Rafaello Carboni, one of those acquitted after the Eureka Stockade uprising, had self-published a book on the incident and the subsequent trial within twelve months of its conclusion:

"I came from old Europe, 16,000 miles across two oceans, and I thought it a respectable distance from the hated Austrian rule … The old style: oppressors and oppressed. A sad reflection, very sad reflection, for any educated and honest man.

For what did we come into this colony? Chi sta bene non si move, is an old Roman proverb. If then in old Europe, we had a bird in the hand, what silly fools we were to venture across two oceans, and try to catch two jack-asses in the bush of Australia!

I had a dream, a happy dream, I dreamed that we had met here together to render thanks unto our Father in heaven for a plentiful harvest, such that for the first time in this, our adopted land, we had our own food for the year; and so each of us holding in our hands a tumbler of Victorian wine, you called on me for a song. My harp was tuned, and in good order: I cheerfully struck up, "Oh, let us be happy together."

Not so, Britons, not so! We must meet as in old Europe - old style - improved by far in the south - for the redress of grievances inflicted on us, not by crowned heads, but blockheads, aristocratical incapables, who never did a day's work in their life.

I hate the oppressor, let him wear a red, blue, white, or black coat." - and here certainly, I tackled in right earnest with our silver and gold lace on Ballaarat, and called on all my fellow-diggers, irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the "Southern Cross" as the refuge of all the oppressed from all countries on Earth. - The applause was universal, and accordingly I received my full reward: Prisons and Chains! Old style."

from The Eureka Stockade, by Rafaello Carboni

 

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Mark Twain travelled to Ballarat, and was impressed with the accents of the locals as well as the Eureka uprising:

Forty-five years ago the site now occupied by the City of Ballarat was a sylvan solitude as quiet as Eden and as lovely. Nobody had ever heard of it. On the 25th of August, 1851, the first great gold-strike made in Australia was made here. The wandering prospectors who made it scraped up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $600. A few days later the place was a hive -- a town.

The news of the strike spread everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way -- spread like a flash to the very ends of the earth. A celebrity so prompt and so universal has hardly been paralleled in history, perhaps. It was as if the name BALLARAT had suddenly been written on the sky, where all the world could read it at once. ...

Ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days. Everybody was happy, for a time, and apparently prosperous. Then came trouble. The government swooped down with a mining tax. And in its worst form, too; for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he was going to take out -- if he could find it. It was a license-tax license to work his claim -- and it had to be paid before he could begin digging. …

Consider the situation. No business is so uncertain as surface-mining. Your claim may be good, and it may be worthless. It may make you well off in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have been thrown away. It might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly sum to encourage him to develop the country's riches; but to tax him monthly in advance instead -- why, such a thing was never dreamed of in America.There, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever rich or poor, were taxed.

The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained -- it was of no use; the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax. And not by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to free people.

The rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible. By and by there was a result; and I think it may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution -- small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a principle, a stand against injustice and oppression. It was the Barons and John, over again; it was Hampden and Ship-Money; it was Concord and Lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great in political results, all of them epoch-making. It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honorable page to history; the people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at the Eureka Stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.

Samuel Clemens