The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (40 page)

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?

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.