Even John Howard.s hero . that crusty old conservative Sir Robert Menzies . had a good word for the rebels. Now, of course, with the 150th anniversary approaching, the tourist industry is going gangbusters to cash in on the Eureka legend.

There are three main interpretations of the revolt. There is the old radical legend that Eureka was a heroic working class rebellion that set the scene for the development of the workers. movement in Australia.

Then there is the racist, nationalist myth that Eureka was where White Australians first stood up to defend the white race against the Chinese and foreign tyranny.

Finally, there is the reformist myth that the rebels at Eureka were very much in the spirit of the ALP . out to win a few reforms to make capitalism work better. Sure, taking up arms might seem a bit extreme. But there was no parliamentary democracy in those days. Thanks to the Eureka rebels we have our much cherished democracy. So mass revolts are no longer necessary. We can just work through the system.

History, myths, symbols and legends are an important part of the ideological battlefield where socialists have to take a stand against reactionary and reformist ideas. The way symbols like the Eureka flag are used tells us as much about political developments today as it does about what happened on Bakery Hill in Ballarat 150 years ago.

At 3.30 in the morning of Sunday 3 December 1854 British troops stormed the stockade formed by rebel goldminers on Bakery Hill.

Thirty miners were killed and 114 taken prisoner. Though some of the key leaders . including the Irishman Peter Lalor . escaped, the Eureka revolt seemed to have been totally suppressed.

Yet within a few short months, the Colonial government, in the face of growing agitation in Melbourne and Geelong, had conceded virtually all the miners. demands.

Police were withdrawn from the administration of the goldfields. The hated 30 shillings a month licence fee on all miners was abolished. The miners gained the right to vote.

Colonial Secretary Foster was forced to resign, as it was put at the time, .to stay the rising tide of revolution.. To add icing to the cake Melbourne juries acquitted the rebel miners charged with treason. By 1859 universal male suffrage had been introduced in Victoria . the only place in the British Empire.

The seemingly failed revolt had turned into a stunning victory.

Myths

First I want to deal with the nationalist myth about Eureka. Numerous racist and even fascist groups have claimed the Eureka flag as a symbol of .White Australia..

But the fact is that when the Eureka flag was first unfurled one of the key leaders of the revolt, the Italian revolutionary Raffaello Carboni declared: .I call upon you, my fellow diggers, irrespective of nationality, religion or colour . to salute the Southern Cross as the refuge of the oppressed from all countries on earth..

Hardly the declaration of some racist Pauline Hanson lover! Standing beside Carboni at the meeting was one of his closest supporters, the black American miner John Josephs. Josephs was one of the leaders of the rebellion subsequently put on trial for treason. He was acquitted by an all white jury and carried in triumph through the streets of Melbourne by a huge crowd.

There were flare ups of anti-Chinese racism on the goldfields. But there is no evidence that it was an issue at Eureka.

The rebel miners included French, Germans, Irish, Russians, Scots, Italians and African-Americans. The miners were united in a progressive, democratic struggle directed against their real enemies . the British government and their hated agents, the police. They were not diverted into scapegoating Chinese. After Eureka a fearful colonial ruling class did launch a racist anti-Chinese campaign in an attempt to head off the threat of further revolts.

So how did the racist myth about Eureka develop? In part it is due to the fact that the ruling order always tries to co-opt radical movements, and in the years after Eureka a strong racist nationalist agitation developed that attempted to appropriate Eureka along with rebels like Ned Kelly. The fact that Eureka was not actually a working class rebellion opened it up more readily to subsequent populist and racist interpretations.

December 1854 was the fourth year of the gold rushes that had transformed the Australian colonies and led to a population explosion in Victoria. Hundreds of thousands flooded the goldfields in search of fortunes. A few became fabulously wealthy. Most did not.

Many of the miners had been workers . sailors jumped ship, farm workers fled the land, building workers the city in search of gold . but on the goldfields most did not work for a boss. The diggers were largely self-employed. This is important to emphasise as a corrective to many of the myths about Eureka.

Indeed the initial impact of the gold rushes was to destroy those unions that did exist in Melbourne because so many workers had abandoned their jobs. Not being wage labourers, the miners could not take collective strike action to win their demands.

This did not mean that the miners could not revolt. However their revolts were likely to take the form of riots, armed street fighting or protest meetings. The gold miners could be revolutionary . in the sense of taking up arms and overthrowing the government . but their revolution was not one that could abolish capitalism.

They could not take over their workplaces and run them collectively under workers. control. Their struggles could not lead to a democratic socialist society.

One of the main grievances of the miners was that they had to pay a licence fee of 30 shillings a month (a lot of money when the wage of a skilled building worker was only 8 shillings a day) whether they were successful in finding gold or not. The government imposed this head tax, not just to raise revenue but to try to force the miners back to work for a boss. Employers . above all the large landowners, the squatters . were screaming because their workers had abandoned their jobs and they were forced to offer much higher wages to try to get a few to stay.

One of the first serious revolts on the goldfields occurred when the government tried to double the licence fee. They were forced to back down.

During 1852 and 1853 there were waves of unrest across the diggings. However this unrest was contained, partly because there was still a degree of prosperity, partly because of the lack of organisation among the miners as they rushed from field to field chasing the latest Eldorado.

This was to change rapidly in 1854. The arrival of a new British Governor, Sir Charles Hotham, sparked hopes of reform.

The diggers naively thought that Hotham had come to right their grievances . to abolish the licence fee, end police harassment of miners and deal with the rampant corruption of the government authorities. They were to be sadly disillusioned.

Rather than being a benevolent reformer Hotham had specific instructions from the British authorities to crack down. The British government thought the previous Governor had been too soft!

In a private letter, Rede, the Resident Commissioner at Ballarat (the top government official on the goldfields) spelled out the new strategy:

.I am convinced that the future of the Colony depends on the crushing of the movement in such a manner that it may act as a warning . we may be able to crush the democratic agitation at one blow, which can only be done, if we find them with arms in their hands..

The authorities might have succeeded but for two things. Firstly, the resolute political leadership that had arisen amongst the miners. An important minority of the miners had radical backgrounds . they had participated in the revolutions that had swept Europe in 1848, or been active in the revolutionary wing of the Irish republican movement, or were British Chartists (the world.s first mass radical working class movement).

Secondly, in 1854 a growing economic and political crisis was engulfing the whole of Victoria, not just the goldfields. There was a sharp rise in unemployment in Melbourne and wages plunged from their previous high.

The government was rocked by a series of corruption crises and a growing anti-British Empire sentiment arose over an attempt to reintroduce the transportation of convicts. All of this meant that when the miners took up arms in Ballarat, they had enormous sympathy throughout Victoria.

Karl Marx wrote at the time: .We must distinguish between the riot in Ballarat and the general revolutionary movement in the Colony of Victoria. The former has probably been suppressed by now. The latter can only be ended as a result of considerable concessions..

This shows what is wrong with the reformist interpretation of Eureka. It was only by the use of revolutionary methods that major reforms could be won. If the initial reformist leadership of the miners had retained their influence, Hotham would not have had to make any serious concessions.

How they won

So how did the movement develop on the ground at Ballarat?

Discontent came to a head in October 1854 when a huge crowd of miners marched on the Eureka hotel and burnt it to the ground. This was no mindless riot, but a deliberate act.

The publican, Bentley, a notoriously corrupt figure close to the British administration, had murdered a miner. But the authorities protected him.

A Ballarat Reform League was set up to agitate around the miners. grievances. Initially it was dominated by moderate Chartists, who today would be politically close to the ALP, though on its left wing.

The most prominent figure was John Humffray, a Welsh .moral force. Chartist, committed to non-violence and moral persuasion . as opposed to left-wing Chartists, who in the terminology of the times were called .physical force. Chartists.

The balance of forces in the movement at this stage was reflected in the composition of the three delegates the miners sent to Melbourne to negotiate for the release of the miners arrested for burning Bentley.s pub. Two of the three . Humffray and George Black . were moral force Chartists.

One . Thomas Kenneddy . was a Scottish Chartist, not so convinced of moral persuasion. His favourite saying was: .nothing succeeds like a lick of the lug. . which roughly translates as a smack in the head.

The moral force Chartists had up to this point played a positive role. They had helped politically cohere and organise the disparate miners. They had popularised demands like the right to vote and breaking up the lands of the wealthy squatters.

But by mid-November 1854 they were beginning to lose their grip on a rapidly radicalising movement. German and Irish miners were arming for a showdown. Miners attacked a convoy of troops. Arms and ammunition were seized.

The decisive turning point came at a meeting on 29 November when 15,000 miners gathered to hear a report from the three delegates who had been to Melbourne. The moral force Chartists argued for compromise with the government. They were howled down.

One of the radicals moved that the diggers burn their hated licences and that they physically defend anyone who was arrested for not having a licence.

The scale of the shift to the left was reflected in the fact that the moderates, in an attempt to tone down the militancy of the Irish miners, had encouraged a Catholic priest to speak . to no avail. The miners listened in stony silence to the priest but not one miner voted against burning the licences.

Eureka is sometimes portrayed as essentially an Irish rebellion against British tyranny. There is a certain amount of evidence for this view.

Many of the key leaders, including Peter Lalor and Timothy Hayes, were Irish. The rebels. password was Vinegar Hill after a famous Irish convict rebellion. A high proportion of those killed or wounded in the fighting in the stockade were Irish.

Nevertheless, the movement that led to Eureka was a genuine mass movement that united the diggers across national lines. Initially the Irish were not prominent. The leadership was in the hands of British Chartists.

However, as things moved closer and closer to an armed rising, the Irish and Germans (though their numbers were much smaller) were to provide the mass base of the radicals. The Irish were not inherently left-wing but they and the Germans, because of their revolutionary traditions, were much more ready to take up arms. For many of the British diggers a resort to arms was a much more radical step and they drew back as the movement peaked, just as the Irish rushed forward.

It was not just the militancy of the miners that was growing. The movement was being transformed politically. Alongside demands for the right to vote now came calls for the formation of a republic and a break with British rule . for a revolution on the American model.

The authorities threw down the gauntlet. The police began arresting miners for not having licences.

The miners resisted. Fighting broke out. The Riot Act was read. There was mass arming in self-defence. Thousands assembled in a stockade built on Bakery Hill.

The moral force partisans like Humffray abandoned the struggle. They had nothing to offer once the battle lines were clearly drawn.

The authorities waited a few days to bring up reinforcements and heavy artillery. Then, early on Sunday morning, when the numbers in the stockade were low, they launched their assault.

The stockade was stormed within half an hour. It seemed a total defeat.

But the miners. revolutionary stand had provided a focus for the mood of revolt that was sweeping the colony. In Melbourne a giant mass meeting called by respectable middle class figures to support the Governor.s stand was taken over by radicals. A motion supporting the miners was carried overwhelmingly. An amazing victory had been won by bold revolutionary action.