‘Vida has a conscience that is not easily satisfied.’
– Julia Sutherland
For Vida and her brother and sisters, Melbourne could scarcely have been more different from the humdrum peace and slow pace of Warrnambool. To an eight-year-old, the metropolis was a large and sprawling, even magnificent, beast, its streets almost literally paved with gold, for the city was still basking in the prosperity following the rushes of the 1850s. Vida had never seen anything like the grand civic buildings, the schools in solid brick with a Latin motto over the entrance, the large houses with classical sculpture in carefully manicured front gardens, the theatres and the coffee palaces. And the city was so noisy, with the clop of horses’ hooves, the squeal of carts and the screech of the horse-drawn steam trams bearing down on what seemed like dozens of people on foot; and odorous, with the smells of horse manure and metal and woodsmoke from the small shops that lined the streets, and the scent of freshly cut wood from the timber yards. Nor had Vida seen anything like the fashionable ladies and gentlemen who thronged the business district. So much wealth, so much power. Melbourne seemed to come from another more interesting and exotic world.
Jacob quickly found work in the Lands Department, then as a contract draughtsman in the Land Titles Office. With a regular income plus Isabella’s money, the Goldsteins were free to look for somewhere pleasant to live. They settled in the burgeoning and genteel suburbs to the east of the city. However, one of the surprising things about Vida’s family is their insistence on moving around Melbourne: sometimes it seems that every time Vida and her family are mentioned, they are living in a different place. They preferred to rent rather than buy property, apparently. They could not have afforded to buy something in the most desirable areas of the city, but renting was possible. This restlessness in search of a home seems to have been characteristic of both Vida’s parents. As a result Vida grew into a thoroughly urban young woman, and one without strong ties to any particular place in Melbourne. There is no evidence, for instance, that she ever displayed much interest in making or maintaining a garden anywhere.
With the family settled and Jacob, like dozens of other commuters, heading off to the metropolitan railway station or tram stop in the mornings in his high-collared dark suit and bowler hat, Isabella had time on her hands. With little interest in or aptitude for domestic pursuits, she could easily have embarked upon an easy social life of visiting friends – presumably the Hawkins family had contacts in Melbourne – and attending the tea parties and soirees much favoured by smart and ambitious young Melbourne matrons. None of that much interested Vida’s mother. She marched right past the fashionable parts of Melbourne and headed for the city’s slum areas, where she felt she could do some good.
Isabella could spend time on charitable pursuits because she had help in the home. From the time Vida was three, in Warrnambool, her parents had employed a young woman, Lizzie Kavanagh, as a cook and cleaner. Lizzie came to Melbourne with the Goldstein family and lived with them for more than sixty years, although she was always threatening to walk out and leave them.
Lizzie’s duties were often onerous. She did the cleaning and cooking – in a family of picky eaters – as well as the washing and ironing, looking after the clothes of seven people. She was no martyr or drudge: she knew the family depended on her and she had a very clear idea of her own worth. The immaculate grooming for which Vida was noted during her political career owed a great deal to Lizzie’s skills: one can sense in photographs the watchful presence of Lizzie in the background, flatiron in hand.
Lizzie’s job was important in keeping the household running smoothly, but the woman outside the family who was probably most important in Vida’s life at the time was Julia Sutherland. It was to this progressive young woman that Jacob and Isabella entrusted the education of their children. Schools, including very good ones, were springing up all over Melbourne, but Jacob and Isabella opted to employ a governess. Unlike some well-to-do couples, they were keen to give their children as many educational opportunities as possible, and to keep a close eye on their progress. Their support for giving girls – four out of five of the Goldstein children – an education for something other than marriage shows how very progressive, how far ahead of their time, Jacob and Isabella were.
Julia Sutherland was an astute and conscientious teacher. One of her duties was to prepare detailed reports about all the Goldstein children – and it is thanks to these reports that the personalities of Vida and her emerge clearly for the first time.
Apart from Vida, the children did not enjoy school much. Elsie and Lina, who were not yet ten, had difficulty in applying themselves; Selwyn was a daydreamer who sometimes tried to wriggle out of doing homework, and he disliked reading. (Aileen was too young for school yet.) Sutherland also commented severely on the excitability of her charges: they seem to have had a tendency to burst into unprovoked tears. It is possible that their governess, a young woman without children of her own or much teaching experience, was expecting too much of her pupils. She might have been unused to the swiftly changing emotions and attention spans of small children. However, it is also possible that the young Goldsteins were rather spoiled and attention-seeking.1
Eleven-year-old Vida was the most receptive to learning, and Sutherland obviously turned to her with some relief, setting her examinations in mathematics and English, history and music. Teacher and student became fast friends, and Sutherland was able to report to Jacob and Isabella that ‘Vida is still the same hard-working, willing and obedient pupil that I found her at first, spreading a good influence all around her’. She mentioned Vida’s shortcomings too, though hardly in a spirit of harsh criticism: Vida did not distinguish herself as a scholar of Latin, though she worked hard.
One aspect of Vida’s home education is especially interesting. Sutherland coached her to take the exams given by the Australian Health Society. This organisation had been set up in 1876 by a group of Melbourne’s municipal leaders, including doctors, to promote public health. It held lectures, wrote pamphlets and produced posters about such subjects as the prevention and treatment of diphtheria in crowded buildings, and the necessity for cleanliness in preventing disease. Very likely Isabella had a hand in this – if she intended her daughter to help her in her slum work, a knowledge of public health would be useful.
From Sutherland’s reports, Vida emerges as a highly intelligent, conscientious, calm young girl, though not one especially drawn to pursuits such as art or creative writing. She seems, in fact, to have been the archetypal eldest child, eager to please her parents and set an example to her younger siblings. She clearly more than met the scholastic standards of the 1880s, which leaned heavily on rote learning. One thing she always had was an excellent memory for facts; she might have developed her analytical skills a little later.
In 1884, when Vida was fifteen, her parents decided to send her to the Presbyterian Ladies’ College as a day student. This must have been at Sutherland’s urging – she had been to school there – and Isabella and Jacob recognised that their eldest daughter was ready to have her horizons broadened.
PLC was a relatively new school, established in 1876 in East Melbourne by the Presbyterian Church to ‘provide for the daughters of our colonists as high an education as their sons are receiving’ at, for example, Wesley College and Scotch College, which had been set up in emulation of English public schools such as Eton and Harrow. PLC was probably the first school in Australia to acknowledge and recognise that the quality of a girl’s education need not be limited because of her gender.2 The school principal, Andrew Harper, who had six daughters, believed that the traditionally female subjects of music and art should be taught as rigorously and seriously as English and mathematics, and he set up a proper music department with studies in harmony and counterpoint. He introduced the study of botany, physiology and other sciences, as well as classical Greek. This last was a prerequisite for the study of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Harper anticipated that before long the university would open its doors to women – which it did in 1881.
PLC was at the forefront of a movement that was gathering strength in the 1880s. Women, it was clear, were beginning to make progress in several areas apart from education. The Married Women’s Property Act, passed in 1884 (in Victoria; in other colonies later), allowed women for the first time to own property and have bank accounts of their own. Financial independence, so crucial for other kinds of independence, was now a real possibility for women. Another straw in the wind: in 1869, the year of Vida’s birth, the US state of Wyoming had become the first place in the world to give women the vote.
The school’s examination results were spectacular from the start. At the end of Vida’s first year, twenty-seven girls had passed their matriculation examination. Seven took first-class honours; no other school in Victoria, for boys or girls, had more than three. And, in fulfilment of this early promise, many of Vida’s contemporaries went on to have distinguished careers. Helen Mitchell, for example, who sang in the choir of the church that Vida and her mother belonged to, gained lasting fame when she changed her name to Nellie Melba. Some, as well as Vida herself, were pioneers: Flos Greig became the first woman solicitor and barrister in Australia; Constance Ellis was the first woman in Victoria to gain a medical degree from the University of Melbourne; Ethel Godfrey became the state’s first woman dentist; and Myrie Shappere was Victoria’s first woman analytical chemist.
Vida always expressed warm and affectionate memories of her schooldays. But it is very possible that, having come from the country and initially been educated at home, her first reaction to PLC had something in common with that of twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham, the main character in Henry Handel Richardson’s novel The Getting of Wisdom. Richardson was a year younger than Vida, and it seems that her own love of the old school was not unqualified:
It certainly was an imposing building viewed from within, when the paling-gate had closed behind them. To Laura . . . it seemed vast in its breadth and height, appalling in its sombre greatness . . . she walked up an asphalted path and mounted the steps that led to a massive stone portico . . . [She found herself] in a plainly furnished but very lofty waiting-room . . . There was the faint, distinctive smell of strange furniture. But what impressed Laura most was the stillness. No street noises pierced the massy walls, but neither did the faintest echo of all that might be taking place in the great building itself reach their ears. They sat aloof, shut off, as it were, from the living world.3
Vida might have found PLC’s rather hermetic atmosphere intimidating too, but she did not let this deter her, mostly thanks to Julia Sutherland’s thorough teaching. She seems to have been a good, solid all-rounder without being outstanding. Her favourite subjects were music and gymnastics, and she joined the Magpie Club, a group of girls who met regularly in the gym to discuss literary subjects. Members also wrote poetry and read compositions for group discussion, though it is not clear whether Vida did so, or whether she contributed to the school magazine Patchwork. This magazine occasionally slipped from the high moral Presbyterian ground. In 1880, for example, two issues were devoted to the new hairstyle fashion of fringes – quite literally a burning question, as some girls curled their fringes with the aid of heated lead pencils.
However, PLC rarely lost sight of its mission to educate girls outside the domestic arena. In 1885, when Vida was in her second year, Patchwork published an editorial, possibly by the principal, that stated: ‘Women’s sphere, it is said, is in the home. Truly, but we cannot consent to have the radius from a vital centre arbitrarily limited . . . the Sphere is a circle of chalk which the tide of necessity and the steps of these noble times is obliterating.’4 It is probably not coincidental that when Vida set up a radical newspaper a few years later, she named it The Australian Woman’s Sphere.
Sutherland kept a close and approving eye on her former pupil’s progress, telling Isabella and Jacob that her only fear for their daughter was that Vida might be inclined to work too hard. ‘She has a conscience that is not easily satisfied, and she is not happy until it is satisfied,’ she said. The fact that Sutherland noted this as a cause for concern – and that Isabella, too, worried about Vida’s health and need to drive herself, possibly mindful of her own father’s mental fragility – indicates that as a young girl Vida tended not to take things lightly and drove herself to excel as far as she could, and was therefore vulnerable to a high level of stress.
She passed her matriculation exams creditably in 1886, aged seventeen. She was awarded honours in English and French and passes in Latin, algebra and arithmetic, with second prize in her year for French and third for English, and came equal first in ‘private readings’ and first in music.
Did Vida have any idea what she wanted her career to be? She had done well enough to study Arts at the University of Melbourne, perhaps followed by teaching. But she did not enter university. Years later she confessed that she had not continued with study because she had suffered a breakdown when she left school. That was all she ever said, but in later life she seems to have suffered from depression – the seeds of which are often sown very early – though this seems not to have stopped her working. Perhaps as a seventeen-year-old she was simply suffering from nervous exhaustion, from the strain of having to excel in order to meet her parents’ expectations: her sisters’ education seems not to have been as rigorous.
Whatever the nature or severity of her breakdown, Vida’s decision not to continue to university could have been a financial one. In those days before bursaries and scholarships, with women only beginning to make their mark academically, university education was expensive, and Vida’s parents had four other children to bring up and educate.
So Vida seems to have been at a loose end. However, she was a young and pretty girl. She threw off her blue and white school uniform in favour of evening dresses, put her hair up and embarked on a round of picnics, dances and parties. As a young woman with a father in the militia and a mother from a well-known Western District family, and with contacts from her years at PLC, she already had – and continued to increase – a wide circle of contacts and acquaintances. Her social activities were apparently treated with indulgence by Jacob and Isabella: they seem to have known that their daughter needed to relax. And Vida aged eighteen, with thick dark hair, brown eyes, a full sensuous mouth and a petite hourglass figure, was very attractive. Her ‘look’ was fashionable for the time, too; she resembled a ‘Gibson girl’, one of the lushly beautiful young women in the drawings by the American artist Charles Dana Gibson.
As befitted someone who had enjoyed gymnastics at school, Vida enjoyed many forms of sport. She had learned to ride as a young girl in the country, and remained physically adventurous. She played an excellent game of tennis and was proficient at billiards and clay pigeon shooting. On one famous occasion she drove a coach and five horses from the small hamlet of Deans Marsh to Lorne, a distance of about 23 kilometres, to test her strength. She was triumphantly successful, but her arms ached so much afterwards that she complained she couldn’t do her own hair for a week. She was also enthusiastic about the newly fashionable sport of bicycle riding, though she does not seem to have followed the fad for ‘rational dress’: wide-legged, long bloomers and a tunic worn by some women bicyclists to make pedalling easier.
A revealing glimpse of Vida comes from, of all people, John Monash.5 He was one of Jacob’s junior officers in the Victorian Garrison Artillery (Jacob had risen to the rank of colonel by this time). Four years older than Vida, young Monash – tallish and slim with a dashing moustache – was developing a reputation as a great flirt and was pleased when Vida came into his orbit. But she did not succumb to his charms and, piqued, he wrote, ‘I found her rather too self-possessed and affected, and she plainly did not like me.’
Vida later described herself at this stage of her life as unsure, and it could be that an irritated Monash confused brittleness for composure. Vida evidently failed to exhibit the admiring deference he considered his due. He thought that if he could get her alone without interruption he could ‘put himself on a satisfactory footing with her’. He seems not to have managed this at the time, but he obviously forgave her intransigence, or she forgave him for being a bit pompous. Later in life they became friends, staying in occasional contact until Monash’s death in 1931.
Monash was not the only potential beau of Vida’s. She received several proposals of marriage and turned them all down. There seems to have been no parental pressure for her to marry: no doubt Jacob and Isabella thought there was plenty of time for that. But the next chapter of her life, which was just about to begin, turned Vida’s mind and her energies in a different direction altogether.