by Clare Wright
On Monday, Lady Hotham went without her husband to Black Hill to view the mining operations there. She made a distinct impression. All were pleased with the governor, the GEELONG ADVERTISER later reported, but Lady Hotham ranks still higher. The diggers considered her a perfect darling and no more frightened of the mud than ourselves. It was considered a stroke of policy genius to conduct a private tour, an unobtrusive, inconspicuous visit rather than the tinsel, formality and studied effect of a public tour, which the diggers would have despised. Was this judicious decision made by Lady Hotham? She certainly seemed to enjoy the unorthodox viceregal outing. It was indeed a grand and gratifying sight, wrote the DIGGERS’ ADVOCATE, to see her Ladyship shaking hands and exchanging civilities with the clay-besmeared but generous-hearted diggers…scattering to the winds the almost blinding cloud of aristocratic prejudice. A miner wrote to the BALLARAT TIMES to express the same appreciation of Lady Hotham’s egalitarian inclinations. C.G.D. (Constantly Growling Digger) expected the Hothams to come up here as aristocratic novelties to have a look at us cattle [and] shrug their shoulders in horror. But he was delighted to observe her ladyship breaking and examining bits of clay in her white, delicate little hand and talking and smiling to the people about her all the while…why, bless your soul, she hasn’t half the airs and graces of your innkeeper’s or storekeeper’s wives.23 That was the diggings: the common slags getting all uppity, while the governor’s wife got down in the dirt.
It is thanks to the no-longer-growling digger that we have the best eyewitness pen portrait of the governor’s wife available:
There is Lady Hotham on his arm, her shoes and stockings all over mud, she doesn’t care a straw—she is joyous, and evidently happy. She is a tall young woman of six and twenty [actually she was thirty and seven]24 fine symmetrical figure, very active, no mock delicacy about her, blond complexion, fine liquid ox-eyes, fair hair, teeth white and regular, as a greyhound’s, and affable and conciliating manner—none of all that hauteur in her manner you might expect in her high position—cheerfulness and goodness are impressed upon her countenance. But dear me, how plain she dresses; plaid dress, red stripe, very plain bonnet…A gold watch, suspended by a massive gold chain, and hanging carelessly from her neck is the only ornament she wears.
The passage is descriptive, but sounds a cautionary note. All those women whose behaviour and attitude in the colonies has become uncomfortably defiant, ambitious or demanding, beware.
Now, if all the diggers, storekeepers and publicans wives would throw by their silks and satins, and appear like Lady Hotham, simplex in munditiis, they would confer a great boon upon their indulgent husbands; and be more respected, the closer they would follow Lady Hotham’s example.25
Less pressure to perform, more yielding to the simplicity of their surroundings—that’s what the miners of Ballarat wanted from their wives.
But Lady Hotham was not merely a walking mannequin of feminine decency. When the people threw up a hearty three cheers for Hotham and his lady, Jane turned around to face the crowd, her eyes beaming with delight and face suffused with gladness. She smiled, not with the cold dignity of a high born dame but with holiday glee. She said plainly, ‘Well, I declare, these diggers are, after all, fine hearty fellows; I’ll speak to Charles to be kind to the poor fellows, when we get back to town again’.
There is a more celebrated image of Lady Hotham at the Ballarat diggings: the moment when she was swept up in the arms of a hefty digger, who transported her safely over a muddy ditch. Either Lady Hotham was an independent spirit by nature, or her adaptable nature adjusted readily to the sense of freedom from convention that many women experienced on the diggings.
There’s a moment in Bendigo on their goldfields tour when we see the Hothams in an arresting snapshot of marital dissonance. In Bendigo Hotham was invited to a public dinner at the Criterion Hotel. Earlier that day, in front of a crowd of nine thousand, he promised to throw open the lands, and encouraged the people to pursue agricultural activities and make beautiful homes for themselves on the rich lands of the colony. He was presented with a petition to abolish the licence tax. He could not promise, he said, to do away with so large a portion of public revenue. All must pay for liberty and freedom in some shape or another, he consoled. To show his man-of-the-people stripes, he confided that he paid ten per cent tax on his property in England—and I can assure you, I dislike it most infernally, but I still must pay it. He agreed to give the subject his full attention but warned, having made up my mind as to what is right, I am just the boy to stick to it.
At the dinner that night, the boy prophesied that although Victoria was in its infancy, it would soon reach its manhood and live happily into old age. Though no individual would be threatened, Hotham was certain that the introduction of machinery to the goldfields would be an essential part of its rigorous manhood.
Now it was time to get on with the toasts. The chairman proposed a toast to Lady Hotham, who was present. Perhaps she wanted to answer the toast herself, to use the voice that Ballarat’s diggers had found so refreshing and open. But Sir Charles rose and spoke for her.
As you know, it is not in the power of a lady to take part in politics, and it is certainly not my wish that Lady Hotham should do so. In her name, I thank you for the toast that has been given. It is her part, and I believe I may add, her study, to take part in all those charities, and other works of a social character, which women are best suited for. (Cheers) If she adhere to this part of her duty, she can be as useful in that way to the people of this country, as I, with God’s blessing, can be in mine. (Great cheering.)26
What an odd speech. Who is it really for? The audience who met his uncontroversial ideas about women’s place with applause? Or Lady Hotham, who must have sat in silence, as she absorbed the subtle sting of rebuke from her husband of just nine months? It is possible that Hotham’s backhander was intended partly for Ellen Young, whose overtly political incursions may well have been brought to his attention in Ballarat. But later events cast it in the most personal light.
Fifty years after the Hothams’ goldfields tour, an old Ballarat pioneer added a piece to the Jane Hotham jigsaw. One day in the winter of ’54, the digger recalled in a letter to the Ballarat Council on 3 December 1904, he had sheltered a fugitive from a licence hunt, hiding the man in his tent. The next day the digger encountered a gentleman and his wife, asking directions to Bath’s Hotel. He walked them to their destination, and was surprised to find them asking him many questions about the conditions on the goldfields. Happy for an audience, he denounced the impudence and cruelty of the authorities, giving the events of the previous day as example. The gentleman halted, stood in front of the digger and said I am surprised Sir, that you, an Englishman, should give sanctuary to a rebel against your Queen. Do you know who I am? Yes, the governor. The digger protested: I simply did my duty as an Englishman should do to try and free a fellow man from oppression. An animated discussion then ensued, in which fifteen minutes was spent arguing the point of justification for my action, in which her Ladyship very energetically joined. Sir Charles retorted that he would not stand for insubordination—whether from the digger or his wife is unclear.27
Of course, the pugnacious digger could have been gilding the historical lily, half a century on—showcasing his courage in taking on the new governor. But then why bring Lady Hotham into the reminiscence of what he described as a triangular debate? Why draw a woman into the ring? Lady Hotham’s actions that day must have made a lasting impression on him, either from the sheer force of her energy or the unorthodox nature of her involvement in the discussion. Was her ladyship always so lippy, or was there something in the colonial air that made her feel suddenly reckless? It may have been this indiscretion, this challenge to his authority, that led Hotham to rein his wife in publicly at the Bendigo dinner. How could the governor rule with an iron fist if he could not control his lady? The governor certainly would not look like the sort of boy who stuck to his guns if even
his outspoken young wife was prepared to take him on.
After the goldfields tour, the Hothams returned to Toorak, where Lady Hotham tended her unchaperoned garden and sold off all the gaudy, glittering ottomans and easy chairs that came with the house, while Sir Charles got on with the business of firing public servants and answering his mail.
In one of the frank, liberal speeches Hotham delivered on arrival, he encouraged the people to contact him directly should they wish to discuss a problem. Whenever a suggestion can be made or a hint given, he said magnanimously, let the author come to me, and he will always find me ready to attend to his wants. At all events he will find in me a friend who is willing to give a patient and attentive hearing.28
Be careful what you wish for. Raising and signing petitions had long been a way for individuals and groups to register protest and call attention to their causes. These days, we sign mass petitions on the internet or at stalls outside shopping centres with no real belief that we will have an effect. It is a gesture, a way of registering support for a cause, rather than a conscious act of participatory democracy. But in the nineteenth century petitions were a direct link between people and their leaders; the word ‘petitioner’ was, in some real sense, a synonym for ‘citizen’. Petitioning also performed an adhesive function, rallying support for local issues that gave people a sense of belonging to a moral, political or geographic community. (Internet petitions do have the effect of rallying what Benedict Anderson famously called ‘imagined communities’.)
In the early to mid-nineteenth-century, it was not uncommon for women to act as organisers for mass petitions in their towns, villages or neighbourhoods, although these petitions were customarily signed by men only. The British Anti-Corn Law League made masterful use of middle-class women to mobilise public opinion in its 1840s campaigns against government economic policy. The TIMES sneered at such women as the petticoat politicians of Manchester.29 Individual women also produced their own petitions supporting the rights of their husbands, dependents, local freedom fighters, victims of persecution or others for whom they pleaded for amnesty or mercy.
There are also several celebrated petitions, signed by thousands of women, to represent the interests of women as a group against a perceived social evil. Examples include the Women’s Petition Against Coffee Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying Enfeebling Liquor (1674)30 and the Women’s Petition to the National Assembly, presented in Versailles in 1789 by the women of France, demanding an equality of rights for all individuals, including the sweetest and most interesting half among you. Some historians claim that women’s petitioning efforts in Britain contributed substantively to parliament’s decision to end slavery.
It should come as no surprise, then, to find women involved in the petitioning activity that was one of the dominant forms for non-representative democracy on the early goldfields. Five thousand diggers, including two hardy women, Florence Foley and Sarah Williamson, signed the Bendigo Goldfields Petition, presented to Governor La Trobe in August 1853 in protest over the licence fee. At least one of the major petitions written by Ballarat miners pertaining to the licence fee or judicial proceedings in the final months of 1854 contains women’s names. With their husbands down a shaft, diggers’ wives probably did much of the footwork to collect signatures.
But goldfields women found other ways of making their presence felt at Toorak. Many eagerly accepted Hotham’s kind offer to be a friend when in need. Their individual petitions are peppered through the dusty piles of inward correspondence to the Colonial Office, tied with ragged string, secure in the vaults of the Public Record Office of Victoria.
The brittle blue pages make compulsive reading. In them we find women who were otherwise voiceless and undistinguished sending out distress signals that can still be heard today. Mary Sullivan of Bendigo began her campaign for compassion in May 1853, and was still fighting it with serial petitions up to January 1855. Mary’s husband had been sentenced to five years hard labour for stealing in a tent £5. She begged for remittance of the sentence, as she and her eighteen-month-old child were entirely without the means of living in an honest manner. In one of her petitions, Mary explained that her husband was only a few weeks in bad Company and promised to use all of my influence to lead him to the path of honesty. She hinted at her fate should her husband not be restored to her: I am Young and in a Town abounding in Vice, already I have been insulted. Mary was finally told that not enough of her husband’s sentence had been served; she should try again in October 1855.31 That Mary did not furnish this final petition suggests a poor outcome for her efforts to remain respectable.
Ann Middleton of Buninyong petitioned the governor on behalf of her husband, Charles, a butcher by trade, who had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to five years hard labour on the roads. Ann pleaded for the welfare of her five children, aged between eight years and two weeks. She maintained that this was a first offence, and in any case Charles was not guilty; his partner claimed to have purchased the sheep and her husband paid half the purchase price. Please, begged Ann, restore him to his distressed and unhappy wife and by doing so enable him to provide the necessities of his now distressed family. Some forty signatures were attached to the petition, plus testimonials from former employees. Hotham scrawled his reply on the bottom corner of the petition. Cannot interfere with the course of the law. The law, as administered by the local judiciary, was so clearly regarded as an ass that such dismissive responses could only have fuelled the tension that was mounting in the second half of 1854.32
There are multiple petitions written by women—or, if a woman could only sign with her mark, by a literate friend—seeking to commute their husbands’ gaol sentences or have them freed from lunatic asylums. Some petitions are written in French and Italian. Mrs Grant collected 117 signatures in her petition to remit the gaol sentence of her husband, James Grant, who was nicked for shewing another person’s licence. Mrs Grant’s appeal was poignant.
Your Petitioner is at the present time in abject poverty and not able to procure the means of livelihood having just been confined, she wrote. Your Petitioner has also other children who are looking to her for the means of subsistence and what will become of herself and them during her husband’s imprisonment Petitioner knoweth not.
These heartfelt pleas fell on deaf ears, terminating with Governor Hotham’s standard and abrupt response: Cannot entertain. Not granted. Put away. To Mrs Grant’s appeal, the governor appended an extra chastisement: Never interfere with sentences. Culprit knew the law and risked being found out.33
Hotham tossed formal petitions bearing hundreds of signatures in the same bin as the many barely decipherable notes, which he marked begging letters, received from impoverished widows in search of pecuniary aid or frantic wives seeking work for their unemployed husbands. These women’s letters, along with their formal petitions, are immensely significant. Historian R. D. Walshe has claimed that the Eureka clash was inevitable due to Hotham’s ‘absolute intransigence’ in his mission to revamp the colony’s economy no matter the consequences.
Hotham’s resulting policy—of small government, smaller heart—was put under intense pressure by the constant barrage of earnest missives from desperate and deserving women. Some women even travelled down from the goldfields to seek a personal audience with the governor. Honoria Anna Bayley came from Ballarat to request employment for her husband. I trust that as one of her Majesty’s subjects you will not consider my request an intrusion, she wrote to Hotham.34 Others cast aside the usual petitioners’ attitude of fawning humility and came out all guns blazing. Eliza Dixon wrote to Hotham on behalf of her husband, who was awaiting his death sentence in jail. Should the sentence be carried into effect, she pleaded, you will leave a Wife and Mother of 4 children utterly destitute neither of them being able to support themselves one being at the breast and the rest all under 5 years of age. Eliza attributed personal r
esponsibility to Hotham for this potential outcome, and she was remarkably forthright in her solution: Your Excellency’s mercy is a great attribute. Extend it to a poor unfortunate man who now cannot help himself and the Great Judge (should you ever require it) will do the same by you.35 Eliza’s letter was put away with all the others, and we can only guess what she thought when Hotham met his maker just over a year later.
Suspicious of what their governor’s friendship meant, people formed a new strategy. Lady Hotham began receiving her own cache of begging letters. Mrs O’Neill, supporting herself and her three children by needle work and selling mostly everything I had, requested assistance in finding a position for her two boys. Hoping your Ladyship will not think me too impolite, she wrote, perhaps you would have the goodness to speak to Sir Charles Hotham.36 Twenty-three-year-old Esther McKenzie petitioned Lady Hotham the same week. Owing to her husband being indisposed and her sixteen-month-old baby dangerously ill by Dentition and Colonial Fever and is not expected to live, she was very distressed and without the necessities of life. Money for rent, medicine, medical attendance and even the very sixpence with which I post this petition was borrowed. Lady Hotham had developed a reputation for benevolence; her largesse seemed to exist in inverse proportion to her husband’s. Esther was fully convinced of your Ladyship’s kindness to the distressed, and wrote that she is filled with hopes…in bestowing her a trifle to purchase some bread for her disabled family. Lady Hotham was not without pity. She instructed her clerk to acknowledge receipt of Esther’s petition, and ask her to forward testimonials from respectable persons who are acquainted with you. There is no further notation on the file. We can assume it too was put away. By coincidence, Lady Hotham did send £5 to another Mrs O’Neil in October 1854, after receiving her plea for assistance. Gold Commissioner Wright had appended a note to Mrs O’Neil’s letter explaining that her husband was a lieutenant in the 4th Regiment before he became ill and died. Mrs O’Neil argued that her husband’s military service entitled her to a grant of land in the colony, but £5 was all she got.37