You won’t read about these women in the countless books published on the Eureka Stockade. As Clare Wright notes in this extraordinary new history, Eureka has been presented as ‘an essentially masculine episode in which male passions were inflamed, male blood was shed and, ultimately, manhood suffrage won’. According to certain versions of the myth, brave men confronted an oppressive system at Eureka Lead on the Ballarat diggings that Bloody Sunday. No longer prepared to endure extortionate fees for mining licences, calling for political representation and an end to police harassment, they burned their licences and built a barricade to resist arrest. After the troopers mowed them down, their sacrifice prompted widespread reform. It is for this reason – so the story goes – that we recognise them as the founding fathers of Australian democracy.

If one accepts this (and not every-one does), why haven’t we been told of our founding mothers? What about the women who were behind the barricade, who fuelled the protest in the local paper, or raised funds for the miners whose legal grievances helped to prompt the Stockade? One of these women even wrote a poem for the local paper in 1884, celebrating the site of the massacre as ‘… the old, old spot / Where we fought for liberty’. What about her?

‘All of Australia’s foundational myths are emphatically masculine ... the role of women is still largely obscured.’

The answer to this question is bleedingly obvious. All of Australia’s foundational myths are emphatically masculine. Even after decades of feminist activism and history-telling, the role of women is still largely obscured. Admittedly, the situation is now changing in primary schools. Recently, my eleven-year-old daughter produced an assignment called ‘Women on the Goldfields’. Choosing a scarlet sheet of cardboard, she proudly pasted text about the Ballarat shopkeeper, Martha Glendinning, and the travelling dancer, Lola Montez, accompanied by images from Internet sites. Yet this hardly amounts to recognition of women as political actors in the Eureka story. For this we must turn to Wright’s work.

Based on ten years of research, The Forgotten Rebels introduces us to women such as Ellen Young, the ‘Ballarat Poetess’ whose verse in the Geelong Advertiser provided a potent distillation of miners’ grievances. Wright familiarises us with Clara Seekamp, who after the massacre wrote ‘genuinely revolutionary’ articles in the Ballarat Times. She introduces us to women who petitioned the inadequate governor, Sir Charles Hotham, after their husbands were arrested for unpaid licence fees. These women’s complaints were a rebuke to Hotham’s administration, challenging ‘the moral legitimacy of his rule’. Crucially, too, Wright acquaints us with Fanny Smith, a Ballarat resident who advocated women’s right to political citizenship as early as 1856.

Wright claims to have avoided entering into ‘the usual interpretative controversies’ surrounding Eureka. She tells us she has refrained from debating which side fired the first shot, or ‘whether Eureka even deserves the press it gets as a key landmark in Australia’s democratic traditions’. This is disingenuous. There is no question that Wright empathises with the Eureka rebels. She obviously regards the licensing system as unfair, imposed irrespective of whether or not a miner had made money. Patently, too, Wright considers the rebels to have been motivated by fundamental democratic principles. Yet The Forgotten Rebels is more than just a sympathetic account of the Stockade told with an eye to its female participants. It is also a social and cultural history of the Ballarat diggings aimed at scotching the fantasy of an all-male society.

Those of us not currently in primary school have long been accustomed to characterisations of gold-era Victoria as a site of ‘footloose masculinity’; a place for men who ‘revelled in the freedom from domestic constraints offered by frontier living’. There was plenty of drunken revelry on the goldfields. There was also a preponderance of men. Among those living solo, however, many longed for a wife and a home. Others pined for loved ones far away. Conversely, some of the women who came to the goldfields did so in search of footloose femininity: adventure, novelty, and freedom from Old World conventions.

Women made up a quarter of the non-Indigenous population in Ballarat in 1854. That was a significantly higher proportion than on the Californian goldfields. More strikingly, women and children together comprised forty-five per cent of the Ballarat populace. The tent-town was in the grip of a baby boom, which made for plenty of domesticity. Wright reveals this through an array of evocative minutiae: breast pumps and embroidered babies’ clothes at the local shops; the sensual shadow-play of bodies glimpsed through the canvas walls by candlelight; the disinclination of a publican to allow her children to play with their poorer neighbours. And it was not just women who partook of this domesticity. Many of the Stockade’s male participants were young husbands and new fathers, careworn from babies squalling in their tents by night. Anger over the expensive mining licences was sharpest among those with hungry mouths to feed.

The Forgotten Rebels is a doorstopper of a book: five-hundred pages and counting. Wright evidently found it difficult to cull from her colossal trove of material. She would have benefited from a more hands-on editor. There is so much to be learned from her prodigality of content, however: not just about the role of women in Eureka and on the goldfields – and not just about the early articulation of women’s political rights in Ballarat – but also about Australian society.

As Wright says, any society that worships the lucky strike is bound to have winners and losers. There would always be tensions on the goldfields, where the desire for egalitarianism jostled against the competitiveness bred by gold-seeking, and where noble notions of liberty were hard to distinguish from resources-boom veniality. There were always going to be grievances, too, once the mostly youthful diggers were disabused of a ‘common illusion of youth’: that ‘honest industry and good intentions … bring just rewards’. Male and female alike, the participants in the Eureka Stockade wanted to restore their faith in this notion, to ensure that it was not just an illusion in the future Australia.