The anger came out of the gold itself. To dig, a miner had to buy a licence, an expensive monthly fee charged whether or not he found any gold, and the police enforced it with humiliating 'licence hunts' — demanding papers, dragging men from their claims, chaining offenders to logs. The diggers had crossed oceans for a fair go and found instead a system that taxed the poor and answered to no one they had elected, for they had no vote at all. When a miner named James Scobie was killed near a Ballarat hotel and the case was bungled, the resentment boiled over. The miners organised. On 11 November 1854 more than ten thousand gathered at Bakery Hill, and out of that meeting came the Ballarat Reform League, chaired by the Chartist John Humffray, demanding the vote and an end to the licence.

On 29 November some twelve thousand met again at Bakery Hill, and a new flag rose above them: a white cross and five white stars on a deep blue field, the Southern Cross. It carried no crown and no empire, only the constellation that hung over the goldfields every night. The miners burned their licences in the fire. Their leader emerged in Peter Lalor, an Irish-born engineer who climbed onto a stump, and as the men knelt beneath the flag he led them in an oath that Australians still quote: 'We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.' They built a crude stockade on the Eureka lead, an acre of ground fenced with mining slabs, and they waited.

The authorities did not wait long. They chose the early hours of Sunday, when the stockade was lightly held, and attacked before sunrise. The defenders, perhaps 120 men still inside, had pikes and a few firearms against trained troops; resistance collapsed almost at once. Soldiers bayoneted the wounded and burned the tents. Peter Lalor was shot in the arm and hidden by his comrades; the arm was later amputated to save his life, and a price was put on his head he never paid. The dead were mostly young diggers, a great many of them Irish, men like Edward Thonen, the lemonade-seller remembered in folk song. The exact toll has never been settled — official counts say at least twenty-two miners, but later tallies record more, and in 2022 a new memorial at Ballarat named thirty-five who lost their lives. The uncertainty is itself part of the story: some of the dead were carried away quietly by friends, and the government had every reason to keep the number low.

The crackdown backfired completely. Thirteen captured miners were put on trial for high treason in Melbourne, and one after another, juries refused to convict them — the public was on the diggers' side. Within months the hated licence was abolished and replaced with a cheap miner's right that carried, crucially, the vote. By 1857 Victoria had granted the franchise to all white men, among the first places on Earth to do so, and Peter Lalor, the hunted rebel, took a seat in the very parliament his uprising had helped open. The Eureka Flag survives in fragments at the Eureka Centre Ballarat — owned by the Art Gallery of Ballarat but on long-term public display at the Eureka Stockade site — about two-thirds of the original. The Southern Cross has since been claimed by causes its makers never imagined, for good and for ill. But on the ground where the stockade stood, a monument has marked the rebel graves since 1884, and the diggers who died there at dawn are remembered not as rioters but as the people who taught a young country to demand a say in its own affairs.