As early as 1849 a visionary named Henry O'Rielly proposed a plan to construct a telegraph line between St .Louis and California that in effect would have established a Pony Express-like mail system by virtue of daily deliveries between small stockades located about 20 miles (32 km) apart during the building of the telegraph.
In 1854, two years after its founding, Ballarat (its name was derived from two Aboriginal words meaning "resting place") was the scene of an armed rebellion known as Eureka Stockade, in which about 25 miners, demanding political reform and the abolition of licenses, were shot down by the military; the incident is commemorated by a memorial and the Eureka Stockade Centre.
The fort, completed June 2, was not much more than a wooden stockade 7 feet high and about 50 feet in diameter surrounded by a ditch.
That night, when the stockade lights were snuffed, he lay in his bunk and thought about Lucy Sorrels.
One day there were new, clunky white planters in the stockade district and then, mysteriously, in October they became canvases for about 37 stenciled goats, red on white, like ghost goats from another world.
The group continued up the Apple River, looting and stealing horses along the way, including an incident about ¾ of the way up the Apple River in which about a dozen horses were stolen from a small stockade.
To block construction, the villagers here -- on the Kra isthmus linking Thailand with Malaysia, about 450 south of Bangkok -- have put up a makeshift stockade where they convene for lectures on energy, pollution and globalization.
When the historian began her research on the Eureka stockade, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, she comments that colleagues asked, "'What could you possibly say about the Eureka stockade that hasn't been said in 150 years?
After that she added the stockade fencing.
