‘The condition under which our Melbourne poor live is fast drifting towards the low level . . . of the old world.’
– Isabella Goldstein
Vida had embarked on her career as a social butterfly at a time when Melbourne was at the height of its glory. In the mid-1880s, it was the largest and wealthiest city in Australia and the seventh largest in the British Empire. More than 800,000 people lived there, and it was home to 40 per cent of Australia’s population. New elaborate houses, ornate pubs, luxury hotels, theatres, churches – all were being built, it seemed, every week. No wonder, said admiring journalists, that the city was called Melbourne the Marvellous.1
But this was only one reality. Throughout the inner suburbs, close to the factories where men and women worked in the newly prosperous city, stretched rows of small, mean houses. Many were rat-infested, others so badly built and ventilated that watercress grew in the cupboards. As Vida later wrote in her newspaper The Australian Woman’s Sphere:
Thousands of women, the mothers of young children, work twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day for fifteen shillings and one pound a week; others do charing work for the daily pittance of two shillings. They have to lock up their homes till six and seven in the evening, and their children must play in the gutters till they return. What time have these women to look after the physical and moral well being of their children? All they can do is rub and scrub and stitch from morning till night to provide themselves and their children with unwholesome and often adulterated food . . . Boys and girls parade the streets until eleven and twelve at night.
Naturally, their only recreation ground is the street, there is nowhere else to go. It is suggested that the law should compel them to return to their homes at eight or nine o’clock. This seems to us as nothing less than cruelty. In the winter their only chance of keeping warm is exercise in the streets. Their homes know not the luxury of fires, in the summer the houses are unendurable.2
Government pensions and benefit schemes did not exist: any help for the poor had to come from more affluent citizens or private organisations. Church-affiliated groups usually believed that, in the words of the Bible, the poor are always with us, and that it was the duty of good Christians to help them – mostly by giving food, or clothing, or money. The other approach was to try to give them skills that would break the cycle of need and penury, and to try to change the law to make their lives fairer and easier.
Isabella Goldstein belonged to the second group. A practical Scotswoman, she was firmly committed to helping people stand on their own two feet. Vida’s parents evidently believed in two mottos: knowledge is power, and the Lord helps those who help themselves. Jacob, a man of ferocious energy, had no time for pieties about ‘the poor’. As well as holding down his job in Melbourne and a senior position in the militia, he was instrumental in establishing the Cheltenham Men’s Home and the Hospital League of Mercy. Both he and Isabella became involved in organisations set up to help poor working people. One of these was the Try Society. William Forster, a successful English-born saddler, had made his large and comfortable Toorak home into an informal school for street boys, organising games and other group activities as well as music, reading and talks. He called it the Try Society – a Victorian-moralist title intended to convey the message that the young members should help themselves by acquiring knowledge, at the same time learning how to discipline themselves and each other.3
The Try Society was a great success. In 1889 Forster was given a government grant towards a building on city land, and this became the Gordon Institute for Boys. Forster was now providing training for unemployed youths, with classes in carpentry, boot repairing, shorthand and bookkeeping as well as reading, writing, singing and elocution. In 1892, classes for girls were established. The example of Forster’s work, not least his ability to persuade influential people to support him and to solicit funds, was not lost on Jacob and Isabella Goldstein – or on their daughter Vida.
For many years Jacob, Isabella and Vida were members of the Charity Organisation Society. Founded in 1887 as an offshoot of a London-based group, the COS also rejected the common middle-class attitude that the best way to eliminate poverty was simply to throw money at it. The COS was set up to examine the whole cycle of poverty, and its aims were twofold: to be a central source of information about available services for the poor, for the benefit of community groups and other charitable bodies; and to give poor people the means of finding work, in order to restore their self-sufficiency and self-respect.
Jacob became honorary secretary. The set-up of the COS was highly congenial to him, for he was a man with a strong sense of organisation, provided he was in charge. He rejected any idea that the administration of charities should be left to government, or – certainly not – to political parties. He believed the latter were unable to handle the problems of society without making them worse, and that the actions of politicians could never be truly self-sacrificing, nor their motives purely altruistic. Vida’s suspicion of organised political parties – a consistent feature of her public life in years to come – was something she obviously imbibed from an early age.
When Jacob lost his job during the disastrous depression of the 1890s, his zeal for reform apparently increased. He was particularly interested in possible measures to provide unemployment relief for men. In the early 1890s he proposed setting up work colonies in parts of rural Victoria, taking unemployed working men away from the city and training them to be farmers or land workers. This, he believed, would provide the dignity of proper work, and steer families away from the humiliation of relying on charity.
A successful labour colony of sorts, mostly funded by the government with support from public subscription and with about 260 men, had already been set up at Leongatha in South Gippsland, about 130 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. A letter to The Argus from a young man who signed himself ‘Grateful’ praised ‘the chance of a residence up country with the surety of plenty to eat and a tent to sleep in in return for a fair day’s work, the management also giving me two or three shillings a week’ and the opportunity of gaining practical experience in bush work.4
The colony had a resident manager who was paid £70 a year with the use of a house for himself and his family. Early in 1894, when the current manager proved an incompetent administrator, Jacob offered himself for the job. However, the committee was short of money and, embarrassed, had to tell him they could not afford the salary or accommodation. No matter, said Jacob airily: he would do the job in an honorary capacity. Isabella’s reaction to his decision is not recorded. Perhaps, like her husband, she considered that the importance of the work outweighed any possible remuneration. Or perhaps not.
Under Jacob, the colony ran smoothly for some months, though the management committee clashed with him about Leongatha’s purpose: they wanted it to be self-supporting, possibly employing skilled labour, while Jacob argued that its purpose was to relieve unemployment, pure and simple.
In October 1894, William Squire was appointed to run the colony under Jacob’s supervision. Squire, an English farmer with agricultural college training, was paid £140 a year – twice what Jacob had been offered. This did not help relations between the two men. Jacob, who had adopted Leongatha as his pet project and asserted that he knew as much about farming as a lawyer did about the law, resented Squire and his role; Squire considered Jacob a city-based crank.
Their antagonism was fuelled by the local paper, the Great Southern Star, which praised Squire while accusing Jacob of dishonesty and incompetence. Jacob retaliated by twice dismissing Squire for disobedience, only to see him reinstated by the colony’s government-appointed trustees. In 1898 Squire asserted that Jacob had received a commission for some of the machinery he had bought for the farm. Jacob sued him for libel, and lost.
Eventually the government appointed a committee to sort things out between the two men. Its final report damned Jacob with faint praise, saying he had ‘shown energy and enthusiasm throughout’; it was not suggested that he should resign. The Minister for Lands announced that the colony would close – it was costing too much to run, he said, and the men had not acquired useful skills anyway. Jacob fought against this strongly, to no avail. The colony was reduced to half its original size, and the number of men working there correspondingly dwindled.
Jacob finally resigned as superintendent of Leongatha in 1903. He remained bitter about his treatment, and it is doubtful whether he ever changed his way of operating. His daughter Vida, who had watched her father’s drama unfold, learned valuable lessons from it. She clearly inherited some elements of Jacob’s desire to be in charge, as well as his persistence. But following the example of her mother, Vida instinctively adopted a more persuasive approach to social reform.
In all the work Isabella Goldstein did for the less fortunate, religion was her lodestar. She took the biblical exhortation to look after the poor as a literal instruction. From the time the family settled in Melbourne, and throughout Vida’s schooldays and beyond, the Goldsteins, led by Isabella, regularly attended Presbyterian Scots’ Church in the city. (It was here that Nellie Melba, née Helen Mitchell, sang in the choir.)5
Since 1875, Scots’ Church had been run by the formidable and charismatic Reverend Charles Strong. His photographs, showing a full-bearded man with deep-set, rather troubled eyes, fail to bring out his sheer energy and force, or his intellectual curiosity. Strong had a wide range of interests and a great talent for friendship. His friends included philanthropist and art collector Alfred Felton, whose bequest still forms a significant portion of the holdings of Victoria’s National Gallery; future prime minister Alfred Deakin; lawyer and judge Henry Bournes Higgins; and the poet Bernard O’Dowd. Strong was a member of the councils of Scotch College and of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne.6
Like most progressive clerics, Strong saw no conflict between a belief in God and an acceptance of Darwin’s principles; indeed, he felt that Darwin’s beliefs could ‘enable religion to take a higher and wider flight, to think of God and man and human destiny in a far nobler way’. This was heresy to the leaders of Victoria’s Presbyterian Church at the time. They were not alone: in 1880s Australia, many churchgoers were still struggling with the science-or-religion choice they felt Darwinism had presented to them.
In 1883 Strong chaired a meeting at which politician and judge George Higinbotham spoke on the subject ‘Science and Religion’. Though Strong dissociated himself from some of the things Higinbotham said about the need for education to be secular and for science and religion to inform each other, the elders of the Church charged Strong with promoting unsound and heretical doctrine, and he had no alternative but to resign. Many of his friends and parishioners supported him, presenting him with a cheque substantial enough to set up a new church. However, Strong sailed for the UK instead, and the day after his departure the Church assembly declared him no longer a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria.
Strong returned to Melbourne about a year later. He set up the Australian Church, which he described as a free religious fellowship committed to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and upholding the ideals of faith, hope and love, but without the organisational structures, or strictures, of other churches. Isabella and her children – though not Jacob for some reason, perhaps he found his own Unitarian beliefs sufficiently liberal – quickly joined the congregation. The new church’s manifesto was: ‘The Australian Church is a society held together by a common religious spirit of trust and hope towards God as our father, and of love towards man as our brother, and not by dogmatic creed or an unchanging ecclesiastical form. It recognises the principles of development and seeks to reinterpret Christianity in the light of present-day knowledge and experience.’7 Take that, Presbyterian elders.
Vida was a schoolgirl at PLC when Charles Strong established his Australian Church. She soon became a member of his Religious Science Club, set up as a means of discussing different religions, sometimes other than Christianity, through the prism of scientific inquiry. She and Strong gradually established a warm friendship that endured until he died in 1942.
Strong was a socialist and a passionate champion of Melbourne’s underprivileged: his outspoken condemnation of social evils often made his largely middle-class congregation uncomfortable, though clearly not Isabella Goldstein, who fully supported him. In May 1891 Strong and Isabella – and possibly Vida too – visited the slums of Collingwood. ‘Hawkeye’ of the Melbourne Herald, clearly no friend of Strong’s, suggested that this was the first time Strong had seen how the poor lived. In response, Isabella wrote a furious letter to the editor. She pointed out that Strong had been well aware of the dreadful poverty in Collingwood before she went with him on this occasion, and that it was shameful that ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ should have slums as bad as any in the ‘old world’.8 So forceful was her letter that a reporter from the Herald, who thought she had been exaggerating, went to Collingwood to see for himself. To his shocked readers he described dilapidated homes with rats scampering through them; one woman said the rats jumped on her bed and ran over her face at night. Human waste poured through the mean backyards and pooled under houses, and typhoid was common.
Isabella and Strong hit upon the idea of having young slum children looked after while both their parents toiled to earn a living. With the help of other members of the Australian Church they set up Australia’s first creche, in Collingwood. Vida would have seen her mother marshalling supporters, organising the help of like-minded people – skills that Isabella developed and from which Vida learned.
Vida and Isabella were also vitally interested in campaigns about the treatment of women. Then, as now, there was no shortage of information on violence against women, and then, as now, the penalties for offenders were often anything but severe. A counterfeiter could go to prison for ten years for stamping Queen Victoria’s face on a piece of metal, but if he had beaten his wife badly enough to injure her permanently, he would serve only a month.
One of Isabella’s longest-running campaigns, which Vida joined, concerned women in prison. Women were not generally long-term prisoners: the norm was six to twelve months, usually for debt or drunkenness, and if they were mentally ill, prison was a way of keeping them off the streets. (Ellen Kelly, mother of Ned, imprisoned for three years from 1880, was an anomaly.) Isabella and Vida joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (which did a great deal more than crusade against alcohol abuse, of which more later) to campaign for the appointment of women prison officers in women’s prisons. As Vida later wrote, ‘Women attempt to commit suicide, drunken women choke and struggle, their clothes have to be loosened, violent women are dragged out and put under the tap . . . and all this men do to women without supervision, acting on their own responsibility, and not a woman to appeal to, to give assistance or to ensure decency.’9
The campaign had partial success: when Victoria set up the first prison solely for women in 1894, some female prison officers were employed. But they were not the norm for many years.