by Clare Wright
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 Hassell Benden 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 Spanake, the nineteen-year-old English 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 Spanake 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. John 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?
