Everyone had the blues that winter. But there was jazz, too, plenty of it. The rhythm of life on the Ballarat diggings was syncopated, improvised, dissonant, ecstatic. The circus was in town. There were late-night card games, wandering minstrels, beer and skittles. Many potent, grave, rich citizens look back at the ’50s as the happiest and best days of their lives, wrote pioneer digger John Deegan in his memoirs. Amid the doom and gloom, perhaps as an antidote to it—a delirious subculture of leisure and entertainment. Balls, plays, music, dancing, drinking and sex flourished. Central to the provision of such amusements and diversions were, of course, women, laying it on and lapping it up. At the end of another hard day’s digging there was another long, cold, dark night to face. Women not only offered a welcome diversion—they also profited from the exchange.
At the head of the queue, handing out pleasure for a price, was Sarah Hanmer. Trading under the respectable title of Mrs Leicester Hanmer, Sarah was among the first women to capitalise on the golden potential above ground. She had arrived in Victoria with her twelve-year-old daughter, Julia, and her brother William McCullough in August 1853. By early 1854, mother and daughter were working as actresses in Stephen Clarke’s Queen’s Theatre, the first to open at Eureka, and the only competition to Coleman’s tent theatre at Red Hill, where Clara Du Val, prior to her union with Henry Seekamp, was treading the boards. In May, the ARGUS reported that Sarah Hanmer had become the chief, if not sole attraction of the Queen’s Theatre.1 But by this time, Sarah already had her sights set on an even grander entrance.
On 7 May 1854, she placed an advertisement in the GEELONG ADVERTISER for her new establishment, the Adelphi Theatre. The advertisement, which ran daily for three weeks, announced that:
Mrs Leicester Hanmer has the honor to announce to her friends, the public, that she is about opening at the above place, on or about the 15th instant, in a style worthy of herself and the colonies.
She took out another ad the following week to declare, without false modesty, that an engagement is open to a leading man and light comedian. Applications from ladies will be unnecessary, as the Press have declared, without hesitation, she possesses the best female talent in the country.2 The troupe included Sarah’s daughter Julia and several other American actors and actresses, including Mary Stevens, who would soon have a leading role to play in Ballarat’s political life. By early June, the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER could confidently file his glowing report that Mrs Hanmer’s Adelphi had become the resort of all old playgoers. The BALLARAT TIMES would have promoted the venue with equal vigour. Former actress Clara Du Val had by this time retired from acting, having accepted the part of Mrs Seekamp.
The State Library of Victoria holds a magnificent contemporary watercolour, by an unknown artist, simply entitled Interior Adelphi Theatre, Ballarat 1855. Nothing is known of its provenance. The painting shows a large, high-pitched canvas tent. Wooden benches are arranged in neat rows before a timber stage. The stage holds several sections of painted sets, depicting European scenes (a Grecian temple? a Roman villa?). Five men congregate in the tent, performing various menial tasks: fixing a set, washing down the benches. At the right, a woman stands proudly overseeing her terrain. She is tall and solidly built, her hair swept up in a bun. She stands straight-backed in her striking blue gown, with her hands clasped in front of her abdomen: regal, haughty. The painting is incomplete; a man sitting at the front gesticulates with an arm that has no hand. Perhaps it was meant to be a preliminary sketch for a larger artwork. The artist captured Sarah Hanmer at a moment when her notoriety was at its apex: after her theatre had become the venue for show-stopping political rallies that would change the course of Australian history.
American miner and restaurateur Charles Ferguson first encountered Sarah Hanmer in early 1854 when her aim was more modest. She wanted out of the Queen’s and into her own theatre. The upward social mobility of actresses, according to English theatre historian Michael Booth, is ‘an interesting phenomenon of the Victorian [era] stage’. Ferguson had built a large (tent) concert hall where the Empire minstrels played to packed houses. He received a curious offer. One Mrs Hanmer offered to move the hall to Red Hill and lease it for a theatre, which we accepted, moved it and re-christened it the Adelphi Theatre. Here is Ferguson with the rest of his story.
But somehow Mrs Hanmer and I could not get along happily together, and disagreed respecting the rent. She wished to pay in promises and smiles, which I did not consider legal tender, so I closed the theatre. Now there was a young man, Mr Smith, one of the firm of Moody, Nichols and Smith [American merchants] who differed from me respecting the value of Mrs Hanmer’s promises and smiles. He seemed to consider them as way above par and reproached me for declining the lady’s terms, and said he would have accepted her circulating medium.
Ferguson sold the theatre to Smith for US$3500. Smith ran it for one month when, according to Ferguson,
in the last scene of this eventful history, the lady appeared, sans promises, sans smiles, sans money, sans everything but a horsewhip, which she laid over the head of poor Smith with the spirit and vigor of a McDuff, and that closed his theatrical partnership with Mrs Hanmer.3
Sarah Hanmer now had the Adelphi on her own terms, and soon advertised its imminent opening with herself as its lessee and directress. She had learnt to use shrewdly the femininity expected of her, schooled in that compelling mix of personal history and cultural expectation.
The theatre was the semi-respectable guiding light of Victorian-era culture. People were mad for it. Everyone from the highest-ranking official to the street sweepers flocked to see the latest production of Shakespeare, or classic melodramas like the Hunchback or The Lady of Lyons. And now Ballarat finally had a first-rate theatre company, the Adelphi Players. Mrs Hanmer’s Adelphi has become the resort of all old play-goers, reported the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER in the first week of winter. The Adelphi, under this lady’s superintendence, has achieved a position hardly, if anything, inferior to any theatre in Victoria.4 The handbills for the Adelphi Theatre were printed at Charles Evans’ Criterion Printing Office, located across the road in Main Street. We have all the business for the theatre, noted Charles in his diary, a sign of his own effective management.
Once established as its indisputable boss, and pulling in rapturous, loyal crowds, Sarah Hanmer regularly volunteered her theatre for holding charity events, such as benefits for the Miners’ Hospital. These gestures were noted in the press as expressive of Mrs Hanmer’s great generosity and the energy and ability of her management. The acclaim continued. Mrs Hanmer is deserving the utmost praise for her kindness, gushed the editor of the Melbourne-based SPIRIT OF THE AGE. She was the darling of the BALLARAT TIMES; homilies such as this one appeared regularly:
Mrs Hanmer and her daughter are immense favourites on the diggings, and we do not wonder at it, for there are none here who have more earnestly strove to gain the good-will of the digging community… her endeavours to please deserve every success.
A crowd-pleaser plus an eager crowd: it was a recipe for financial success.
Sarah wasn’t afraid, however, to risk her bankable reputation for feminine benevolence by publicly contesting behaviours that she found repugnant. At the end of winter, she wrote a letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES, defending herself against a slight that must have been doing the rounds on the streets, for it was not aired in the papers. Signing herself off as the Public’s Obedient Servant, Sarah took the fight up to her accuser, a former employee called Bartlett:
Mr Bartlett is a sillier little gentleman than even I suppose him if he imagines the public feel at all interested about him. And I should not have done a person of his very moderate pretensions, the honor of noticing him, but that he has been cowardly enough to insinuate what he dares not speak out openly about—my character.
Showing no such spinelessness herself, Sarah continued:
I here challenge him to say I am other than an honest, virtuous woman, in the strictest sense of the words…And as to my being a weak-minded woman, that should excite his pity, though weak-minded as I am, I was too much for him…the Theatre is carried on in a systematic manner…and Mr Bartlett not being consulted on the matter, was most decidedly and distinctly because he was not of sufficient consequence.
Mrs Hanmer went public with her moral indignation, daring Bartlett to be man enough to do the same. In a final flourish, she also showcased her superior education, paraphrasing Shakespeare: For this Hanmer has borne herself so honestly in her great office, that her virtues will speak trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of her slanderers.5 If anyone was concerned that Sarah Hanmer was playing the gender card—bending the rules to suit her own maverick ends—you don’t get a whiff of it in the local press or at the licensing bench. Official records show she was never denied a theatrical licence, despite allegations from her male rivals that she was not of fit character to hold one.6 Instead of bureaucratic obstruction, there was only gratitude that her theatrical offerings, and suitably feminine inclination to philanthropy, had raised Ballarat’s intellectual and moral standard.
The theatre, pointed out actress and writer Olive Logan in 1869, was the single avenue in those days where women could expect to receive equal pay for equal work.7 For centuries in England, France, Italy and Spain, the only acceptable role for women in the theatre was as wife, daughter or mother of a male performer. But the international gold rushes of the 1850s changed all that. Isolated, exhausted, predominantly male crowds were eager for any amusement, all the more so if they could see women. With the general atmosphere of freedom on the frontier, entrepreneurial women eschewed theatrical traditions and stepped into the void, advertising their companies as providing more refined entertainment than the usual drinking, gambling and whoring.
Female theatre managers hired, trained, paid, supervised and disciplined the men in their company: actors, set builders, roadies and promoters. It was the theatre manager’s task to administer a stock company, own or lease a theatre, hire actors or other personnel, select plays for production, direct rehearsals and organise publicity. In addition, many female managers also acted in leading roles, or performed in benefit performances, where the house takings were donated to a worthy local cause, chosen by the manager. It was unusual, radical even, for women to be in such a position of power in any other professional field. But, argues historian Jane Kathleen Curry in her book on nineteenth-century American female theatre managers, ‘while their mere existence could be read as a threat to the social order, most women managers were careful not to disturb the status quo more than necessary’. That is, a woman had to be careful that by taking on the powerful, traditionally male position of manager, she did not undermine her public persona as a model of femininity: honest, charitable and chaste. It was a fine balancing act, and not all theatrical women walked the line.
Just over a year after Sarah Hanmer opened her locally celebrated theatre, the world-famous Lola Montez demonstrated what could happen when female performers disturbed the status quo more than necessary. Lola Montez, born Maria Eliza Delores Rosanna Gilbert in Limerick, Ireland in 1818, lived in England, India, Germany, France, Russia and Switzerland before travelling to California in 1852. By then she was thrice married and twice widowed and had been exiled from her politically influential position as the consort of King Ludwig of Prussia. Lola had smoked cigars with the cross-dressing George Sand in Paris. She had bought her own gold mine in California. She arrived in Melbourne in August 1855 but not before a warrant was issued for her arrest for unpaid debts in Sydney. Reviewing the Melbourne performance of Lola Montez in Bavaria, an autobiographical pantomime recalling Lola’s days spent routing the Jesuit-controlled monarchy from Prussia, PUNCH derided Lola for wearing her hair in short curls like a barrister’s wig. She can talk politics like a book, continued the review, and teach kings how to govern their people more easily than you and I could conjugate a French verb.8 This was faint praise, and Lola was damned too for her blatant self-promotion and delusions of grandeur, unchecked by charitable gestures or community-minded benefits.
Lola toured the Ballarat diggings in March 1856, where she found the crowds as generous with their nuggets as the critics were with their vituperation. There had been no such difficulty for her predecessor, Sarah Hanmer, who, in that muddy winter of 1854, kept her purse open and her politics to herself. In a matter of months she had converted herself from an actress and single mother into a respectable businesswoman and civic identity. That was enough—for now.
The Victorian-era theatre was fascinated by metamorphic themes, and thus perfectly in tune with the unruly, unstable nature of gold rush society. Audiences loved to follow the miraculous transformations of characters, revelling in the subversive power of the act of concealing or switching identities. Apart from theatrical players, there was also a surfeit of blackface minstrels, magicians, gymnasts, ventriloquists, puppeteers and mesmerists on the diggings, cashing in on the fixation with modification and makeovers.
In particular, audiences were enthralled by acts of cross-dressing. The Ballarat diggers may have beaten their bumptious wives but they didn’t mind a bit of role reversal on stage. According to Henry Mundy, they were especially fond of the actress Margaret Catchpole, a big masculine looking woman [who] often played men’s parts and parts in which a woman disguises herself as a man. She was renowned for her roles as Hamlet and Romeo, playing to the satisfaction of all beholders. Indeed, wrote Mundy, many experienced playgoers declared her Romeo to be the best they had ever seen. Transvestism has been a part of the theatrical tradition since the classical Greek period, but it typically sees a resurgence in times of critical social flux. At such moments, argues theatre historian Jean Howard, extreme social mobility and rapid economic change are paralleled by instability in the gender system and this is no better, no more safely, reflected than in theatre.9
Many plays were intensely preoccupied with threats or disruptions to the sex-gender system, as portrayed by cross-dressing characters, narratives of mistaken identity, women masquerading as soldiers and men taking refuge in feminine disguise. Theatre played a role in managing anxieties about women on top, women not in their rightful places as well as the fragility of male authority. The transvestite waif was a favourite character; wearing lower-class, working man’s clothes licensed her to be insolent, cheeky, independent and free of the constraints of her bourgeois upbringing. For men to play women required them to become the other: subservient, restricted, dependant. For women to play men required them to be domineering, confident and mobile. This was no great feat for actors; all in a night’s work. It is precisely the protean nature of actors’ bodies and personas that has dictated their customary status as outsiders. Neither was it such a stretch of the imagination for Ballarat audiences. It was a relief. The stage, argues theatre-studies expert Laurence Senelick, ‘offers licence and liberty, not anxiety and crisis’.
There is a rare extant playbill for the 1854 farce The Stage-Struck Digger, written by a Mrs Hetherington. Numerous acting families and troupes toured the goldfields—as well as the permanent players like Mrs Hanmer’s crew at the Adelphi—and Mr and Mrs Hetherington were one such couple. Mr ran the company, and Mrs, apart from writing, did the acting. No script survives that would give an inkling of The Stage-Struck Digger’s content but it’s likely to have been topical. Theatre had long been a forum for discussion of what we would now call ‘current affairs’. Pantomimes, in particular, had an emphasis on contemporary jokes about local personalities, places and newsworthy events of the preceding twelve months.
In 1854, William Akhurst, an English-born journalist with a flair for topical themes, penned a farce called Rights of Woman. Characters in the play included a strong-minded lady who is a Pupil of the New Age and a firm supporter of the Rights of Woman, a barrister and a waitress.10 Another early colonial entertainer with an eye for contemporary relevance, Charles Thatcher, wrote many songs about how girls in Australia gave themselves airs. In ‘London and the Diggings’, included in his popular Colonial Songster of 1857, Thatcher crooned that The gals that come out to Australia to roam/Have much higher notions than when they’re at home.11 In 1854, Akhurst and the Nelson family also teamed up to perform Colonial Experience, whose well-worn theme was the difficulty of engaging and managing domestic servants. As we’ve seen, MELBOURNE PUNCH also regularly published illustrations depicting maids defying their masters and haughty, self-important young women displaying uncommon recalcitrance in the colonial marriage market.12 In the mid-1850s, the creative arts reflected widespread disquiet about women’s new-found social, economic and cultural authority.
You certainly didn’t have to look far to find creative inspiration for tales of inversion. Miska Hauser was a Jewish Viennese violinist, a child prodigy who had travelled the world, and made a killing in California. He arrived in Australia in late 1854 and was struck by the feverish enthusiasm with which audiences attended concerts, operas and plays. Here, songstresses such as Catherine Hayes and Madame Carandini were literally showered with gold. But it was the scenes on the streets, not on the stage, that most piqued Hauser’s fascination. In Melbourne, wrote Hauser to his brother in May 1855, emancipated wenches in unbecoming riding habits, and with smoking cigars in their mouths, appear on horseback, and crazy gentlemen…career madly after them and laugh delightedly if a flirtatious equestrienne in a spicy mood aims a mock smack at them with her riding crop. Why, it was just like a bawdy farce. When would the tables turn and the wenches get their ritual comeuppance? Not, it appeared to Hauser, in the foreseeable future. He was incensed to find that he couldn’t book a theatre to demonstrate his virtuosity. A veritable army of songstresses, virtuosi, ropedancers, danseuses, and other such birds of paradise, he wrote, all wanting to shake the fruit from the tree simultaneously, had taken or bespoken all the concert halls, or hired them for weeks again. This man, who had lived his life on the stage, could not believe his eyes.
Life here is like a Venetian carnival!…Nowhere in the world do husbands get as short shrift from their wives as here…You see all the dykes of civil order torn down…Women who have long since forsaken the joys of family life and despised all regard for respectability are here hoisted to rank and wealth. Even young ladies who nevertheless claim to be well-reared and cultured, sit all day at the latter-day gambling tables, where every decent impulse disintegrates… no one seems to want to develop a solid middle-class society.13
For a time in the mid-1850s, everyone was simply having too much fun.
Hauser attended one meeting in Melbourne to determine how the ever-worsening fickleness of women could be most quickly and safely remedied. One suggestion, which Hauser didn’t dismiss, was a house of correction for undutiful and flighty wives. Following the meeting, he marched to the theatre where Lola Montez was performing Lola Montez in Bavaria. Hauser denounced her as a wicked specimen of a female Satan. Art imitating life, or vice versa? In the grand colonial masquerade, who could tell?
Gold rush Victoria was a colony of shape-shifters. The stage was not the only place where women got to wear the pants. Harriet, the Irish orphan girl who accompanied her brother Frank to the diggings and soon became something of a necessity, in fact travelled as a man. Donning male attire, she reckoned, was her best chance at the blissful anonymity she craved. Here’s how she did it.
I was resolved to accompany my brother and his friends to the diggings, and I felt that to do so in my own proper costume and character would be to run an unnecessary hazard. Hence my change. I cut my hair into a very masculine fashion; I purchased a broad felt hat, a sort of tunic or smock of coarse blue cloth, trousers to conform, boots of a miner, and thus parting with my sex for a season (I hoped a better one), behold me an accomplished candidate for mining operations, and all the perils and inconveniences they might be supposed to bring.
Harriet was reconfigured as Mr Harry. All the diggings was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Harriet exited her proper costume and character, and entered as a young man. All this transmutation took place with Frank’s sanction, Harriet tells us, as they both believed she would be safer in male attire. Safer, it’s presumed, from predatory male admirers on the road to the goldfields. Harriet was not the only woman to protect herself from the dangers of the road, real or imagined, in this fashion.
But once at the diggings, Harriet’s cover was blown. Of course, my sex is generally known, she laughed. She had suitors—I have them in plenty—but preferred the merry company of brotherly diggers who gathered together each night in her tent. And she maintained the external trappings of the gender subterfuge. The short hair, the coarse smock, the nom de guerre. ‘Parting with her sex’ meant more to Harriet than a quick costume change backstage. And ‘safety’ was merely an acceptable rationale for gender bending. Cross-dressing allowed a mobility and freedom that subverted the customary expectations of domesticity and romance. Harriet could cook and wash and mend for her ‘fellow’ diggers, but she could also play in their company without risk to her sexual reputation. Did Frank’s mates enjoy a homoerotic charge in her presence? Was it exciting to be in the presence of a sweet young companion with whom, should ‘he’ consent to disrobe, you could have legitimate heterosexual sex?
Cultural historian Lucy Chesser, who has thoroughly analysed the many instances of gender ambiguity in colonial Australia—from the Kelly Gang to encounters between European and Aboriginal people—argues that cross-dressing is an indicator of ‘category crisis’, a process of ‘working-through, or managing pre-existing contradictions or confusions’.14 Gender bending does not create but rather reflects the inconsistencies and ambiguities of a time of intense social flux.
And it was perversely comforting to the players, all this gender gymnastics. It’s possible John Capper chose to include Harriet/Mr Harry’s tale in his phenomenally successful guidebook to the goldfields precisely to illustrate the ease with which the radical transmutations occurring within women on the diggings could revert back to ‘normal’, to the Victorian-era gender status quo of public (political) men and private (domestic) women. (He may even have invented Harriet and Frank as cultural archetypes, much like Hansel and Gretel or Jack and Jill.) Independence and self-rule for women becomes a glitch: a wardrobe malfunction.
But there were plenty of flesh-and-bone women on the goldfields who adopted male attire for pragmatic, not symbolic, reasons. Women readily abandoned the most restrictive elements of their daily dress in deference to the practical conditions of colonial life. Emma Macpherson, who arrived in Victoria at the beginning of 1854, wrote in her published travel reminiscences that men had high boots to counter the scandalous condition of the roads, but for women:
the condition presented by their long flowing dresses was pitiable in the extreme; I really think they will eventually adopt the Bloomer costume, which, if allowable under any circumstances, would certainly be so there, for traversing these terrible quagmires.
Some gold rush immigrants didn’t wait to see whether fashion or social mores permitted them to reject conventional feminine attire. Henrietta Dugdale, who arrived in Victoria in 1852 and would go on to found Australia’s first women’s suffrage society in 1884, wore a long bifurcated skirt to match her defiant gaze.15
Others were traumatised out of their corsetry. Eliza Lucus’s teenage sister, Fanny, died through the cursed crinolines. It was a horrific accident. Fanny was dishing up dinner when her voluminous dress caught alight from the open fireplace. She lived for five hours in excruciating pain. It was nearly the death of poor mother, recalled Eliza, her grief was great. Eliza’s mother never wore crinolines again. For goldfields women, corsets and crinolines made even less sense in the stifling heat or noxious mud, especially if there was manual work to be done. For gentlewomen, ‘dressing down’ also made a potent statement of solidarity with the democratic ethos of goldfields life.
But as Lucy Chesser documents, and contrary to John Capper’s reassurances, many cross-dressing colonial women did not reconstitute themselves as outwardly female, instead choosing to live out their days as ‘men’, some with wives. Others had a bet each way. As late as 1879, you could still find women working alongside male miners during the week, dressed as men, then stepping out in satin and lace to a Saturday night dance on the arm of their husband.16
If some women were dressing down, there was also an upswing in conspicuous consumption by successful digging families. Genteel Mrs Massey lampooned the material girls of the goldfields: newly married, newly rich, spending up on luxury items such as parasols and lace, with which they had no previous acquaintance. She dismissed them as the most absurd caricature of a digger’s wife: gaudy, ostentatious, laughable. Numerous commentators remarked with snobbish surprise on the superior quality and taste of Victoria’s fashions. William Westgarth is typical. The ladies are attired with an elegance and costliness that would scarcely be looked for in the miscellaneous gathering of so young a society, he wrote. Robert Caldwell missed the elegance: every extravagance and peculiarity of costume, he marvelled, is indulged in at pleasure.
Men, too, trialled new looks and fashion statements. By day, you couldn’t distinguish a gentleman from an ex-convict because of the unofficial diggings uniform of blue flannel shirt, gray neckerchief, straw hat, knee-high boots and beard and moustache, which was worn by miners, labourers and draymen alike. But at night, some men cast off their utilitarian duds and slipped into evening clothes: black pants, white shirt, a red sash, patent leather boots and black plush hat. John Deegan describes such men as swells or mashers, and says they took their sartorial cues from the Californians in their midst. The outmoded term masher is a real gem. It derives from the Romani gypsy word masha, meaning to entice, allure, delude or fascinate, and was originally used in the theatre, although it is unclear who these diggers were setting out to delude.
Men were caught cross-dressing too, but as an entirely different form of escape. Fugitives fleeing from the hands of justice regularly disguised themselves as women. Charles Evans was returning to Ballarat from a trip to Melbourne when he met a man in woman’s clothes, handcuffed and guarded by an armed policeman. Evans later learned that the man had shot dead another man a short distance up the road.
So while some women and men dressed down, either for political or practical purposes, others played dress-ups, experimenting with new-found wealth or social flexibility. Just as a girl in her mother’s wardrobe will try on new identities—imagining herself as twice the woman she knows herself to be—so the early gold rush generation experimented with wearing the breeches of alluring power and prosperity, whether they permanently achieved it or not. Could anybody blame them for playing the game?
Thousands of men from every corner of the globe, all living in tents, en plein air, manually labouring, in holiday mode, young and free. The La Trobe government took one look at the social landscape of the goldfields and came to the speedy realisation that the only way to prevent complete carnage was to regulate the sale of alcohol. Publicans licences would only be granted in the surrounding townships. No alcohol was to be sold on the diggings. It was a cunning plan bound to fail.
Every storekeeper sold sly-grog, Police Magistrate John D’Ewes wrote in his 1857 memoir of Ballarat in 1854. A first offence for unlicensed selling elicited a £50 fine or four months in prison for non-payment. Police officers received a portion of the fine if they recorded a conviction. A second offence received six to twelve months gaol, with hard labour. The local magistrates had no power to commute; only the governor could interfere with statutory sentences. The cards were stacked in favour of the police, and they either pursued known sly groggers relentlessly or extracted sufficient hush money—and no doubt other ‘favours’—to stay on the right side of the cut. Samuel Huyghue, from his view inside the Camp, believed the system of rewards for sly-grog seizures was to blame for the demoralisation of the police force.
Every traveller to or resident on the diggings remarked on the presence of sly-grog sellers. There were an estimated seven hundred sly-grog outlets in Ballarat.17 That means approximately one venue for every thirty adult residents. Ellen Clacy theorised that the privacy and risk gives the obtaining it an excitement which the diggers enjoy as much as the spirit itself. It helped that women ran most of the ‘refreshment tents’ on the diggings. Mrs Massey called sly grog this most hateful traffic. But since she knew the sale of alcohol was the most lucrative activity on the goldfields, she took its presence for granted, along with everybody else.
Apart from the grog that was sold from the stores, there were what Henry Mundy called regular grog shanties. These were conspicuous by having a large square shutter hung on hinges at the top of one gable of the tent, facing the road. Inside, a rough counter with five- to ten-gallon kegs of hops beer, ginger beer, lemonade and cider was retailed out at sixpence a pannikin. Jugs could be filled up and taken home, to be shared among friends and family. Such shanties were similarly the domain of women, and have been immortalised in S. T. Gill’s famous watercolours. Charles Thatcher also made a legend of Big Poll the Grog Seller, who epitomised youthful colonial pluck and bounce, dodging and weaving authorities while turning in plenty of tin people say/ for she knows what she’s about.18 Even artful young women were making an ass of the law.
Not only were women selling the grog, but they were consuming it too. Some women delighted in having a nobbler or a shandy gaff—pale ale mixed with ginger beer—telling racy jokes, which were none of the choicest as far as language was concerned. This is Henry Mundy’s assessment of a Mrs Charlton who saw no reason to be squeamish. She could see no harm in her talk nor cared if others did. Charles Evans noted a similar tendency for women to feel liberated from more polite behaviour on the goldfields where drinking was concerned. It is painful to contemplate, he wrote in his diary,
the horrible havoc which drunkenness makes on the diggings, even women feeling themselves relieved from the salutary checks which society in civilised life lays on them fall into a view bad enough in men, but disgusting and repulsive beyond expression in women.
Some women were dead-set alcoholics, either before they arrived at the diggings or due to its harsh realities, but others were merely joining in the carnival. Some, buoyed by the mood of entitlement, may even have felt a drink at the end of the day was their own just reward for ceaseless toil.
Certainly, women expected to be included in the effervescent social life of Ballarat. Mrs Massey attended a ball on the diggings and described the scene in detail. The event occurred in a large tent, with smaller refreshment tents and ladies dressing-room tents scattered about like satellites. Gentlemen diggers and their wives, and Camp officials and their wives, attended the evening. The ‘ball-room’ walls were covered with pink and white calico, the pillars supporting the roof were adorned with garlands intermixed of pink and white. There were lighted Chinese lamps, carpets, divans and sofas. The band was excellent and there was dancing until sun-up. The effect, thought Mrs Massey, was charming.
The sober Englishwoman also noted a feature of the event that young artist S. T. Gill failed to capture in his well-known sketch, Subscription Ball, Ballarat 1854. Women were hired to care for the babies, aged from newborns to toddlers. Mrs Massey explained that the mothers were not able to leave them at home, and wishing to join in the evening’s amusement, brought them along and put them to sleep on beds and sofas, popping in to visit between dances. During the evening, she said, I saw several ladies walking about, in full ball dress of course, nursing and hushing their dearly beloved infants. So here was another goldfields innovation: paid childcare at social functions so the hard-working, bread-winning mothers of Ballarat weren’t left holding the baby.
By the winter of 1854, it was clear that the licensing laws would have to change. Police magistrates such as John D’Ewes were begging the government to review its policies. The diggings were awash with sly grog, and the police were drunk on their power to either overlook infringements (for a price) or shut down an operation with brutal force. Rum, gin, brandy, beer and stout have been known to run down Camp Hill from Lydiard Street in streams, attested Henry Mundy. He was speaking literally: the police poured away rivers of contraband alcohol, draining it into the dirt.
The waste of so valued a commodity was seen as flagrant baiting of the impoverished community by a bloody-minded police force. Poor shanty keepers, often widows, were used as scapegoats of caution; they paid the penalty of the pretended vigilance of the police, observed Henry Mundy. Too poor to pay bribes, the sly-grog seller would be bailed up by a commissioner and six troopers who would proceed to set fire to the frail tenement over the owner’s head and burn it to the ground and everything combustible in it. It was a show trial. The members of the open-air court would stand by helplessly as judge and jury dispensed their justice, and the now homeless woman in the dock wept piteously.
Legitimate access to liquor was a major source of grievance for a population that had both the original hard-earned thirst and a libertarian taste for self-rule. Meanwhile, legitimate publicans in the township rued the competition of the sly groggers. The authorities deemed that the new breed of publicans, only a piece of paper away from their illicit origins, could be used to help dob in sly-grog sellers. It was considered truly bad form to lag on a sly-grog seller if you couldn’t pay the bill, but desperate diggers were known to do it. Spies were the blackest of Satan’s crew, according to Henry Mundy: if found out, an informer’s life was in danger. Publicans and sly groggers—former comrades in crime—were now to be set against each other in a risky strategy of divide and conquer.
The new law was proclaimed on 1 June, in the administrative black hole between La Trobe’s departure and Hotham’s arrival. Publicans licences would now be granted on the goldfields, but exclusively to owners of substantial houses only on sold lands or within half a mile of such. It was a licence not just to sell booze but to print money, and the government knew it. The annual fee to sell spirits was set at £100, with an extra £50 to occupy Crown Lands for the purpose.
The good news for the government was that opening the floodgates to legal liquor sales would generate much-needed revenue. But the legislators had sowed the seeds of the policy’s own demise. In other localities good tents may be licensed at the discretion of the Bench of Magistrates, read one clause of the new legislation. So discretionary power was back in the hands of local warlords. And what on earth did good tents mean? Good structure? Good conduct? Good connections? The scene was set for a tragic turf war between the owners of licensed public houses (which, by law, had to provide accommodation and meals), licensed tents (which merely had to be good), the residual sly groggers (selling out of their coffee houses, refreshment tents and stores), and the already abhorred local authorities who were entrusted to act as umpire.
But there was a startling twist. In July, a further qualification was introduced. Applicants for a publicans licence had to show their marriage certificates. No single men would be eligible for a licence. One Melbourne journalist drew a long bow between this novel constraint on men’s commercial freedom and the palpable zeitgeist of autonomy (and votes) for women. Good news for the ladies, he wrote, this will, most probably, cause an increase in the marriage returns. The mocking continued.
Why should we not go the whole hog and recommend the ladies get up an agitation for a universal marriage act, which should disqualify bachelors from voting at elections, entering the public service etc?19
The new licensing law made its own kind of sense: it had been designed to control the distribution of alcohol, based on the logic that women were more likely to regulate men’s behaviour and run establishments that were more domesticated, offering food and accommodation, rather than exclusively devoted to drinking. This was a principle that had been applied in Australia since the granting of licences in the penal settlement of Sydney in the 1790s. But this journalist’s curious, slightly paranoid response managed to see the legislative change as part of goldfields women’s collusion to restrict male liberties. Perhaps this suggests that women’s wider ‘agitations’ were having an influence on the public domain. At any rate, the law had the undisputed effect of catapulting women into the epicentre of social and economic life: the pub.
Enter Catherine Bentley, stage right.
In July 1854 James and Catherine Bentley were in pole position when the goldfields authorities reversed the ban on issuing liquor licences on the diggings. They had come prepared to capitalise on this new opportunity to mine for liquid gold. James had sureties from leading bankers and merchants in Melbourne. He had the sufficient confidence of creditors to build an extravagant landmark of a hotel on the profitable Eureka Lead. He had a bona fide wife to satisfy the marriage requirements. And he had the pre-emptive right to a section of Crown land, secured and signed for in Catherine’s name on 13 June that year.20
Ballarat was still a tent city, to be sure. But with a population of twenty thousand, the occasional whopping nugget still being pulled from the ground, a host of shops selling everything from fresh ground coffee to preserved hare to Havana cigars, a cultural life infused with theatres, circuses and concert halls, and even a racing carnival planned for December, it was a canvas community well on its way to becoming a rip-roaring town.
The Bentleys intended to be in on the ground floor, staking their claim to the economic and social heart of a new mercantile class of affluent, influential publicans and traders. Thomas Bath’s hotel in Lydiard Street might play host to the Camp officials and professional men of the district, but Bentley’s Hotel would soon provide a worthy competitor at Eureka, the bustling heartland of East Ballarat. Just to mark his territory further, James Bentley became president of the fledgling Licensed Victuallers Association of Ballarat. His network of local associates included leading merchants, auctioneers and bankers.
On 15 July, the BALLARAT TIMES announced the opening of Bentley’s Eureka Hotel:
Placards had been circulated and by ten o’clock the place was crowded with men eager to join in the jollification. Paltzer’s fine brass band kept things lively and as champagne was served with the sumptuous free breakfast for all visitors, the greatest hilarity prevailed which was kept up all day. So happy a house warming has seldom been seen in these parts.
The hotel’s main bar was tastefully arranged in the style of San Francisco, and the newspaper praised the barman for understanding the finer points of gin slings and mint juleps. A confident prediction was made:
It is expected that the next good lead opened up in the vicinity will be called Bently [sic] Flat as some acknowledgment for the energy displayed by Mr Bently in providing the miners with such a respectable and comfortable house of accommodation.21
Bentley may have been an ex-con with a limp, but he had hit the ground running.
By August, the Bentleys’ stock orders included twenty-five dozen bottles of champagne, forty dozen bottles of sherry and port, twenty-five gallons of whisky and two thousand cigars. Catherine purchased electroplated silver cutlery. A chandelier bathed the hotel in a dreamy light of candlelit opulence. The main public bar had a sixty-foot frontage and three entrances. Inside the double-storey weatherboard structure were three parlours, three bars, a dining room, concert room, billiard room and bagatelle room. Upstairs were seven bedrooms, with an equal amount of additional space, still in the process of construction, earmarked for use as a superior concert room. Adjacent to the hotel was a ninety-foot bowling alley, with its own bar, 120 feet of stabling and a large storehouse. These facilities surrounded a vast auction yard, let for an annual sum of £500. Two water closets and a kitchen with brick oven completed the minor metropolis that was Bentley’s Eureka Hotel. The whole edifice was painted gold, green and vermillion.
The venue was such a landmark that other traders advertised their whereabouts in relation to the hotel: just across from, one mile east of. The prominent Jewish merchants and auctioneers Henry Harris and Charles Dyte stored their goods at the hotel. Jacques Paltzer’s band got a regular gig, and the musicians took up residence in the upstairs bedrooms. James was on good terms with Ballarat’s mercantile and administrative elite. And Catherine was pregnant with their second child. The Bentleys’ self-assurance was such that they named the rising land on which their premises stood ‘Bentley’s Hill’. A beacon. A signal of success. A very tall poppy.
The move to grant licences on the diggings caused an immediate onslaught of applications. No sooner was the law proclaimed than the licensing bench was besieged with applicants. Every individual who had the means, seemed desirous of setting up a public house as a certain method of making a fortune, recalled magistrate John D’Ewes, who was on the bench. Over a hundred applications were received overnight. At Eureka, licences were granted to the Free Trade run by Alfred Lester, the London run by Benden Hassell and Robert Monkton, the Star run by William McRae, the Turf Inn run by William Tait, and the Victoria Hotel run by Germans Brandt and Hirschler. Other diggings hotels included the Alhambra on Esmond Street, and the Arcade on York Street, just up from Main Road. The Duchess of Kent Hotel, on Main Road, was licensed to Mrs Spanhake, the twenty-five-year-old wife of a German miner. Raffaello Carboni lodged here for some period in 1854. There was the Eagle on Scotchman’s Hill and the Prince Albert on Bakery Hill. Carboni said the publican at the Prince Albert was as wealthy and proud as a merchant-prince of the City of London. Hotels were licensed to Englishmen, Germans, Jews, the Irish and Scots. New publicans vied for the custom that had previously been monopolised by the town hotels, Bath’s, the Clarendon and the George.
Women like Mrs Spanhake seized the opportunity to enter into the liberalised market, joining the ranks of female publicans who had long been legends in the district. Mother Jamieson had run the hotel at Buninyong, eight miles from Ballarat, since 1845. John D’Ewes described Mrs Jamieson as:
an extraordinary specimen of a Scotch landlady, whose colonial independence of character (except when she took a liking) always verged upon insolence, and very often abuse; woe to be the mistaken individual who tried to oppose her when in these moods as he had little chance of either food or lodging at her hands.
D’Ewes felt fortunate to fall in her good graces, suggesting the power of such landladies to call the shots.
Catherine Bentley had now joined the ranks of women who were legally empowered to say who was in and who was out.
Prostitution is notoriously hard to research. Reconstructing the lives of prostitutes on the mining frontier—a history that has been either suppressed by Victorian-era prudery or distorted by modernity’s obsession with the salacious—is a research project all of its own. American historian Marion S. Goldman has completed the rare undertaking brilliantly.22 Her 1981 book Gold Diggers and Silver Miners examines the history of prostitution on the Comstock Lode in Nevada circa 1860–80. Goldman set out to gracefully bury the legend of the frontier prostitute as the ‘harlot heroine’, whose beauty, wealth, luxurious surroundings, adoring male companions, envious female rivals and eventual mobility into respectable affluence has been the mainstay of novels, films and other popular historical representations. The legend of the whore with a heart of gold, argues Goldman, rests on a primordial male ambivalence towards women’s sexual power, which has the capacity simultaneously to comfort, manipulate and destroy. The idealised frontier prostitute also appealed to women, suggests Goldman, as ‘she epitomised feminine strivings for adventure and autonomy at a time when most women were constricted by economic discrimination and custom’. Over the course of her book, Goldman demolishes the myth of the good-time girl and replaces it with the reality that most frontier prostitutes led miserable lives of poverty, degradation, disease and violence.
Goldman was lucky. Nevada is the only American state where prostitution, along with gambling, is legally tolerated. Organised sexual commerce, as she calls it, was thus a visible and documented part of everyday life, and she found ‘information about it everywhere’. Ballarat is another story.
Ballarat’s red-light district centred around Brown Hill, Specimen Hill, Esmond and Arcade streets and Main Road. Prostitution enterprises were female-run small businesses that, unlike shopkeeping, could always continue to operate on a small scale—well after businesses with greater access to capital had muscled out smaller competitors.23 The clandestine diversions and opportunities for orgies were not lacking, Charles Eberle wrote in his diary. It could not be otherwise in a populous environment composed of men with often very loose morals.
Now, an orgy can mean simple drunken revelry, but its more common connotation of excessive sexual indulgence is apparent in Eberle’s account. There was certainly nothing clandestine about a standard piss-up on the diggings. He goes further.
The thirst for gold led to that for pleasure and there were always traders ready to promote this leaning, by means of establishments, more or less dubious, where the diverse passions of this still undisciplined population found satisfaction.
Pleasure. Passion. Satisfaction. Eberle talks openly about hotels and sly-grog shops; the nature of the establishments he politely alludes to is obvious.
It’s also possible to identify some of Ballarat’s more notorious prostitutes. Mary Clarke alias Margaret Clarke alias Margaret Allen was known to all and sundry as the Bull Pup. On 20 January 1854, she was charged with being an idle and disorderly person, a quaint legal euphemism for a street hooker. Poor Margaret got herself nicked by coming to the Camp in her cups to press charges against another woman. Margaret was drunk at the time, and Sergeant Major Milne remembered seeing her previously on the side of the road with her clothes above her head. In 1854, the Bull Pup spent two stints in the Ballarat lockup, the first time for two months, the second for six months, for being idle and disorderly.24 She later moved to the Brown Hill diggings, east of Eureka, where Henry Mundy spotted her. All the pleasures and amusements common in Ballarat were to be found, wrote Mundy, a theatre, dancing saloons, bowling alleys, gymnasiums, concert rooms, Hobart Town Poll with her bevy of girls, Bones, the Bull Pup, Cross-Eyed Luke etc and grog shanties galore.
Hobart Town Poll is the most easily identifiable madam on the 1850s goldfields. Henry Mundy first came to know of her operations, which were corralled into an isolated little township of tents snugly ensconced among the trees by the roadside near Ballarat. He asked a passer-by what went on in that discreet camp, and was informed it was Hobart Town Poll’s establishment where the aristocratic ladies hang out. Mundy, who was married to Ann Gillingham by this time, appears to have made an objective study.
Scenes of revelry were going on by day; the laughing and screeching of men and women was uproarious. If I had been a single man I should probably have passed through the excited crowd, to see what the fun was about but being a married man and father of a family I thought of the proprieties and passed by like a serious Benedict.
What a spectacle, viewed from the roadside! Nothing discreet about it. But madams like Hobart Town Poll garnered a considerable amount of esteem, within the Victorian underworld at least, for their management skills and business nous. In a social microcosm that valued entrepreneurship, economic success and the ability to stay afloat in the fast lane, top brothel madams were both respected and traduced.
But Ballarat’s prostitutes knew they need not be too prudent where the authorities were concerned. Gentlemen of the Government Camp were among their best customers. For soldiers, the purchase of sex while on campaign or in barracks was an open connivance. It was British army policy until 1885 that soldiers should not marry, and a quota system of permissible marriages was enforced: one wife per seven cavalrymen and one per twelve infantrymen. There was no quota for officers’ wives. If that wasn’t restrictive enough, only a small number of those registered wives were permitted to follow their husbands on any given overseas campaign. Selection was made by drawing lots or throwing dice.
‘Large garrisons inevitably attracted prostitutes,’ writes military historian Richard Holmes. Women lived among the army camps in makeshift huts, and were known as ‘wrens’, flocking to the morsels thrown to them by sexually deprived soldiers. A subculture of survival prevailed among the camp followers. Older women minded children while younger women set off for trysts with soldiers. The fact that up to twenty-five per cent of a camp would be infected with venereal disease in any given year led the British army to establish ‘lock hospitals’ or regimental brothels, where women’s sexual health could be monitored. Such ‘licensed sin’ or ‘mercenary love’, as Holmes calls it, was seen as vastly preferable to the consequences of ‘forced repression of physiological natural instincts’.25 Meanwhile, officers kept ‘their own girls’, mistresses whom they could afford to set up in quasi-brothels for the duration of a campaign. These women often held day jobs as serving girls and laundresses.
It was not until the late nineteenth century that the British army decided that it was only by increasing the allowable quota of regimental wives that homosexual acts and rates of venereal disease would decline. Hobart Town Poll’s enclave, with its aristocratic ladies, may well have been the brothel for the top end of town. Ballarat’s hated police, who were already in cahoots with the sly-grog sellers, were more likely to patronise than shut down the services that such houses of pleasure provided on the side, forcing up prices while they were at it.
There’s little evidence to suggest that Ballarat’s prostitutes either suffered under conditions of a punitive and discriminatory criminal justice system or experienced everyday social stigma. Court records show that most women who came before the law were brought up on charges of theft or drunkenness. On 8 February 1855, a man called Burroughs was sentenced to four months hard labour for keeping a disorderly tent at Ballarat. The judge found his brothel—for this is clearly what it was—utterly subversive of order and decency.26 There is no mention of the women who worked in his tent. In February 1858, Mary Johnson pleaded not guilty in the Ballarat Circuit Court to keeping and maintaining a certain common ill governed and disorderly house, and in the said house for the lucre and gain etc etc. Richard Ireland, for the prosecution, said the superintendent of police had entered the house in Arcade Street on a Sunday morning and found seventeen men and Mary Johnson drinking, kicking up a row and using obscene language. In another room he saw a man and woman in bed together who he did not disturb. Mary admitted to being the tenant of one Wilson, who had built a number of similar establishments, but said she had given back the key and virtually vacated the premises. Mary Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to one month in prison.27
Such reports of convictions for prostitution are remarkable for their scarcity and are limited to brothel keepers. When Mary Ann Harvey appealed against her conviction for vagrancy in Ballarat in 1858 (being without lawful means of support was another euphemism for sex work), the judge did not accept the police constable’s evidence that he heard at least five women and two men in the house using most filthy language. The judge concluded it was not known how those unfortunate girls obtained their living, it might be by dress-making or anything else.28 Though the house was an infamous resort of thieves and prostitutes, the judge preferred the local form of arbitration: turning a blind eye.
Ballarat was just the place to let it all hang out. Love mightn’t have come free, but it was not hard to find. There’s no such thing as a back alley in a tent city. John Deegan remembered arriving at Ballarat as a young lad in late 1854. Sitting atop a dray, rolling through the honeycombed streets, he was gobsmacked by the sight of the inhabitants, [men] lounging about saloon fronts, loud in voice and laughter, bandying free jests with buxom, red-cheeked wenches, who boldly smirked at them from the open doorways. Were these women working for themselves, or the proprietors of the ‘saloons’ to which they attracted custom?
Deegan gives us an idea of how the system might have worked. The dancing saloon, Deegan explained, was the place of base, common, popular entertainment for the mass of diggers, those wild spirits who found music and drama too slow. Most concert rooms and theatres were cleared of seats following an evening’s performance and turned over to bacchanalian dancing after 9pm. What wild, whirling, reckless carnivals of unrestrained frolic these bal masques were! recalled Deegan in his 1889 lecture to the Australian Natives Association (so let’s allow for the rosy tint of memory and concede that the female dancers mightn’t have been as deliriously happy as their partners). Scenes of orgie, beside which scenes of Paris would be chaste. Central to the frenzy were the dancers, women who were mostly retainers, or camp followers, maintained by the landlord. By day, these women worked as barmaids, waitresses, housemaids or servants. But their chief business duty was to dance at night with the gay and festive miners, said Deegan, and to cajole their partners into a lavish outlay. Young and handsome, the women were brightly and richly dressed in fashionable crinolines, revealing high-heeled boots and a show of ankle when spinning around in a dance. According to Deegan, they were not ones to show maidenly modesty or high-bred manners, but some of them were intensely fascinating. No doubt paid sex was on the dance card at these establishments; whether the payment went directly to the ‘dancer’ or whether she was merely on wages is impossible to tell.
Since the beginning of European occupation of Australia, white men had formed sexual relationships with Aboriginal women. The terms of their liaisons could range from rape to consensual casual sex to paid prostitution to long-term unions.29 There is no direct evidence of Aboriginal women working in Ballarat’s brothels, but sanctimonious white men like Thomas McCombie did accuse black men of selling their lubras into sex slavery instead of working honourably themselves. Aboriginal women, he lamented, were forced to consent to the improper advances of Europeans for money or provisions that their men were too lazy to procure.
Historian Richard Broome has shown that after European occupation, Aboriginal women frequently offered themselves for sexual service to white men, or were ‘gifted’ by their husbands, because they saw this as their best chance for gaining food, tobacco or alcohol for themselves, their children and extended kin networks. Broome argues that they did not interpret such social transactions as prostitution, even if that’s how Europeans perceived it, and cultural misunderstanding over sex often led to violence. Genuine and longstanding sexual unions between non-Indigenous miners and Aboriginal women were also common, with many mixed-ethnicity relationships occurring on the Ballarat goldfields.30
The question of how to define prostitution applies to relationships between white people too. Is a prostitute strictly someone who exchanges sex for a negotiated or set fee? What about women who enter into de facto living arrangements with men, not for love but survival? According to Lord Cecil, a former digger informed him that when he was in Bendigo a lady had offered to ‘be his wife’ for the moderate charge of 1/6. The number of registered ex-nuptial births in Victoria in 1854 and 1855 suggests that many single women who immigrated to Australia found themselves in sexual liaisons that, although not sanctioned by church or state, were not officially illegal either. Providing sexual and domestic services in exchange for a dry roof and warm bed in a temporary capacity is not technically prostitution, but neither is it necessarily born of romance. That 1/6 might come in the form of housekeeping, for as long as the woman wished to keep house.
Of course, there are those critics who would say that the whole institution of marriage is nothing but legalised prostitution, and not just modern-day radical feminists. American women’s rights campaigners in the 1850s saw their movement as the natural legacy of the pioneer tradition, arguing that women had crossed continents, fought Indians, tilled the soil and established homesteads, thus proving themselves to be more than playthings of men, whose only pleasure was to breed and serve.31 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer, both married in 1840, omitted the word ‘obey’ from their marriage vows. In 1883 Henrietta Dugdale wrote a utopian novella about women’s emancipation called A Few Hours in a Far Off Age and predicted that the marriage of the future would be based solely on fidelity and lasting affection which can only spring from the mutual respect of one equal for another in that life-long bond. For living a life of shame and indignity brought on by their oppression of women, Dugdale called men the real prostitutes.
In gold rush Ballarat, not all men were happy about the easy availability of women for a price. A letter published in the GOLD DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE on 19 August 1854 conflated the autocratic rule of the goldfields administration with the domination of heartless women who sold grog and then, perhaps, a more lucrative chaser. First, wrote the miner, the diggers were fleeced through the wanton and petty tyranny of public officers.
Next, for the digger’s plunder, are a long roll of harpies, who toil not, neither do they spin; but I will not say they do not rob; for they are, in general, wealthy. But how have they become so? Even young women, with large anguishing eyes, seem to derive a large revenue for their use from the digger.
These predatory women ran pop-shops, wrote the disgruntled digger, where they served up grog with a soft and tender glance in the administration of the dose.
Alexander Dick, who came to Victoria from Scotland with the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society, frequented a grog shanty that was run by a highlander named Shaw. Shaw had a wife whose price was not above rubies, tutted Dick. He was also partial to another shanty run by a Geordie chap called Lal Matt; he too had a female partner who did not pretend to be his wife. Dick was often invited to spend an evening under their hospitable canvas, but he resolved to stay clear of such demoralising temptations. By the by, Dick tells us that both Shaw and Lal Matt worked gold claims. It’s likely, then, that the grog shanties were run by the ersatz wives, who might have served other wares during the day while their men were out digging. The rules of sexual engagement were clearly played fast and loose. Whether the women who ended up in such situations had foreseen that this was where their antipodean journey would lead them is simply impossible to determine. If there were high-class courtesans on the Victorian goldfields, as there were in Nevada, they have resisted disclosure. There are no names that stand out, unless you count Lola Montez, who was married to her manager Noel Follin only for the duration of her Australian tour, or the former French courtesan, Céleste de Chabrillan, now married to the French consul to Victoria.
In all likelihood, however, there was a ranking system, as has been documented on the American mining frontier, from high- to low-status prostitutes. The higher the grade, the more clandestine in soliciting custom, subtle about obtaining payment, likely to offer skills or talents besides just sex, and be involved with fewer and richer men. This sort of stratification also fits with what we know of the Ballarat goldfields, where competition for precious resources led to status rewards. Lucky men could afford to drink champagne, smoke cigars and hire attractive, gracious whores on a more or less permanent basis. Unlucky diggers were left to line up for the coarse, foul-mouthed tarts that hung about in the doorways of hotels and shanties. And some men couldn’t even scrape together the two bits required to lay their burden down.
By the end of the winter of 1854, Ballarat was transformed. It was no longer a frontier outpost predicated on yanking nuggets of gold from the ground, but a fledgling town boasting all the appliances of civilised life…the comforts and conveniences of high civilisation, as Thomas McCombie put it. The hotel. The store. The theatre. The printing press. McCombie crossed them off his list of heralds of progress. And they were institutions, McCombie failed to note, with women at the helm. Catherine Bentley and Mother Jamieson at the hotel. Tick. Martha Clendinning and Anne Diamond at the store. Tick. Sarah Hanmer at the theatre. Tick. Clara du Val Seekamp at the printing press with Ellen Young feeding her the copy. Tick.
The town was settling down. So why did no one feel at ease? Samuel Huyghue, high up on the hill, could see only a population in a constant state of chronic irritation. There they all were, scratching at an itch that would not subside, further inflaming the exquisite pain with every scrape of the flesh.
If, as Governor Hotham and James Bonwick believed, women were the ground order of society, and if they now controlled the instruments of civilisation in Ballarat, then the town should have been on the fast track to stability and regulation. But it wasn’t. It was heading for a train wreck. And the women weren’t hauling on the brake. They were stoking the coals.