Portal:Australia/Featured article/Week 41, 2006



The Eureka Stockade was a miners' revolt in 1854 in Victoria, Australia against the officials supervising the gold-mining region of Ballarat due to many reasons, including heavily priced mining items and the expense of a digging license. It is often regarded as being an event of equal significance to Australian history as the storming of the Bastille was to French history, but almost equally often dismissed as an event of little long-term consequence. It has been variously mythologised by particular groups as a revolt of free men against imperial tyranny, of independent free enterprise against burdensome taxation, of labour against a privileged ruling class, or as an expression of multicultural republicanism. Although the revolt failed, it was a watershed event in Australian politics, and is often described controversially as the "Birth of Australian Democracy".