Eureka Rebellion

And then there's also been a lot of violence during industrial disputes.

I mean, most famous is the Eureka Stockade in 1854, which is really one of the few times where there's like mass killing of workers in this country.

Like I know in America, that's like one of your favorite things to do, but that was pretty rare for us.

Pinkerton's coming in with a machine gun or whatever.

Australia's population quadrupled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million by 1871.

We talked about the Eureka Stockade, which took place in 1854.

And then last week, we talked about William Wentworth and the writing of the New South Wales Constitution in 1855.

So...

a

system with legislative councils and legislative assemblies.

But at the same time, we've got the Eureka Stockade, which we've talked about previously.

We've got a little bit of unrest with what's happening down in the gold mines.

North of Italy, sorry, yeah.

For us it's important, like the memory of the Eureka Rebellion is important in exploring what are the links to this country that are often swept under the rug.

So when we hear about the mythologization of the migrant and the migrant problem, and especially in the Italian community, A big contentious issue is, as we see it, is that there's a real divide from reactionary right-wing Italians that Italian Australians said have very quickly assimilated to the status quo and are happy to... kick the shit down to the next person rather than assume responsibility.

And so we believe in creating an alternative idea of what it means to be a migrant on this country.

Cheerfully celebrating expectations of the whole town being carted off to jails en masse.

or of having to set up a latter-day Eureka stockade to defend themselves against assault by troops of the militia from Brisbane.

With no miners reporting for work the following morning, the Mount Isa mines took advantage of the state of emergency and shut down entire operations, locking out almost 3,000 workers.

In the month that followed, A compulsory conference was called by the Industrial Commission to hear out the dispute.

And I just thought, you know, we talk about people from older generations that aren't here anymore.

We know about Peter Layla and the Eureka Stockade, but these are still people here that we can touch base with, that we can talk to.

And it just made me really think that they deserve to have their story recorded in their words while they were here to do that.

So that just made me really want to get it out in a book.

the Chartist movement in the UK.

And so one of the reasons why you get very early pickup of male suffrage in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia and what became Tasmania was partly a response to the Eureka Stockade and partly because there were so many well-educated Chartists who were pushing for suffrage.

And so not the upper houses, but the lower houses, you had almost universal male suffrage quite early on.

Yeah, yeah.

And they were always regarded as other people by the rest of the colonists.

And, you know, very early on, the very first So the Victorian Legislative Council, it had already become self-managed by 1855, so they no longer needed to get the colonial office in London to sign off on the legislation, domestic legislation.

And so in 1855, after the Eureka Stockade, they published, rather coyly named, an act to make certain provisions for immigrants free.

Yeah.

This is the state of Ned Kelly.

This is the state of the Eureka Stockade,

where

the miners of Ballarat raised a flag, drew a line in the sand and told the government, their government, enough.