by Clare Wright
What did men think of women’s petitioning efforts? Did they put their wives up to it, thinking that women’s appeals would fire a more penetrating arrow into the steely breast of the administration?
It seems not. The women’s letters were neither a ruse nor a joint strategy. The GEELONG ADVERTISER reported on the exacerbated humiliation of imprisoned diggers, knowing their wives were peddling for their release. When one man was inhumanely punished for his poverty with a gaol term for being unlicensed, the paper editorialised that what was worse than the injustice was the indignity.
These men in gold and silver lace, armed from head to heel, have taken the aged and sick from their tents. The spectacle is presented to us of a wife taking round, for signature, a petition for the release of her husband from gaol, by reason of his poverty and ill health.38
A spectacle. A debacle. A disgrace.
Can the writing of begging letters and petitions by women be considered a form of political activism? Clearly, they contribute to no formal political agenda or structural goal. They do not constitute part of an organised push for reform; there is no association or lobby group. No League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen. But when they are read as a block—and there are countless numbers of these petitions and begging letters—there’s no doubt that the ill-spelled, scribbled tales of deprivation, suffering and despair represented a significant rebuke to Hotham’s administration, and particularly to the moral legitimacy of his rule.
This wasn’t mob violence. There were no barricades or stone-throwing; no burning of effigies. But the message was the same. By constitutional means, these humble petitioners contributed to the growing murmur of public opprobrium inspired by Hotham’s obstinate refusal to listen to the people’s grievances. Unlike La Trobe, he openly promised to give a patient and attentive hearing to the hungry, homeless people. Instead, the men and women of Ballarat found their life-or-death pleas hastily put away.
EIGHT
PARTING WITH MY SEX
Everyone had the blues that winter. But there was jazz, too, plenty of it. The rhythm of life on the Ballarat diggings was syncopated, improvised, dissonant, ecstatic. The circus was in town. There were late-night card games, wandering minstrels, beer and skittles. Many potent, grave, rich citizens look back at the ’50s as the happiest and best days of their lives, wrote pioneer digger John Deegan in his memoirs. Amid the doom and gloom, perhaps as an antidote to it—a delirious subculture of leisure and entertainment. Balls, plays, music, dancing, drinking and sex flourished. Central to the provision of such amusements and diversions were, of course, women, laying it on and lapping it up. At the end of another hard day’s digging there was another long, cold, dark night to face. Women not only offered a welcome diversion—they also profited from the exchange.
At the head of the queue, handing out pleasure for a price, was Sarah Hanmer. Trading under the respectable title of Mrs Leicester Hanmer, Sarah was among the first women to capitalise on the golden potential above ground. She had arrived in Victoria with her twelve-year-old daughter, Julia, and her brother William McCullough in August 1853. By early 1854, mother and daughter were working as actresses in Stephen Clarke’s Queen’s Theatre, the first to open at Eureka, and the only competition to Coleman’s tent theatre at Red Hill, where Clara Du Val, prior to her union with Henry Seekamp, was treading the boards. In May, the ARGUS reported that Sarah Hanmer had become the chief, if not sole attraction of the Queen’s Theatre.1 But by this time, Sarah already had her sights set on an even grander entrance.
On 7 May 1854, she placed an advertisement in the GEELONG ADVERTISER for her new establishment, the Adelphi Theatre. The advertisement, which ran daily for three weeks, announced that:
Mrs Leicester Hanmer has the honor to announce to her friends, the public, that she is about opening at the above place, on or about the 15th instant, in a style worthy of herself and the colonies.
She took out another ad the following week to declare, without false modesty, that an engagement is open to a leading man and light comedian. Applications from ladies will be unnecessary, as the Press have declared, without hesitation, she possesses the best female talent in the country.2 The troupe included Sarah’s daughter Julia and several other American actors and actresses, including Mary Stevens, who would soon have a leading role to play in Ballarat’s political life. By early June, the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER could confidently file his glowing report that Mrs Hanmer’s Adelphi had become the resort of all old playgoers. The BALLARAT TIMES would have promoted the venue with equal vigour. Former actress Clara Du Val had by this time retired from acting, having accepted the part of Mrs Seekamp.
The State Library of Victoria holds a magnificent contemporary watercolour, by an unknown artist, simply entitled Interior Adelphi Theatre, Ballarat 1855. Nothing is known of its provenance. The painting shows a large, high-pitched canvas tent. Wooden benches are arranged in neat rows before a timber stage. The stage holds several sections of painted sets, depicting European scenes (a Grecian temple? a Roman villa?). Five men congregate in the tent, performing various menial tasks: fixing a set, washing down the benches. At the right, a woman stands proudly overseeing her terrain. She is tall and solidly built, her hair swept up in a bun. She stands straight-backed in her striking blue gown, with her hands clasped in front of her abdomen: regal, haughty. The painting is incomplete; a man sitting at the front gesticulates with an arm that has no hand. Perhaps it was meant to be a preliminary sketch for a larger artwork. The artist captured Sarah Hanmer at a moment when her notoriety was at its apex: after her theatre had become the venue for show-stopping political rallies that would change the course of Australian history.
American miner and restaurateur Charles Ferguson first encountered Sarah Hanmer in early 1854 when her aim was more modest. She wanted out of the Queen’s and into her own theatre. The upward social mobility of actresses, according to English theatre historian Michael Booth, is ‘an interesting phenomenon of the Victorian [era] stage’. Ferguson had built a large (tent) concert hall where the Empire minstrels played to packed houses. He received a curious offer. One Mrs Hanmer offered to move the hall to Red Hill and lease it for a theatre, which we accepted, moved it and re-christened it the Adelphi Theatre. Here is Ferguson with the rest of his story.
But somehow Mrs Hanmer and I could not get along happily together, and disagreed respecting the rent. She wished to pay in promises and smiles, which I did not consider legal tender, so I closed the theatre. Now there was a young man, Mr Smith, one of the firm of Moody, Nichols and Smith [American merchants] who differed from me respecting the value of Mrs Hanmer’s promises and smiles. He seemed to consider them as way above par and reproached me for declining the lady’s terms, and said he would have accepted her circulating medium.
Ferguson sold the theatre to Smith for US$3500. Smith ran it for one month when, according to Ferguson,
in the last scene of this eventful history, the lady appeared, sans promises, sans smiles, sans money, sans everything but a horsewhip, which she laid over the head of poor Smith with the spirit and vigor of a McDuff, and that closed his theatrical partnership with Mrs Hanmer.3
Sarah Hanmer now had the Adelphi on her own terms, and soon advertised its imminent opening with herself as its lessee and directress. She had learnt to use shrewdly the femininity expected of her, schooled in that compelling mix of personal history and cultural expectation.
The theatre was the semi-respectable guiding light of Victorian-era culture. People were mad for it. Everyone from the highest-ranking official to the street sweepers flocked to see the latest production of Shakespeare, or classic melodramas like the Hunchback or The Lady of Lyons. And now Ballarat finally had a first-rate theatre company, the Adelphi Players. Mrs Hanmer’s Adelphi has become the resort of all old play-goers, reported the Ballarat correspondent to the GEELONG ADVERTISER in the first week of winter. The Adelphi, under this lady’s superintendence, has achieved a position hardly, if any
thing, inferior to any theatre in Victoria.4 The handbills for the Adelphi Theatre were printed at Charles Evans’ Criterion Printing Office, located across the road in Main Street. We have all the business for the theatre, noted Charles in his diary, a sign of his own effective management.
Once established as its indisputable boss, and pulling in rapturous, loyal crowds, Sarah Hanmer regularly volunteered her theatre for holding charity events, such as benefits for the Miners’ Hospital. These gestures were noted in the press as expressive of Mrs Hanmer’s great generosity and the energy and ability of her management. The acclaim continued. Mrs Hanmer is deserving the utmost praise for her kindness, gushed the editor of the Melbourne-based SPIRIT OF THE AGE. She was the darling of the BALLARAT TIMES; homilies such as this one appeared regularly:
Mrs Hanmer and her daughter are immense favourites on the diggings, and we do not wonder at it, for there are none here who have more earnestly strove to gain the good-will of the digging community… her endeavours to please deserve every success.
A crowd-pleaser plus an eager crowd: it was a recipe for financial success.
Sarah wasn’t afraid, however, to risk her bankable reputation for feminine benevolence by publicly contesting behaviours that she found repugnant. At the end of winter, she wrote a letter to the editor of the BALLARAT TIMES, defending herself against a slight that must have been doing the rounds on the streets, for it was not aired in the papers. Signing herself off as the Public’s Obedient Servant, Sarah took the fight up to her accuser, a former employee called Bartlett:
Mr Bartlett is a sillier little gentleman than even I suppose him if he imagines the public feel at all interested about him. And I should not have done a person of his very moderate pretensions, the honor of noticing him, but that he has been cowardly enough to insinuate what he dares not speak out openly about—my character.
Showing no such spinelessness herself, Sarah continued:
I here challenge him to say I am other than an honest, virtuous woman, in the strictest sense of the words…And as to my being a weak-minded woman, that should excite his pity, though weak-minded as I am, I was too much for him…the Theatre is carried on in a systematic manner…and Mr Bartlett not being consulted on the matter, was most decidedly and distinctly because he was not of sufficient consequence.
Mrs Hanmer went public with her moral indignation, daring Bartlett to be man enough to do the same. In a final flourish, she also showcased her superior education, paraphrasing Shakespeare: For this Hanmer has borne herself so honestly in her great office, that her virtues will speak trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of her slanderers.5 If anyone was concerned that Sarah Hanmer was playing the gender card—bending the rules to suit her own maverick ends—you don’t get a whiff of it in the local press or at the licensing bench. Official records show she was never denied a theatrical licence, despite allegations from her male rivals that she was not of fit character to hold one.6 Instead of bureaucratic obstruction, there was only gratitude that her theatrical offerings, and suitably feminine inclination to philanthropy, had raised Ballarat’s intellectual and moral standard.
The theatre, pointed out actress and writer Olive Logan in 1869, was the single avenue in those days where women could expect to receive equal pay for equal work.7 For centuries in England, France, Italy and Spain, the only acceptable role for women in the theatre was as wife, daughter or mother of a male performer. But the international gold rushes of the 1850s changed all that. Isolated, exhausted, predominantly male crowds were eager for any amusement, all the more so if they could see women. With the general atmosphere of freedom on the frontier, entrepreneurial women eschewed theatrical traditions and stepped into the void, advertising their companies as providing more refined entertainment than the usual drinking, gambling and whoring.
Female theatre managers hired, trained, paid, supervised and disciplined the men in their company: actors, set builders, roadies and promoters. It was the theatre manager’s task to administer a stock company, own or lease a theatre, hire actors or other personnel, select plays for production, direct rehearsals and organise publicity. In addition, many female managers also acted in leading roles, or performed in benefit performances, where the house takings were donated to a worthy local cause, chosen by the manager. It was unusual, radical even, for women to be in such a position of power in any other professional field. But, argues historian Jane Kathleen Curry in her book on nineteenth-century American female theatre managers, ‘while their mere existence could be read as a threat to the social order, most women managers were careful not to disturb the status quo more than necessary’. That is, a woman had to be careful that by taking on the powerful, traditionally male position of manager, she did not undermine her public persona as a model of femininity: honest, charitable and chaste. It was a fine balancing act, and not all theatrical women walked the line.
Just over a year after Sarah Hanmer opened her locally celebrated theatre, the world-famous Lola Montez demonstrated what could happen when female performers disturbed the status quo more than necessary. Lola Montez, born Maria Eliza Delores Rosanna Gilbert in Limerick, Ireland in 1818, lived in England, India, Germany, France, Russia and Switzerland before travelling to California in 1852. By then she was thrice married and twice widowed and had been exiled from her politically influential position as the consort of King Ludwig of Prussia. Lola had smoked cigars with the cross-dressing George Sand in Paris. She had bought her own gold mine in California. She arrived in Melbourne in August 1855 but not before a warrant was issued for her arrest for unpaid debts in Sydney. Reviewing the Melbourne performance of Lola Montez in Bavaria, an autobiographical pantomime recalling Lola’s days spent routing the Jesuit-controlled monarchy from Prussia, PUNCH derided Lola for wearing her hair in short curls like a barrister’s wig. She can talk politics like a book, continued the review, and teach kings how to govern their people more easily than you and I could conjugate a French verb.8 This was faint praise, and Lola was damned too for her blatant self-promotion and delusions of grandeur, unchecked by charitable gestures or community-minded benefits.
Lola toured the Ballarat diggings in March 1856, where she found the crowds as generous with their nuggets as the critics were with their vituperation. There had been no such difficulty for her predecessor, Sarah Hanmer, who, in that muddy winter of 1854, kept her purse open and her politics to herself. In a matter of months she had converted herself from an actress and single mother into a respectable businesswoman and civic identity. That was enough—for now.
The Victorian-era theatre was fascinated by metamorphic themes, and thus perfectly in tune with the unruly, unstable nature of gold rush society. Audiences loved to follow the miraculous transformations of characters, revelling in the subversive power of the act of concealing or switching identities. Apart from theatrical players, there was also a surfeit of blackface minstrels, magicians, gymnasts, ventriloquists, puppeteers and mesmerists on the diggings, cashing in on the fixation with modification and makeovers.
In particular, audiences were enthralled by acts of cross-dressing. The Ballarat diggers may have beaten their bumptious wives but they didn’t mind a bit of role reversal on stage. According to Henry Mundy, they were especially fond of the actress Margaret Catchpole, a big masculine looking woman [who] often played men’s parts and parts in which a woman disguises herself as a man. She was renowned for her roles as Hamlet and Romeo, playing to the satisfaction of all beholders. Indeed, wrote Mundy, many experienced playgoers declared her Romeo to be the best they had ever seen. Transvestism has been a part of the theatrical tradition since the classical Greek period, but it typically sees a resurgence in times of critical social flux. At such moments, argues theatre historian Jean Howard, extreme social mobility and rapid economic change are paralleled by instability in the gender system and this is no better, no more safely, reflected than in theatre.9
Many plays were intensely preoccupied with threats or disruptions to the sex-gende
r system, as portrayed by cross-dressing characters, narratives of mistaken identity, women masquerading as soldiers and men taking refuge in feminine disguise. Theatre played a role in managing anxieties about women on top, women not in their rightful places as well as the fragility of male authority. The transvestite waif was a favourite character; wearing lower-class, working man’s clothes licensed her to be insolent, cheeky, independent and free of the constraints of her bourgeois upbringing. For men to play women required them to become the other: subservient, restricted, dependant. For women to play men required them to be domineering, confident and mobile. This was no great feat for actors; all in a night’s work. It is precisely the protean nature of actors’ bodies and personas that has dictated their customary status as outsiders. Neither was it such a stretch of the imagination for Ballarat audiences. It was a relief. The stage, argues theatre-studies expert Laurence Senelick, ‘offers licence and liberty, not anxiety and crisis’.
There is a rare extant playbill for the 1854 farce The Stage-Struck Digger, written by a Mrs Hetherington. Numerous acting families and troupes toured the goldfields—as well as the permanent players like Mrs Hanmer’s crew at the Adelphi—and Mr and Mrs Hetherington were one such couple. Mr ran the company, and Mrs, apart from writing, did the acting. No script survives that would give an inkling of The Stage-Struck Digger’s content but it’s likely to have been topical. Theatre had long been a forum for discussion of what we would now call ‘current affairs’. Pantomimes, in particular, had an emphasis on contemporary jokes about local personalities, places and newsworthy events of the preceding twelve months.