This paper examines the impact of radical political movements on the development of parliamentary democracy in Victoria, Australia. Radical political groups sprang up in Victoria following the discovery of gold in 1851. Alluvial Gold has been described as the most democratic of minerals, allowing all classes, races and ages an equal opportunity to win material gain. When gold was discovered in abundant quantities in Victoria in the early 1850s, the old pastoral ascendancy that had dominated political life in the colonies was challenged by the flood of immigrants from all parts of the world. These immigrants gathered on the goldfields to demand their political rights. In making their demands, they were strongly influenced by ideas and examples from other continents and colonies, notably by the English Chartists and by the achievements of the Canadian colonists after their rebellions of 1837-8. As in Canada, so at Ballarat blood was shed by men uttering the cry 'no taxation without representation'. This paper argues that the Eureka Stockade did indeed have a democratising impact on the implementation of the Victorian constitution.

The notion of responsible government, or an executive responsible to a legislature, and through it to the people, was raised by Canadians in May 1829 when they petitioned the British parliament for self-government.^[1] Canadian precedents were very important for democrats to use in Australia in their fight to secure self-government and parliamentary democracy. A strong democratic movement, organized on the Victorian goldfields between 1853-5, was able to re-write the Victorian constitution after it had received Royal Assent in 1855. But as Peter Lalor, the Irish Commander-in-Chief of the diggers at the Eureka Stockade, commented in 1855; 'a British Government can never bring forth a measure of reform without having first prepared a font of human blood in which to baptise that offspring of their generous love'.^[2] Lalor's statement was made soon after the Eureka Stockade incident of 3 December 1854, when 30 miners were killed by Her Majesty's police and soldiers while in the act of protesting against the policies of the Victorian government.^[3] Lalor's argument was that blood had to be spilt before political reform could be gained. This view was radically different from that of Sir Edmund Burke, who at the end of the eighteenth century had extolled the need for ties within the Empire that were 'light as air but strong as iron'.^[4] This seeming paradox became the theme for Peter Cochrane's recent study of the evolution of responsible government in New South Wales.^[5] Here was a paradox that the Colonial Office and the Secretary of State for the Colonies would take a long time to come to terms with.

     London was not prepared to listen to the demands of its Australian colonists for self government as long as they remained convict colonies. But the clamour of the free citizens for a stake in government increased, led by the Australian Patriotic Association in Sydney from 1835. The Australian Patriotic Association, with W.C. Wentworth as Vice President, aimed to win representative government for New South Wales, albeit on behalf of propertied interests. Charles Buller MP was employed by the Association as their London agent in 1838, and he proved an able advocate of the citizens of New South Wales.^[6]

     Australian advocates of self-government were interested to read of rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837-8. Democrats in Lower Canada (French speaking Quebec) and Upper Canada (Ontario) were dissatisfied at their system of government, where the elected Legislative Assembly could be overridden by the nominated-for-life upper house and the Governor, whose ministers were not responsible to the Assembly. It was 'an arbitrary, arrogant, vindictive and fraudulent oligarchy'.^[7]      In Lower Canada, the Assembly under Louis Joseph Papineau had sent a petition signed by 80,000 citizens to London with 92 Resolutions seeking responsible government and a more liberal franchise. The petition was rejected and the governor issued warrants for the arrest of the militants, some of whom had declared a republic.^[8] A separate political reform movement arose in Upper Canada, led by the democratic minority in the Legislative Assembly. The militant wing of the movement took up arms but as in Lower Canada, the movement was ruthlessly suppressed by the Governor – by 1838 the Governor was none other than Sir George Arthur, late of Tasmania, who ordered the execution of captured rebels found guilty of treason, or else transportation to the Australian colonies.^[9]

     Lord Durham was sent to take over as Governor-General of Lower Canada in 1838, with the special task of reporting on the political situation in Canada. His Durham Report profoundly influenced the political future of Canada, and of Australia. From June to September 1839, the report was serialized in the pages of the Sydney Gazette.^[10] According to Sweetman, Governor Richard Bourke declared in the NSW Legislative Council that 'every man would do well to read it'.^[11] Durham recommended that the two Canadian provinces be united, that the Legislative Council become elective, and that the Executive Council be made responsible to the Assembly. This was in fact the platform of the democratic movement which had been suppressed, and these reforms would be introduced in 1848. Peter Lalor's words about the necessity of a font of blood preceding reform are certainly true of Canada in 1838, as they were also true of Ireland in 1798 and 1848.

     The Durham Report would influence the Australian constitutions of the 1850s, but before that report was adopted, the British government looked at offering some form of self-government to New South Wales. When James Macarthur was visiting London in 1842, he drafted with Charles Buller's help a document that became the basis of the 'blended house' concept of representative government offered to the Australian colonies from 1842 – one third nominated, two thirds elected, but with no concept of ministerial responsibility.^[12] This was a concept unique in the Empire to the Australian colonies – the concept of a single legislative chamber that blended appointed and elected representatives. Such an assembly was considered quite liberal by English standards, avoiding the problems of an 'appointed for life' upper house used in Canada.^[13] The Governor was however firmly in control of the government, for he chose his ministers who were responsible to him, not to the Legislative Council. Nor did the Legislative Council control funds derived from the sale of Crown Lands, an important source of income firmly controlled from London.

     The rapid growth of the Port Phillip District of NSW led to a demand for separation and in 1850 the NSW Legislative Council debated the 'Victorian Electoral Districts Bill', deciding on the electoral franchise for the new colony, and the Victorian representatives – most notably William Westgarth – fought unsuccessfully for the Chartist points of equal electoral districts and vote by ballot.^[14] On 1 July 1851 the new colony of Victoria came into existence, and writs were issued for the election of its first Legislative Council, modelled on the NSW Council. But within a week Victoria was convulsed by news of the discovery of gold within a hundred miles of Melbourne. By the time the new Council met in November, thousands of people were living and working on the goldfields, localities that were totally unrepresented by electorates in the new Legislative Council.

     When the Victorian Legislative Council sat for the first time in November 1851, one of the first motions of the elected members was to ask the British Government to grant control of the Crown Land fund to the Council so that it could manage the goldfields. Significantly, the Governor had decided that taxes raised by the gold license system would go into the Land Fund, which the Legislative Council did not control.^[15] From the very start, antipathy was set up between the elected and appointed members, and conflicting interests of the pastoralists and the urban merchants. The vast new population flooding into the colony to look for gold were not entitled to vote because they did not own or rent property, and had to rely on a few urban elected members of democratic inclination to represent their interests.^[16]

     A Secretary of State who probably agreed with Bourke's concept of bonds 'light as air but strong as iron' was Lord Pakington (Secretary of State briefly at the end of 1852). He wrote to the Australian Governors giving them permission to draft responsible constitutions. His letter to Lieutenant-Governor Joseph La Trobe was tabled in the Victorian Legislative Council on 30 August 1853. The letter conceded self-government, proposed a bi-cameral legislature with an appointed Upper House, and indicated that control of land revenues would follow. He also stipulated that the Crown would retain a veto over legislation of imperial concern.

La Trobe and his executive were determined that control of the government of Victoria should lie in conservative hands, and when the new constitution was drawn up late in 1853, it represented very firmly conservative interests.^[17] The franchise was based on property ownership; only property holders could stand for parliament; there was no payment of members, and the seats were distributed in such a way that rural interests could dominate metropolitan interests. The goldfields, which had the bulk of the population in 1853, were allocated no seats, so the mining interest was totally unrepresented.^[18]

     The issue of nominated versus elected upper house became lively after the Cape Colony (South Africa) secured an elected upper house in 1853, followed almost immediately by New Zealand, and the Melbourne Argus ran a campaign in 1853 during the debates over the Victorian constitution for an elected upper house.^[19] Such was the strength of popular feeling against the concept of an appointed upper house that it was never a question in Victoria, even though New South Wales chose that style. However the wily drafters were aware of a Canadian precedent of how a nominated upper house could be manipulated to suit government interest, and saw the effectiveness of an elected upper house, representing wealth and property, as an effective bulwark against a democratic lower house.^[20]

     Strangely, there were few popular meetings to discuss this important process of drafting a constitution.^[21] The largest component of the Victorian population were on the diggings, and from the beginning of the gold rush, their concerns had been directly linked to the licencing and administration of the gold fields. The first protest meeting was organized at Buninyong on 25 August 1851 when news arrived of a license fee of 30 shillings a month being levied on all miners. The Geelong Advertiser's reporter Alfred Clarke attended the meeting under the stars and wrote:

there has not been a more gross attempt at injustice since the days of Wat Tyler… It is a solemn protest of labour against oppression, an outburst of light, reason and right against the infliction of an effete objectionable Royal claim... It is taxation without representation. Tonight for the first time since Australia rose from the bosom of the ocean, were men strong in their sense of right, lifting up a protest against an impending wrong, and protesting against the Government. Let the Government beware!^[22]

The seeds of Eureka were sown. This early agitation was followed by a number of protest movements, beginning with the formation of a Miners' Association at Mount Alexander (Castlemaine) in December 1851. Geoffrey Serle traces these embryonic movements, which rose and fell with the movement of diggers from goldfield to goldfield.^[23] Bruce Kent's 1954 analysis of agitations on the goldfields still stands as an astute investigation. He argues that the protests were driven by opposition to tyranny and issues of social rights, rather than more explicitly political issues.^[24] There were protests at the Ovens and at Bendigo, a Colonial Reform Association was formed in Melbourne in 1853, and in Bendigo the Red Ribbon agitation was led by the Anti-Gold License Association.^[25] At Bendigo in the winter of 1853 protesting diggers wore red ribbons, refused to pay their licenses and collected a monster petition which was presented to Governor La Trobe on 1 August 1853, seeking immediate reform of government administration, the right to vote for the unrepresented diggers, and land reform.^[26] The petition - all 13 meters of it containing 23,000 signatures collected throughout the Victorian goldfields - was couched in Chartist terms.^[27]

     Protest meetings were held at Ballarat, involving Dr. Alfred Carr and J.B. Humffray, and a Chartist newspaper, the Diggers Advocate, was founded in Melbourne in October 1853 by Henry Holyoake and George Black, with H.R. Nicholls as an assistant editor.^[28] The newspaper was circulated around the goldfields, and its editors visited the various communities and organised public meetings and petitions. Its editorials called the Victorian government 'an arbitrary despotism… which denied the right to assist in making the laws under which they (the diggers) lived'.^[29] On 3 November 1853 the Argus reported the formation of a Gold Diggers' Association.

     The continual movement and volatility of the gold rush experience made it difficult to organize the diggers, and these political movements were short lived. However the arrival of a new and severe governor in the guise of naval man Sir Charles Hotham in July 1854 had cause to re-invigorate the popular movement. Although at first he had been popular, he soon showed a strong autocratic tendency. He chose to ignore even his Executive Council, and govern the colony personally. He ordered that the diggers must pay their licenses, and ordered his police and military to conduct regular inspections at the point of a bayonet.

     This unconstitutional and un-British situation was highlighted by James McEachren, a Sydney radical activist who personally experienced the arbitrary goldfields administration in 1853. He had come from Sydney with his brother to make some money selling spirits on the Victorian diggings, and had his stocks confiscated by a Police Magistrate in Wangaratta in November 1853. There is no evidence that this radical, who had been an agent for a diggers' movement in NSW in 1852, had any contact with Holyoake or Black and their Diggers' Advocate. But McEachren did make his personal protest with a pamphlet published in Melbourne in May 1854, The Dynasty of La Trobe and Foster Illustrated: or, The Evils of Summary Jurisdiction and Irresponsible Government Exemplified.^[30] Certainly some key principles emerge from his pamphlet – the issue of the qualifications of magistrates, respect for British justice, and the tyranny of a police force being armed with bayonets. He asks the Legislative Council:

Whether the liberty and property of the subject are to be left at the mercy of a generally incompetent and irresponsible Magistracy, wielding the unconstitutional and dangerous powers of summary jurisdiction to an unprecedented extent, and backed by a semi-military police to enforce their most tyrannous decisions at the point of a bayonet and with the edge of a sword.^[31]

His pamphlet appeals to the new Governor Hotham to purge the magistracy and appoint only men with knowledge of the law. He quotes Blackstone's Commentaries on summary justice and appeals to the Legislative Council 'to revise and retrench the summary jurisdiction system of this colony and of fixing, by a declaratory law, the liability of magistrates and the ultimate responsibility of Government for the acts of its paid officials.'^[32]

     Neither Hotham nor the Legislative Council took any notice of McEachren's pamphlet. The issue of corruption of the magistracy continued to fester until it flared into public indignation and action at Ballarat with the formation of the Ballarat Reform League on 1 November 1854.^[33] Basic Chartist democratic demands were central to the movement, symbolised most strikingly by the Ballarat Reform League Charter, and its flag of the Southern Cross, representing nationalist aspirations.^[34] The League adopted five points of the British Charter for democratic parliamentary reform – manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament, payment of members, short term parliaments - and presented its charter to Governor Hotham, demanding political representation and reform of the constitution. The Governor curtly dismissed the delegation. At that point the physical force arm of the League took over the movement. The Irishman Peter Lalor, son of an Irish MP and brother of the dead 'Young Irelander' of 1848, Fintan Lalor, stepped forward and shouted 'Liberty', and called for men to swear a solemn oath 'to fight to defend our rights and liberties'.^[35]

     In a situation echoing Canada in 1837, the Governor over-reacted and sent troops against the protestors, resulting in the attack on the Eureka Stockade where the physical force activists had armed and gathered. Robin Gollan reflected on the importance of the formation of the League. For a revolt against established authority to succeed, he argued there must be two components of a popular protest movement; there must be specific grievances, and there must be a political program.^[36] The Charter couched the popular unrest in political terms, and the League became the representative organisation of the diggers. As Gollan states, the protest at Ballarat 'decided that the language of Australian politics would from then on be the language of democracy'.^[37]

     The Ballarat Reform League came too late to influence the drafting of the Victorian constitution. The dramatic events of late 1854 took place when the draft was safely in the Colonial Office, having arrived in England on 31 May 1854, right at the end of the parliamentary session. In London the Crimean War totally occupied the Parliamentary benches, and the Victorian Legislative Council became angry at the delay in hearing about its fate. On 14 November 1854 it prepared an address to the Queen, stating that there was no reason for the delay and that 'public opinion was making itself felt with regard to the system of Ministerial irresponsibility to the people's representatives.'^[38]

     Sweetman argues that the Eureka Stockade unexpectedly gave rise to an important feature of the doctrine of Responsible Government. Almost a year before the Constitution returned home, the Colonial Secretary handed in his resignation to the Governor following the Eureka Stockade and the public outrage at the deaths of 30 diggers at the Stockade. Hotham accepted the resignation for 'if I were to decline accepting your resignation, the Queen's colony would be in jeopardy.'^[39]

     The political climate in Victoria had changed dramatically. Hotham began the hearings of a Commission of Inquiry into the Goldfields. Petitions poured into Melbourne from the diggings. The Bendigo Reform League 'earnestly warned' the governor on 13 March 1855 against proceeding with the treason trials against thirteen diggers captured at or near the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854.^[40] Between 22 February and 27 March 1855, juries refused to convict the Eureka men charged with treason; and on the last day of the trials, 27 March, the Goldfields Commission report was released, recommending sweeping changes to the administration of the goldfields, and the introduction of the Miner's Right which gave virtual manhood suffrage to Victorian citizens. To top off the successes, Hotham agreed to give representation to the goldfields electorates, and Humffray and Lalor were nominated by the diggers of Ballarat to sit in the Legislative Council, within a year of the Stockade.

     Bob Walshe, writing on the significance of Eureka in Australian History in 1954, shows quite convincingly by his quotations from the press that radicals in Victoria gleefully awaited the return of the conservative constitution in order to remodel it in a democratic caste.^[41] Weston Bate makes a similar point in his history of Ballarat.^[42] The question of responsible government was taken up by another radical-liberal with Empire experience, the lawyer Henry Chapman, who arrived in Victoria in October 1854, having edited a radical newspaper in Montreal in the lead up to the troubles in Lower Canada.^[43] He published a pamphlet in Hobart in 1854 called Parliamentary Government or Responsible Ministries for the Australian Colonies.^[44] This lucid explanation of responsible government was informed by his experience in Lower Canada in the early 1830s. His argument dwelt on the virtues of the Durham Report and the way it had achieved responsible government in Canada, and how this model should be applied to the Australian colonies seeking responsible government. Prior to writing this pamphlet, Chapman had been the paid employee of the Colonial Office as Chief Secretary to Tasmania. However his Radical Benthamite conscience demanded he could not support his governor on a vote in favour of the continuation of transportation to Tasmania, and he had absented himself from a crucial vote in the Tasmanian Legislative Council. For this action he was subsequently sacked by the Colonial Office, but he became a staunch democratic lawyer and politician in Victoria, achieving local fame with his pro bono defence of the Afro-American John Josephs at the Eureka treason trials in Melbourne in March 1855.

     In England debate did not start on the bills until December 1854. When news of the Eureka Stockade reached London with publication of a report in The Times of 27 March 1855, Robert Lowe (former NSW liberal MLC) remonstrated in the House of Commons that the Eureka incident was caused by the absence of self-government.^[45] Dr. Thompson, who was the agent for Victoria in London, actually made the difficult journey to Vienna to see Lord Russell (Secretary of State) and tell him that further riots might occur if he did not act on the constitutions. Lord Russell, preoccupied with the Crimean War, gave Thompson a promise of action and the bills were passed in early July and dispatched on 20 July 1855.^[46]

     W.C. Wentworth was in London whilst the bills were being considered, lobbying for the landed interests in NSW. He was championing his nominated upper house, and was disconcerted when a request came from Canada to change their nominated upper house to an elected upper house, and to introduce payment of members. These requests were agreed to by the London parliament.^[47] News that Wentworth's constitution bill had been criticised in London, followed by news of the Eureka Stockade, gave impetus to the Sydney radicals, although Henry Parkes greeted the news from Ballarat as 'melancholy' in his editorial for The Empire on 12 December 1854. However Lang and Hawksley welcomed the rebellion as a revolutionary step that would strengthen the cause of republicanism, writing in The People's Advocate of 9 and 16 December 1854. They advocated the unlocking of the land so as to avoid further bloodshed, and advocated the formation of a Land League, though it did not eventuate at that time.^[48]

     Meanwhile back in Melbourne the Legislative Council had grown impatient about the Constitution at the end of the parliamentary session of 1855, and on 12 June 1855, John O'Shanassy foreshadowed a motion for the next session whereby he would call for immediate Responsible Government.^[49] The beleaguered Governor Hotham was alarmed by this notice of motion, and wrote urgently to the Secretary of State for advice. If no advice was received, 'either I must accede to the wishes of the people, prepare for an excitement which will border on revolution, or leave the colony without a government'.^[50] Hotham was torn and unhappy, wishing himself away from Victoria and in command of a ship at the Crimea. He tried his best, but was totally unfitted for the situation. He was derided in the popular press, especially the new satirical journal Punch.

     He was mightily relieved when news of the passing of the Victorian Constitution arrived on 23 October 1855. But this presented a complicated and unclear scenario about the transition to Responsible Government. Hotham issued a memo to his executive in which he set out his understanding of the new constitution, and his understanding that it allowed him a veto over all legislation.^[51] The elected representatives of Council were outraged by this interpretation, but before they could force Hotham to withdraw it, he died suddenly on 31 December 1855 after catching a chill whilst doing an official duty.

     At the beginning of 1856, Victoria had neither Governor nor Government, for the Haines Ministry had resigned over the failure to pass the secret ballot legislation, introduced at Christmas 1855. Edward Macarthur, brother of James and head of the military in Australia, was appointed temporary Governor, and Haines was able to form a Ministry a few days later. The new electoral act was passed, which introduced Chapman's rules for the operation of the secret ballot – one of the Chartist points and a world first.^[52]

     This was the last act of the blended house before it was prorogued by the acting Governor, in expectation of the new bi-cameral parliament meeting at the end of 1856. When the new Legislative Assembly met, it was brimming with members from the urban areas and the goldfields who had been influenced by Chartist ideas. Geoffrey Serle outlines graphically the clash that occurred in the new parliament between the democratic lower house and the conservative Legislate Council, elected on a very limited franchise and a heavy pastoral gerrymander. In fact this impasse had been accurately predicted in an article in the Dublin Review of 1837, probably written by Henry Chapman, where the writer predicted with uncanny accuracy the obstruction which a Legislative Council elected on a conservative franchise could do to a democratic lower house.^[53]

     A number of political reform associations sprang up in Melbourne, Geelong and on the goldfields, with the Chartist points as their agenda, plus the demand to unlock the land.^[54] Early successes in the Assembly, led by Henry Chapman, were the secret ballot, the abolition of the property qualification for members of the Assembly, and the introduction of manhood suffrage and short-term (three year) parliaments. The Victorian Legislative Assembly led the British world in its democratic reforms, apart from the model colony of South Australia, that 'paradise of dissent' that had been founded by English dissenters upon liberal-Chartist principles, and so never had to shed a 'font of blood' to win reform.^[55]

     The democratic members of the Victorian Assembly provided a great stimulus to the Land League and its People's Parliament that met nightly at the Eastern Market in Melbourne for three weeks in July 1857, in close proximity to where parliament was sitting at St. Patrick's Hall. Eighty-nine delegates from 32 centres throughout the colony met to formulate a people's land policy and to fight for the People's Charter, especially payment of members, which would allow working people to stand for parliament. The excellent debates of the convention, chaired by the able Wilson Grey, were fully reported in the newspapers, and the League organized a monster petition signed by 70,000 people. demanding that Crown Land be placed on sale to former gold miners.^[56] As David Goodman explains in his analysis of the language of the 1850s, 'democratic politics in the 1850s…placed the issue of right to the land at the very centre of public discussion'.^[57] One of the most powerful and articulate justifications of land rights was written by 'Peter Papineau', who published a pamphlet Homesteads for the People in Melbourne in 1855. This pamphlet has all the hallmarks of Henry Chapman's writing.^[58] These very public discussions by the Land League had a strong impact on the Land Acts passed by the Victorian Parliament in the 1860s to unlock the land from the squatters' grasp.

     Unfortunately one aspect of the conservative constitution proved very difficult for the democrats, as the Dublin Review had predicted in 1837. When the draft constitution was being reviewed by the Colonial Office in 1854, the legal officer Sir Frederick Rogers worried about the property qualification for the Victorian upper-house, and that it entrenched the power of one small and elite group. He thought that in the event of a serious deadlock, there should be a provision for the Crown and Assembly to legislate. But this important suggestion was not listened to, leading to many deadlocks over the next 40 years.^[59] Hence the radical program of the democrats was amended or blocked by the entrenched pastoral interests of the upper house.

     But in spite of the conservative hold on the Legislative Council, and its attempts to frustrate land legislation, politics in Victoria was deeply marked by Eureka. R.N. Ebbels commented that 'the concessions to democratic government which followed the Stockade produced a political framework and an atmosphere which facilitated the development of Australian trade unionism.'^[60] The Ballarat Reform League could be counted a very successful political movement - the envy of its Chartist antecedents in Britain. With its basic demands won in 1855, it developed into a new organisation, the Victoria Land League, with its emblem the Southern Cross, and its motto 'Advance Australia'.^[61]

     Thanks to the democratic reforms instituted after the Eureka Stockade, the Victorian constitution came to echo that evocative phrase of Sir Edmund Burke: 'ties light as air but strong as iron'. In granting responsible government and the possibility of parliamentary democracy to the colony of Victoria in 1855, the British Government had granted a 'virtual republic', but in its graciousness it won the devotion of colonists to their British heritage. Had Lalor, full of Irish romance, spleen and passion, exaggerated when he spoke of the necessity of a 'font of blood'? No other Australian colony had to shed blood at its birth in the way that Victoria did, but we would argue that because blood was shed at Ballarat, and because of the memory of that blood, the language of Australian politics would ever more be democratic.