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Clip description
Peter Lalor (Chips Rafferty) addresses the miners who have just elected him leader, calling for volunteers. He tells the crowd that some of them may be killed, so men with wives and children should think hard before joining their new Ballarat Reform League. He asks those who are not ready to take an oath to the Southern Cross, the new flag behind him, to leave the meeting. He leads the remaining men in swearing an oath of allegiance to each other, to defend their rights and liberties. After the meeting, the men form up into military formations. They march up the hill bearing arms, behind a band playing 'La Marseillaise’.
Curator’s notes
It is clear in the way that Harry Watt mounts this scene that there was some revolutionary fervour, or at least a strong sense of solidarity, in the back of his own mind. He chooses a low angle as Lalor addresses the crowd, to accentuate the solemnity of the occasion and the heroic part played by Lalor. Some of the hotheads, represented by Tom Kennedy (the young blonde man in a black cap) demand arms, but Lalor stresses strict discipline, threatening to shoot any man who steals anything they do not need for their defence. Watt also cuts to a reaction shot of five or six women listening to Lalor. The one in the centre is the schoolteacher Alicia Dunne (Jane Barrett), who looks lovingly towards her hero, Lalor. In fact, the real Alicia Dunne later married Lalor.
This scene also makes clear a major shortcoming of the film. Chips Rafferty’s performance of these lines has some strength, especially when he is in full voice, but the quiet emotions sound false and unconvincing. Rafferty was an untrained actor, although relatively experienced by the time he made this film. He was not the director’s own choice for the part and the performance is rarely convincing. It was thought to be so at the time.
Harry Watt had spent a solid six months researching the events of the Eureka Stockade, so much of what we see in the film is accurate, but not all. Historians say the words spoken in the oath are exact: that is what they said at that meeting on Thursday 30 November on Bakery Hill. The newly made flag of the Southern Cross did fly over their heads and Lalor did address them with a rifle in hand. A band did play the French anthem – albeit the next day, and with a different group of men. Historian KS Inglis writes in The Australian Colonists (1974, Melbourne University Press) that Lalor was surprised to become the leader of ‘these outraged free emigrants’. About 500 men knelt with Lalor to take the oath. ‘Head bare, right hand pointing up to the flag and the sky, he said: ”We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties”. ”Amen”, they responded.’
Inglis notes that Lalor was later accused of inciting men ‘to take up Arms, with a view to make war against Our Sovereign Lady the Queen’:
He would always deny it and so would his aide and war historian Carboni. ‘It was perfectly understood and openly declared’, Carboni wrote of the diggers’ Council of War, ‘that we meant to organise for defence, and that we had taken up arms for no other purpose’.
The men began that afternoon to raise a stockade on a hill at the Eureka lead, a place largely occupied by Irish miners. Carboni wrote that it covered about an acre of ground ‘in higgledy-piggledy fashion’. Carboni himself walked with a limp, having fought in 1849 for the Roman Republic, but Peter Lalor had no military training. According to Carboni, Lalor had no revolutionary intent either. He sent two men that evening to the government camp to demand the release of diggers arrested that morning, and a promise to end licence hunting. They reported back that Commissioner Rede dismissed the agitation about licences as ‘a mere cloak to cover a Democratic Revolution’.
