by Clare Wright
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.
Zealous diggers: mining as a family affair. S. T. Gill, 1852.
A ‘refreshment tent’ on the diggings. S. T. Gill, 1852–3.
Sarah Hanmer, probably c. 1860.
Interior of the Adelphi Hotel, with Sarah Hanmer on the right, 1854.
A store on the diggings, like the one Martha Clendinning would have kept. Thomas Ham, 1854.
Subscription ball in Ballarat. S. T. Gill, 1854.
‘The servant problem’ as seen by Melbourne Punch, 1856.
PART 3
TRANSGRESSIONS
NINE
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Spring.
verb move rapidly or suddenly from a constrained position.
noun 1 the season after winter and before summer, in which vegetation begins to appear, in the northern hemisphere from March to May and in the southern hemisphere from September to November.
2 a resilient device, typically a helical metal coil, that can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released, used chiefly to exert constant tension or absorb movement.
They didn’t call this Bentley’s Hill for nothing. Catherine Bentley had a commanding view of the Ballarat diggings from the second-storey bedroom of her hotel. To the south, the vast sea of honeycombed earth stretching towards Red Hill and the Canadian Lead. To the northwest, the tent hamlet of Bakery Hill, where Clara Seekamp and her husband were churning out their newspaper. Stretched out along the Yarrowee River to the north, the golden gutters of the Gravel Pits Lead, and over the river, the old alluvial flats of Black Hill. To the east loomed Mt Warrenheip: grave, solid, like a conscience. To the southwest, she could see Golden Point. In one of those tents over there sat Ellen Young, scribbling the letters and poems that kept appearing in the TIMES.
This vast landscape of endeavour was now dry and thirsty. Spring had only just arrived and already the ground looked parched. A month ago, Catherine’s lad Thomas was chipping ice from the water pail in the morning; now she would have to chase him to put his bonnet on. Come summer, she would have a new baby to shelter from Ballarat’s inscrutable climate. A week of rain would put a stop to digging—a busy week at the bar—then a week of hot winds would blow up clouds of dust. What a country, where things could turn around so just like that.
Beyond Bakery Hill, Catherine could see clear through to the Camp. The government men still did their drinking at Bath’s Hotel, but by September 1854 she and James were raking in so much (£350 on their first night alone) that the toffs could go to hell anyway. She didn’t need them in her front bar; they’d only scare off the locals. In any case, she and James would be in demand to attend to the next Subscription Ball; all the leading townsfolk were invited, especially if they had deep pockets. Even men like the Jews—auctioneer Henry Harris and his mate Charles Dyte—were always on the subscription list.1 And now Harris and Ikey Dyte were storing their goods at her hotel. The merchant George Smith also entrusted over £300 worth of his wares to her care, including two dozen black satin neckties, five dozen fine linen shirts, three double-barrelled Dean and Adams revolvers, fifty-three gold signet rings, forty-four gold pencil cases and four dozen electroplated dessert spoons and forks. Smith even asked them to guard his Masonic certificate and apron.2 Jacques Paltzer had been quick to sign up his band as the regular entertainment at Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, especially since the band members could live upstairs. They were the most sought-after concert band on the goldfields and would no doubt be asked to play at the next ball. People might talk in envious whispers about what went on inside the big red house on the hill, but they wanted what the Bentleys had to offer regardless. Not just grog and cash, but the structure itself: the sense of permanence.
Now that the weather had fined up, the last stage of the hotel’s construction could gather pace. The bowling alley was finally operational but there were still seven bedrooms upstairs to be finished and the new concert rooms out the back. And of course there were bills to pay: £230 for paint—white, gold, green and vermillion; 150 squares of glass; cornices, wallpaper and ceiling paper; £320 to five contractors for the stables and concert room; £96 to the sawyer; £190 to Thomas Bath for ten casks of his porter and ten cases of his gin; Rutherford and Tingman, the wine and spirit merchants, would get £596 for twenty-five dozen bottles of champagne, sherry, and port, two thousand cigars, 124 dozen bottles of ale, porter and twenty-two gallons of whisky. Fifty single beds, ten double beds and one hundred pillows also had to be paid for. A massive bill, but it all paled in comparison to the £4540 owed to F. E. Beaver for cartage since May.3 (This was the opportunity cost of building in winter, when the roads turned to something resembling Irish stew.) Some people might call the Eureka Hotel the slaughterhouse, but many believed that James Bentley was a fair dealer, upright, well mannered and in thriving circumstances. They needed no inducement to give him credit.
But the Eureka Hotel was not just a business, it was also home—to Catherine and James and wee Thomas, and the new baby quickening inside her. Just an ex-con and a Sligo girl—she was only twenty-two—but they had built themselves a fine home. Practically a palace. The hotel was also home to Catherine’s sister Mary, and Mary’s husband, Everard Gadd, to Duncan the barman and the nursemaid, Agnes Sinclair. Two other servants as well, Mrs Gill and Mary Haines. Michael Walsh, the waiter. Sam in the stables and George in the bowling alley. Isaac Rigby, the carpenter working on the adjoining concert rooms. Charles Smith, the cook and baker. The musicians: Augustus Neill, Edward West and Jacques Paltzer. And Farrell and Hance, the watchmen and rouseabouts.
Nineteen residents in all. It was quite a compound. Those who lived in a hotel were, by Victorian law, called inmates. So what did that make the hundreds of people who flocked to drink and gamble and bowl and dance there each night? Outsiders? Hardly. It was Catherine and James’s job to make everyone feel welcome: offer hospitality. They did it well.
The change of season brought a flurry of activity, as if a clutch of baby spiders had burst from a taut maternal egg-sac and scattered into the warm spring air. Business of all kinds has looked up amazingly, noted the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE.4 A ball was held on 2 September in the new Lydiard Street Arcade in aid of the Hospital Fund. The sexes were nearly equal in number, noted the correspondent, some of the ladies did complain, but not much, that there was too little variety in the dances. Resident Gold Commissioner Robert Rede, Magistrate John D’Ewes, Police Inspector Gordon Evans and many leading storekeepers were there. Down on the Eureka, the stores that had cleared out over winter were now returning. A glee club started up at Bath’s Hotel. A lending library opened on the diggings, with copies of Dickens, Thackeray and Ida Pfeiffer, the popular writers of the day. Messrs Robinson and Cole opened their chemist at Ballarat Flat. Their inventory included:
Robinson’s Dysentery Mixture, a never-failing remedy; Robinson’s Carmative and Preservative for infants, Robinson’s Patent Groats, Robinson’s Amboyna Tincture for the teeth and gums; and surgical instruments of all kinds, trusses, cupping apparatus, enema apparatus, breast pumps, nipple shields, feeding bottles, puff boxes, etc.5
Ellen Young’s husband, Frederick, was a chemist but lacked Robinson’s entrepreneurial flair.
New enterprises caught the waft of rejuvenation on the clement breeze. It was announced that a bathing house was to be erected near the Gravel Pits, at an investment of £900, offering hot and cold shower baths. By making the luxury
of bathing available to all, rich and poor alike, the proprietors will not only invite a large concourse of eager customers but also monopolise the business, heralded the advertorial in the TIMES.6 A time to plant, a time to reap.
Seeds that were furtively sown in the desperate clutch of winter would now begin to swell. Sixteen-year-old Anne Duke discovered she was pregnant with her first child. So was Margaret Johnston. She and James had married in August; theirs was a honeymoon baby, conceived along the road to Maggie’s new home in Ballarat’s Government Camp. Bridget Nolan would also be in her first trimester this Christmas. Realising her situation, Bridget was to marry her travelling companion Thomas Hynes on 2 October at St Alipius Church on the Eureka, with Father Patrick Smyth officiating and old shipmate Paddy Gittens as best man. Eight weeks later the young blacksmith Gittens would be beaten to death by redcoats amid a hail of bullets and the acrid smoke of a hundred fires. A time to be born, a time to die.
On Sundays, diggers washed their clothes. Then, enjoying the blue skies and balmy air, they joined in hunting parties in the bush. Storekeepers continued to inflame the Sabbath Alliance by openly trading, vending and carting on the Lord’s Day. It was the only day that diggers were not mining, so of course they needed to buy and sell, argued the shopkeepers. Members of the alliance trudged through the diggings, remonstrating with the violators of the Pearl of Days. A pulpit-thumping meeting was held at the Wesleyan Tent Chapel in the second week of September, attended by Resident Commissioner Robert Rede, who offered his full support. The DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE, reporting the meeting, referred to Rede as our strutting, swellish, little head commissioner, our little handsome functionary.7 George Evans attended the Wesleyan Chapel but was not much pleased by the tone of the minister. His brother Charles had forsaken religious observance for the time being; he was busy working at the Criterion Printing Office in partnership with a twenty-five-year-old Yorkshire man named Thomas Fletcher.
