Imagine the Eureka Stockade, all carriages and fence posts and overturned wagons, created not out of timber and steel, but instead – cardboard.
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Inside, the diggers are similarly dressed in cardboard outfits, brandishing cardboard pikes and cardboard firearms. Outside the barricades, the troops of the British Army regiments sent to quell the uprising are also in cardboard uniforms, their swords and muskets all recyclable and lethal only in the bearer’s imagination.
Welcome to the Boxwars’ recreation of the formative act of Ballarat, to be conducted on what’s believed to be the actual site of the rebellion in December 1854, near the Eureka Centre.
The Boxwars team specialise in recreating historical battles and cultural events in cardboard. Everything from sea battles to WWI air dogfights, Roman chariot races and the Napoleonic wars to Mad Max recreations and alien invasions, they have taken and coated in hard paper.
Their only rules? No winners; everyone loses in a Box war.
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Sunday afternoon will see the opposing Ballarat factions of 1854 meet in battle once more, as part of the Biennale of Australian Art’s (BOAA) contribution to the retelling and re-examination of Eureka – as well as being the opportunity for mayhem and music.
Described by the creators of Boxwars with some grammatical flexibility as ‘history retold with absolute un-clarity in a day of cardboard debortiary’ (we think they mean ‘debauchery’), the organisers promise a battle at least three times longer than the original stockade, which lasted a whole 10 minutes before the troopers ran amok through the camps of Ballarat.
BOAA’s musical director Sherry Rich says aside from a life-size Cobb and Co stagecoach and water tower, people attending the free event at Eureka on Sunday will have live bands playing all afternoon from 1pm, including Sonika youth bands Snake Valley, Anticline and Leftfield Luxury, supported by the City of Ballarat.
The battle’s soundtrack will be provided by The Yard Apes.
“These people, Boxwars, are engineers and set designers,” says Ms Rich.
“They have been doing these shows all over the world. It’s not a kindergarten craft day with toilet roll tubes and Kleenex boxes; they are precise and historically accurate. The uniforms of the police and soldiers will be like what they wore at the Stockade.”
Anyone over the age of 18 is welcome to register, and anyone between 15 and 18 can also join the action with a guardian’s signature. Ms Rich suggests participants get there early if they want a spot in recreating the defining moment of Ballarat’s history.