by Clare Wright
Ann Middleton of Buninyong petitioned the Governor on behalf of her husband Charles, a butcher, who had been convicted of sheep stealing and sentenced to five years’ hard labour on the roads. 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 40 signatures were attached to the petition.
Hotham scrawled his reply on the bottom corner of the petition. Cannot interfere with the course of the law.
There are multiple petitions written by women—or, if a woman could not write, by a literate friend—seeking to commute their husbands’ jail sentences or have them freed from lunatic asylums. Mrs Grant collected 117 signatures in her petition to remit the jail sentence of her husband, James Grant, who was nicked for shewing another person’s licence. She was in abject poverty and not able to procure the means of livelihood, 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.
He 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 or frantic wives seeking work for their unemployed husbands.
With their pleas to the Governor falling on deaf ears, people formed a new strategy. Lady Hotham began receiving begging letters too. 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.
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 [teething] and Colonial Fever and is not expected to live, she was very distressed and without the necessities of life. 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. But there is no further notation on the file. We can assume it too was put away.
A SHAMEFUL SPECTACLE
And what did the men think of women’s petitioning efforts? Did they put their wives up to it, thinking that women’s appeals would melt the icy hearts in the government?
It seems not. The women’s letters were neither a ruse nor a joint strategy. They were a source of shame for the men.
The Geelong Advertiser reported on the humiliation of imprisoned diggers, knowing their wives were wheedling for their release. Being punished for your poverty with a jail term for being unlicensed was one thing. But, the paper’s editorial argued, what was worse than the injustice was the indignity when the spectacle is presented to us of a wife taking round, for signature, a petition for the release of her husband from jail, by reason of his poverty and ill health.
A spectacle. A debacle. A disgrace.
This wasn’t mob violence. There were no barricades, no stone-throwing or burning of effigies. But the message was the same. By constitutional means, these humble petitioners contributed to the growing murmur of restlessness towards Hotham and his refusal to listen to the people’s grievances. Unlike his predecessor 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.
Women’s letters and petitions thus served two significant purposes: they highlighted the powerlessness of their menfolk and underscored the heartless intransigence of the new governor. And that put both of them under intense pressure.
A LICENCE TO SWILL
By that cold and cranky winter of 1854, it was clear that the licensing laws would have to change. Police magistrates such as John D’Ewes were begging the government to review its policies. Lawful access to liquor was a major source of grievance for a very thirsty population with a strong independent streak.
The diggings were awash with sly grog, and the police were drunk on their power—either to overlook infringements (for a price) or shut down an operation with brutal force. Shanty keepers, often widows, who were too poor to pay bribes were still useful to the police as scapegoats. They paid the penalty of the pretended vigilance of the police, observed Henry Mundy. The sly-grog seller would be bailed up by a commissioner and six troopers, who would proceed to set fire to the frail tenement over the owner’s head and burn it to the ground and everything combustible in it in a big show of fake law enforcement.
Mundy also observed: Rum, gin, brandy, beer and stout have been known to run down Camp Hill from Lydiard Street in streams, and he was speaking literally. The police poured away rivers of contraband alcohol, draining it into the dirt. The terrible waste of a valued commodity was seen by the impoverished community as flagrant provocation.
Meanwhile, legitimate publicans in the township were increasingly angry about illicit competition from the sly-groggers on the diggings.
Something had to give, and so a new law was proclaimed on 1 June, just before Governor Hotham’s arrival. Publicans’ licences would now be granted on the goldfields, exclusively to owners of substantial houses: the big-time grog sellers. 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 a whopping £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. The bad news was the new law was nearly as big a mess as the old one.
There were loopholes allowing magistrates to issue licences to smaller operators, thus setting the scene for a tragic turf war between the owners of licensed public houses (which, by law, had to provide accommodation and meals), licensed tents (which, the legislation said, merely had to be good tents—whatever that meant), the remaining illegal grog sellers (selling out of their coffee houses, refreshment tents and stores) and the already-hated local authorities, who were supposed to act as umpire.
And there was a startling twist.
In July, a further qualification was introduced. Applicants for a publican’s licence had to show their marriage certificates. No single men would be eligible for a licence.
This criterion made its own kind of sense. The idea was to control the distribution of alcohol, based on the logic that women were more likely to make men behave themselves, and to run establishments that were more domesticated, offering food and accommodation, rather than exclusively devoted to drinking. It was a principle that had been applied in Australia since liquor licences were first granted in the penal settlement of Sydney in the 1790s.
But the humorous, slightly paranoid, response of one Melbourne journalist suggests the move may have raised eyebrows. Why should we not go the whole hog, he wr
ote, 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?
People rarely make satirical jokes about non-issues. Was ‘women’s place’ becoming a source of anxiety in the public domain? At any rate, the law had the undisputed effect of catapulting women into the dead centre of colonial social and economic life: the pub.
Enter Catherine Bentley.
THE EUREKA HOTEL
In July 1854 Irish Protestant Catherine Bentley was in pole position when the goldfields authorities reversed the ban on liquor licences on the diggings. With her husband James and toddler in tow, Catherine had come prepared to capitalise on this new opportunity to mine for liquid gold.
James had done well. He'd been transported as a convict to Norfolk Island some years before. Now he had sureties from leading bankers and merchants in Melbourne. He had the confidence of creditors, sufficient 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 the couple had the pre-emptive right to a section of Crown land, secured and signed for in Catherine’s name on 13 June that year.
Ballarat was still a tent city, to be sure. But with a population of 20,000, the occasional monstrous nugget still being pulled from the ground, a host of shops selling everything from fresh ground coffee to French cheeses, 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 township, 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 new Licensed Victuallers Association of Ballarat. His network of local associates included merchants, auctioneers and bankers.
On 15 July, the Ballarat Times announced the opening of Bentley’s Eureka Hotel.
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.
Bentley may have been an ex-con with a limp, but he had hit the ground running.
The Bentleys’ enterprise was opulence itself. A chandelier bathed the hotel in a dreamy glow of candlelit luxury. The main public bar had a 60-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 90-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 vermilion.
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. 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.
LIQUID GOLD
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 Turf Inn, run by William Tait, the Free Trade, run by Alfred Lester, the London, run by Hassell Benden and Robert Monkton, the Star, run by William McRae 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 Spanhake, the 25-year-old 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 described the publican at the Prince Albert as: 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, Baths, the Clarendon and the George.
Women like Mrs Spanhake 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.
THE ADELPHI THEATRE
Catherine wasn’t the only woman making her mark on the cultural landscape of Ballarat. The State Library of Victoria holds a magnificent watercolour by an unknown artist entitled Interior Adelphi Theatre, Ballarat 1855. The painting shows a large canvas tent with a high roof. 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 are working at various menial tasks and, on their 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 o
f her: regal, haughty. The artist has captured the Adelphi’s owner, Sarah Hanmer, at a moment when her notoriety was at its peak: after her theatre had become the venue for show-stopping political rallies that would change the course of Australian history.
Sarah Hanmer—Mrs Leicester Hanmer, as she was known professionally—was one of Ballarat’s first and most successful businesswomen. She 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 the Queen’s Theatre and by May she was not only the chief, if not sole attraction of the Queen’s Theatre—she was about to open her own establishment, the Adelphi.
In the Victorian era the theatre was almost respectable but still exciting, and people were mad for it. Everyone from the highest-ranking official to the street sweepers flocked to see the latest production. It was also one of the few trades in which a woman could get ahead, and Sarah Hanmer made very sure that she did.
She had learned to use shrewdly the femininity expected of her. When she was establishing the Adelphi, one business associate said, She wished to pay in promises and smiles, which I did not consider legal tender, so I closed the theatre. A young admirer stepped in to help financially and when he had served his purpose (it was implied) Sarah cast him forcefully aside: sans promises, sans smiles, sans money, sans everything but a horsewhip. A dash of leather prompted the young man to move on.