This month Stella celebrates The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright, the winner of the 2014 Stella Prize.
What sparked your initial interest in the story of the women behind the Eureka stockade?
My curiosity about whether women were involved in the Eureka Stockade was piqued by my previous doctoral research into female publicans (which resulted in my first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge). I discovered then that the Eureka Hotel in Ballarat was owned by a woman, Catherine Bentley. The burning of the Eureka Hotel was a pivotal event in the lead up to the massacre at the Stockade. Catherine’s centrality to the Eureka story got me wondering how many other women might have been part of the Ballarat community in 1854, and what they might have been doing. This simple question sparked ten years of research and a big, fat book. Turns out there were a lot of women and they were doing EVERYTHING!
“…a gripping and compelling read.”
How did you conduct research, and sustain momentum in the ten years that it took you to write The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka?
I got pregnant with my third child the same time I started the Eureka research proper. (The research was funded by an ARC postdoctoral grant.) So it was a hectic few years! I had two kids in primary school and a new baby to juggle with the new project. I coped by doing all the research first, and leaving all of the writing to the second half of that decade, when I’d had a bit more sleep and could begin to process all that I’d discovered in those precious years in the archives. That balance – between research and writing – is an anxious one to negotiate. The question is always: how will I use this? How will I use this? In the end, the momentum is sustained by great passion for the work and the gut feeling that you’ve got something new and important to share.
You inhabit the roles of a historian and a writer. How did these roles intersect in the creation of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka?
Writing Forgotten Rebels was the first time I’d been able to step out from the role of student scholar to legitimate scholar. No-one had to examine the results of my writing. There were no marking matrixes to abide by. The only benchmark I had to reach was the eternal question for any author: is this good writing? Will an audience be engaged by what I have to say and the way I am saying it. My driving impulse was to test my literary skills. I wanted readers to FEEL the way I had felt when I was immersed in the archives all those years, when I was practically living in Ballarat in 1854, in the tents, down the mine shafts, on the muddy streets, behind the barricades of the Stockade. I didn’t know whether I had the capacity as a writer but I damn well wanted to try!
In researching and writing The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, what were some of the most surprising unknown details you uncovered about the role of women in the rebellion?
The headline finding is that a woman was killed at the Stockade, defending the life of her husband from the troopers. We don’t know her name but a contemporary diary entry delivers the fact of her death. One of the most surprising elements of this archival find for me was that so many historians before me had used exactly the same diary that reveals the woman’s death, yet none of them had thought the detail important enough to include in their telling of the Eureka Stockade story. The myth of Eureka as an exclusively masculine event – the birth of Australian democracy, delivered by men – had been created and protected by male historians. It was an object lesson in always going back to the primary sources armed with a different set of questions. Those questions will likely produce different answers.
The book emphasises the impact of the rebellion on Australian identity and democracy. How do you see the legacy of Eureka influencing contemporary issues of social justice and political activism in Australia today?
The Eureka story has been used as a political football since at least the late nineteenth century: a symbol of resistance to tyranny and injustice that is utilised by both progressive and conservative forces. The mining industry still evokes Eureka as a touchstone of the need to resist oppressive taxation laws by government; unions still proudly fly the Eureka flag as an emblem of workers’ rights and entitlements. I think the most enduring legacy to come out of Eureka is the fact that the polyglot, heterosocial, cross-cultural, multi-racial community of Ballarat raised its voice as one, calling for a voice in making the laws that affected peoples’ daily lives. This call for a representative voice is fundamental to democracy. It was also critical to the referendum that was held and lost in 2023 to give our First Nations’ people a voice to parliament. The story of Eureka is not over. The fight for justice continues.
About the Author
Professor Clare Wright is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare holds a PhD in Australian Studies from the University of Melbourne and an MA in Public History from Monash University and is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University.
About the Book
The Eureka Stockade.
It’s one of Australia’s foundation legends—yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren’t there. But what if the hot-tempered, free-spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them, inside the Stockade, when the bullets started to fly? And how do the answers to these questions change what we thought we knew about the so-called ‘birth of Australian democracy’?
Who, in fact, were the midwives to that precious delivery?
Ten years in the research and writing, irrepressibly bold, entertaining and often irreverent in style, Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat—women who made Eureka a story for us all.
Judges Report
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka sheds a bright new light on a dark old Australian story. In her account of the Eureka Stockade and the years leading up to it, historian Clare Wright revisits that well-trodden territory from an entirely new perspective, unearthing images, portraits and stories of the women of 1850s Ballarat and the parts they played not only in its society but also in its public life, as they ran newspapers, theatres and hotels with energy and confidence.
A rare combination of true scholarship with a warmly engaging narrative voice, along with a wealth of detail about individual characters and daily life on the goldfields, makes this book compulsively readable. It has a highly visual, almost cinematic quality, with vivid snapshots and pen-portraits of goldfields life. It also moves briskly from one scene or character to the next, with variations in pace and mood, in a way that heightens anticipation and suspense even though we know about the violence that will eventually explode as the tensions between the miners and the forces of officialdom increase to a point beyond containment.
The book explores the different kinds of power and influence that women wielded, and reveals the importance of their role in the miners’ growing resistance to oppressive government regulations. That resistance culminated in the fifteen minutes of chaos that came to be known as the Eureka Stockade, leaving four soldiers and at least 20 miners dead – as well as one unnamed and hitherto unrecorded woman, an eyewitness account of whose funeral Wright has unearthed in the private diary of a shell-shocked Ballarat citizen.
Material from newspapers and journals reveals a flourishing female culture in the life of the goldfields: there are notices for dances and balls where childcare will be provided, stories of women setting up a business in baby clothes, even advertisements for breast pumps. Wright also makes extensive use of private journals and letters, which are always a revealing and sometimes very moving source of information about the ordinary folk who get written out of the official records and histories. Her frank and lively style of storytelling makes her material accessible without sacrificing either the scholarly accuracy of her account, the depth of its detail, or the complexity of its ideas.
Traditionally represented as a key moment in the forging of Australian masculinity, the Eureka conflict and the events that led up to it are shown in this book to have involved many women as well. Far from the popular image of a wild shantytown with an all-male population, the book reveals a relatively ordered goldfields society where commerce, domestic life and even theatre all flourished. The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a revisionist history written not in a corrective or a combative way, but as something more positive and celebratory: Wright does not attempt to discredit existing versions of events, but rather to deepen and enrich our knowledge of Eureka and our understanding of its place in Australian history.
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