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Eureka flag fragment finally comes home

Dec 03, 2013
Part of the Eureka flag. Photo: AAP

Part of the Eureka flag. Photo: AAP

Its owner calls it “a little piece of rag … a bit of rough blue cloth you wouldn’t want anywhere near your skin”.

But today that little piece of blue wool-and-cotton cloth is being unveiled at Ballarat’s Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka (MADE) and is the subject of considerable excitement.

Why? Because testing by Adelaide experts Artlab has confirmed it is a piece of the Eureka flag.

When miners on the Victorian goldfields rose up in protest in 1854, a home-made flag fluttered above their crude stockade to symbolise their defiance, their hatred of the authorities and, especially, of the 30-shillings-a-month mining licence fee.

The Eureka Stockade began on November 30 with a solemn oath by the miners to stand by each other. It ended on December 3 with a battle that resulted in the deaths of 38 people. The flag was trampled, hacked and carried off as a trophy by Trooper John King.

These days the huge flag, with its white cross on a blue background, is in MADE – but 40 per cent of it is missing.

But now an extra little fragment will go on display at the museum, courtesy of Adrian Millane of Nambour, Queensland.

The story of the rectangle, which measures just 5cm by 2cm, is almost as interesting as the failed uprising.

Millane was given the scrap by his great aunt Dot Millane in 1992 when, as he says, “she was in sight of the goalposts of life”. Dot had been given it in 1956 by her mother, Gertrude Millane, who in turn had received it in 1891 from her father, Francis William Joseph Breen Hanlon.

Hanlon had been a cousin and great friend of the miners’ Irish leader, Peter Lalor – and was even at the bedside when Lalor (who post-Eureka became a parliamentarian) died in 1889.

Millane says his family folklore was adamant the cloth was a Eureka relic: “Lalor at one point made a gift of a small snippet of the flag to Francis Hanlon.”

But how did Lalor, whose arm was badly injured in the battle, get the souvenir?

Millane has a theory: “I think some character who had obtained some pieces of the flag gave them to Lalor out of respect.”

For 21 years, Millane kept the blue cloth in a box in his wardrobe, viewing its preservation as “a sacred trust”.

“I grew up with the story of the Eureka Stockade as one of great Irish courage against adversity and the horrible tyrant of the Crown,” he says.

But Millane became increasingly convinced that “this just can’t stay in my cupboard”. So when MADE put out a call a couple of months ago for anyone with pieces of the flag to come forward, he got in touch.

MADE’s director, Jane Smith, says she had “a level of healthy scepticism”, but also a gut feeling the Millane family legend might be right – not least because the fabric was pinned to a 1910 postcard featuring Eureka Park’s cannons. On the back someone had written: “This is the Eureka flag.”

So off the scrap went to Adelaide’s Artlab, which had carried out significant conservation work on the flag a couple of years earlier, for testing.

“I spent 300 hours stitching it then, so we’re quite intimately acquainted,” Artlab fabrics conservator Mary-Anne Gooden says.

She took samples of the Millane fragment and did a painstaking comparison with the flag: “We looked at the weave, the type of fibres and the dye that was used.”

The scrap matched the flag in every respect, right down to its Prussian blue dye. Gooden phoned the news through to Smith, who in turn phoned its owner.

“When Jane rang me back and told me I just about dropped the packet of nails I was holding in the hardware shop,” Millane says.

All three hope more fragments of the flag will come out of cupboards.

“We know there are a lot of pieces out there,” Gooden says.

Smith is also convinced more fragments remain in private hands: “It was an era where souveniring was kind of what you did.”

She adds that a school student recently came through the museum and said, “Dad’s got a piece of the flag but he doesn’t tell anybody.”

Millane had made loan of his fragment for MADE to put on display. He unveiled it there today, in a ceremony which just happens to fall on Eureka Day, the 159th anniversary of the bloody end of the miners’ stand.

Millane sees the happy outcome as a vindication of family folklore, and is proud that successive hands took such good care of a scrap of cloth.

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