Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution by Peter Fitzsimons

Author:Peter Fitzsimons [FitzSimons, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9781742755250
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2012-10-23T13:00:00+00:00

What makes the whole issue of Fletcher, McIntyre and Westerby even more galling is that only four days earlier the Board of Inquiry, which interviewed 58 witnesses at Bath’s Hotel in the first weeks of November, released a public report heavily covered in the newspapers that went a long way towards acknowledging that the diggers’ outrage over both the collection of license fees and the Scobie case were justified! In the case of the Bentley trial, it said, ‘the Bench’s decision was opposed to the facts and evidence elicited’, the effect of which created ‘a unanimity in the popular feeling’ among the rioters.19

But look what the Board said about the man in charge of that whole case!

‘A subject of deep regret’, it noted, is how Police Magistrate John Dewes ‘laid himself under obligation to a class of person whose conduct in their capacity of licensed victuallers brought them under the supervision and scrutiny of the Bench of which he was Chairman, thereby subjecting himself to influences unbecoming to his position as police magistrate and public officer’.20

Exactly!

Among the report’s final conclusions is the observation that ‘hunting sly grog sellers and taking up unlicensed miners’ have made the police ‘very obnoxious to the diggers, and it had a most pernicious effect on the morals of the police force …

‘With regard to the employment of Police in arresting unlicensed miners, your Board believe that no duty in which the police are employed is so calculated as to render them hateful to the population as this … Your Board are therefore of the opinion that, were the license fee abolished, and the police released from the false position in which they are placed by being made collectors of revenue, their efficiency would be greatly increased, their moral influence with the community would be raised, and, as a consequence, the extent of the force which is now hardly adequate to the duties required would no longer be necessary.’21

For the trouble Dewes has caused them, for the way he has conducted recent judicial proceedings in a manner that has subverted ‘public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the the Bench’,22 His Excellency has already directed that ‘the name of Mr Dewes be erased from the Commission of the Peace, and that he be informed that the Lieutenant-Governor has no further occasion for his services’.23 The government had even gone one better and announced the week earlier that another, more powerful Goldfields Commission of Enquiry would soon be set up to investigate the whole administration of the law at the goldfields.

Despite this tacit recognition that the administration of law was lacking and the official acknowledgement that Dewes had been corrupt - which had, after all, been the primary cause for the Eureka Hotel being burnt down - the government had still gaoled McIntyre, Fletcher and Westerby. Hopefully, the diggers’ delegation will be able to sort this out in person with Sir Charles Hotham.

Some on the goldfields, however, do not wish to wait and would prefer a more violent means of liberating the diggers.

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