brought, they petitioned the government and were successful. This is well documented at the Sovereign Hill Mine we visited yesterday.
The town grew and grew about the mining activity in the east, with a new well planned town planned in the west, this latter with wide streets and grand public buildings. Just as occurred later in Mount Isa, there was great rivalry between the settlement that had grown up haphazardly around the mine and the more formal administrative centre. Over the intervening years the two parts of Ballarat merged and embraced the fine architecture that was born out of this rivalry.
But getting back to our pilgrimage to the Eureka Stockade; there is little there now but an aged pile of concrete, the names of those who were massacred and four old graffitied cannons pointing to the four corners of the earth. Given the significance of the event, we were rather disappointed. Fortunately, we had read in a tourist publication that the construction going on down in the corner is the “Australian Centre for Democracy @ Eureka”, an $11 million “redevelopment” due to open in July 2012, so obviously there was something here more than this tired memorial, and again we are either too early or too late.
Now quite recovered from my morning’s efforts, we decided to drive to the Botanic Gardens at Lake Esmond, just around the road. Here we discovered an old deep clay pit filled with murky water, well-populated by water fowl, and the odd fisherman who was more intent on escaping the heat of home rather than honestly expecting to find anything on the end of his line. We walked about the lake, along the dusty scrub lined path, glad for the exercise but otherwise not greatly impressed, and decided that we would do better by driving across town to the city’s official Botanic Gardens beside Lake Wendouree.
Lake Wendouree is an artificial lake, the result of damming a natural wetlands in 1851, for recreational purposes. Today there was much activity by way of a rowing competition, reminiscent of that seen at Geelong just days ago. Right there, at the race start point is an Olympic Rings monument, a reminder that the Lake hosted the rowing, kayaking and canoeing events during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Obviously there was water in the lake that year, because there have been numerous occasions when the water has dried up, as it did in the more recent drought years from 2006 to 2011.
Bordering the lake along the western shore are extensive parklands, forty acres in total, divided up into areas simply to provide shaded picnic and playgrounds, and a large area gazetted in 1857 as Botanical Gardens. There is an avenue of Mammoth Sequoias, thus called because their lower branches straggle scruffily ground wards like the great horns of mammoth, which of course we are all so familiar with, glasshouses full of fuchsias, geraniums and hydrangeas, an avenue of bronze busts of all Australian past prime ministers (with a gravel space ready for Julia’s when she falls off her perch) and a mass of other trees and plants one would expect in such a formal garden. We enjoyed wandering about in the shade before heading back through the quite Sunday streets, pausing to enjoy sundaes at our favourite restaurant, before coming home and touching base with my parents on Skype.
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