by Clare Wright
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 would go on to found Australia’s first women’s suffrage society in 1884, wore a long bifurcated skirt and short jackets her whole long life in Victoria.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 inn
ovation: 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.
