To-night at 6.30pm at St Paul's Anglican Church, 3-5 Humffray Street,
Bakery Hill, Ballarat, Advocacy@ St Paul's is joining with the Ballarat Trades & Labour Council to celebrate the Charter of Rights,
drafted by the English chartist John Basson Humffray who was a leading figure in the events leading up to and surrounding the Eureka Rebellion. Members of the modern-day
Ballarat Reform League are interested too. The site on which St Paul's is located is believed to be the site of the "Monster Meeting" of 10,000 miners who gathered to hear the
Charter of Rights. Hedley Thomson, Chair of Advocacy @ St Paul's, will read the Charter of Rights. Brett Edgington, Secretary of the
Ballarat Trades & Labour Council, will speak. The Charter of Rights is Australia's first document relating to the concept of participatory democracy.
To-day is not only the anniversary of the Charter of Rights. It is Remembrance Day, the day when we commemorate
"the war to end all wars". Below is a letter written earlier this year by Hedley Thomson with reference to the idea of 'nation building' in which he references the events of Eureka. If you want to let us know that you are coming,
please go here.
14th May 2015
The Editor
‘Ballarat Courier’
PO Box 21
Ballarat, 3353
Dear sir,
In the lead up to the 100th Anniversary of the
Gallipoli landing, the ‘nation building’ significance of the event was often
mentioned. This assertion needs to be challenged. Aside from the disaster that
was Gallipoli, for three quarters of a century prior, European settlers had a
clear-eyed view that the Australian landmass would one day comprise one nation.
For example:
1840s
– colonial governments agreed that there should be one railway gauge to
facilitate trade and transport throughout what would one day be a single
nation. The fact that the one gauge objective was not achieved was to do with
subsequent technical decisions, not a change of vision.
- 1854
– the Eureka rising – no civil war was required to affirm the commitment to
establishing a parliamentary democracy; the death of two-dozen people was
enough. What’s more, Eureka was a multi-cultural event at a time when Australia
was the most multi cultural ‘nation’ on Earth.
- 1860s
onwards - the Australian Constitution was developed over 40 years by the
‘founding fathers’, including Ballarat’s own Alfred Deakin. Here was true
leadership, providing us with a parliamentary and electoral system with a
sensible pragmatic structure to ensure representative democratic government.
- 1880s
– the works of Henry Lawson and other writers, with their strong references to
a sense of being Australian, independent of spirit, the mother country left
behind.
- 1901
– Federation – the culmination of the past 60 years’ work.
On the basis of this history of Australia, it is arguable
that our ‘nation’ was more independent, self-supporting and self-assured then
than we are now!
Hedley Thomson
Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market
fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. The social contract is under assault,
neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist
political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life,
anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism
and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a
politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of
extermination for those considered excess. 
JOHN SCHELLNHUBER, CLIMATE SCIENTIST
