The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (37 page)

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.
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Many plays were intensely preoccupied with threats or disruptions to the sex-gender 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.

In 1854, William Akhurst, an English-born journalist with a flair for topical themes, penned a farce called
Rights of Woman
. Characters in the play included
a strong-minded lady who is a Pupil of the New Age and a firm supporter of the Rights of Woman,
a barrister and a waitress.
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Another early colonial entertainer with an eye for contemporary relevance, Charles Thatcher, wrote many songs about how girls in Australia
gave themselves airs
. In ‘London and the Diggings', included in his popular
Colonial Songster
of 1857, Thatcher crooned that
The gals that come out to Australia to roam/Have much higher notions than when they're
at home.
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In 1854, Akhurst and the Nelson family also teamed up to perform
Colonial Experience
, whose well-worn theme was the difficulty of engaging and managing domestic servants. As we've seen,
MELBOURNE PUNCH
also regularly published illustrations depicting maids defying their masters and haughty, self-important young women displaying uncommon recalcitrance in the colonial marriage market.
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In the mid-1850s, the creative arts reflected widespread disquiet about women's new-found social, economic and cultural authority.

You certainly didn't have to look far to find creative inspiration for tales of inversion. Miska Hauser was a Jewish Viennese violinist, a child prodigy who had travelled the world, and made a killing in California. He arrived in Australia in late 1854 and was struck by the
feverish enthusiasm
with which audiences attended concerts, operas and plays. Here, songstresses such as Catherine Hayes and Madame Carandini were
literally showered with gold
. But it was the scenes on the streets, not on the stage, that most piqued Hauser's fascination. In Melbourne, wrote Hauser to his brother in May 1855,
emancipated wenches in unbecoming riding habits, and with smoking cigars in their mouths, appear on horseback, and crazy gentlemen…career madly after them and laugh delightedly if a flirtatious equestrienne in a spicy mood aims a mock smack at them with her riding crop
. Why, it was just like a bawdy farce. When would the tables turn and the wenches get their ritual comeuppance? Not, it appeared to Hauser, in the foreseeable future. He was incensed to find that he couldn't book a theatre to demonstrate his virtuosity.
A veritable army of songstresses, virtuosi, ropedancers, danseuses, and other such birds of paradise
, he wrote,
all wanting to shake the fruit from the tree simultaneously, had taken or bespoken all the concert halls, or hired them for weeks again.
This man, who had lived his life on the stage, could not believe his eyes.

Life here is like a Venetian carnival!…Nowhere in the world do husbands get as short shrift from their wives as here…You see all the dykes of civil order torn down…Women who have long since forsaken the joys of family life and despised all regard for respectability are here hoisted to rank and wealth. Even young ladies who nevertheless claim to be well-reared and cultured, sit all day at the latter-day gambling tables, where every decent impulse disintegrates… no one seems to want to develop a solid middle-class society.
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For a time in the mid-1850s, everyone was simply having too much fun.

Hauser attended one meeting in Melbourne to determine how the ever-worsening fickleness of women could be most quickly and safely remedied. One suggestion, which Hauser didn't dismiss, was a house of correction for
undutiful and flighty wives
. Following the meeting, he marched to the theatre where Lola Montez was performing
Lola Montez in Bavaria
. Hauser denounced her as
a wicked specimen of a female Satan
. Art imitating life, or vice versa? In the grand colonial masquerade, who could tell?

Gold rush Victoria was a colony of shape-shifters. The stage was not the only place where women got to wear the pants. Harriet, the Irish orphan girl who accompanied her brother Frank to the diggings and soon became
something of a necessity
, in fact travelled as a man. Donning male attire, she reckoned, was her best chance at the blissful anonymity she craved. Here's how she did it.

I was resolved to accompany my brother and his friends to the diggings, and I felt that to do so in my own proper costume and character would be to run an unnecessary hazard. Hence my change. I cut my hair into a very masculine fashion; I purchased a broad felt hat, a sort of tunic or smock of coarse blue cloth, trousers to conform, boots of a miner, and thus parting with my sex for a season (I hoped a better one), behold me an accomplished candidate for mining operations, and all the perils and inconveniences they might be supposed to bring.

Harriet was reconfigured as
Mr Harry
. All the diggings was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Harriet exited her proper costume and character, and entered as a young man.
All this transmutation took place with Frank's sanction
, Harriet tells us, as they both believed she would be safer in male attire. Safer, it's presumed, from predatory male admirers on the road to the goldfields. Harriet was not the only woman to protect herself from the dangers of the road, real or imagined, in this fashion.

But once at the diggings, Harriet's cover was blown.
Of course, my sex is generally known
, she laughed. She had suitors—
I have them in plenty
—but preferred the
merry company
of brotherly diggers who gathered together each night in her tent. And she maintained the external trappings of the gender subterfuge. The short hair, the coarse smock, the nom de guerre. ‘Parting with her sex' meant more to Harriet than a quick costume change backstage. And ‘safety' was merely an acceptable rationale for gender bending. Cross-dressing allowed a mobility and freedom that subverted the customary expectations of domesticity and romance. Harriet could cook and wash and mend for her ‘fellow' diggers, but she could also play in their company without risk to her sexual reputation. Did Frank's mates enjoy a homoerotic charge in her presence? Was it exciting to be in the presence of a sweet young companion with whom, should ‘he' consent to disrobe, you could have legitimate heterosexual sex?

Cultural historian Lucy Chesser, who has thoroughly analysed the many instances of gender ambiguity in colonial Australia—from the Kelly Gang to encounters between European and Aboriginal people—argues that cross-dressing is an indicator of ‘category crisis', a process of ‘working-through, or managing pre-existing contradictions or confusions'.
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Gender bending does not create but rather reflects the inconsistencies and ambiguities of a time of intense social flux.

And it was perversely comforting to the players, all this gender gymnastics. It's possible John Capper chose to include Harriet/Mr Harry's tale in his phenomenally successful guidebook to the goldfields precisely to illustrate the ease with which the radical transmutations occurring within women on the diggings could revert back to ‘normal', to the Victorian-era gender status quo of public (political) men and private (domestic) women. (He may even have invented Harriet and Frank as cultural archetypes, much like Hansel and Gretel or Jack and Jill.) Independence and self-rule for women becomes a glitch: a wardrobe malfunction.

But there were plenty of flesh-and-bone women on the goldfields who adopted male attire for pragmatic, not symbolic, reasons. Women readily abandoned the most restrictive elements of their daily dress in deference to the practical conditions of colonial life. Emma Macpherson, who arrived in Victoria at the beginning of 1854, wrote in her published travel reminiscences that men had high boots to counter the scandalous condition of the roads, but for women:

the condition presented by their long flowing dresses was pitiable in the extreme; I really think they will eventually adopt the Bloomer costume, which, if allowable under any circumstances, would certainly be so there, for traversing these terrible quagmires.

Some gold rush immigrants didn't wait to see whether fashion or social mores permitted them to reject conventional feminine attire. Henrietta Dugdale, who would go on to found Australia's first women's suffrage society in 1884, wore a long bifurcated skirt and short jackets her whole long life in Victoria.
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