Eureka 161 years on: Honest History miscellany

‘Eureka 161 years on: Honest History miscellany’, Honest History, 1 December 2015

Thursday this week, 3 December, is the 161st anniversary of Eureka. Honest History has collected resources on Eureka over the last couple of years and here are links to some of them:

• Andrew Leigh MP gave the 2013 Eureka lecture and called Eureka Australia’s greatest story.
• Humphrey McQueen used Eureka dinners in 2012, 2013 and 2014 to range widely across Australian politics and history.
• Clare Wright won the Stella Prize for The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (lots of links) and talked to Jane Hutcheon about the role of women at Eureka.
• The ABC’s Bush Telegraph did a segment in 2014 on the women who stitched the Eureka flag.
• Greg Blake wrote on the military aspects in Stockings and Connor’s collection, Before the Anzac Dawn, published in 2013.
• Mick Armstrong in 2012 put Eureka in the context of Australian riots.
• Tom Keneally ended volume I of his Australians (2009) with Eureka.
• Anne Beggs-Sunter wrote an article in 2008 on the changing meanings of Eureka.
• Alan Mayne edited a collection in 2006 on reappraisals of Eureka; the conference was in 2004.

Part of the mounted force of military and police moved towards the left of their position to threaten its flank and rear, the remainder of the mounted force and the foot police were kept in reserve; we then advanced quietly towards the intrenchments, where the revolutionary flag was flying. At about 150 yards we were received by a rather sharp and well directed fire from the rebels, without word or challenge on their part. Then, and not till then, I ordered the bugle to sound the “commence firing.” For about ten minutes a heavy fire was kept up by the troops advancing, which was replied to by the rebels. (Extract from report of Captain J W Thomas, commanding troops at Ballarat, to Deputy Adjutant-General, 3 December 1854: Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, 20 December 1854, p. 5, under headline ‘The Ballarat disturbance’)

Battle of the Eureka Stockade, JB Henderson watercolour 1854 (Wikimedia Commons/State Library of NSW/Mattingbn)