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Clip description
Government soldiers have taken up positions around the Eureka Stockade, early on the morning of 3 December 1854. The miners do not expect an attack on the Sabbath. It begins with a signal from a bugler. The miners react quickly, taking up positions along the flimsy walls. Peter Lalor (Chips Rafferty) dispatches his commanders to cover attacks coming from two sides. The soldiers fire first, killing a man raising the Eureka flag. Casualties mount on both sides, as the soldiers with fixed bayonets storm the barricades. Mounted policemen begin their charge with swords drawn. Inexperienced miners with pikes fall back, as the horses leap into the compound. Many miners are killed in the hand-to-hand fighting. A marksman takes aim and shoots Peter Lalor in the shoulder. The battle is lost.
Curator’s notes
This is the climax of the film, the storming of the Eureka Stockade. The depiction is far more savage than might have been expected by audiences in 1949. Scotsman Harry Watt was an experienced and highly esteemed director by this time. He builds this sequence with great skill and clever use of low light, to simulate dawn. There are a number of high-value shots, such as the charge of the mounted policemen towards camera, which build excitement. There is a strong sense of chaos in the hand-to-hand fighting and some of it is pretty brutal, such as the shot in which a one-armed man sitting on the ground strikes with sword at the legs of a passing soldier and is then dispatched himself, by a blow from a mounted policeman.
Watt’s command of film technique was far in advance of what was practised in Australia, where few features were being made. He began his career in documentaries in England, and in 1936, he co-directed Night Mail, one of the most famous documentaries ever made, with Basil Wright. Early in the war, he co-directed some highly influential documentaries about Britain’s war effort (including London Can Take it, 1940, and Target for Tonight, 1941). He also made two fiction features for Ealing, before being sent to Australia in 1944 to make what became The Overlanders (1946).
Australian historian KS Inglis writes about the battle recreated in this clip in his book The Australian Colonists (1974, Melbourne University Press). Most of the miners were still asleep when the attack began, from both north and south, at dawn:
There were 30 cavalrymen and 87 foot soldiers of the 40th Regiment, 65 foot soldiers of the 12th Regiment, 70 mounted police and 24 policemen on foot. On Lalor’s count the defenders had about 70 guns, 30 pistols and 20 pikes, many of the men with arms having only one or two rounds of ammunition. When the attackers were about 150 yards off, the men in the stockade fired, hitting several soldiers. The soldiers and troopers fired two volleys back. Lalor, waving to his men to get down into holes, was shot in the left shoulder and fell. The men with pikes stood firm at the barricade, an easy target for muskets. Soldiers and policemen fixed bayonets and charged the stockade, and in ten minutes the battle was over – too quickly for some of the mounted police, who stuck their bayonets into dead and wounded bodies.
Figures for the casualties differ from one historian to the next. Professor Inglis estimates that between 30 and 40 of the participants were dead or dying. A captain of the 40th Regiment and four private soldiers were killed.
Twelve other soldiers and one policemen were wounded. Of the diggers, 20 were buried at Ballarat and perhaps another 10 died later of wounds. Two of the dead soldiers, and ten of the dead miners, were Irish. Of other rebels killed, three were from England, two from Scotland, and one each from Canada, Nova Scotia, Hanover and Prussia. Only one was Australian-born. It was, as Lalor said, a movement of men who had come thousands of miles to labour for independence.
Lalor escaped on a horse owned by a Catholic priest, to the priest’s house, where an Irish doctor took off his left arm. Lalor stayed in hiding for several months, until the 13 miners who were tried for high treason and other crimes were all acquitted by juries in Melbourne. Raffaello Carboni appeared before Judge Redmond Barry, who would later become famous as the judge who sentenced Ned Kelly. The government set up a commission of inquiry, which found fault on both sides. The miners’ licence system was soon replaced by a duty on exports of gold.
KS Inglis writes:
If the export duty had been introduced earlier there would have been no Eureka stockade. If there had been no Eureka stockade the government of Victoria in 1855 would not have given a vote to every purchaser of a miner’s right and thus granted virtual manhood suffrage on the goldfields. The new constitution for the colony was well on its way to Westminster before the end of 1854. Eureka made it more nearly democratic.
