The 15,000 gold diggers flew a new flag when they gathered for Australia’s first mass protest meeting at Forest Creek on Monday 15 December 1851. We don’t know lot about that original flag. The only visual record is in a drawing of the Meeting done by David Tulloch and it shows only part of the flag. We have no record of who designed the flag, who made it or what happened to it.

The contemporary Diggers’ Flag was created in 1995 by Robin Annear for the first modern commemoration of the 1851 Meeting, as an artistic interpretation based on the Tulloch drawing and other historical sources. It now flies permanently at the highway entrance to Chewton and at the site of the 1851 Meeting in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park in Dja Dja Wurrung country. The site is listed in the Victorian Heritage Register (VHR2368) to acknowledge the historical significance of the Diggers’ Meeting in the early development of democracy in Victoria.

Chewton Domain Society member, Jackie McMaster, explains how the contemporary flag was created and why it has been adopted to represent the spirit of Chewton.

The Diggers’ Monster Meeting Flag flies at various places in Chewton and Castlemaine. People have asked if this is the original historic flag design or a more recent design that Chewton has adopted. The answer is that the contemporary Diggers’ Flag is an artistic interpretation and recreation of the flag flown at the December 1851 Monster Meeting of 15,000 Diggers, when they defied the government by refusing to pay more for their gold licences. It is based on an 1852 engraving by Thomas Ham of an 1851 drawing by David Tulloch entitled The Great Meeting of Diggers 1851, plus what was known and recorded about the Central Victorian goldfields in 1851, including a report by historian William Howitt in his 1855 book , Land, Labour and Gold. The colours were based on descriptions of the clothing worn by the diggers at the time.

 In 1995 Castlemaine author and historian Robyn Annear created a hand drawn and stitched recreation of the original flag for the first commemoration of the 1851 Meeting. It was her best interpretation using the information. She explained that the design came from looking at the Tulloch/Ham lithograph and reading historian Howitt’s report (in his 1855 book Land Labour and Gold) that an earlier version of the Red Ribbon Rebellion flag had been flown at the Monster Meeting in 1851. 

In 1999 editor Phil Ingamels, commissioned artist Robert Avitabile to refine Robyn’s flag design to be included in the book Discovering the Mount Alexander Diggings published by Friends of the Castlemaine Diggings (FOMAD).

Tulloch’s drawing shows the flag had four quadrants with a pick and shovel in the top left hand quadrant. Because the flag is drawn fluttering the other symbols are not clearly visible. Robyn’s contemporary design has four quadrants like the original, with the following four symbols.

• the pick and shovel (for the diggers’ labour), 
• a set of scales (for the social justice they sought), 
• a tied bundle of sticks (representing the strength of their unity) and  
• kangaroo and emu (for Australia).

In the early 2000s a group of history enthusiasts began publicising the 1851 Monster Meeting under the auspices of the Chewton Domain Society. The Society set about trying to unearth some more detailed information about what the flag had looked like, with a view to getting some replica flags made. Letters published in local papers and a query in the Weekly Times about the flag design and colours brought no responses. Because the Monster Meeting was considered an important event in the birth of democracy in our country, the group itself was democratic in the process of deciding exactly how Chewton’s Diggers’ Flag should look. They used a worksheet so that any interested party could say how they thought the flag should be interpreted. Eventually it was voted that the flag design in the FOMAD book was an excellent, thoughtful and educated interpretation of the historical flag. So permission was sought and given to use that design.

The flag we fly now is the result of that collaborative team effort to research and finalise the design with input from many people. It has been flown since then to remind people of the how the Diggers of 1851 at their Monster Meeting set in motion a democratic movement of protest that was a first step in the development of democracy in Victoria. It has also been adopted as representing the spirit of Chewton – taking a stand together to fight for our rights and social justice. For example, the flag was flown over the Chewton Pool in 2009 when the community was battling to save it from being closed. 

However not everyone agrees that the design of the contemporary flag is appropriate. Goldfields author and artist, Geoff Hocking, believes that the flag adopted by the Chewton Domain Society, with its bold colours and graphic symbols, is too contemporary to be historically accurate. His alternative view can be read in full in the Bendigo Magazine Spring 2006 (www.bendigomagazine.com.au). Geoff suggests that a contemporary interpretation of the flag should better reflect what we know of the history of the very different decorative styles, technique and imagery at the the time.

But Geoff concludes:

Any interpretation of our history is a tricky business. When Bendigo and Chewton look to tell their story of their part in the story of the gold fields agitation, from the Great Meeting to the Red Ribbon Rebellion, they need a banner as bright, and as thoughtful in the interpretation of its meaning as that flown in another large central goldfields city. And they need to fly them from the highest flagpoles, after all the Bendigo and Chewton agitations were bigger, better armed and better organised than that other one in 1854 – just no one got shot.