From Rural Wales To Australia
At the meeting of over 10,000 diggers at Bakery Hill on Saturday, 11 November 1854, Humffray was elected secretary of the Ballarat Reform League. He was a member of the three person delegation which met with Governor Hotham in Melbourne on Monday, 27 November 1854. The miners' demands for economic and political reforms were rejected. After a particularly vicious licence hunt, a meeting of the Ballarat Reform League was held on Thursday, 30 November 1854 in which the miners rejected those such as Humffray who advocated "moral force" and embarked on the "physical force" route by electing Peter Lalor and deciding to meet force with force and build the Eureka Stockade.
Humffray was not part of the rebellion but played the role of peacemaker in the lead up to the battle on 3 December 1854. He represented the interests of aggrieved diggers at the Commission of Enquiry into the discontent on the goldfields. Humffray was a vocal defender of the 13 miners who were charged with High Treason for their role in the rebellion. He was the editor of the short-lived Ballarat Leader, first president of the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute; and passed first-year law, University of Melbourne (1860). Humffray was an Anglican and died a pauper on 18 March 1891.
Read more about this topic: John Basson Humffray
Famous quotes containing the words rural, wales and/or australia:
“What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools:
The rural parts are turned into a den
Of savage men:
And where ‘s a city from all vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“I just come and talk to the plants, really—very important to talk to them, they respond I find.”
—Charles, Prince Of Wales (b. 1948)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)