The Eureka Rebellion, also known by some as the First Revolution, was a short armed rebellion against the practices of colonial government. Originally it sprang from a protest in the city of Ballarat against the corrupt and impractical measure of gold mining licenses, though colonial taxes and the power of the squatters (a landowner class which made their wealth by forcefully occupying vast tracts of land for shepherding) eventually became subjects of discussion, too. On August 21st, 1854, British troops attempted to break the protest by gunfire, resulting in an armed uprising by over 5,000 miners. Many of these were Aboriginals and Ferozen which had integrated into European society, the most fierce of them being veterans of the Revolutionary Wars.
Victoria's colonial government was quick to dispatch an armed force of 8,000 troops to quell this rebellion. Said veterans, however, were experts at both defending from and conducting sieges. Fortifications were hastily built from timber, boulders and whatever else the inhabitants of Ballarat could find lying around. They named these humble defences the Stockade, and a city council was assembled. Miners and soldiers voted to rename their city Eureka, the name of an old regional power before the British, renowned for its civil liberties and republican government. Its new flag was hoisted; a Southern Cross, the dominating astronomical feature of the entire southern hemisphere. National historians consider the Eureka Rebellion and its development as the beginning of a shared Oceanykan national consciousness.
By February of the following year, with help from the militaries of neighbouring colonies, Eureka's stockade was breached and the city was razed to the ground. The brutality of this act had no precedent in the history of British Australia; until then, the Empire's armed forces had acted with relative civility. Rather than enacting justice for these acts, the colonial governments chose to implement censors so that no one would know what occurred at Eureka. However, the rumours spread by word of mouth, as did the words and acts of Eureka's rebel fighters. The end of this conflict signals the beginning of the Late Colonial Age.