Our wars are on the football field and cricket pitch!
And we export Shane Warne!
Everyone wins!
The wealthy squatters and business people were losing their workers to the gold fields. To force the workers back, the government of the day imposed a prospecting fee they knew the men could not pay.
The rest is history.
Nothing has changed, the landed gentry and business people still control the government to this very day.
A couple of observations :
The Southern Cross, featured on the Australian flag, was the flag first raised by those miners.
Australia, in it's infancy, was a culture of very independant minded people, who didn't like people trying to impose authority on them (some aspects of this culture still exists today), to such an extent that some Bushrangers (outlaws/highwaymen/brigands) became famous, even to the point of legend. General Sir John Monash (unarguably Australia's finest general, and possibly the greatest Australian to have lived) once said that the highlight of his life was meeting the bushranger Ned Kelly. In this climate, I've not doubt that the miners rebellion at the Eureka Stockade was a huge issue to Australians of the time.
