Eureka Stockade

1854 Australia: The Battle of Eureka Stockade, an uprising of Victorian Gold Rush gold miners against the State of Victoria; six troopers and 22 miners died in the civil revolt by gold miners against the officials supervising the gold-mining regions of Ballarat. Although the revolt failed, it has endured in the collective social consciousness of Australia. As Mark Twain wrote, "It was the Barons and John over again ... it was Concord and Lexington".

Eureka has been variously described as the birthplace of Australia's democracy, republicanism and multiculturalism. It is often regarded as being an event of equal significance in Australian history as the storming of the Bastille was to French history, the Easter Uprising to the Irish, or the Boston Tea Party or Battle of the Alamo to the history of the USA. Its multicultural heroes include an Italian writer (Raffaello Carboni), a freed African-American slave (John Joseph, who was the first to be charged with sedition), a former German soldier and sundry American democrats, Canadians, Irish rebels and British Chartists. The first incident was the arbitrary arrest of a physically disabled, non-English speaking Armenian, wrongfully charged with assaulting an officer ...

Categories: australia, history, australian-history, labor-history, progressive, rebellion, activism, authoritarianism