New Holland Onwards

In 1860 a reward of 100 pound was offered for the apprehension of Edward Frank Hall, wanted for cattle stealing in the Vasse and Balckwood districts. this was at a time when a married couple were hired to work on a farm for 50 pound, or a labourer for 1 pound a week. A reward of such a sum would have been a fortune to most people in the 1860s.

How did all this come about?

Named after their father Henry Edward Hall, Frank Hall was the younger brother of Wm. S. Hall. Frank was born after the family arrived in Western Australia and spent much of his childhood among Aboriginal children and their families, just like many other boys who grew up in the bush in the earliest days days of the colony. He spoke the Aborigines’ language, as well as his father and brothers could if not better, and learned bushlore from them.

Edward Frank Hall

In his early twenties, Frank went to the south and took up the first cattle run, about where Manjimup is today. In early September 1860, Frank was found stealing cattle from other runners with clear evidence and eventually arrested at the Commercial Hotel in Busselton. Cattle stealing was a crime against property and few crimes were more serious in those days.

Frank was held in the Busselton goal pending his trial, but a week after his arrest he escaped. Then for the next three and half months, he “disappeared” into the karri country. Native constables and trackers were sent out to search for him but failed to find a trace.

Harold Aubrey Hall, the youngest son of William Shakespeare Hall, was born in 1871 and died in 1963 at the age of 92. He is the  author of  A partial vocabulary of the Ngalooma aboriginal tribe.

A partial vocabulary of the Ngalooma aboriginal tribe, State Library of Western Australia.

Aubrey was born in Perth and taken to Roebourne and Cossack at the age of five, where he grew up swimming, diving, fishing, boating and playing with aboriginal kids. He had to leave the area when his three daughters needed better education and in 1958 he moved to Perth to retire from his country life. He died there suddenly in 1963 and he was still working on his Ngalooma vocabulary the night to the end of his life. Unfortunately, Aubrey’s study was unfinished therefore failed to interest anthropological circles. 

I would like to mark the beginning of Eureka at the time when Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe resigned in July 1853 and left for England on 5 May 1854. When an experienced general deserted the battle field and passed off the stage before the great wind, it signaled the beginning of the end. The fixed rate license fee system brought inequality amongst the gold diggers with varying income levels, the lucky one earned more than cover the license fee while most of the not so lucky majority found the license fee a burden hard to bear. When the easy gold pickings on the surface were exhausted, the number of the discontent were getting larger and larger, transforming a tax and economical problem to a social and constitutional problem.  A most inappropriate replacement Sir Charles Hotham became the new Lieutenant-governor. Governor Hotham was born on 14 January 1806, and had served in the navy with such distinction that he had won a knighthood and the rank of commodore the year he turned forty. Having been in the navy for all his life, he was said to lack the political and diplomatic skills required for the Governor’s job but to resolve to force for answers to all his questions. When opposed, his rage became so violent that some feared he would one day die of a heart attack on the spot. In the eyes of the Chinese, names are important. Crash was unavoidable when someone with a name HOT-HAM was appointed to a governor position in charge of the goldfields. On 22 June 1854, Governor Hotham rode in triumph through the streets of Melbourne and in August, he visited Ballarat to find out ‘the real feelings of diggers toward the Governor’. Ignoring totally the distress underlying the life of the diggers and the inequality of the tax burden imposed by the license system, Governor Hotham concluded the diggers, provided they were kindly treated, would be ‘found in the path of loyalty and duty’, that meant diggers could be bullied easily. The diggers soon became the answers for the financial problems of the Government of Victoria. During his trip to the gold-fields, Governor Hotham had learned that out of the 70,000 diggers on the Victoria fields, only 43,750 were paying for their license. He decided to force the evaders to pay and on 13 September 1854 he ordered that police conduct license searches on the gold fields twice a week. Now the diggers felt like slaves working for a license. Just as the hot wind begin to blow, on the night of 7 October 1854 Scottish James Scobie and a man named Martin knocked on the door of the Eureka Hotel looking for a drink. The proprietor of the hotel, J.F. Bentley kicked Scobie to death accidentally in a scuffle. A court of inquiry on 12 October 1854 including J.D. Eves, who was closely related to Bentley in business, decided by two to one that there was no prima facie case to charge Bentley murder or manslaughter. Convinced that the government camp and the magistrates were all corrupted with the rich and powerful, a crowd of angry diggers gathered near Eureka Hotel on 17 October 1854 to voice their grievance. Familiar with taking laws in their own hands by mob justice when the authorities were far away, the diggers soon got out of hand and burnt down the Eureka Hotel. Governor Hotham immediately on 21 October 1854 commanded the arrest of Henry Westerly, Thomas Hetcher and Andrew McIntrye for the arson attack. On 1 November 1854 at Bakery Hill in a meeting of 8,000 to 10,000 diggers, the militants suggested the use of force as they reminded the crowd the good old Scottish couplet, “That mere persuasion is all humburg. Nothing convinces like a lick in the lug”. The Ballarat Reform League was formed on 11 November 1854 in another meeting at Bakery Hill. When Bentley and two others were sentenced to three years hard labor on the road for the manslaughter of James Scobie, the diggers cheered the news. But when news reached Ballarat in the last week of November 1854 that Westerby, Hectcher and McIntyre had been sentenced respectively to six, four and three months in prisons, the mood turned upside down. At the same time rumors ran like wildfire that Commissioner Rede and Governor Hotham were prepared to give the diggers a ‘bloody lesson of government by artillery”.

 It was too late when the delegates from the diggers, two ‘Moral Force’ and one ‘Physical Force’ men Black, Humffray and Kennedy, met with Governor Hotham, the Colonial Secretary John Foster and the Attorney-general William Stawell in Melbourne on 27 November 1854.  Their demands of the release of the 3 men, diggers representations in the government, and access to land had all fallen on deaf ears, they left the room empty handed, save for the vague undertaking that the government would ‘look into it’. On 29 November 1854, another meeting held at Bakery Hill, Peter Lalor, the young Irishman, united the diggers when he pledged the tyranny of government forced them into rebellion just like his ancestors in Ireland were forced to fight the Anglo-Saxon tyrants. On 30 November 1854, the diggers elected Peter Lalor as their leader, swear to flight and stand truly by each other to defend their rights. The Moral Force now gave way to the Physical Force, they cried out to burn the hated license and refused to pay any more license fee, a move that might provoke Governor Hotham to get tough, he wanted his tax. The diggers were stopped by one of their leaders Raffaello Carboni, an Italian from Europe, from taking offensive actions against the troops first. Raffaello silenced this madness with a ‘respectable kick in the less respectable region’ with a most ‘respectable boot’. Defensive stockade was built on 1 December Friday and 2 December Saturday 1854. By Saturday night, the number had fallen from 2,000 to 150 with the mass retreated strategically. The troops attacked the stockade at day-break on 3 December 1854, it was over in fifteen minutes. Five soldiers lay dead and twelve were wounded, twenty four diggers lay dead and twenty were wounded, 114 Ballarat rebels had taken prisoner. Lalor was wounded and escaped with a 200 pound reward offered for his arrest. Victory was short-lived. At a public meeting of 3,000 called by the Mayor on 5 December 1854 in front of the city court house in Swanston street to condemn the diggers, the radicals took over the meeting instead, and called for another meeting of 6,000 gathered the next day in the open space adjoining St Paul’s Church to condemn the government and protest the rule of the rifle. All the press over Australian Colonies wrote the events at Eureka as an “un-British error”. To make things worse, on 22 February 1855, Government Hotham decided to charge thirteen of the state prisoners including Timothy Hayes and Raffaello Corboni from the riot at Eureka with high treason. But later all thirteen were found not guilty by a court of jury in Melbourne reflecting that the English Governor could no long control the Australian colonies no more. By 22 March 1855, the Age, t press in Melbourne, was ready to sum it all up, that heart of people was sound; the heart of the government was rotten.

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       On 3 December 1854, Eureka Stockade, a watershed event in Victoria, is thought by many to be the birth place of Australian democracy. I would rather consider it as the midwife of Australian democracy. If democracy was the baby, the conditions for self-government in Australia had accumulated her momentum prior to Eureka like expectant mother during pregnancy.

The path to independence for the white colonies of the British Empire began with the 1839 Durham Report, which proposed unification and self-government for Upper and Lower Canada. In 1840, the Act of Union was passed and created the Province of Canada, responsible government was granted to Nova Scotia in 1848, and was soon extended to the other British colonies.

In February 1851, E.H. Hagreaves discovered gold in Bathurst district and announced it in the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 May 1851.

Among the sudden influx of new immigrants for gold, there were a lot of working class people in Britain where Chartism was their common belief. Chartism was a working class national protest movement which got its name from the People’s Charter of 1838. Their petitions and mass demonstrations put pressure on politicians to concede to manhood suffrage. The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic. A vote for every man twenty–one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime; a secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote; no property qualifications for Members of Parliament; payment of members, enabling tradesman, working man, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation; no plural voting, equal constituencies securing the same amount of representations for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much as or more weight than larger ones; and annual parliamentary election to stop members from staying in the elected positions too long inviting bribery. zEAo�8]r�J�8a^�J

William Shakespeare Hall, the second son of the family, was largely responsible for WA’s first sheep station and pearling industry.

William Shakespeare Hall

William Shakespeare Hall's parents' families both claimed connections with the poet, and hence his name. 

After moving to Perth, the family bought a partly-improved property at Wongong near Armadale, where William Shakespeare Hall received education and then learnt how to farm. In 1852, he went to the Victorian goldfields and eight years later, returned to WA without achieving much so he started to explore the northwest. In 1863, Hall took up the first sheep station in the Roebourne district and about two years later when most of the station’s development was achieved, he turned to pearling with Malay and Aboriginal divers. And later, he strove for other business pursuits in Roebourne and Cossack where he spent the rest of his life and died of a heart attack in 1895.

Such is life

A wounded Ned Kelly was not only arrested but also charged with the murder of three policemen. He was tried and found guilty. So the judge, Redmond Barry sentenced him to death. But Ned Kelly just said to the judge” I will see you there where I go.”

By the time Kelly was captured, the bushman had won the hearts of Victorians. There were 30,000 people signed a petition to ask clemency for him. Eventually their plate-metal icon armour were saved. Some police officers involved in the capture wanted to keep parts of the suits as souvenirs. Many pieces of the suits of armour were separated.

Ned Kelly met his death without any fear. He was hanged at the Melbourne prison on 11 November 1880. It was a huge news event at that time. The old Melbourne jail was covered by journalists. Kelly’s famous last words were ” Well, I suppose it has come to this” or by another version ”Such is life”. 

On the 23rd of the same month, twelve days after Ned Kelly was execution, the judge, Sir Redmond Barry died from an untreated carbuncle on his neck. Some people thought the cause of his death as “curse”.

The remains of Kelly had been a mystery until 2011. Scientists used DNA testing to identify Kelly’s bones among those dug from a grave at the former Pentridge Prison site.

For more than a century, Ned Kelly had become a legendary figure in Australia. But some people regard him as nothing more than a cold-blooded murderer while others celebrate him as Australia’s version of Robin Hood. Just like Journalist Martin Flanagan wrote:” What makes Ned a legend is not that everyone sees him the same--it’s that everyone sees him. Like a bush fire on the horizon casting its red glow into the night.”

When Italy declared war to Britain in 1940, Italians migrants in Australia became political hostages.

Italian interned families had no access to the government support, and there were many sad cases of reported deaths during the internment. In some cases, internees were denied basic medical care. There is a report case we can read about a child died and the parents could not be present at the funeral. The question is ‘ did the Italian migrants deserved and must accept their wartime simply because the fascist Italy declared war to Britain?

For the few Italian migrants still alive in their 80s, 90s and descents, the time for a full and sincere apology has come. Canada and USA have apologise to Japanese and Italians interned civilians with reparations during the war, how long do the Italians Australians will need to wait? 

While the South Australian state has publicly acknowledged and apologised for the ‘many political, military errors of judgement and violations of human rights’, a full federal parliament apology like for the stolen generation and the child migrants is patiently waited for.

The last stand

The Kelly Gang had been on the run from the police in a number of incidents, such as killing policemen, highway robbery and bank robberies. At first, the Victorian government offered a reward of £500 for every Gang member, no matter alive or dead. Later the reward for the bushrangers was increased to £2000 by NSW. Then the Victorian Government made the total reward for the Kelly gang £8,000 (equivalent to $1.5 million in modern Australian currency).

The Kelly Gang had successfully eluding the police for nearly two years. While on the run, Kelly wrote the famous 8000-word Jerilderie Letter. This letter described all his reasons for becoming an outlaw, and gave details in which his Irish Catholic family and working class had been victimised by the law.

Nevertheless the bushranger’s luck had seemed to run out of in a small town Glenrowan, Victoria. That was June 1880, The Gang held up the local railway station, tried to derail a police train. Kelly had hoped this confrontation would arouse a rebellion of poor people against the unjust legal system. They also took about 60 hostages at the Glenrowan Inn. The hostages included the owner of the Inn, her children and some other people of the town. Most of them were just waiting for the police to come, because they were supporters of the Kelly Gang.

However a local school teacher waved a flag to stop the police train. He also told police where the Gang was. So police surrounded the hotel, in order to fire at any of the gang members who left the building. During the shooting, Kelly Gang and the police agreed to allow the hostages to leave the hotel. Only the gang members left inside the Inn.

After that, police set a fire to the hotel to smoke out all the gang members. They shot Joe Byrne when he came out of the burning hotel, while the other two gang members Steve Hart and Dan Kelly continued to fight in the night until they were burnt in the fire.

In the next early morning, Ned Kelly appeared in his steel armour outside the hotel, injured but alive. His appearance horrified the authorities, looking huge, like a ghost in the mist. Police aimed at his unprotected legs. 

Finally Ned Kelly was captured from the nearby bush. He was the only gang member to survive in that battle.

The burnt remains of the Glenrowan Inn, after a siege between the Kelly Gang and Victorian Police. IMAGE CREDIT: John Bray/State Library of Victoria

When Italy entered war in 1940, all Italians in Australia were considered as enemies. Restrictions were put into place and over 4000 Italians were arrested and placed in camps such as Holsworthy, Cowra, Barmera and Loveday.

The life conditions in camps depended on the Geographical location of the camp, the climate, the composition of the camp population, and more importantly the officer's personality in charge. They were not only men, but entire families with children living in camps, it is believed that the number of Italians displaced attained 7000 internees.

At the end of the war, the 'internee's' were allowed to leave the camps and return to a 'normal' life outside the camps...

In 1881, about 200 Italians from Veneto arrived in Sydney, they were swindled and promised land and prosperity in New Ireland ( one of the Solomon Islands) by the Marquis of De Rays. In reality, the island was uninhabitable and many Italians died of starvation and diseases.

The government of New South Wales had learned of the situation and out of sympathy decided to send a ship to save the survivors and gave them the status of refugees in New South Wales. They eventually settled near Lismore, a town that was later renamed ' New Italy'. New Italy ( Woodburn) had its own church, school, post office and a successful agricultural settlement built by Italians themselves.

The Kelly Gang

The life of crime of the Kelly gang received a quick but confused response from the police. In the following months, police tried to catch the two Kelly brothers but they didn’t realise that there were now four in the group. They learnt this when Ned Kelly and his three partners surprised the police. In that gun battle, three policemen were killed. Soon after, the four members became known as “the Kelly Gang”.

The Kelly Gang was formed in April 1878. Joe Byrne became mates with Ned Kelly since 19 and trusted him completely. Joe was part of the Kelly Gang beca use he happened to be around on the day of the Stringybark killings. Otherwise the gang could have been made up from totally different people. Like the rest of the Kelly Gang, Joe Byrne was a good shot and fine horseman.  

Born in 1859, Steve Hart won local frame as a boy, because he was the only one who could jump his horse over some high railway gates. For Steve, horses were his business card being a flash rider, he even won the Beechworth Handicap after a protest was upheld. Dan Kelly was born in 1861, he was the youngest of the three boys in Kelly’s family. Dan was always credited by his parents as being more of a thinker than his brothers. 

While the Gang was hiding in the rangers, they had a idea of making some suits of armour. In 1879, the Kelly Gang created their famous armour made by metal plates. But the four suits of armour were used only once--at the final battle between the Gang and police at Glenrowan.

The Italian community is one the largest  in Australia with Italian being the second most widely spoken language with more than 353 000 speakers. Over 800 000 Australians claim Italian descent. A significant number for a nation that has most certainly contributed an shaped Australia as we know it today. But Let’s turn back time for a brief migration chapter and discover when and how the Italian migration started.

It is believed that the first Italians to sight the Australian continent were sailors  on board of a Spanish expedition in 1520, but the first Italian man to land in Australia was on board a Dutch ship in 1616, his name was Mario Sega, a Sailor from Genoa who jumped out of the boat on shark bay in Western Australia and eloped with an Aboriginal woman.

But is really from the Gold rush in 1850 that the number of Italians considerably increased. Actually, a very significant event started with an Italian miner named Raffaelo Carboni who was the Author of the Eureka stockade, the very first miners revolt. 

Later on, following a failed attempt to settle in an island of New Guinea, Italians received the title of refugees in Australia and eventually settled near Lismore, which was later renamed ‘New Italy’.

By the End of the century, there were Italian doctors, engineers, musicians, businessmen in Australia, many of whom made a substantial contribution to Colonial life.

The Arrival

In February 1830, Henry Edward Hall, Squire of Shakerstone Manor, Leicestershire, UK, arrived in Fremantle, WA, with his wife Sarah Theodosia (1793-1858) and six children.

On arrival in Fremantle they landed their livestock, farming equipment, a 25 ton sloop and a jolly boat, necessities and luxuries and ten servants and apprentices. The value of the cargo entitled the Halls to two land grants in Mandurah where they built Halls Cottage in 1833 and as of 2014 this was believed to be the only extant settler's building in the Mandurah area.

Halls Cottage Then 

Halls Cottage Now

Halls Head is one of four suburbs in Mandurah and the locality was named after the Hall’s family.

Halls Head

Unfortunately, the Halls’ attempt at developing the land was a failure, because the land around Mandurah was not suitable for the type of farming that they wished to undertake, so the large-holding was sold and the family moved to Perth in 1836.

As one of the Australian’s famous folk heroes, Ned Kelly has been memorised by writers, painters and filmmakers. Many people think he was a hero, others say he was also a thief and murderer. So what makes the bush ranger Ned Kelly and Kelly Gang more special than other group of Australian figures? Let’s find out.

Earlier life

Edward “Ned” Kelly was born at the British colony of Victoria in 1854. He was the third child, the first-born son of the their family. His father John Kelly (known as “Red”) had been a convict transported to Australia for the theft of two pigs. 

Ned was acknowledged as a local hero at the age of 10, after saved a seven year-old boy from drowning. By the age of 11 or 12 Ned left school after his father died. He began to help his grandfather with family cattle. At that time they were often in trouble with police about horse and cattle theft, but were not found guilty for lack of evidence. Ned was arrested at the age of 14 for stealing 10 shillings. Meanwhile he was reported to have said that he would be a bushranger. 

Actually Ned’s real problem with the police started when his mother Ellen Kelly was arrested for helping his brother Dan Kelly in the attempted murder. Ellen was sentenced to three years hard labour in prison by judge Redmond Barry for attacking a police officer, even though the officer’s testimony probably was not true. 

Ned and Dan run to the bush, along with Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, they formed a gang-- the Kelly gang. Kelly and his gang were not only defeat the police, but stood up for other people like them.  

       On 3 December 1854, Eureka Stockade, a watershed event in Victoria, is thought by many to be the birth place of Australian democracy. I would rather consider it as the midwife of Australian democracy. If democracy was the baby, the conditions for self-government in Australia had accumulated her momentum prior to Eureka like expectant mother during pregnancy.

The path to independence for the white colonies of the British Empire began with the 1839 Durham Report, which proposed unification and self-government for Upper and Lower Canada. In 1840, the Act of Union was passed and created the Province of Canada, responsible government was granted to Nova Scotia in 1848, and was soon extended to the other British colonies.

In February 1851, E.H. Hagreaves discovered gold in Bathurst district and announced it in the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 May 1851.

Among the sudden influx of new immigrants for gold, there were a lot of working class people in Britain where Chartism was their common belief. Chartism was a working class national protest movement which got its name from the People’s Charter of 1838. Their petitions and mass demonstrations put pressure on politicians to concede to manhood suffrage. The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic. A vote for every man twenty–one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime; a secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote; no property qualifications for Members of Parliament; payment of members, enabling tradesman, working man, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation; no plural voting, equal constituencies securing the same amount of representations for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much as or more weight than larger ones; and annual parliamentary election to stop members from staying in the elected positions too long inviting bribery.