Tag Archives: Ballarat

The Late Great Aussie Moore – Chapter 3 Eureka Days

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by in Neville Cole

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The Diggings

By Neville Cole

The beautiful English home on the hill that had been my grandfather’s pride and joy was gone. All that remained was the stone hearth and chimney that my father rebuilt and tended to as if it were my mother’s earthly tomb. The years that followed, my brothers recalled, were unrelentingly difficult without a hint of a woman’s touch. Although my father still had money remaining from his father’s glorious golden days, we, his kin, lived as feral outcasts in a one-room miner’s shack by the tapped out stream at the bottom of the hill. My father brought a goat to replace the mother’s milk my colicky lungs cried out for and later he purchased a few hundred head of sheep and turned my brothers into unwilling shepherds. The parties, gaiety, and gatherings of neighbours ceased and we became known collectively as the “wild Moores of Ballarat.”

My father turned quickly to drink as his only consolation. His chief bursts of productivity coming once a year at shearing time when he worked almost around the clock until all the wool had been clipped and bagged. Then he would be gone, sometimes for weeks at a time, to Melbourne to sell his measly wares for the best price he could muster. But later, on quiet evenings in the shack, before the spirits turned his heart as dark and cold as a mid-winter storm, he would tell us stories of his father Samuel, the lucky Moore from Kilmarnock.

Kilmarnock

 “Your grandfather came from the land of Robert Burns and Walker’s Kilmarnock Whisky,” he would always start as if the jug in his hand was drawing the story from the depths of his soul. He was the luckiest man who ever lived,” he would add with the bitterest of smiles. “He turned his back on the land of the true Moores and laid plans to come to this godforsaken plot as soon word of Edward Hargraves’ find at Ophir spread across the globe. Of course, by the time he made it to these shores, Ballarat was the center of the universe and the lure of golden riches drew him here as surely as the sun holds us all in orbit. He was barely twenty years at the time with little education and no discernable skills but he soon learned he had a nose for gold to go along with his limitless yearning for adventure. He was also the unsung hero of the Eureka stockade, lost to history, but were it not for your grandfather we may not be now be living in a free Australia. For you see, it was your grandfather who saved the life of one Peter Lalor.”

How my grandfather Samuel came to the rescue of the first outlaw to make it to parliament is a story of reckless bravery and frankly impossible luck. It all began soon after his arrival when he fell in, quite literally, with another young Scottish miner named James Scobie. The two met, as most miners do, at a hotel when Samuel stepped between James and the hotel’s proprietor, a Mr. Bentley, during a confrontation over an apparently unpaid tab. Samuel was knocked unconscious and woke up later outside in the dirt being tended to by a grateful James Scobie. Now you may think that was a rather unlucky beginning to what I proposed was a story of remarkable luck; but taking a billy club for a stranger can tend to forge a quick friendship and James and Samuel became mining partners shortly thereafter and thus my grandfather began his trek down the often hazardous path of the gold miner in earnest.

James Scobie was a fine miner but as pig-headed as the day is long. He and Samuel continued to frequent the Eureka despite the constant threat of bodily harm from Mr. Bentley. As the months and years passed, Samuel began to suspect that the reason for their almost nightly visits to the Eureka was due to more than just a taste for whiskey and rum; he noted that James attentions often fell upon the proprietor’s comely wife, Catherine. These attentions, Samuel recognized most likely accounted for Mr. Bentley’s simmering fury every time this usually free spending and frankly mostly trouble-free customer walked through his doors.

Lucky for him, Samuel was not with James as he wandered past the Eureka hotel during the early morning of October 6, 1854. If he did it is quite possible he too would have been found face down in the dirt with a fatal battleaxe wound to his head. Samuel attended the hasty trial that took place that very afternoon when the local magistrate acquitted Mr. Bentley for lack of evidence, even though witnesses saw Mr. Bentley on the street with three other men and a woman at the time of the murder. It was noted that a woman, believed to be Catherine, was heard to exclaim “how dare you break my window.” It would not be until many years later that Samuel would wonder just what caused James Scobie to break Catherine Bentley’s window at two o’clock in the morning. At the time of the trial all he could think of was revenging his good friend’s death.

It was Samuel that took the lead ten days later when a reported 10,000 miners took to the streets and burned down the Eureka hotel while James and Catherine Bentley fled for their lives. Again, due mostly to luck and partly to his quiet, unassuming nature, Samuel was not among the nine miners arrested over the next few days for starting the fire.

The miner’s anger turn quickly to political revolt and Samuel too was present at Bakery Hill to vote in the resolution “that it is the inalienable right of every citizen to have a voice in making the laws he is called on to obey, that taxation without representation is tyranny“. The group also resolved that day to secede from the United Kingdom if the situation did not improve.

The mood of the Ballarat miners reached its feverous peak on 16 November 1854 when Governor Hotham appointed a Royal Commission on goldfields problems and grievances. But as history has shown us, authority rarely bows out of a bad situation gracefully and Commissioner Rede’s response the governor was to ignore the grievances and instead increase the police presence in the gold fields and summon reinforcements from Melbourne.

The Oath

How Samuel avoided arrest and death during those revolutionary days can only be attributed to pure luck. After all, he was one of the first of the miner’s to pledge open rebellion and burn his mining license and he was among the mob that surrounded arresting officers conducting a license search the very next day. He was present at the unfurling of the rebel Eureka Flag and part of the mob who swore the oath of allegiance to it. “We swear,” they spoke as one, “by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”

Eureka Stockade

The tragic events of the battle of the stockade have been well documented; it is now known how what had at one time been a force of 1700 men dwindled to a mere 150 miners on December 3rd, 1854 when most of the miners at the stockade returned to their tents under the assumption that the Queen’s military forces would not be sent to attack on the Sabbath.

Samuel was one of the 150 who remained when a party of 276 police and military personnel under the command of Captain J.W. Thomas approached the Eureka Stockade and a battle ensued. The ramshackle army of miners was hopelessly outclassed by the well-trained military regiment and was routed in about 10 minutes. But it is his actions during that 10 minute battle for which Samuel ought to be legend; for it was he who hid Lalor, arm shattered by musketshot, under a pile of timbers. Samuel then somehow managed to stay nearby undetected while the victors removed the dead from the stockade. He could see blood trickling from beneath the pile of slabs where he had Lalor hid; but while soldiers, keen to capture Lalor were still in the stockade, Samuel dared not make a move. That is, until the last of soldiers had left. Then he quickly stepped back into the fray and smuggled Lalor away, put him on a horse, and sent him off to eventual safety.

Now, I’m not here to pretend that it was an easy escape for Lalor. We all know well that over the following weeks he had to survive several near captures and undergo two amputations before he would be truly free; but the fact remains that, without my grandfather, Samuel Moore, he never would have survived the stockade. Without my grandfather, Samuel Moore, the near 50 year trudge to independence that followed would have surely been without one of its most passionate and influential leaders. For the lucky Moore from Kilmarnock it was just one of a hundred such times during which he tempted fate and won. If only my own father had just one tenth of his father’s good fortune my early life would have been quite different indeed. Then again, perhaps luck, like many other genetic traits, tends from time to time to skip a generation.

The Great Aussie Moore – Chapter 1 Victor Australis

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Neville Cole

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Fossickers

By Neville Cole

My mother always had a rare sense of timing. She passed away last year on my birthday. Instead of celebrating another year around the sun with my friends, I travelled back to Melbourne to organize her funeral and take care of her affairs. It was all fairly straight-forward until it came time to go through her stuff. The house where she passed was filled to overflowing with the assorted flotsam and jetsam of a long and disorganized life.

Sadly, most everything I came across was destined for a quick trip to the local tip. I was beginning to think that I should save myself a considerable effort and toss it all, until deep down in a box pile of ancient papers, I started to discover bits and pieces of a jumbled handwritten manuscript entitled Victor Australis that appeared to have been written by a long-lost Great Uncle named Aussie Moore.

I knew my Great Uncle Clarry well. He was a legendary figure around Kilmore, the town my mother grew up in. One of many famous Clarry Moore tales was that on his 82nd birthday the family purchased him a table saw so that he could put a new roof on his barn. He completed the task by himself in less than a week. I knew all about Clarry and Grandpa Dot; but until I came across Victor Australis, I had never heard of Aussie Moore. It was if he had been banished from the Moore family records.

Victor Australis is a rambling and outrageous account of a very strange life. Many events are described in exhausting detail then whole decades disappear without a trace. Much of he describes is too coincidental to be true, while other parts of his life story are clearly historical fact. In his own words, Aussie Moore was one of the “first true Australians” as he was born during the early hours of January 1st, 1901: the day Australia became an independent federation.

Ever since I picked up Victor Australis I have haven’t been able to set it back down for long; which is why I have decided to write out Aussie’s tales out in some kind of a logical order and bring them to the world. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the late, great Aussie Moore!

NOTE: The section of italic text that follows I believe to be the opening paragraph of Aussie’s autobiography. I have tried to capture his idiosyncratic phrasing exactly as he laid them to paper; but, truth be told, some of these pages have been pretty severely damaged by the ravages of time and in places I was forced to make my own best guess as to what had been once been intended.

I was born into trouble and it has followed close at me heels throughout my entire life. I have done too many things to remember them all, seen much more than even that, and just to have survived this long I consider myself a fortunate fellow indeed. I was born in an Englishman’s house high on a hill overlooking the rich goldfields of Ballarat. The morning of my birth was the first morning of the new Australian federation, which makes me one of the first true Australians, the first of the Aussies. I don’t count in this group any of the many indigenous peoples who have inhabited the great southern land as they all predate terra australis by centuries at least. I don’t remember any of the particulars of my birth. Which isn’t unusual, I suppose. In fact, any man who says he does remember that time of his life is a damned liar at best and at worst a devil in the flesh.

I was, quite naturally, told stories of that morning by others from time to time. However, never by my own father, Duncan Robert Moore, for reasons I will reveal at a later time.

Ballarat – the town where Aussie was born

At the dawn of 1901, Ballarat was a town still thriving from sale of gold. It was a town with a thick rough edge and a tough, unforgiving, and almost unimaginably wealthy center. It was a town still driven by the Eureka spirit. My father was far more proud of Australia’s hard fought federation than my arrival. In fact, on more than one occasion he informed me that it was always his intention that I would be a daughter – a gift from him to my mother for her hard toil over the years. My name had already been chosen. I was to be Victoria Australis Moore. When it was clear that a nob and two bollocks hung between my thighs, my parents removed the last two letters of my first given name and I became Victor Australis Moore – forever after known simply as Aussie. But getting my name changed is the least memorable part of this story.

You see, as was customary on the last night of each year, my father spent a good part of New Years Eve, 1900 drinking heavily with good friends and neighbours and, only after midnight passed and it became obvious that I would wait no longer, did he send his guests home and my brother Clarry to fetch the local mid-wife. She arrived none too soon and immediately saw my mother was in grave danger as I was well on my way to coming out breach. There was no time now to fetch the doctor so, as the mid-wife did what she could to make my mother comfortable, my father staggered to his horse and galloped off to fetch Mr. Webb, a local horse breeder who had experience with various animal surgeries. Mr. Webb by all accounts had also been partaking in a long evening of revels and, perhaps because of this, made the immediate decision that I must be delivered in the manner of the great Caesar himself. He administered a gulping gut full of rum down my mother’s gullet then proceeded to quickly and skillfully slit her belly and tear me screaming from her womb.

My oldest brother, Clarry watched the whole ordeal in utter fascination, and later would recount the horrible episode to me late at night causing me to suffer from a lifetime of sleep shattering nightmares. Clarry never failed to mention that Mr. Webb sowed my mother’s belly back together “like a seamstress at her loom using naught but dried sheep intestines that had been soaked in spirits”. Such was my coming in and such has been my path ever since.

 —ooo—