The Night They Stormed Eureka

Jackie French’s junior fiction novel The Night They Stormed Eureka (2009) starts when Sam, a teenage girl, seeks refuge in a cemetery after having run away from her mother’s abusive boyfriend. In mental and physical pain, Sam imagines what life would have been like for the family of Percival and Elsie Puddleham, their names and dates carved on a headstone she shelters near. The depth of Sam’s longing for love and comfort reaches across the years to meet a yearning for a lost child, and she finds herself in mid-19th century Ballarat, not long before the bloody battle at the Eureka Stockade.

Now in 1854 Sam finds a warm, inviting home with the Puddlehams who run “the best little cook shop on the diggings”. But it was a time of great unrest among the miners on the diggings and Sam is swept up in the Eureka Rebellion, an iconic event on our national heritage landscape.

French’s recreation of the uprising against the British is not the Eureka of history books. She does not know if she’s changed the past or if it was another past. In Sam’s Ballarat the Eureka rebellion was really about turning Australia into a republic, rather than an uprising of miners over compulsory mining licence fees. And while there were only 120 men left in the stockade when it was eventually stormed, in The Night They Stormed Eureka this was because thousands were lured to different parts of the camp through trickery.

At the end of the story, Sam awakens in the graveyard to a concerned friend and worried teacher who, suspecting she was homeless, have been looking for her. Experiencing Eureka has changed Sam and, for the first time, she reaches out for help. What she learns at Eureka is that when you stand together, you can change the world.

Readers will be drawn into this world of treacle dumplings, pink bonnets, injustice, dreams and courage. Along with the Dickensian characters there are themes of race, equality, democracy and freedom. French states this is a story 'with historical background, not history’. Readers from 10 years and up couldn’t do better than read this novel to feel the texture of the event that almost turned us on the path to republicanism.

Five days to go until the First National Republican Short Story Competition closes.

The 1954 Royal Tour

Queen Elizabeth II is the only reigning British monarch to have set foot on terra australis. On the gold and blue morning of 3 February 1954, in the presence of a massive crowd, one million and more, she cam ashore at Farm Cove. This journey through Australia would be the longest single part of a six-month post-Coronation tour through twelve Commonwealth countries. In the eight weeks allotted to Australia, the Queen and her husband travelled to every capital city bar Darwin, and to seventy country towns.

In Janet Withers 2008 One Brisbane One Story short story “Winged Feet” it’s 1954, Queen Elizabeth is coming to Brisbane, and Flora’s school will participate in the welcome dance pageant. But how can she reconcile this with her father’s anti-royalist views? And should his socialist ideals prevail to move the family from the beautiful Clayfield home and garden that her mother loves?

When I told my father that the Queen was coming to visit he exploded. ‘The Queen! Down with the Queen and the Monarchy. She’s not even a reader, the Queen. She reads the Women’s Weekly and has trouble digesting that.’ …

‘Banish from under your bonny skies / Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies,’ quoted Dad from Henry Lawson. ‘We want a classless society, where all are free and equally educated. Down with the Queen and all she stands for!’

Conflict and loyalty are explored in “Winged Feet” amid a chorus of birds and a remembered streetscape of trees and flowers that add sparkle to this unconventional family story.

Perverse Acts

Camilla Nelson’s comic novel Perverse Acts (1998) depicts an Australian republic with a ceremonial President and a government that must build coalitions of support among the many small parties represented in parliament.

It is set in the Australian Parliament and deals with political machinations in a future republic. The narrative is related in turn by Venus and M. M is a young male Member of the House of Representatives who quickly becomes a Parliamentary Secretary and then a Cabinet Minister. His plans to become Prime Minister are eventually thwarted by Lucretia, the only female MP in ‘the Party’ and a member of a rival faction. Venus is an ambitious ministerial staffer who works for several ministers, including M, with whom she has a sexual relationship. When Lucretia wins, Venus transfers to her staff.

Until Lucretia’s leadership bid, the government has steadily lost ground in the electorate. Part of the cause of this growing unpopularity is the government’s attempt to get its Freedom from Government Bill, an advanced privatisation measure, through the Senate. There it needs the support of the Reverend Warren Weedon’s Circle of Light Party. The price for Weedon’s support is a growing list of legal restrictions on sex and fertility, beginning with a debate on his Single Mothers Obliteration Bill, which would force unmarried pregnant women to have abortions, then support for an amendment to prevent single women and lesbians from accessing IVF, and finally a law to force ‘single women to become born-again virgins’. Lucretia’s popularity as challenger for the prime ministership is boosted by her opposition to the deals between the Government and Weedon and is undiminished when she outs herself as a lesbian.

Nelson’s Australian republic seems to be based on the minimalist model, particularly with regard to the powers of the President. Presidents have simply replaced Governors-General. The incumbent President remains unnamed and hardly appears throughout the novel. He is ensconced in the old vice regal house at Yarralumla, where his official duties seem limited to swearing in new ministers.

Political power in Nelson’s republican Australia remains firmly centred on the Prime Minister and Cabinet and their ministerial and public service advisers. The major legislative challenge for governments is still to steer bills through Parliament, hence the importance of Weedon’s Circle of Light. The Republic (or later constitutional amendment) has changed some institutions--federalism has been done away with, and the High Court’s independence removed - but these developments are only mentioned in passing. They have no bearing on the activities of governing, which take place almost entirely within Parliament House.

Nelson depicts her republic as a cosmetic change to a corrupted game of politics. She sees power primarily in terms of gender rather than economic structures and suggests more open-ended possibilities for her imagined political institutions. Nelson indicates at least the chance that a new type of political leadership will emerge in an imagined future republic.

Melbourne, 12 August 2992

Henry Crocker Marriott Watson wrote a number of novels during the late nineteenth century in the utopian genre. He was born in Tasmania in 1835, but lived mainly in Victoria where he was ordained as a clergyman. His first novel was Erchomenon, or the republic of materialism (1879). Eutopia is set six hundred years in the future in which everyone lives in cities, there is a religion of humanity based on Auguste Comte (1798-1857), and children are raised by women other than their natural mother.

In 1890, Watson wrote The decline and fall of the British Empire or, The witch's cavern. The novel is set in the future and begins with “A letter of explanation”, dated, “Melbourne, 12 August 2992” by William Furley. Furley’s letter sets the scene for the narrative of his experiences.

In the world of 2992 British civilisation survives most strongly in Australia, which is now an independent republic with an elected president. The continent has been developed extensively and is a garden spot, with Eyreton as a new inland capital. Trade flourishes extensively with China, which provides raw materials in exchange for Australian manufactures. While Furley does not describe material culture extensively, there are electric land cars and fairly fast air transportation.

Having finished his education in 2988 Furley decides to travel, first visiting Tasmania and then Africa where the population shows signs of racial mixture. Along with his fiancee and Professor Fowler, a historian, he next visits England, the home of the British people. England has gone primitive. Population has decreased enormously, with London consisting of some twenty thousand people who live amid ruins, and with little evidence of the high civilisation of a thousand years earlier. Wolves range through the land and are a particular menace in the north. The land is ruled by Prince Albert, and rank is still important, despite the overall shabby, neo-primitive nature of the culture.

As the travellers wander about they find that Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament have completely vanished. One of the causes for the degeneration of England was a change in the Gulf Stream, which with the opening of the Panama Canal altered its course and now flows into the Pacific.

As Furley wanders about he sees a large white hare which he follows down into a great cavern where he meets the witch, or Sibyl, as she is sometimes called. She shows him visions and gives him a ring to protect him. He then awakens along with certain of his Australian friends and companions in London of the 1890s.

The heart of the book consists of Furley’s experiences and observations in the collapsing late nineteenth century world. He obtains a job as a journalist on the London Express and sees much of the contemporary misery. While admitting that society is in a bad way, the author takes a conservative position on political economy and religion. When a speaker at a public meeting states the socialist interpretation of history with recommendations for improvement, Furley stands forth and addresses the meeting in reply. His rejoinder to the thesis that capitalists are parasites is that wealth was really created by the capitalists through hard toil. As remedies for the nation’s ills he recommends hard work, thrift, and temperance. England collapses. Strikes break out. In a short time a mammoth demonstration ushers in the Great Revolution. The Sibyl shows Furley spot scenes of the future debacle. Eventually, the better people leave England, migrating to the colonies.

Furley awakens back in his own era. He declares that when Australia becomes overpopulated, he and his fiancee will return to England to repopulate and recivilise it. The author’s point of view is a mixture of social democracy, laissez faire capitalism, and limited reform.

A Song of the Republic

Henry Lawson was one of Australia's greatest writers. His interest in the republican movement was sparked by his exposure to the radicalism of friends of his mother, Louisa. In 1887 he became titular publisher of the Republican. In the aftermath of the republican riots in Sydney in 1887, he penned his first published poem "A Song of the Republic". The poem appeared in The Bulletin, 1 October 1887 and on Saturday, 15 October 1887 in The Republican. Other republican poems by Lawson included “The Statue of Our Queen” (1890), and “The English Queen” (1892).

Lawson was of course not a political theorist; rather, he was the voice of an "Australian sentiment" that put to words the yearnings of the radical nationalists of his day. Lawson was aware that to achieve independence, identity and a just social order, a Republic was the only form of government.

Sons of the South, awake! arise!

Sons of the South, and do.

Banish from under your bonny skies

Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies.

Making a hell in a Paradise

That belongs to your sons and you.

*

Sons of the South, make choice between

(Sons of the South, choose true),

The Land of Morn and the Land of E'en,

The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green,

The Land that belongs to the lord and the Queen,

And the Land that belongs to you.

*

Sons of the South, your time will come –

Sons of the South, 'tis near –

The "Signs of the Times", in their language dumb,

Fortell it, and ominous whispers hum

Like sullen sounds of a distant drum,

In the ominous atmosphere.

*

Sons of the South, aroused at last!

Sons of the South are few!

But your ranks grow longer and deeper fast,

And ye shall swell to an army vast,

And free from the wrongs of the North and Past

The land that belongs to you.

Kisses of the Enemy

Rodney Hall’s Kisses of the Enemy (1987) is set in the future in the newly created Republic of Australia headed by an elected president whose power finally diminishes that of parliament. Hall portrays his republic as corrupted from birth by the power of international capital and specifically satirises and warns against the dangers of a powerful directly elected President.

The central political story begins with the success of the 1992 Republic Referendum and the election in 1993 of Bernard Buchanan, a real estate developer, as the Republic’s first President. Buchanan’s selection as candidate and his campaign are organised by the political minder Luigi Squarcia and business leader William Penhallurick. Both Squarcia and Penhallurick in turn work on behalf of IFID (Interim Freeholdings Incorporated of Delaware) a shadowy multinational corporation. IFID has worldwide strategic interests that include the Paringa military and communications base in Australia.

The Republic is marked by growing authoritarianism, military control and social squalor. It is punctuated by disasters, such as the tidal wave that smashes into Eden as a result of IFID experiments with gravitational weaponry.

As the state becomes more self-propagating, Buchanan fearful of real and imagined enemies. He grows so huge that he cannot see the ground and must be carried even to the bathroom by six aides, while he declaims: "I am the State." By now, he is infested by mice that gnaw at his entrails but at least, he thinks, he is feeling something.

While he has opponents within the political elite, his position remains safe as long as he retains IFID’s support. Resistance to Buchanan and IFID comes from a guerrilla group led by Peter Taverner (‘the Wild Dog’). Tensions between Buchanan and IFID grow. Buchanan attempts to govern alone, leaving the power to issue a licence required by IFID solely in his hands.
Buchanan is eventually brought down from a different quarter, during nationally televised divorce proceedings initiated by his wife Dorina. his sensitive, enigmatic wife Dorina, who lives separately, is inspired by disgust for Buchanan to provoke, in an uncharacteristic move, a "showdown" - enough has been enough. At the novel’s close, new presidential elections are under way, with a new unsuspecting front candidate for IFID the likely winner.

Kisses of the Enemy depicts the development of Australian political institutions under a directly elected President in nightmarishly authoritarian terms. Hall’s novel anticipates many of the fears expressed by opponents of a direct election model in Australian republican debates during the 1990s. Rather than a US-style balancing of powers between legislature and executive, in Hall’s republic the presidential powers simply overwhelm Parliament.