[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.]
XXXVIII.
Un bon calcio, e la canaglia, stronca va come la paglia.
The drill afterwards was gone through with eagerness.
Another scene, though of a different kind all together, was going on at a corner of the above picture.
Judas Iscariot, “Goodenough,” was among us, in the garb of a fossiker; he appeared to me, then, to be under the influence of drink; so Vandemonian-like were his shouts about standing up and fighting for rights and liberties; and burning down the camp in a blaze like the late Eureka Hotel.
Mind good reader, I tell you no joke, I am not in humour just now to spin a yarn. — I wished to shame the fellow for his villainy on such a solemn occasion. The fellow persisted in his drunken shouts. I lost my temper, and gave the scoundrel such a respectable kick, in a less respectable region, with a most respectable boot of mine, that it served me right when both my new watertight boots were robbed from my shins by Goodenough’s satellites on the subsequent Sunday, at the Ballaarat Camp.
The Thursday’s sun is setting: we returned to the Eureka. I had to attend the “Council for the Defence.”
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 51
Editor’s notes:
*un bon calcio, e la canaglia, stronca va come la paglia = (Italian) “a bon soccer, and the rogue, strangles [rushes] is like straw” (*rough translation)
The Institute of Australian Culture
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