FitzSimons - Eureka : the unfinished revolution

Like most Australians, the saga of the Eureka Stockade is in the very marrow of my bones. As a primary school kid in the late 1960s, I recall both the fun of participating in a mock Eureka Stockade re-enactment at the Mangrove Mountain Community Fair, and being pleased that I got to dress up as a good rebel and not in the red coat of a bad British soldier. We learnt about the subject briefly at Peats Ridge Public, and it was almost as much fun a legend from Australias past as the bushrangers - not that I was particularly interested in the Eureka saga academically.

Nevertheless, in Mr Rex Wards history class at high school in Sydney in the mid-70s, that changed. On one particular sleepy afternoon I was doing what I usually did in history class - multiplying the number of bricks on the wall from top to bottom, by the number of bricks from left to right - when Mr Ward started his lesson on the Eureka Stockade. Remembering Mangrove Mountain and the excitement of it all, my ears pricked up and, for the first time in months, I not only sat up straight but went further. Out of pure bloody-mindedness I began to listen , and it was right there and then that my love of Australian history began - my enthrallment with that particular story sparked a wider, burning passion. The action! The characters! The fact - and this was perhaps the key - that this was a real Australian story!

The leap forward to this book, however, was only relatively recent. A couple years ago, at a meeting of the directors of Ausflag in the Sydney suburb of Crows Nest, we were sifting through many worthy submissions from our fellow citizens of what a modern Australian flag should look like when the thought struck me: what a pity we Australians dont have our own version of the Americans legendary Betsy Ross story, that countrys purported maker of the first Stars and Stripes flag during the Revolutionary War.

While the designs we were seeing were mostly admirable, I had my doubts as to whether the Australian people as a whole would ever choose a flag designed last Tuesday ahead of one designed at the beginning of the last century, one that had been fluttering ever since.

And that, of course, led me to thinking about the Eureka story as the possible subject for a book. Look, I certainly didnt think that the flag of the Southern Cross would ever be embraced as the answer - in the 21st century it is too associated with either right-wing racist rednecks who brandish it as a symbol of white Australia or hard left-wing members of the union movement who, far more admirably, wave it for workers rights. But, against that, Eureka was certainly a saga that encompassed our oldest and best-known flag after the national flag, and so it might be worth exploring anyway. All this happened in roughly the same time frame that my friend and researcher Henry Barrkman started suggesting that Eureka would be a good subject for me, and a producer from SBS Radio in Melbourne, Yvonne Davis, wrote to me, pointing out that the multicultural aspects of the saga had never been truly explored. (Multicultural aspects? What multicultural aspects? I wasnt really aware that there were any?) And then, the breakthrough Out of the blue, two brothers, Peter and Ron Craig, wrote to me saying they were the great-grandsons of William Craig, who had not only come out on the ship from Ireland with the hero of the piece, Peter Lalor, but also penned a long-forgotten book about Lalor and his experience in the Eureka Stockade. Given that I was interested in writing books on Australian history, they wondered if I would like to read their great-grandfathers original manuscript?

I would, and I did. We wined, we dined, we talked. I was hooked, and soon afterwards I began.

Rarely have I been so enthused while working on a book. Yes, I have been equally passionate about other stories, just as stories, but with this one I felt I was getting to uncover the very foundation stones of what it is to be an Australian - from multiculturalism to mateship, from our broad distrust of the elites who would seek to rule over us, to our wide embrace of egalitarianism and insistence on a fair go, mate, to the very use of the word mate! In the diggers willingness to roll up their sleeves and just get on with it, whatever the appalling conditions, and their propensity to pull together to overcome hardships, I recognised much of the spirit that the country was built on. In their refusal to cower before power - most particularly their loud insistence to the government of no taxation without representation - and backing that up with their willingness to fight for their rights, even against overwhelming odds, I found fascinating parallels with the Boston Tea Party that I had never before appreciated.

And early on, to my shame, I realised I knew more about that Boston Tea Party than I did about this seminal episode in our own history. I had no idea, for example, that on the eve of the Eureka battle, an Australian Declaration of Independence had been written and enunciated; that diggers from other goldfields had marched to the aid of the men on Ballarat behind a man brandishing a sword as the lightning cracked, while they all sang La Marseillaise ! I simply didnt know that for the first part of the actual battle the rebels gave at least as good as they got; that Karl Marx himself had followed the Eureka uprising and written about it; and that the court cases after the battle, as they put 13 of the rebels on trial for High Treason, had been the seminal court cases in Australian history and nothing less than a triumph of Australian justice. How exciting I found it that, far from being an isolated local tax revolt as some of its deriders would have it, the Eureka rebellion was nothing less than the flowering of a broad international movement towards democracy, a flowering that put Australia at the very prow of democratic change around the world.

In short, I soon became obsessed with the whole story, and determined to blow the dust off the saga and try to bring it to life using every resource I had and could access.

In terms of making it accurate, the bad news was that there are so many layers of mythology surrounding what actually occurred, and even conflicting contemporary accounts, that it was frequently difficult to separate fact from fiction. However, the good news was that the source material - diaries, letters and newspapers - was bountiful beyond belief and rich in wonderful detail.

Of course, it will be for you, the reader, to judge whether or not I have managed to pull it off, but my aim at the outset was to take that rich detail and place it at the service of making this book feel like a novel - to take the thousand points of light represented by footnoted fact and place the reader in the moment, rather than in the 21st century looking back with a telescope on events long ago. It is the approach I have employed in my books since coming under the influence of the American writer Gary Smith in 2000, most particularly in Kokoda , Tobruk , The Ballad of Les Darcy , Charles Kingsford Smith , Batavia and Mawson - but only with Sir Douglas Mawson have I been as blessed with as much fine detail as was available on this book. For the sake of that novel-like feel, for the sake of the storytelling, I have very occasionally created a direct quote from reported speech in a newspaper, diary or letter. For the same reason, I have stayed with the imperial form of measurement and used the spelling of the day, as in Toorac, as opposed to Toorak. In instances where two spellings were used at the time - i.e. Ballarat and Ballaarat - to avoid confusion I have chosen the modern version. And finally, in my attempts to make the story live and breathe, when no positive determination can be made as to which of many versions of the truth is correct - who designed and sewed the original Eureka flag, for example - I have put my reasons for choosing the version I did in the endnotes, rather than interrupt the narrative flow.