We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright Page B

was on, alerting neighbours to the threat. (Joe was the universal slang for police. It
was not a nice word.)
    WHO COULD VOTE?
    In 1854 the Victorian government consisted of an Executive Council : the Lieutenant
Governor, the Colonial Secretary, the Attorney General, the Colonial Treasurer and
the Collector of Customs. Then there was the Legislative Council , which had eight
members nominated by the Governor, and 35 by voters. You could vote if you were:
a British subject, male, over 21 years old and a free colonist. There was also a
‘property qualification’. You had to own land worth £100, or a lease worth £10 a
year or pay rent of £10 a year—quite substantial sums.
    It was this property qualification that effectively disenfranchised most of the
new immigrant population. Prior to the reform of the Land Acts in the 1860s, it was
very difficult to get access to small parcels of land. Victoria was thus governed
by a system where the land-owning ‘squattocracy’ had more than their fair share of
representation, while the diggers have none at all , as merchant Robert Caldwell put
it. At present , wrote Caldwell, the diggers had no constitutional way of calling
attention to their grievances, real or fancied. It was a huge problem.
    Licence hunting by the police was heavy-handed and quite random: a form of victimisation
that particularly played on the shame of being unable to afford a licence. Very few
like to have their poverty exposed , assessed the Geelong Advertiser. But that was
precisely what the practice of indiscriminate licence checking achieved: the licence
law makes poverty a crime . If you were caught you were imprisoned—which turned a
loyal subject into a broken-spirited man . Especially if he’d been arrested in front
of his wife and children and dragged away at the point of a bayonet.
    To rub salt in the wounds, the police were beardless boys , as digger John Bastin
put it, who would not leave the camp unless arrayed in uniform and gold lace —whereas
(said Henry Mundy) the diggers were as fine a class of men as anyone could wish to
see, many of them well educated, doctors, lawyers, merchants’ sons. He went on: These
were men of pluck and spirit and intolerant of injustice, indignant at the impervious
and corrupt administration of the law .
    For American George Francis Train, however, it was political. He had no argument
with the licence fee itself. He thought it a perfectly reasonable trade for wood,
water, a gold escort and the privilege of driving a spade into the earth. What Train
despised was the Victorian Legislative Council, an institution he called a burlesque
on free representation . It was absurd that the miners had no vote, no voice in parliament.
Citizen George, who would later run for the US Presidency as an independent, could
patently see there is a strong Australian feeling growing up , rooted in the fundamental
democratic principle: taxation without representation is tyranny .

ENTER ELLEN YOUNG
    From her tent on Golden Point, Ellen Young could see what was coming. At 44, she
was a community elder thanks to the unusual demographics of gold-rush Victoria. She
was also a woman of keen intellect who had been a prolific poet since the age of
thirteen. Today, you can find her lifelong collection of hand-written poetry bound
in a leather volume in the Ballarat Library. But it was on the first day of the miserable
winter of 1854 that Ellen decided it was time to go into print, publishing her first
truly political poem in the local newspaper, the Ballarat Times.
    She had written the poem the previous week, during a flood. At the height of the
storm, Ellen later recalled, she rescued her mattress and then her spleen evaporated .
‘Ballarat’ is a sixteen-verse commentary on the community’s woeful living conditions
and depressed emotions. It begins ominously:
    If you’ve not been to Ballarat
    Then stay away from there;
    I would not have my worst foe’s cat
    To have such sorry fare.
    Ellen