Eureka - The Birthplace of the Australian Spirit

A large blackboard dominated the platform of grade eight - written in bold chalked letters, the words - "The Eureka Uprising" - but why uprising? Everyone else called it the Eureka Rebellion.

For the first hour our teacher had been giving us a history lesson about the uprising. He placed the chalk on a small ledge on the blackboard and left the room. He was a tall, thin man and walked with a very bad limp - it was said that he was wounded some sixteen years ago on the killing fields of Europe, on the Western Front, where sometimes 30,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in one day.

People said he was decorated but he never spoke of war; only man's inhumanity to man!

Whatever he told us was gospel and he was a hero to that grade of '32, not for what his war deeds were, for hadn't he coached our football team to three state school premierships, we would have followed him anywhere! As he spoke about Eureka that morning he told us our great, great grandparents had probably been at Eureka, for were we not born and bred from Brown Hill, Ballarat East and Golden Point and we had the Eureka spirit flowing through our veins. I looked around the classroom. Surely not this motley mob - 5 Chinese, 2 sons of Indian hawkers, an Aboriginal - all descendants of another time and my best mates Tuffy, Brownie, whose father had a sweet factory, and Charlie Cheong, who brought us long pull and short pull toffee from his father's Chinese grocers shop at the corner of Main Road and Barkly Streets.

My thoughts were interrupted abruptly by five elderly Chinese walking past in single file in the street outside yabbering away in their foreign tongue. Every Monday morning they walked back to their market gardens near the Yarrawee Creek returning from the Joss House in Main Road where they probably smoked an opium pipe or two and dreamed of old Cathay and played Fan Tan and gambled as they were wont to do each weekend, and possibly just like us, descendants of Eureka!

It was soon lunchtime and the kids with lunches ate them slowly, while the others hungrily looked on for a time, then made off to the fruit shops and picked over the specs thrown out by the fruit shops and fruit market. We were in the midst of a great depression, some said not only in Australia, but all over the world, and many people went hungry every day.

I started thinking about that Eureka mob who fought against injustice, what have they left us - people starving, no jobs, no future, they fought in vain, they left us with bloody nothing, that Eureka mob!

As I left the school that afternoon to catch my Brown Hill bus a young man in his early twenties was singing "Mother Macree", his tattered old hat alongside his swag contained a few pennies and halfpennies. I wondered how he felt begging so that he could eat, would it be my lot? Further down the street another played an old accordion, for in 1932 there were no pensions or social welfare if you didn't work, you didn't eat!

As I left the bus the noisy batteries were crushing stone, Ryans on the hill behind the Brown Hill swimming pool, the Metrop further up, and the one on Black Hill worked day and night. Mining had been resurrected and men were working small alluvial mines to get a crust and batteries crushed the stone for them to extract the gold.

I rushed home, brandishing my Merit Certificate and a permit to work - I was just thirteen and a half years old. The State had done its duty to educate me to merit Certificate standard, and now with thousands of other kids throw me onto the impossible work heap, with 40% unemployed and little prospect of work.

I finally got a message boys' job at twelve shillings a week and as I became older the firm kept me on - then suddenly the world was at war again and that class of '32 rallied to the cause to become soldiers, sailors and airmen - we were just 21 years old.

I joined the army and my mates from school days were posted to various units and after training some went to the Middle East, and some went to New Guinea, like me, and in behind Salamaua as I 'stood to' with my mates, in that dreadful hour before dawn and waited for that attack to come, or didn't, my whole life appeared before me, my school days and that teacher and his Eureka spirit!

Suddenly, like a born again Christian it became loud and clear. I felt like crying out "Eureka" I've found it, like that miner long ago, the message of our teacher was trying to get through about the Spirit of Eureka in that class of '32, "it's all around us", it's me and you and you, to know what's right from wrong - and against all odds stand up and be counted when you know that things are wrong - like what we are doing in this battle as we drive the enemy from Kokoda, Salamaua and Lae - it's the "Spirit of Eureka" that says the enemy will not pass those last thirty miles to Australia and take away the very things those miners fought for, the right to choose and that might isn't the right, to dictate to your fellow man.

In retrospect, that class of '32, we are left with but a few, many died on foreign soil for you and you and you, to keep that "Eureka Spirit" flowing, and me, I was wrong when I said they had left us nothing, that Eureka mob, they have left us everything that we hold dear, our principles, the knowledge of right from wrong and to speak out and stand up when things aren't right.

My old mates "Tuffy" who didn't make it back and "Brownie" a prisoner of the Japanese on the infamous Burma Railway came home with one leg instead of two, and Charlie Cheong, a fighter pilot, died while fighting for his beloved China.

Our teacher, long gone, God love him, taught me something those miners fought for so long ago - the fight for justice!

"THE SPIRIT OF EUREKA" - "THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE AUSTRALIAN SPIRIT".

Copyright © 1997 Fred Ludbrook