In 1854, a rough barricade on the Ballarat goldfields became one of the most contested symbols in Australian history.
The Eureka Stockade was brief, bloody and badly prepared. It was not a grand military rising, nor was it the clean democratic birth story later generations sometimes wanted it to be. It was a crisis born from gold, taxation, police power, humiliation, legal distrust and a colonial government that failed to understand the men it governed.
This book tells the full story beyond the familiar myth.
It follows the gold rush that transformed Victoria, the hated licence system, the death of James Scobie, the burning of Bentley's Eureka Hotel, the rise of the Ballarat Reform League, the Southern Cross flag, the oath, the stockade, the dawn attack, the treason trials and the reforms that followed.
Eureka was a defeat that changed the future. The miners lost the fight, but the old licence order could not survive. The colonial state won the field, but lost moral control of the story. Out of that contradiction came one of Australia's most enduring arguments about freedom, authority, fairness and democracy.
Written in the direct, unsentimental style of the Australia Without Apology series, Eureka Stockade examines not only what happened at Ballarat, but why Australia chose to remember it.
