The birth of a notion

The beginning of December was a fine time to visit Ballarat. Victoria's third-largest city (after Melbourne and Geelong) was in the grip of sesquicentenary fever.

In December, 1854, belligerent miners, tired of the colonial Government's punitively expensive licensing regime, took up arms and set up a stockade around their diggings.

The British troops easily overran the miners' pitiful defences and the actual date on which the Eureka Stockade is remembered - December 3 - was the day in which the rebellion was crushed. More than 30 diggers and bystanders died in the assault, but all 13 of the men charged with treason were acquitted. Two of them were elected to the state legislature the next year.

Eureka is regarded as the birthplace of Australian democracy, and the week's wide press coverage makes me wonder if Kiwis' national identity has suffered from the lack of such a single, unifying moment.

Ballarat remembers Eureka in style. Blood on the Southern Cross is an impressive sound-and-light show that accurately evokes life on the goldfields and re-enacts the events of that dramatic night. The 90-minute show plays twice nightly at Sovereign Hill, the tastefully recreated goldfields town that occupies a sprawling theme-park site on the outskirts of the city.

As actors with broad Irish accents shake their fists and bellow: "Dis land belongs to oos and nut to da British", I can't help picturing a couple of Aborigines, under the shade of a coolibah tree, shaking their heads and wondering.

The same idea must have occurred to someone in the celebration organising committee. A note in the official programme for the sesquicentenary "respectfully acknowledges the traditional owners of the land" on which the commemorative events take place.