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Peter Lalor

1823–1889

 

The role of the Irish in the drama of creating the very idea of Australia is summed up in the career of Peter Lalor, and of the events at the Eureka Stockade in the goldfields of the 1880s.

      Born at Tinnakill, County Laois, on 5th February 1827, he was the younger brother of the Irish political leader James Fintan Lalor (himself a man of continuing importance in the Irish republican tradition), the child of a wealthy farmer and member of Parliament.  His father had radical views and had resisted the imposition of tithes and was an advocate of the repeal oft he Act of Union.  The family remained in good circumstances until the famine.  Latter in life, Lalor's father claimed, 'I have been for upwards of forty years struggling without ceasing in the cause of the people'.  Some of this passion was passed on to his sons.

      Peter Lalor was educated at Carlow College and Trinity College in Dublin, and became a civil engineer.  As a youth he did not share his family's political activities, and had no desire to mix himself up in them.

      Like so many of his countrymen, the discovery of gold at Golden Point, Victoria, in October 1851, tempted him to immigrate to Australia with his brother Richard.  They arrived in Melbourne in October 1852.  At first he found work as an engineer on the construction of the Melbourne-Geelong Railway.  He and his brother also had an interest in a provisions store in Melbourne.

      Richard returned to Ireland, where he was later a Parnellite MP.  In 1854 Peter moved to Ballarat (seventy-six miles west-northwest of Melbourne), where he held rich gold claims.  He intended to continue the provisions supply business in the fields.

      He was involved in a protest by the miners, though not as a leading figure.  'The people,' he said, recalling the language of Irish politics, 'were dissatisfied with the laws, because they excluded them from possession of the land, from being represented in the Legislative Council, and imposed on them an odious poll tax.'  The protest was one familiar to colonial America: no taxation without representation.

      A miners' strike broke out when they refused to continue paying a licence to the crown.  This had its origins in the imprisonment of three miners after Bentley's Hotel was burned.  The Ballarat Reform League then developed a programme of reforms.  A mass meeting was held on 29th November, 1854, to hear what the governor had to say, but his concessions were not enough.  The twelve thousand miners, over whose head flew a Southern Cross flag, were for resistance.

      The next day soldiers and police were sent to the goldfields, where they arrested some miners and withdrew with their prisoners.  Other miners crowded onto the scene and occupied Bakery Hill, where they raised their flag.  Lalor was the only one of the committee now present, and he called on the miners to arm and resist, swearing by the Southern Cross to defend their rights and liberties.

      The next day the miners marched from Bakery Hill to the Eureka site.  Lalor was elected commander, and a stockade was erected.  This followed the pattern planned by the Young Irish rebels that Lalor's brother Fintan had led.  Peter Lalor, however, had no military background, and an American was appointed to deal with military matters.

      The stockade was not intended as a complete defence.  The miners returned to their tents for the night, leaving only 120 men, mostly Irish, in the stockade.  Early on the morning of 3rd December, police and soldiers attacked.  In the fighting at the stockade over thirty miners were shot dead and twelve wounded.  Some 125 miners were then arrested.

      Lalor, who had been leading the striking miners, lost his arm but escaped in the confusion.  In due course the goldfields were granted representation, and Lalor was elected to the assembly as the member from Ballarat in November 1855.  In the next half century the mines there produced £70 million, making them of crucial importance to the Australian economy as a whole.

      Lalor defended the interests of the miners but did not follow their views on all matters.  He was especially conservative in his outlook.  He was not, he explained, actually a democrat if that meant 'Chartism, communism, or republicanism', but 'if democracy means opposition to a tyrannical press, a tyrannical people, or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been, I am still, and will ever remain, a democrat'.

      His political career belongs to the history of Australia, but his views, which were liberal but not fully democratic, were influenced by the ideas of Young Ireland and the Americans who had flooded into Australia from California.  In subsequent years Peter Lalor held several posts, such as Postmaster General and commissioner of customs.  He was Speaker of the House from 1880 to 1888.  He had to resign because of ill health, but was voted a grant of £4,000 for his patriotic services.  He died at Melbourne on 10th February 1889.

      The Eureka Stockade has entered into the mythology of Australia.  It was acclaimed by no less a person than Karl Marx as a truly revolutionary episode, but the later career of Peter Lalor and modern historians suggest otherwise.  The myth remains, enshrined in histories, novels, and films.  And that myth, of a people's uprising, still influences the populist politics of Australia.  Lalor brought to the new politics of Australia something of the passion that had informed his brother's efforts for land reform in Ireland.  Ever since, in the politics of Australia, the Irish element has been just as important as it has been in America.