Critical Times

The powers that be want us to adopt Anzac Day as our main day of country-wide reflection. Bah! Eureka Day (December 3rd) is where it’s at!

Anzac Day celebrates our right to die in a ditch whilst invading a distant country in the service of an ungrateful, murderous foreign empire.

Eureka Day is about standing truly by each other and fighting for rights and liberties.

More and more brainwashed Australian youth (and others) are trekking to Gallopolli and commemorations of Anzac Day around Australia.

Wrapped in their Cronulla capes they are conditioned as cannon fodder for future imperial adventures.

Jingoistic, nationalistic, nostalgic fervour rules the airwaves. Dissent is hardly heard (or given space to be heard).

The diggers of Eureka helped secure for all of us, the vote (just men at first), regular parliamentary elections, paid MPs, unpropertied MPs etc… These were fundamental rights for people in what was just recently a penal colony. These rights had not even been gained in England at this time which was where the diggers had got their inspiration from the Chartist Movement.

The Eureka Rebellion’s ideals helped to galvanise the spirit of the early union movement in the major industrial struggles of the shearers and dock workers.

Meanwhile, Eureka Day is virtually ignored, even by the citizens of Ballarat who have Eureka flags on numberplates, shops, buildings, everywhere…

The Eureka flag is featured in the flags and uniform of many, many unions and unionists.

On the 150th anniversary, John Howard refused to fly the Eureka flag from Parliament when it was flown on many other civic buildings. His deputy PM, John Anderson decried the revolutionary aspects of the Eureka Rebellion.

I am a non-violent activist and whilst the Eureka Rebellion involved the taking up of arms, it is the radical spirit we seek to reclaim (as stated by Joe Toscano). In hindsight, we could say that the miners were not privy to the successful legacy of mass non-violent civil disobedience that we are to-day thanks to Ghandi, Martin Luther King jr etc…

Joe Toscano has distilled the fundamental values displayed in the Eureka movement:

DIRECT ACTION-The miners vowed to actively resist an oppressive regime and it’s laws.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY-There were mass monster meetings of 10,000+ people in Ballarat and elsewhere which eventually formed the Ballarat Reform League. Leaders were also recallable.

SOLIDARITY-The miners vowed to “truly stand by each other” and act when one of the their numbers were unfairly targetted by the gold licence laws.

INTERNATIONALISM-About 20 different nationalities were represented at the Eureka Stockade. Rafaello Carboni (Captain of the Anarchists) called the new flag, the Southern Cross-”the refuge of all the oppressed of the world”.
The Eureka oath made no reference to God, Queen or country- “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”
None of the digger demands were racist. It was the Government (dividing and ruling) who, a couple of years after the rebellion brought in the forerunner of the White Australia policy by taxing Chinese immigrants.

Eureka is not about replacing one form of Nationalism with another. Eureka is internationlistic and is about improving the culture and values of this land we all live on and call Australia. Hopefully by striving for our collective independence and freedom we will help to make the planet a better place. We at least need to free ourselves from the US Empire just as the diggers sought freedom from the British Empire.

See you in Ballarat on December 3rd.

For more info on past Eureka radical commemorations and a radical history of Eureka see:

http://www.peacebus.com/Eureka/

http://www.takver.com/history/eureka.htm

Here is a great opinion piece that was in The Age to-day about this very subject:

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER DIGGERS?

By Clare Wright
April 25, 2006

Ballarat was typically parched in late November 2004, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Aboriginal activist, filmmaker and all-round maverick Richard Frankland addressed the international democracy conference.

Frankland joined other prominent possum-stirrers, including Jose Ramos Horta and Mo Mowlam, to discuss issues of sovereignty, human rights and political inclusiveness in the long shadow cast by the diggers’ rebellion.

Ardent, fiercely articulate and not a little pulpit-thumping, Frankland canvassed the topic “Democracy at work is hard work”. He spoke of the need for constant vigilance and unerring hope if democracy’s promise of government of the people, by the people and for the people is to be fulfilled. Most poignantly, he dared to dream of living in a country in which his daughter could be prIme minister.

I found myself thinking about Frankland’s modern dreaming as Anzac Day rolls around this year. Could Australians ever mark Eureka Day on their calendars?

It’s scarcely going out on a limb to suggest that Anzac Day has become Australia’s de facto national day. January 26 seems to come and go in the haze of summer’s holiday season, but by Anzac Day we’re ready to stop and genuinely reflect on the significance and meaning of a critical event in our history.

All commemorations of events, by their nature, are backward-looking. But Anzac Day strikes a particularly nostalgic note. It recalls a time when sacrifices were willingly made to ideas and institutions larger than our individual self-interest. It upholds ideals that we fear are in short supply in this atomised, narcissistic age: courage, endurance and mateship, according to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs website.

Attendances at Anzac Day parades increased steadily during the 1990s and legions of backpackers have famously made Lone Pine a pilgrimage site. My sense is that Anzac Day has grown in appeal in inverse proportion to confidence about our common identity, future prosperity and national security.

History, as eminent American historian David Lowenthal asserts, perpetuates collective self-awareness.

The Anzac legend offers a comfortably prescriptive notion of who we once were.

By contrast, when Eureka’s sesquicentenary was celebrated, the focus was emphatically on the contemporary relevance of the event. “Diversity, dissent, democracy” was the official Victorian Government slogan. Historians continue to debate the technicalities of whether Eureka was truly the birthplace of Australian democracy, but the ayes clearly carried the popular verdict. Countless symposiums, orations, newspaper articles and public gatherings dissected the spirit of Eureka, largely concluding that the diggers’ stand against injustice and tyranny continues to inform our understanding of political rights and freedoms.

Eureka commemoration is, inescapably, a progressive act. The polyglot miners (and their many professional and mercantile supporters) fought for principles they wanted their new homeland to exemplify: responsible and representative government, transparent administration, fair taxation, free speech and land rights. They did so in an era in which traditional bounds of authority and identity were remarkably mobile; the line between Jack and his master had never been so fluid. The gold rush generation dreamed big dreams too.

In remembering a visionary movement for social change, we are compelled to examine not only who we were, but who we are and who we want to be.

There have been genuine attempts in recent years to broaden the reach of Anzac Day commemorations. Anzac Day parade organisers have opened the doors to other members of the armed services, including women, in order to counter negative perceptions of parochialism and sexism. This year, Turkish veterans will march. I’d like to see the reformist agenda go further.

Anzac Day properly and profoundly reminds us of the wanton loss of human life. Why not use this key foundation story to reflect more openly and honestly about the loss of life and ensuing pain that has occurred on home turf: Aboriginal frontier conflict, SIEV-X, Port Arthur? But war plays to a tribal beat and military narratives necessarily invoke battle lines between the enemy and the ally, friend and foe, us and them.

Eureka was, of course, an armed conflict too. The problem with Eureka – what makes it such a thorny perennial – is that the combat was between us and us. Civilians took up arms against the state. Miners and military laid down roots in this country, pioneering the land and its institutions.

Strong animosity still exists between the descendants of those forebears. With Eureka, it is difficult to praise, as did John Howard in his 2005 dawn service address, a nation’s easy familiarity with the call to look out for each other. The enemy within is always more menacing than the dodgy outsider.

Then again, at least if you had a bunch of drunken youths cavorting around a windswept plain it would be a credible re-enactment of goldfields life.

So will we ever celebrate Eureka Day? Come the republic, perhaps. But it’s plain to see why Gallipoli is a magnet for conservative politics and Eureka is a lightning rod for nonconformist causes. Where the Anzac legend supports paternalistic nationalism, Eureka symbolises independence of thought and action. Where the Australian government and armed forces were longing for imperial recognition of their valour on foreign battlefields, the goldfields population were self-consciously making their own destinies.

There is nothing easy about the Eureka legacy. And democracy is hard work. Yet, like suffering and loss, injustice seeps down through the ages. We would do well as a nation, respectful of the past and hopeful for the future, to ground our collective self-awareness in multiple, complex histories.

I would like to live in a country that is courageous enough to do that.

Clare Wright is a postdoctoral research fellow in history at La Trobe University. She is writing a book about the women of Eureka.