[Editor: This is a chapter from The Eureka Stockade by Raffaello Carboni. A glossary has been provided to explain various words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to modern readers.]
XLVI.
Non irascimini.
Saturday morning. The night had been very cold, we had kept watch for fear of being surprised; every hour the cry, was “The military are coming.”
Vern had enlarged the stockade across the Melbourne road, and down the Warrenheip Gully.
Suppose, even that all diggers who had fire arms had been present and plucky, yet no man in his right senses will ever give Vern the credit for military tactics, if that gallant officer had thought that an acre of ground on the surface of a hill accessible with the greatest ease on every side, simply fenced in by a few slabs placed at random, could be defended by a handful of men, for the most part totally destitute of military knowledge, against a disciplined soldiery, backed by swarms of traps and troopers.
Such, however, was our infatuation, that now we considered the stockade stronger, because it looked more higgledy-piggledy.
Source:
Raffaello Carboni. The Eureka Stockade: The Consequence of Some Pirates Wanting on Quarter-Deck a Rebellion, Public Library of South Australia, Adelaide, 1962 [facsimile of the 1855 edition], page 60
Editor’s notes:
non irascimini = (Latin) “be not angry”; possibly derived from Genesis 45:24 in the Latin Bible, “Ne irascamini in via” (“Be not angry in the way”, or “Don’t quarrel on the way”, or “Do not quarrel on the journey”)
traps = police (Australian slang)
troopers = mounted police
References:
non irascimini:
“Genesis 45”, New Advent (accessed 9 January 2013)
“Genesis 45:24”, Online Multilingual Bible (accessed 9 January 2013)
“Genesis 45:24”, Veritas Bible (accessed 9 January 2013)
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