Byers, Juliana (2025) “Fatal Collision at Ballarat” – Masculinity at the Eureka Stockade. Research Master thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

On 3 December 1854, just after four o’clock in the morning, 300 soldiers from the 12th and 40th Regiments attacked 150 armed miners from Ballarat, who had entrenched themselves behind a recently built stockade on the Eureka gold lead. Within twenty minutes the military had triumphed, the stockade was aflame and more than 120 men had been taken prisoner; 13 would later stand trial for high treason. This short but bloody skirmish has since become a defining moment in Victoria’s national mythology, yet there is one group of men who were there that have rarely been considered in any detail. The soldiers who stormed the barricade have been made into the villains of the Eureka story: at best they are unintelligent men serving at the behest of tyrants, while at worst they are “beasts” who committed “inhuman brutalities” upon innocent men, women and children.1 This research argues that neither interpretation is accurate, and that the soldiers of Eureka were – like the stockaders and diggers themselves – ordinary men who found themselves in an extraordinary situation. Using the soldiers killed at Eureka as a case study, this work examines the ideas of manhood which influenced their lives and the society they lived in, and how two ultimately incompatible masculinities – British militarism and Australian colonialism – clashed on the goldfields of Ballarat, with disastrous results.

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