Just a quick post today as I have been busy cat wrangling, gardening, preparing “toys” for sale, and getting a book launched on Amazon

The book is currently available on kindle and shortly in both paperback and hard cover. This is the publishers blurb, but don’t believe a word of it!

Threads of Liberty — The Women Who Stitched TogetherAustralian Democracy rewrites the story of the Eureka Stockade from the ground up, revealing a chapter of Australian history that traditional accounts have overlooked. Although the Eureka Flag has become one of the nation’s most powerful symbols of justice and resistance, its creators — three remarkable women — slipped from the historical record for more than 150 years.

Drawing on archival evidence, textile analysis, oral testimony and recent scholarship, this book shows how Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes transformed domestic skill into political action. Stitch by stitch, they produced the banner under which miners swore their legendary oath — not in safety, but in danger, exhaustion and secrecy. The rebellion that followed has long been understood as a male turning point in the democratic movement; this book proves it was a communal one.

Threads of Liberty offers a groundbreaking interpretation of Eureka as a story not just of armed resistance, but of families, households and women whose labour made democracy possible. It reclaims their courage, restores their legacy and expands our understanding of what — and who — forged Australian identity.

The book has been a labor of love over a long period of time and the Authors note sums up my thoughts:

This volume gathers together a collection of essays written over many years, each shaped by its own moment, its own concerns, and my own evolving understanding of Eureka. I have chosen—deliberately—to present each essay in its complete form, preserving its original voice, perspective, and scholarly apparatus. Each stands alone, with its own footnotes and bibliography, because each represents a distinct stage in my engagement with this history. You may notice certain themes, arguments, or insights recur across chapters; this has been left intentionally. These recurrences mark the development of my thinking and serve to reinforce the central motifs that have drawn me repeatedly back to Eureka and to the people who lived it.

The essay titles have been adjusted to create a more coherent chapter structure, yet the substance of each piece remains unchanged. This approach allows the collection to function simultaneously as a unified work and as a record of sustained reflection—a chronicle of my long-standing, and at times deeply personal, devotion to understanding the rebellion and its legacy. My hope is that this format offers readers not only historical insight but also an authentic sense of an intellectual journey, one shaped by genuine passion, gradual discovery, and a persistent desire to confront the gaps and silences in the traditional narrative.

Part of that passion stems from a strong family connection to Eureka—intriguingly, from both inside and outside the stockade. On one side of the family stands Anne Duke, a figure of whom we are immensely proud. Her story is not myth or embellishment; it is documented, verifiable, and deeply moving. Anne Duke was heavily pregnant at the time of the uprising, yet she remained within the stockade as the attack unfolded. She was not a passive observer of events but an active participant, providing vital care, comfort, and solidarity amidst the smoke, chaos, and violence. Her presence on the frontline challenges the simplistic notion of Eureka as an exclusively masculine act of rebellion. Her courage exemplifies the often-unacknowledged female labour that sustained the miners at their most desperate hour. She is a cornerstone of my family’s story and a living testament to the essential, feminist re-reading of Eureka that has long been overdue.

On another branch of the family tree lies a far more shadowed and uncertain tale—a piece of folklore that whispers of a police constable who may have served with the government forces during the assault. The story claims that he was so ashamed by the brutality of the attack on the miners that he resigned from the Victoria Police shortly after Eureka and moved to South Australia, where he reportedly joined the police force there. Historical records confirm the existence of a constable in the South Australian Police with the same second and third initials, serving in Port Adelaide and North Adelaide. Yet nothing definitively connects these two men, and the gaps in the archival record are too wide to bridge with certainty.

It is entirely possible that this tale is a family reimagining, created to soften or redeem an uncomfortable truth. Like many family stories, it may contain a kernel of truth wrapped in layers of hopeful embellishment. The circumstantial details align suggestively, but the evidence remains elusive—insufficient to prove, yet equally insufficient to dismiss. The story sits in a liminal space between historical possibility and inherited mythology.

From a personal perspective, I find myself strangely drawn to the idea that members of my family may have stood on both sides of that rough timber barricade in the early dawn of 3 December 1854. There is something profoundly human in the possibility: the complexity of loyalty, the clash of ideals, the ambiguity that history rarely acknowledges. Whether or not the constable truly belongs to my lineage, the idea enriches my sense of connection to Eureka. It places my family within the full moral spectrum of the event—courage and compassion on one side, duty and remorse on the other. It also reminds me that history is rarely neat, rarely easy, and never entirely free of personal longing.

I cannot confirm the story, but I cannot relinquish it either. It speaks to a deeper truth about why Eureka has always mattered so much to me: it is not simply an episode of political dissent, but a profoundly human drama in which ordinary people—miners, mothers, troopers, workers, families—confronted fear, injustice, hope, and consequence. In exploring their stories, I am in some way also exploring my own.

It is in this spirit that I offer the pages that follow. I hope they illuminate not only the history of Eureka, but the enduring, personal ways in which that history continues to shape identity, memory, and meaning.

---