Lockdown Australia: Eureka Rebellion, Round Two

The Australia you thought you knew has been lost. Down under, the land where women glow and men thunder, is simply a line in a song. A nation once famed for its easy-going egalitarianism is now sprinting towards segregation and authoritarianism. A new feudal class has emerged and asserted dominance over Australian society and almost every check and balance designed to hold Australia’s democracy together has been bulldozed. The behavior of the Chinese Communist authorities toward pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, condemned by governments across Australia, was replicated on the streets of Melbourne last week. At the time of writing, the cities of Sydney and Melbourne are under stricter curfews than either Kabul or Pyongyang.

Australia became a nation in 1901 but the genesis of Australian democracy occurred decades before on the goldfields of Victoria, in what became known as the Eureka Rebellion. The gold rush of the 1800s was a source of economic upheaval in the fledgling colonies. An influx of wealth into the hands of the citizenry left authorities without the resources to maintain order. The lure of easy pickings on the goldfields left cities and towns so devoid of manual laborers that the governor of Victoria was forced to free prisoners from his own jails, on the understanding that they would serve as special constables in the police force.

To slow the growing imbalance between the citizens and the crown, a series of punitive measures were implemented to slow the amount of wealth being amassed in private hands. Exorbitantly priced mining licenses amounting to several months’ worth of wages afforded miners the right to just eight square feet of diggings. Along with a detachment of English soldiers, thousands of troopers—many former criminals—were sent to the goldfields to ensure compliance. The prospect of preemptive taxation via mining licenses, taxation entirely without representation (only significant land-holders were able to vote at the time), and the heavy-handed enforcement tactics of the colonial authorities led to resentment among the miners.

In late 1854 Peter Lalor, an articulate Irishman, gathered a group of “diggers” together near Ballarat. A crude stockade was assembled and the men began drilling with whatever weapons were at hand. Flying proudly above the Eureka Stockade was a new flag, representing the blue sky of possibility and the stars of Crux—the Southern Cross—geometrically arranged to symbolize the coming together of people from all corners of the globe: Australian by choice, not circumstance.