If men were machines you would say that that a screw had shaken itself loose and the whole steely apparatus needed urgent maintenance. But human beings are made of flesh and bone and heart and mind, and on Friday 1 December the people of Ballarat stopped work of their own conscious accord. Miners...
It was May 1854, and Ballarat was a raft of tents in a sea of cold mud. The summer of 1853–4 had been dry, the wet season had arrived early and now the rain had come. Mining had practically ceased. John Manning, the master at St Alipius Catholic School on the Eureka lead (...