[LINK] "The Assassination of the Canadian Kid"

[rfmcdonald]

Walrus Magazine's Justin Robertson surprised me with news of a Canadian connection to Australian state-building, in the form of Canadian-born rebel and flag designer Henry Ross.

Dreck flew off Captain Henry Ross’s steel-capped boots with each step toward the mahogany-trimmed bar of the Star Hotel. He’d spent the previous twelve hours digging for gold in a cramped pit ten metres below the goldfields of Ballarat, Australia; he’d earned a brew. Bypassing like-minded patrons, sipping and spilling their pints in equal measure as William McCrae frantically wiped down his counter, Ross settled in at a secluded table of men deep in conversation. They called themselves the Ballarat Reform League. Their leader, an Irishman from Melbourne named Peter Lalor, was just then sounding off on the eight-pound miners’ tax enforced by Governor Charles Hotham, ostensibly to put a chill on gold fever. The men erupted, pounding the table and damning the colonial government. Ross smiled: it was not the first time he’d heard such talk.

Some fifteen years before, the young Ross had fought in the Canadian Rebellions, much to the embarrassment of his mother, Elizabeth, who was raising his eleven siblings at the family home in Upper Canada Toronto. What objection could the lad possibly have to British rule, she wondered? His grandfather was a Scot who’d been posted to patrol three colonies in Lower Canada during the American Revolution and liked the place enough to stay. His father had not only joined the citizens’ militia when the US attacked Canada in 1812, but made his living sewing uniforms for the colonial army. Ross had inherited his forebears’ military instincts, just not their loyalties.

[. . .]

One warm November afternoon in 1854, thousands of angry miners made their way to a reform rally on Bakery Hill, in a part of Ballarat known as Eureka. Government officials took note when the men burned their papers, and the next day conducted a brutal sweep. The miners responded by gathering back at the Hill. Standing at the summit, Lalor called out an oath: “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties.” Amen, the men replied, and marched off to erect a wooden barricade around about a half-hectare of the goldfields and themselves. At the epicentre, Ross raised a flag he’d designed to symbolize unity in defiance: against a midnight blue background, a silver cross joining the five stars of the southern hemisphere’s most prominent constellation.

Does the last sentence sound familiar?

Go, read.