MINING towns have played an important role in the history of Australia, including Ballarat during the 1854 Eureka Rebellion.
The diggers of Ballarat were fed up with the gold mining licensing system. They rallied together and demanded the abolition of the license and the right to vote for all males.
On November 29, 1854, they assembled together under the now-famous Southern Cross flag on Bakery Hill and burnt their licences.
The men then marched to the Eureka diggings and constructed a wooden stockade. They took an oath to fight against the oppressive British colonial administration.
On December 3 British troops attacked the stockade.
Historian Clare Wright, author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, said it was the first time a white civilian population in Australia had been set upon by the British government.
Of the 28 men killed, 22 were diggers.
In her research Ms Wright discovered that one woman was also killed.
"Many of the things that they had fought for they actually achieved in terms of representation, more access to land and more democratic rights and freedoms," she said.
A bill was passed that granted universal suffrage for white men and a royal commission recommended the licencing system be replaced with a fairer tax.
Ms Wright said for about 30 years nobody talked about it and it wasn't until the 1880s that people started to see the rebellion as being an important episode in Australian history.
Ms Wright said women played a huge role because it was a grassroots movement.
"The goldfields community has always been portrayed as almost exclusively male but that is far from the truth.
"Over a third of the population were women and children and it was a very domestic community.
"Women worked as shop keepers, ran restaurants and theatres and they were selling grog.
"They were selling themselves sometimes too.
"They wielded a lot of economic power and were very often the breadwinners in the community."
Ms Wright thinks the role women played in the rebellion has been previously overlooked by historians because of a dominant masculine narrative about Australia's nationhood.
"Their role was very much drowned out by the chorus of nation builders like Henry Lawson that emphasised the men of the past as brave male pioneers who made the country what it is today.
"It's taken this amount of time for those actual voices of women to come back out again."
The ignored role of women is further demonstrated by the portrayal of rebellion leader Peter Lalor as "the hero of the peace".
Ms Wright said there is not a whole lot to base that title on him but it seems to have stuck.
"Afterward he certainly turned into a very conservative politician and mine owner who employed scab labour.
"To my mind there are other people who put their hand up much earlier and stuck their neck out much further who we should be remembering today.
"Women like Ellen Young, who was really the intellectual leader of the digger's movement, who was the one who started writing letters to the newspaper and giving voice to a sense of communal grievance.
"There are electorates named after Peter Lalor but nobody knows the name Ellen Young today."
Ms Wright views the rebellion as playing an increasingly important role in the history of Aust ralia.
"I think in a sense it has taken on greater significance the further away that we get from it when we realise that so many other things ended up springing from it in one way or another, certainly in terms of building a tradition in Australia of anti-authoritarianism."