Category Archives: women

WOMEN in STEM: Goldfields Pioneers

Posted on August 20, 2024 | Leave a comment

_{Pioneer Women. ACGRC: 78.707, Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association & Ballarat Historical Society Collection}

At Sovereign Hill we are often asked about the experiences of women in the past; in particular, limitations on their dress, behaviour, education, and job opportunities as compared to men. Values, beliefs, and even some science of the time promoted the idea that men and women were inherently different and that this then justified their different treatment and access to opportunities. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields in the nineteenth century provide us with stories of amazing women, who were engaging, inventive, inquisitive, and pioneering in their respective fields.

MADAME ELIZABETH CHARPIOT: Daguerreotype

Elizabeth Henwood, with her younger brother and sister, arrived in Port Phillip Bay aboard the Barque Velore in 1853. They made their way to the Victorian goldfields where in 1855 Elizabeth married George Charpiot, a watchmaker and dentist. It is unclear where her training or equipment came from but by 1856 Elizabeth had set herself up as a photographer, perhaps one of the earliest female photographers in Australia. Within her husband’s jewellery and dentistry business, she had a set of photographic rooms. The Ballarat Star, whose offices were opposite the business commented on her skill:

_{“THE FINE ARTS.” The Star (Ballarat, Vic. : 1855 – 1864) 15 November 1856: 2. Web. 18 Jul 2024 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article250439079>.}

A daguerreotype is the first form of commercial photography. A silver-plated copper plate was treated with a light-sensitive material that reacted when exposed to light. The plate was developed and fixed in a chemical bath, so it was a unique, single image. Our collection includes several examples of daguerreotypes like the style that Elizabeth was producing. The daguerreotype below is carefully mounted and beautifully framed. The lady is wearing several pieces of jewellery and carefully holding a book open – why do you think she chose to include a book in her picture?

If you had your picture taken, would you wear anything special?
What one special object would you want to be included?

_{“Unknown lady with book” daguerreotype, 19^th century. ACGRC: 2014.1392}

When the Charpiot’s moved to Dunolly, both continued their businesses; Madame Charpiot’s portrait services were regularly advertised alongside her husband’s dental business.

_{1858 ‘Advertising’, Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser (Vic. : 1857 – 1867 ; 1914 – 1918), 23 April, p. 3.} _{http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article253586868}

A few years later they moved again to the goldfields town of Tarnagulla. On New Year’s Day 1868, their business caught fire and was destroyed. Most of Elizabeth’s photographic equipment was likely lost and it would seem she never returned to professional photography after the fire.

EADY HART: Inventor

Eady Hart arrived on the goldfields in 1854 as a six-year-old, with her family seeking gold. She became a dressmaker and married engineer William Hart. It seems to have been a difficult marriage and William deserted Eady and their eight children. Eady was remarkably resilient, she supported the family, including six foster children, with her sewing and millinery skills, then taxidermy, then an innovative fire-lighting product. Eady was curious and innovative and turned her attention to dyes. In her small kitchen, she experimented with native plants, like grass trees, to produce a beautiful range of natural dyes – useful for fabric and foodstuffs. Here she met with great technical success. Thirty years of experimenting led to the formation of Hart’s Royal Dyes in 1921. In our collection, we care for a number of her recipe and sample books, along with patent applications and business correspondence.

What is a patent? Why would Eady need a patent for her idea?

Eady had to solve various problems with her experiments. She needed to figure out what colours different plants produced, what was required to make the colour stable and stick to fabric, and whether the ingredients were safe to work with when mixed together. She also had to ensure there were enough ingredients to make lots of dye, and that the recipes were repeatable for others to follow.

_{Sample page in Eady Hart’s scrapbook. Accession Number 06.0576}

People loved the colours Eady created; she won awards for her colours and her dye-making process. Newspapers were filled with reports of her wonderful discovery and for seeing the Australian bush as a sustainable resource: “Mrs. Hart says she has barely tapped on the possibilities of our vegetation. The glory of the Australian bush is not yet known … Mrs. Hart regards as criminal the ruthless cutting for firewood and building purposes valuable timber that should be producing priceless dyes”¹

EUPHEMIA BAKER: Artist & Photographer

For Euphemia Baker, the move to Ballarat as a young girl to live with her grandparents opened to her the world of the Ballarat Observatory and the technology of the camera. In our collection we have a photo of young Euphemia “Effie” Baker with her grandfather, Captain Henry Baker, who ran the Ballarat Observatory, standing beside a large telescope. A retired sea caption, Baker was a master instrument maker, and his daughters grew up around the telescope and observatory. Access to this world inspired in them a love of looking at life through a lens for art and science.

*_{Ballarat Observatory 1891, ACGRC: 163.80}*

His daughter Elizabeth Baker became a photographer and astronomical assistant at the observatory, down the road from where Sovereign Hill is situated in Golden Point. In 1896, the Ballarat Star noted that Miss Baker had taken charge of the observatory, the meteorological equipment and was contributing to international research projects and winning awards for her astronomical photography². When her young niece, Effie, came to live with the family she gifted her a camera and mentored her in photography. Both Elizabeth and Euphemia were noted for their photography, including photos of the moon and stars taken through the telescope.

Where do you find inspiration?

The Goldrush Centre holds several early cameras, including this quarter-plate camera, perhaps similar to the one gifted to Effie, and the camera belonging to astronomer Mr John Brittain, who lectured in astronomy at the Ballarat School of Mines.

_{Quarter-plate camera, unknown maker and age, ACGRC: 2014.0204}

_{Camera belonging to Mr James Brittain c. 1890s, ACGRC: 78.0442}

DR. GRACE VALE: Doctor

Were women treated equally in science and medicine?

As a founding member of the Victorian Medical Women Society, one of the first female graduates from medical school in Melbourne, and then the first woman public vaccinator (in 1910), Dr. Vale became both a doctor and an active public figure in Ballarat, including being highly active in the suffrage movement to give women the vote. She was present for the first X-rays experiments at the Ballarat School of Mines.

*_{“Dr. GRACE VALE.” Table Talk (Melbourne, Vic. : 1885 – 1939) 28 December 1899: 6. Web. 18 Jul 2024 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article145933182>.}*

The article below gives a hint of the medical environment in which Dr Vale worked. The “medical profession for women” suggests that only part of the profession is open to them and they are always described as “woman” or “lady” doctors specifically. She has been working in the practice of another woman doctor, Margaret Whyte with whom she had graduated. Her appearance, rather than her abilities, becoming the focus of newspaper articles. In closing remarks, she is described as “the tallest of all the lady doctors, and commanding in appearance.”

_{“Personal.” Table Talk (Melbourne, Vic. : 1885 – 1939) 24 April 1896: 2. Web. 17 Jul 2024 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article145921688>.}

Dr Vale used her position to lobby throughout her career for the rights of women. She was active in advocating for free or low-cost healthcare for female factory workers in Melbourne, she was elected to the Ballarat City Board of Advice and spent much of her career as a Medical Officer for schools in Victoria and NSW.

These four stories are amongst many examples of resilient, adaptable, and curious women on the goldfields. But this is just the beginning… what stories can you find? Do challenges still exist today for some groups wanting to enter STEM fields and how can we learn from these pioneers in the past?

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Posted in victorian history, women

Tagged STEM in history, teaching history, women

Goldfields Life: how active were its residents?

Posted on April 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

People in the 1850s on the goldfields in Ballarat remained physically active differently to today. Today, people count their steps and go to the gym to keep active. School children keep active by playing sport and have Physical Education classes at school. In the past, mid-19th Century people had a very different lifestyle. Home duties and tasks to be completed around the home were unpaid work, and mostly completed by the women and older children in the household. Home duties were arduous and what was often considered ‘women’s work’, they required strength and resilience, especially when the 1850s household duties required hours upon hours of manual labour. Forward to today and groups in society are still calling for pay parity and equal opportunities.

Today, accessing clean noncontaminated hot and cold water in our home is as simple as turning on a tap. In the 1850s, if you weren’t wealthy, there were no taps in your house and no plumbed water. Most often children would have to collect the water with buckets, from the nearest water source. For many families, this could be downhill and a distance from your house. During the winter months collecting water closer to your home may have been easier with the seasonal rain, however, accessing water in the summer dry months, would have been physically exhausting. Collecting water would mean having to walk heavy buckets filled with water to your house.

Think about everything you need and use water for in your daily life – drinking, bathing, brushing your teeth, washing clothes, watering the plants, and cooking. Even the simple task today of washing the laundry would be physically demanding. The current average washing machine (7.5 Kg) uses about 64 litres to do one wash. Imagine now if you had to bring all that water up from the creek before you could start the washing. It could take up to 189 litres or 17 buckets to do a load of laundry in the 1850s. Washing clothes in the mid-1800s was hard and laborious work. It wasn’t as simple as placing laundry into a washing machine and placing the laundry on the washing line to dry. Instead, it was a time-consuming and tiring process. The laundry would first be soaked in tubs of water overnight. The next day, the laundry would be soaped, boiled, or scalded, rinsed, wrung out, mangled, dried, starched, and ironed, often with steps repeating throughout. This could have been done up to three times. Laundry would be scrubbed up and down on a washboard, by hand.

Laundry was sometimes dollied (this would mean using a wooden dolly that you would turn by hand – pictured above right) for 45-60 minutes (this is like the oscillation or turning process your washing machine does today). The wringing of laundry (getting rid of excess water out of material) was sometimes done first by hand and then squeezed through a machine called a mangle (pictured above left). The mangle required each piece of washed laundry to be squeezed or wrung through, piece by piece, it was also hard to turn, manually by hand. This would have caused a lot of sore arms! The wet laundry could be put through the mangle up to four times (the final fourth time would be before it would be hung out on the washing line outside, to dry).

At home in the 1850s, ironing traditional fabrics without electricity was also a hot, arduous job. Irons had to be kept immaculately clean and polished. Irons in this era did not have temperature controls like they do today, constant care was needed not to scorch material. The iron, depending on which one you were using, could weigh between 2 and 6 kilos requiring a lot of heavy lifting.

Keeping the floors of a home clean in the 1850s was another task that was physically requiring muscle power. Today in our homes we have automatic vacuum cleaners that can be programmed to go around the home via a mobile phone app. However, in the mid-19^th Century, sweeping floors, and beating rugs, and carpets would be done by the women of the household. In the 1850’s not everybody could afford expensive rugs, so many would make their own rugs out of scrap pieces of material (called rag rugs). Even a small rag rug would keep your feet warm getting out of bed on a cold morning! If people were fortunate enough to own rugs, cleaning such carpets or rugs was no easy task. To clean the rug/carpet you would take the rug outside, hang it over a fence, and then beat it with a carpet/rug beater (a handle and large flat paddle, usually made of cane-shaped in a knot). This was sometimes done twice a day.

A lot of physical work was required in the 1850s to make daily food. There were no takeaway meals and no microwaves in the mid-19th Century. For some, there would be a local shop nearby that would provide essential staples (e.g. flour, sugar), but there were no supermarkets or mass pre-packaged food items for convenience, like today. The food was not pre-packaged and there were no refrigerators, as we know them today. Therefore eating seasonal produce was essential. Women of the household, to ensure there was enough food and variety in their family’s diet would pickle foods such as tomatoes, piccalilli, and chutney. To make a preserve could take 3 hours over the stove. These preserves could be kept for months (no use by dates or best before in the 1850’s).

Other domestic physical work that had to be done daily would have included feeding animals and looking after them (chickens for eggs and cows for milking). One labor-intensive home duty could include making the family’s butter. Butter could be purchased from the store; however, many families saw this as expensive and would make their own. The process involved milking the family’s cow and allowing the milk to stand on its own overnight until the cream rises to the top. The next step would be to skim the cream off the top, place it into the butter churner, and turn it by hand. This would take approximately around 20 minutes of vigorous turning to turn into butter. Not to be forgotten household work by women and children would be foraging nearby areas for extra food, cleaning the house, garden maintenance, and emptying the chamber pot (toilet).

Interesting fact – Midway through the 19th century, Dr. John Snow discovered that cholera was being transmitted through unclean water. However, putting chlorine in the drinking water, so drinking water would become safe to drink, would only begin in the early 1900’s.

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Posted in history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, museum education, Sovereign Hill, victorian history, women

Why we do not say “hello”

Posted on March 22, 2024 | Leave a comment

or, “don’t” for that matter as we never “clip our words”

_{François Cogné 1859 (78.2403)
Ballarat’s middle class shopping on Main Road, Ballarat East in 1859}

In welcoming you to the nineteenth-century world of Sovereign Hill one of the first things you may notice, after the clothing, is the way we speak to each other. We will greet you with “Good Morning” or “Good Day”, never “hello”. Why is this?

“Hello” is just emerging in the late nineteenth century as a form of greeting, earlier versions of ‘hullo’ or ‘holla’ were not in common use as greetings, they were informal shouts for attention. Could you go a whole day without saying “hello”? In fact, it will take a big technological shift, the telephone, to change our use of ‘hello’. Telephones change the rules of communication when you cannot see the speaker on the other end. Legend has it, Thomas Edison championed “hello” (telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell preferred “ahoy”)[1] as a useful greeting.

_{FitzGerald Postcard Collection (83.16892)}

[1]“Quick Facts: Did Bell really say ahoy?” https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/ahoy-alexander-graham-bell-and-first-telephone-call accessed 21 Feb 2024

Before telephones, letters and calling cards provided introductions. You would leave a card, with your title and name, as an invitation to speak. We have several examples of these visiting cards in our collections. How many cards you left, whether you left a message on the card, or perhaps bent a corner of the card all sent a message to the recipient. It told the recipient you were home, that you were accepting visitors or that you would like to visit for example.

Is technology today changing the rules around who and how we behave when we speak to each other? Is this a good thing?

In our pre-telephone world, there are very clear rules around how we look at each other (or don’t!), move around each other and speak to each other depending on our relative age, power, and how well we know one another. These rules of behaviour in society, called “etiquette”, are taught and practiced at home and at school. They are also published again and again in books of manners and our collection contains several examples.

The nineteenth century is a period of big and increasingly fast change amongst the societies from which many of our goldfield migrants come. This big, fast change is often referred to as the Industrial Revolution. Along with the advent of steam power and factory production, and the move from country life to city life came the rise of the middle class. The middle class was a group of people who did not come with titles (important family names and connections) or inherited power like the upper class, but who also no longer work in manual trades with little money, power, or education. This new group of people earn more money than it costs to live, have an education, and often professional jobs.

^{_{FitzGerald Postcard Collection (GM 83.16880)}}

The rules of behaviour are becoming a really important way of figuring out whether a person belongs in good society. In the dust and mud of the goldfields particularly it can be very difficult to tell if a person comes from the same background as you and fortunes are being made and lost very quickly. In a society used to organising people based on gender and social power, if you know and follow the rules you will have more opportunities to move up in the world. According to Australian Etiquette: Rules and usages of the best society, published in 1885, “He who does not possess them [good manners] … cannot expect to be called a gentleman; nor can a woman, without good manners, aspire to be considered a lady by ladies.”[2]

You may have noticed that our rules of behaviour are distinct for men and women. In the nineteenth century, there are very distinct understandings of what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’.

Here is a primary source example from The Bendigo Advertiser, 1859, where the writer is very upset that a Magistrate at a stone laying ceremony called the females present women and deliberately not ladies[3]. What an insult! The Magistrate’s Excuse? As an aristocrat (upper class) he should know better, but as a soldier (different social space) he may have rough manners. Appropriate titles are important and make a judgement on the person’s background.

What sort of words does the writer use that tell us how to identify a lady or gentleman?

Gentleman: by birth, education, gone through a college curriculum, conduct
Lady: gentler sex, fair sex

The idea that men and women are made differently, and therefore behave differently[2], shows in different expectations of men and women, including in good behaviour.

[2] Australian Etiquette, or the rules and usages of the Best Society in the Australian Colonies. People’s Publishing Company, Melbourne. 1885, p. 19.

[3] “BAD MANNERS.” Bendigo Advertiser (Vic. : 1855 – 1918) 12 November 1859: 3. accessed 21 Feb 2024 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87993464.

[4] For an example of someone who defied social conventions, explore the story of Edward de Lacy Evans. “The Mysterious Edward/Ellen De Lacy Evans: The Picaresque in Real Life” The LaTrobe Journal, No 69 Autumn 2002 https://latrobejournal.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-69/t1-g-t9.html accessed 21 Feb 2024

Our good behaviour rules may seem unfamiliar to you, as a visitor, as how we interact with each other has become much more familiar and much more diverse in the twenty-first century. Do you have any classroom rules that you have to follow? Who made those rules? Are they different for boys and girls? Are they different for children and adults?

Meeting a new person is a good example of these changes. Our nineteenth century rules of etiquette say that we do not have to introduce someone. A formal introduction is like giving someone a good character reference for a job; if you have been introduced you must never ignore that person in future, it is very rude. Introductions must be done in the correct order: 1. Gentleman to the lady; 2. Younger to the older; 3. Inferior in social standing to the superior. Your social class decided who and how you spoke to others.

SOCIAL CLASS	PROFESSION
Upper Class – landowners and investors, no manual labour	Aristocracy Rich gentry Royals Military Officers Lords Wealthy Men/Business Owners (new to this class)
Middle Class – skilled jobs, white collar professions with no manual labour, very class conscious	Merchant Shopkeeper Bureaucracy – railroad, bank, government
Working Class – skilled jobs with manual labour, unskilled jobs, poor working conditions	Trades Factory work Labourers
*there was also an underclass of people in extreme poverty or “sunken people”

When you are introducing someone, you must use their title (which can let you know marital status, job, social achievement). Titles, and pronouns, are a great example of our changing society. We greet people by first name more often, may not use titles at all and our choice of titles and pronouns is expanding to become much more inclusive of different identities.

If you visit us, you may be greeted as “Sir” or “Ma’am” as an adult, or “Master” or “Miss” as a child, titles of respect in our time. It is respectful to greet a costumed person you meet with Sir or Ma’am. “Sir” is the title given to a gentleman whose name you do not know. “Ma’am”, short for madam, is the title for a lady whose name you do not know; it comes from the Old French for my lady. You must wait for the lady to look at you and nod a greeting first, before you speak to her, and if you are wearing a hat (which of course you would be in the nineteenth century) you would touch the side of the cap as you greet her. We do not generally shake hands when we meet new people; handshakes are more common between gentlemen, and we certainly do not high five. The high five will not be invented for another hundred years in our future.

Can you imagine how the rules might change again in the future? What do you think might be different about how we greet each other and what we call each other?

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Posted in 19th century, 19th century technology, history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, industrial revolution in australia, inventions, Museum, museum education, then and now, women

Tagged 1850s lifestyles, 1850s people, colonial Australia, gold rush, history, history for kids, women

Women on the Goldfields Part 3 – Working in the Home

Posted on April 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

.A costumed character at Sovereign Hill emptying the contents of a chamber pot. This is yellow cordial, not real urine.

The most valuable and respected role a European woman in the 19th century could undertake was that of housewife. Making a home, which included: raising the next generation (educating children, feeding them a nutritious diet, and caring for them during times of sickness), managing all of the chores, mastering needlework, and being able to make an excellent meal for guests, was an accomplishment that women worked hard to achieve, as many still do today.

This final blogpost in our series on goldrush women focuses on the domestic lives of European women living on Victoria’s goldfields in the 1850s. def3

The Art of Housewifery

The culture that European immigrants brought to Australia’s goldfields promoted the idea that women should manage the private life of the family, while men should be involved in public life, which included holding a job outside the home. During this time in history, housewifery was a highly honourable family and community role for women, and the majority of women were proud to perform it (as many are today). While 21st century Australian women might not hold housewifery in the same high regard, it is important to respect the status of housewifery back then.

A woman’s success in housewifery depended very much on her education in the ‘domestic arts’ and the money her husband could spend on their household.

One of Sovereign Hill’s volunteers teaching visitors how butter was made by hand in a mid-19th century kitchen.

While some girls were being sent to school at this time in European history, it was much more common for boys to attend lessons with a qualified teacher. Girls instead were typically kept at home where their mothers would teach them how to cook, clean, sew and raise children because these were the most important skills for a woman to have at this time. Girls who were taught to read (which was considered worthwhile by many as they could then teach that skill to their children) could also learn from books on housewifery such as ‘Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’ (published in 1861). Even if girls had the opportunity to attend school, they were often taught gendered skills like sewing, which was particularly helpful to those whose mothers had died before their skills could be passed on.

Being able to ‘keep a wife’ was an indication of a man’s status, meaning a woman’s clothing, their home and its contents communicated his social and economic success. A European man would have been ashamed if his wife was forced to take a job outside the home to support the family; it was a sign to others that he had failed as man. For a brief time, these European social norms brought to Victoria’s goldfields shifted (read more about this here), but not for long. In the 1850s, almost all of Ballarat’s miners were young men who came to the goldfields by themselves or with their male friends or family. They needed to make some money before they could afford to marry.

Living Conditions for Married Women on the Goldfields

Photographer unknown, Eliza Perrin and her children, c.1860. Reproduced with permission from The Gold Museum, The Sovereign Hill Museums Association. The dress Eliza is wearing here is also in the Gold Museum Collection.

At the start of Victoria’s gold rushes, Europeans on the diggings typically lived in tents and huts. This made it hard for families to keep children healthy and maintain bodily cleanliness, especially during Ballarat’s famously cold winters. However, there were a small number of very resilient women living on the goldfields during this time. It was only in the mid-to-late 1850s, once the community became wealthier and locals started living in more permanent homes (normally made of weatherboards or bricks), that female immigration from Europe increased. This change encouraged the number of families to grow. More hygienic living conditions (including better systems for managing human waste) also made it safer to raise children.

Despite improvements in living conditions, every pregnancy a woman faced was a risk to her life no matter what her social status. Experiencing complications during childbirth was one of the most common causes of death for women until recent history. Until the mid-20th century, most women birthed their babies at home, and if complications occurred, there was a high risk that both mother and child would die. The use of anaesthetics to ease the pain of childbirth was popularised after chloroform was given to Queen Victoria when had her eighth child in 1853. Anaesthetics as we know them today, that enabled caesarean sections to be performed were not available until later in the 19th century. Even then, the risk of death from post-operative infection was still high. A woman could also bleed to death or develop a deadly infection following the successful birth of her baby. Antibiotics and blood transfusions that could save both mother and baby only came along in the 20th century.

Ballarat’s women had a particularly hard time birthing and raising children without the support of their own mothers and older women with childrearing experience. Emily Skinner travelled to Victoria in 1854 and wrote this about her lonely experience of motherhood: “You mothers in England little imagine how blessed you are compared with poor women in the diggings, at this time, especially such as I, who knew nothing about babies and their management”.

Keeping children alive during their most vulnerable early years of life also presented goldrush women with significant challenges. About a quarter of Ballarat’s children died before the age of five in the 1850s, usually from drinking polluted water. Until 1859, people didn’t know that germs existed and were the main cause of disease. At least goldrush women knew not to let their babies crawl on the filthy ground, whether they knew about germs or not. Crawling as a developmental stage in a child’s life only started being encouraged in the late 19th century thanks, in large part, to Germ Theory.

Domestic Technologies

Making a healthy and happy home for a family remains a challenging job for women, even though men today tend to play a larger role in childrearing and undertake more household chores compared to men in the past. Back then, however, housework was much more physically demanding because there were no washing machines, vacuum cleaners or supermarkets. Whether a woman was managing her own domestic duties, or was a maid working for a wealthy family, this job could include many responsibilities such as collecting water (plumbing arrived in Australian houses later in the 19th century), chopping wood, growing and making food from scratch, washing/ironing/sewing the family’s clothes, and disposing of the contents of chamber pots. Lower-class wives frequently washed other people’s laundry or sewed clothes to help pay their family’s bills, while middle class wives owned ‘high-tech’ cleaning technologies (like a charcoal iron instead of a sad iron) to make their chores easier. Wives in the upper classes usually had maids and cooks to do all of this work for them.

Photographer unknown, family outside home, c.1860. Reproduced with permission from The Gold Museum, The Sovereign Hill Museums Association.

One of the most important technologies to affect women’s lives during this time was the sewing machine. On average, it took an experienced sewer about 15 hours to hand-stitch a man’s shirt, but a sewing machine cut that time down to only an hour and a half. Inventions like these became status symbols for middle-class families, and could help many lower-class women make money by producing clothes for sale from the safety and privacy of their homes.

In addition to this busy workload of chores, housewives educated their children, cared for the sick and elderly, and often volunteered for their church. It’s no wonder they used to say “a woman’s work is never done”!

The lives Australian women live today maintain many of the traditions explained in these three blogposts, however, some have been rejected or replaced with new social norms and a focus on gender equality. What do you think Australian womanhood will look like in another 100 or 200 years?

Links and References:

Sovereign Hill Education’s student research notes about women on the Ballarat goldfields: http://education.sovereignhill.com.au/media/uploads/SovHill-women-notes-ss1.pdf

A State Library of Victoria blogpost on women on the goldfields: http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/golden-victoria/life-fields/women-goldfields

An SBS blogpost about women on the goldfields: https://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=27#94

Two Sovereign Hill Education blogposts on 1850s women’s fashion: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2012/02/28/gold-rush-belles-womens-fashion-in-the-1850s/ https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2013/09/06/gold-rush-undies-womens-fashionable-underwear-in-the-1850s/

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost on general clothing in the 1850s: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2018/06/19/1850s-fashions-in-australia/

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost on keeping the floor clean: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2012/08/28/household-arts-of-the-1850s-sweeping-beating-and-scrubbing/

Two Sovereign Hill Education blogposts on laundry: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2016/04/22/in-praise-of-washing-machines/ https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2012/02/09/household-arts-of-the-1850s-laundry/

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost on ironing: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2012/08/13/household-arts-of-the-1850s-ironing/

A series of videos made by a Sovereign Hill volunteer who attempted to live 1850s-style in one of the small houses within the outdoor museum for a few days: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2013/03/05/household-arts-of-the-1850s-a-personal-experience/ https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2013/03/20/household-arts-of-the-1850s-part-2-the-first-night/ https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2013/04/03/household-arts-of-the-1850s-a-personal-experience-part-3/

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost about Lola Montez: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2017/07/19/who-was-lola-montez/

A Culture Victoria webpage about the few Chinese women living in 19th century Victoria: https://cv.vic.gov.au/stories/immigrants-and-emigrants/many-roads-chinese-on-the-goldfields/voyaging-to-australia/who-were-they/nearly-all-men/

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Posted in 19th century, 19th century medicine, 19th century technology, children, gold, goldrush fashion, goldrush food, health on the goldfields, history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, Queen Victoria, Sovereign Hill, then and now, Uncategorized, Victorian Gold Rush, victorian history, women

Women on the Goldfields Part 2 – Working Outside the Home

Posted on April 24, 2020 | 4 comments

Alice Cornwall, also known as ‘Madam Midas’ ran a company mine and became a millionaire by the age of 30. Reproduced with permission from the Gold Museum.

While getting dirty hands in search of gold was viewed as a man’s job in the imported European culture of 1850s Victoria, there were many hardworking and enterprising women making a living in Ballarat during this era. In addition to managing families and households, some women on the goldfields opened shops and eateries, or worked as teachers and entertainers. There is even evidence that a few women swapped their skirts for trousers to search for gold, one became a newspaper editor, and later in the 1800s a woman named Alice Cornwall became a millionaire by the age of 30 through the company mine she owned!

Back then, it was rare for a married woman in Europe to hold a job outside her home, or to play a role in public life. However, the conditions on Australia’s goldfields provided some women with new opportunities and different lifestyles compared to their equals back in Europe. This second blogpost in our series on 1850s goldrush women explores their roles in Victorian communities beyond the home. def2

Working Wadawurrung Women on the Diggings

The Wadawurrung women of the Ballarat region experienced rapid changes to their lifestyles and local environment when Europeans began to colonise South Eastern Australia in the early 19th century. Therefore, by the time the gold rushes began in Ballarat 1851, historians tell us that some Wadawurrung people already spoke English and understood the new political and economic systems that Europeans had introduced. Using their skills in tanning/sewing possum skins, sourcing native food and medicine, fossicking for gold, putting on cultural performances and taking Europeans on tours of the landscape, Wadawurrung women (and men) made money from Europeans by supplying these goods and services. According to oral history handed down by members of the Wadawurrung community, European families also turned to Wadawurrung women when they needed someone to babysit their children.

Working European Women on the Diggings

In the early 1850s, there weren’t many European women living in Ballarat. As explained in Women on the Goldfields Part 1, most of the people who came to try their luck on Australia’s goldfields were European (mostly from Britain), and gold rush communities tended to be male-dominated during this time. By the mid-1850s, Ballarat had become one of the richest places in the world, and as a result of this and the government push to encourage female immigration, the number of (mostly young) women on the goldfields grew.

Author unknown, Bush scene, three women panning for gold, c.1855-1910. Reproduced with permission from the State Library of Victoria.

I saw the other day four or five of these fellows strolling on behind their cart. Amongst them was a young woman very well dressed, wearing a sun-bonnet … [with] a full flap behind at least a foot long, to screen the neck. On one shoulder she had a gun, and in the other hand a basket, while one of the men carried a baby, and another a swag. … You see a good many women going up on the whole, and some of them right handsome young girls. They all seem very cheerful and even merry; and the women seem to make themselves very much at home in this wild, nomadic life. – William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, 1855 (1972 ed.), Victoria, p.64.

Ballarat’s immigrant women proved themselves hardworking and capable, and many appear to have made the most of the opportunity to take up jobs on the goldfields. While housewifery was a highly respected family and community role for European women to perform during this era, some of these goldrush women did all of the work for their households and worked outside their homes as well.

Part of the reason some women took on extra work was due to economics. Food, clothing and household items (much of which was imported from Europe) were very expensive on the diggings, and households with two working adults usually lived more comfortably than those relying on just one income. The main motivation for these immigrants to journey to Australia in the first place was to make money, and the more creative and resourceful you were (whether you were male or female), the more successful you were likely to be.

Some women also took up work that was usually the domain of men at this time – such as school teacher, shop assistant or hotel manager – because the men in the community were too busy searching for gold to perform these roles. Since the social norms that influenced the way Europeans were supposed to behave were somewhat relaxed on the diggings, some women saw an opportunity to work and took it.

A costumed character at Sovereign Hill selling her potent ‘other drinks’ (sly grog) from her tent to support her family after the disappearance of her husband – a common goldrush experience for women on the early diggings.

Being practical and resilient were important characteristics for all to demonstrate on Victoria’s goldfields. Some women had to work because they were abandoned by their husbands. It was fairly common for men to suffer deadly accidents as a result of the dangers that come with gold mining, while others ventured to different Australian goldfields and never returned to their wives and families. When such abandoned women had children to support (and didn’t already have a job), if they could not immediately remarry or turn to charity (there was no Centrelink back then – churches did most of this type of welfare work) they sometimes had to resort to selling sly grog or even their bodies to pay the family’s bills.

Regardless of the work they did, European women arguably built a new kind of womanhood for themselves in Australia, which challenged the gentle, modest 19th century femininity they were expected to perform. This attempt at creating a new culture was part of a broader push by the youthful and broadminded goldrush communities around Australia to challenge European social norms. Some women who thought along these lines even became involved in the Eureka Rebellion.

Anastasia Hayes was a mother, school teacher and Eureka rebel. Reproduced with permission from the Public Records Office of Victoria.

Some very adventurous European women from Victoria’s gold rushes who have interesting stories to explore include Clara Seekamp, Fanny Finch, Martha Clendinning, Anastasia Hayes, Lola Montez, Edward (ne Ellen) De Lacy, Caroline Chisholm, Anne Fraser Bon, Alice Cornwall, Eliza Perrin, Catherine Bently, Anastasia Withers, Céleste de Chabrillan, Ellen Clacy, Harriette Walters, Sarah Hanmer, Elizabeth Wilson and Bridget Hynes.

As Ballarat became a more permanent township by the 1860s, many of the women who had worked in shops etc. at the start of the gold rush began to return to full-time housewifery. Martha Clendinning was a shopkeeper during the early 1850s, but the more successful her shop became as time went by, the more her femininity and class came under question. 19th century European social norms began to be reapplied, sending women back to the private sphere – so how could she be the respectable doctor’s wife, and lady of the house, when working as a shopkeeper?

The time had gone by when, even on the goldfields, a woman unaccustomed to such work could carry on her business without invidious remarks. I began to fear my husband might be blamed for allowing me to continue at it. After the class of residents on the field had become so superior to those of the working class, whom we had found on our first arrival, to whom all species of employment for women seemed perfectly natural if they could carry it on with success. The doctor [her husband] had been most anxious and was greatly pleased when I announced my intention [of selling her shop]. – Martha Clendinning memoirs, 1853-1930.

Chinese Women on the Diggings

By the late 1850s, there were also thousands of Chinese people on Victoria’s goldfields, but only a very small percentage of them were women. The men from China mostly left their wives and children at home to care for their family farms, as most came from agricultural communities.

The 1861 Census of Victoria shows that women were still performing many roles normally undertaken by men at the time across goldrush communities. Reproduced from Weston Bate’s book called ‘Victorian Gold Rushes’, page 37.

Some of Victoria’s immigrant women in the 1850s were ambitious and outspoken, despite these being uncommon characteristics in women in other parts of the world during this era. However, as time went by and Ballarat became a more permanent community, the social norms of Europe directed women (regardless of whether they were European, Aboriginal, or from any other cultural background) to the private sphere (learn more about this at our next blogpost). This is where they largely stayed until Australian factories needed workers during the 20th century’s World Wars (when women replaced the men who became soldiers). Women only became permanent members of Australia’s workforce in large numbers after the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960-80s.

Links and References:

Sovereign Hill Education’s student research notes about women on the Ballarat goldfields: http://education.sovereignhill.com.au/media/uploads/SovHill-women-notes-ss1.pdf

A State Library of Victoria blogpost on women on the goldfields: http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/golden-victoria/life-fields/women-goldfields and website about how Victorian women’s lives have changed since the 19th century: http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/fight-rights/womens-rights

An SBS blogpost about women on the goldfields: https://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=27#94

Dr. Claire Wright wrote a book called ‘The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka’ about the women involved in the Eureka Rebellion: https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka

Women played many different social roles during the Victorian gold rushes: https://theconversation.com/flashers-femmes-and-other-forgotten-figures-of-the-eureka-stockade-20939

A gender equality timeline made by the Victorian Women’s Trust: https://www.vwt.org.au/gender-equality-timeline-australia/ and a fantastic video telling a similar story: https://vimeo.com/225932476

The gender pay gap in Australian explained: https://www.wgea.gov.au/data/fact-sheets/australias-gender-pay-gap-statistics

Sex work on Ballarat’s goldfield: https://www.thecourier.com.au/story/3704053/the-brothels-of-ballarat/

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Posted in 19th century, Eureka, eureka rebellion, history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, Indigenous, Sovereign Hill, then and now, Uncategorized, Victorian Gold Rush, victorian history, women

Tagged culture, Eureka, history, immigration, research, women

Women on the Goldfields Part 1 – 19th Century Womanhood

Posted on April 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

The lives women led in 19th century Australia were similar in some ways and very different in others to those experienced by women in this country today. Much has changed for Australian women in the last 170 years from clothes to hairstyles, average life expectancy and experiences of motherhood.

Over three blogposts we will explore what life was like for women on Victoria’s goldfields between 1851 to 1861. This blogpost will focus on the common characteristics of the women who lived in Ballarat during this era, the second will explain the opportunities goldrush women had to work outside their homes, and the final blogpost will examine domestic life on the goldfields for European women in Australia. def1

The Aboriginal Women of the Ballarat Region

The first women of Ballarat were Wadawurrung women. They have been living in this region for tens of thousands of years and many continue to practice culture on Country (their traditional homeland) today. The lifestyles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people changed dramatically when Europeans began colonising Australia (starting in 1788). The changes took place rapidly in goldrush communities like Ballarat because of the speed at which immigrants – both human and animal – arrived from across the seas to live in such places. These new arrivals changed local ecosystems and cut off access to important Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural and food production sites.

.A drawing of a young Wadawurrung woman who lived in Ballarat during the gold rush. W. Strutt, Waran-drenin, 1852. Reproduced with permission from the British Museum.

While many Wadawurrung women adapted quickly to the changing conditions and played a variety of roles in the new European economy and culture that was brought to Australia, others died from introduced diseases/alcohol and at the hands of violent settler-colonisers. By the late 1860s, most were forced off Country to live on reserves and missions in different parts of Victoria. Despite the damage this caused Aboriginal communities, many Wadawurrung women passed their language and culture onto their children, which is one of the reasons why it lives on today.

The Arrival of Non-Aboriginal Women in Ballarat

In the early years of Australia’s gold rushes, most of the non-Aboriginal women on Ballarat’s diggings came from Europe, specifically the British Isles. Female goldrush immigrants took huge risks to get to Australia by ship and hoped to become wealthy through hard work and/or a good marriage. Social mobility was nearly impossible back in Europe, but in Australia, anyone willing to work could strike it rich on a goldfield which is why around half a million new Australians arrived in Victoria during the 1850s.

John Leech, Alarming Prospect: The Single Ladies off to the Diggings, Punch Pocket Book, 1853. Reproduced with permission from The Gold Museum, The Sovereign Hill Museums Association.

As most of these new arrivals were men, the colonial government (on advice from people like Caroline Chisholm) made many attempts to attract female immigrants because they were considered to be a ‘civilising influence’ on male-dominated goldrush communities like Ballarat. Gold seeking was thought to bring out poor behaviour in some men, and it was believed by many that just the presence of women could restore their more gentlemanly qualities.

Women were in such high demand on the early diggings – not only were they a ‘civilising influence’ but also companions, cooks and cleaners – that ships arriving in the ports of Melbourne or Geelong were often met by miners ready to propose marriage to the first female they clapped eyes on!

Typical 19th Century European Womanhood

.A costumed character at Sovereign Hill panning for gold in a day cap which is designed to both keep hair clean and provide sun protection.

Religion, culture and tradition have always influenced the way in which people behave and dress. A model mid-19th century European woman was likely to be a Christian who obeyed the social norms that came with this identity. This included being quiet and calm, a loving mother/wife, a dutiful homemaker, and good at following the instructions of men. Such women believed that the Bible should guide their behaviour in addition to their clothing choices. During the daytime, European women wore dresses that covered every part of their body except their faces and hands because a polite Christian woman was expected to be modest and hide her body. This is part of the reason you see costumed women at Sovereign Hill wearing day caps.

Ideally, a European woman would only marry a man who could already afford to house, clothe and feed her and the family they would likely make together. On their wedding day, the bride would wear the best dress she owned in whatever colour she liked. White wedding dresses were popularised by Queen Victoria – but only very wealthy families could afford to dress brides in what was ultimately a one-use dress. Back then it was considered quite normal for European women to be married before the end of their teens, as was having ten or more children. In comparison, 21st century Australian women who choose to get married (which is far less common today than it was in the past) are on average aged 30 and will typically only have one or two children.

Womanhood on Australia’s Goldfields

Some historians suggest that immigrant women on Australia’s 1850s goldfields experienced a different kind of womanhood compared to women back in Europe. This was arguably due to the relative youth of the immigrant population and the opportunities that existed for European women in Australia to work outside their homes.

Many of the European women on the goldfields were in their late teens/early twenties. Their youth helped them survive the tough living and working conditions – raising a family in a tent and having to trudge through deep mud in a Ballarat winter to buy food or harvest it from a vegetable garden was hard work. On average, Australian women at this time in history would only live until they were about 40 years old, while life expectancy for Australian women today is about 80 years old. Their shorter (on average) lives is one of the reasons that 19th century women tended to marry and start families at a younger age than women today.

In Europe, if a woman had a job, perhaps as a seamstress, housemaid, or governess (tutor) at this time in history, she would be fired as soon as she got married (unless she was very poor). From her wedding day onwards, she was expected to be busy managing a household and having children, leaving no time for other work. If poverty forced her to work outside the home, it would be a source of shame for the whole family (you can read more about this here). In Australia, and especially in places like 1850s Ballarat, living conditions changed these social norms.

Women on Australia’s goldfields could ‘bend’ social norms somewhat because they filled essential roles that the community needed in order to function while men focused on mining. They could leave the house (to go shopping, visit friends etc.) once they were visibly pregnant, which in Europe was considered bad manners. Put simply, there were many vital jobs that needed doing, so Ballarat’s women rolled up their sleeves and got to work, whether they were already married or not. You can learn more about this topic in our next blogpost.

Photographer unknown, (from left to right) Eliza Sharwood, John Sharwood, and an unknown woman, Lot 50, Peel Street South, Ballarat, c.1875. Reproduced with permission from the Gold Museum, The Sovereign Hill Museums Association.

Once Ballarat became a more permanent community from about the 1860s, the European social norms of the era resumed and women became focussed on life in the private sphere once more.

The lives of Australian women have changed significantly since the 1850s. What social norms do you think have changed for the better and which ones have changed for the worse?

Links and References:

Sovereign Hill Education’s student research notes about women on the Ballarat goldfields: http://education.sovereignhill.com.au/media/uploads/SovHill-women-notes-ss1.pdf

A Crash Course video which summarises how women’s lives have changed in the last 150 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meC5Zl5PC1U&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

A State Library of Victoria blogpost on women on the goldfields: http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/golden-victoria/life-fields/women-goldfields

An SBS blogpost about women on the goldfields: https://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=27#94

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost on general clothing in the 1850s: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2018/06/19/1850s-fashions-in-australia/

A Sovereign Hill Education blogpost about Queen Victoria: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2015/05/13/queen-victoria/

Dr. Claire Wright wrote a book called “The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka” about the women involved in the Eureka Rebellion: https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka

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Posted in 19th century, health on the goldfields, history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, Immigration, Indigenous, Sovereign Hill, then and now, Uncategorized, victorian history, women

Tagged culture, history, immigration, women

Animals on the Goldfields

Posted on October 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

During Ballarat’s gold rushes, there were many animals – both native and introduced – living on the diggings. Some were of great use to the miners and their families as a source of transport or food, while others were security guards, working animals and even served as hot water bottles. Many native animals were just living their lives but when gold mining changed their habitat, they had to relocate to different parts of Victoria as the risk of becoming extinct was high. Let’s explore the roles they played and the lives they would have led back then.

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Rugs made from possum-skins like this one would keep people very warm during a cold Ballarat winter. The Wadawurrung people made these to sell to the miners, who paid a lot of money for such soft and life-saving rugs.

The Wadawurrung people encouraged certain native animals across this region for thousands of years before the arrival of the European squatters and then gold miners in the 1800s. Animals such as brushtail possums, eels and grey kangaroos were plentiful around Ballarat because traditional Wadawurrung landscape management took care of them by making sure their sources of food were in rich supply. This meant that when people wanted to make use of these animals for food or clothing, they could easily be located and collected. However, enough of each species was always left alive at the end of a hunt to ensure people living in this area could keep eating and using products from these animals long into the future.

After 1835, European farmers (known as squatters) brought introduced animals such as sheep, cows, goats, and horses to what we now call the State of Victoria. The introduction of these animals (mainly sheep) and the use of European farming practices changed the landscape in terms of the kinds of plants and trees that covered it. As a result, the habitats for native animals were affected. While some native species survived, others became locally extinct (like quolls, bandicoots and bustards [also known as bush turkeys]) because Europeans ate them in unsustainable numbers, or the introduced animals seized their ecological niche. This means that today there is a mix of native and introduced species wherever you go in Australia, from kookaburras to sparrows in the sky, wombats to foxes on land, and blue-ringed octopuses to European green shore crabs in our oceans.

We had kangaroo-soup, roasted [wild] turkey well stuffed, a boiled leg of mutton, a parrot-pie, potatoes, and green peas; next, a plum pudding and strawberry-tart, with plenty of cream. Katherine Kirkland (who lived in Trawalla – 40kms west of Ballarat), Life in the Bush. By a Lady, 1845, p.23.

Here is one of our Education Officers taking visiting students to the Butcher’s Shamble, where miners could buy mutton (this mutton however, is made of plastic).

The gold rushes began in 1851 and brought hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world to the shores of Victoria. Many of these new migrants transported yet more animals with them. Dogs were particularly useful companion animals on the diggings because they could keep you warm at night and guard your tent/hut while you were goldmining. For this reason, there are many dogs featured in the sketches of ST Gill, one of the most famous goldrush artists. Some animals were even introduced from the late 1850s onward to help Europeans ease their homesickness! Songbirds like sparrows, starlings and blackbirds were thought to make the Australian bush sound more like England.

The most useful of horse breeds on the diggings were draft horses, also known as Clydesdales – these are the biggest and strongest type of horse.

Horses were also in high demand during the early years of the gold rushes (before the need for steam-powered machines increased), as all mining work relied on muscle power. As a horse can typically push/pull the same load as ten people, they were used to lift heavy metal buckets of dirt, rocks and gold from below ground in the first few years of the gold rushes. Likewise, horses could be attached to machines that were used to free gold from paydirt and quartz rock, for example, puddling machines and Chilean mills. People and goods could also move around by horse (or sometimes bullock). They were attached to coaches or other vehicles to transport larger groups of people and/or numerous goods. Cobb & Co built a coach, which was a bit like a modern bus, called the ‘Leviathan’ (a word meaning big monster). This vehicle could carry up to 60 people from Ballarat to Geelong with the help of 16 horses, but it did not prove very successful.

Sheep fat was commonly used to make soap for washing clothes and bodies. Candles could also be made from animal fat.

Many animals were also brought by the new arrivals for food. Goats and cows were milked to produce dairy products to feed miners and their families, while chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys were farmed for eggs and their meat. However, the meat that was most commonly eaten on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s was mutton (old sheep). You can see many animals around Sovereign Hill which represent the animals that were brought here by goldrush migrants. During a visit, you might even spy our museum cat ‘Fergus’ who helps to keep the mice and rats away from the outdoor museum.

Some animals also toured the Victorian goldfields as entertainment – read about the visits from a tiger, an elephant and two zebras that came to Ballarat in the 1850s here.

Even 19th century ladies’ underwear, like this corset, were often made using animal products – the tough ribbing was typically made of baleen whale teeth, while the smooth lining was made by silk worms (the caterpillar of the silk moth).

Next time you visit Sovereign Hill, perhaps you could take photos to write a story book about the many animals that miners would have encountered on the diggings – from native animals to domesticated pets and animals that produce food.

Links and References

An ABC Education ‘digibook’ featuring Bruce Pascoe talking about traditional Aboriginal land management: http://education.abc.net.au/home#!/digibook/3122184/bruce-pascoe-aboriginal-agriculture-technology-an

An ecological niche explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVixvcR4Jc

A brief history of Victoria: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2017/05/18/the-history-of-victoria/

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans in Australia ate native foods to survive: https://cass.anu.edu.au/news/parrot-pie-and-possum-curry-how-colonial-australians-embraced-native-food

SBS Gold on Australia’s introduced species: https://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=130

A fact sheet on invasive species in Australia: https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2bf26cd3-1462-4b9a-a0cc-e72842815b99/files/invasive.pdf

The introduction of rabbits in Australia explained by the National Museum Australia: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/rabbits-introduced

A blogpost exploring what was commonly eaten by goldrush immigrants: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2016/11/30/how-to-cook-a-gold-rush-feast/

An online version of Katherine Kirkland’s book Life in the Bush. By a Lady, published in 1845: https://tinyurl.com/yxavj9fh

Information on animals introduced to Australia to make European settlers less homesick: http://myplace.edu.au/decades_timeline/1860/decade_landing_14.html?tabRank=4&subTabRank=3

A blogpost on mid-19th century transport: https://sovereignhilledblog.com/2015/06/25/1850s-transport/

A great Gold Museum blogpost about dogs on the Victorian diggings: http://www.goldmuseum.com.au/canine-companions/

More information about the Leviathan coach: https://blog.qm.qld.gov.au/2017/09/13/how-big-was-the-leviathan-monster-coach/

In the 1850s, animals were even used to create the red colour of raspberry drops. The cochineal beetle from Brazil was dried and ground-up to make red dye. But don’t worry, no living things are harmed in the making of Sovereign Hill’s lollies.

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Posted in 19th century, animals, bushfire, chinese miners, chinese on the diggings, Environment, fire stick farming, gold, goldrush fashion, goldrush food, history of victoria, History Teaching, history teaching resources, Immigration, Indigenous, S T Gill, Sovereign Hill, Uncategorized, Victorian Gold Rush, victorian goldrush chinese, victorian history, women

Tagged animals, education, food, gold rush, history, immigration, sweets

1850s Fashions in Australia

Posted on June 19, 2018 | 1 comment

At the beginning of the Victorian gold rushes in 1851, most of the people searching for the valuable yellow metal were male and dressed suitably for the tough camping and working conditions experienced on the goldfields. As it was dusty in summer and muddy in winter, a miner needed long leather boots to protect him from the mud, a broad-brimmed hat (usually made of felt) to keep the sun or rain out of his eyes, a comfortable cotton shirt, and a waistcoat. Here is a description of winter on the Ballarat goldfields:

This was called Gravel Pit Lead, but might with more propriety have been called Mud Hole; for a more astonishing scene of mud, muddy water, muddy diggers, muddy tools, and clay trodden into the most vilely adhesive filth, it is impossible to conceive. In fact, Ballarat in winter is unquestionably the most dirty place, the most perfect Serbonian Bog, on earth …- William Howitt Land, Labour and Gold; or Two Years in Victoria, Longmans, London, 1855, p.380

Typical Ballarat clothing in the early 1850s – note the long leather boots. Eugène von Guérard, Blackhill 21 Febrav [February] 1854, Reproduced with permission from the State Library of Victoria.

Gold Museum Curator, Snjez Cosic, modelling a fine example of 1850s fashion made recently by the Sovereign Hill Costume Department. Reproduced with permission from Jade Smithard, Mojo Photography.

It didn’t take long, however, for the wealth from gold to start attracting women and families to the diggings. As living conditions improved and permanent houses were built by the mid-1850s, the trendiest fashions from England, France and the USA began to grace the (still rather muddy) streets. It was no wonder – Ballarat had become one of the richest places in the world by this time, and the fashions sported by residents reflected this new wealth.

While crinolines and corsets, top hats and bling were all the rage, these flashy fashions, much like many today, were about communicating your social class (or status) in society – meaning they showed others how important you were. While the poor (and there were plenty of people at this time who weren’t reaping the rewards of the gold rushes) wore whatever clothing they could patch together, the rich were enjoying fancy fabrics, new dye colours thanks to the Industrial Revolution, and expensive accessories. Fashion brand names weren’t really invented yet, so instead of showing off your money by displaying an expensive brand across your chest like many people do today, you paraded around in lace, silk ribbons, tall hats and elaborate gold jewellery to show off. It will be no surprise that large pieces of gold jewellery were all the rage in Ballarat in the 1850s.

Brooches made of Ballarat gold. Reproduced with permission from the Gold Museum.

At this time in history, cotton fabric was quite cheap to buy for sewing into dresses and shirts, because the plants that produce it were mostly being planted and harvested by African slaves in the USA. As cotton plantation (farm) owners didn’t pay their workers, this very cheap material was transported all over the world and was affordable to everyone; it was turning it from cloth to clothing that cost a lot of money (paid to a tailor/seamstress) or time (for the hardworking housewife). Poorer women made their own clothes by hand (until the sewing machine became widely accessible in Australia in the early 1860s), while wealthy women had their clothes tailor-made.

An example of a crinoline created by the Sovereign Hill Costume Department. Underneath you can see the model’s pantalettes (undies!) and chemise (like a long singlet).

It might surprise you to learn that few people owned wardrobes until recent times, as even the cheapest clothing was still very expensive by today’s standards, which meant that during the gold rush each person only owned a couple of outfits. Clothes are so cheap today in comparison that Australians buy 27kg of new clothes on average per year, making us the second largest consumer of textiles in the world!

Interestingly, the bell-shaped crinoline underskirt which is probably the most well-known fashion of the mid-1800s was viewed by many women of the time as a liberating garment because they could walk more easily than beforehand when they had worn many layers of skirts to make the same shape. While some cartoonists saw the funny side of crinolines which many called ‘crinoline mania’, wearing one could be dangerous as they caught fire easily. Corsets were dangerous, too, when worn very tight – most women wore them like bras are worn today, while the rich and fashion-conscious sometimes wore them so tight they broke ribs and moved vital organs. The Victorian dress reform movement saw women encouraging other women to give up dangerous and uncomfortable clothing from the 1850s onwards, and this was thought by many to represent the first wave of feminism.

‘A Splendid Spread’, a cartoon about crinolines by George Cruikshank, from The Comic Almanack, 1850. Reproduced with permission from Wikipedia Commons.

For men who had already found their fortunes on the goldfields, the wearing of white shirts, tall top hats and swinging about a fancy cane showed off their status, along with sporting beautiful fob or pocket watches. If your great-grandfather handed down his watch through your family, it is likely it was his most valuable and treasured possession, although by the late 1800s they became much cheaper thanks to the Industrial Revolution.

This is a goldrush sketch of a Wadawurrung girl from Ballarat wearing a warm possum-skin cloak – the pelts of brushtail possums are warmer than wool and are waterproof. William Strutt, Waran-drenin, 1852. Reproduced with permission from the British Museum.

Australian-specific clothing became available from the 1850s onwards due to the special furs of our native animals. Warm brushtail possum pelts (the fur with the skin [leather] still attached) sewn together and turned into rugs which were supplied by local Aboriginal people, were useful for keeping miners alive during a Ballarat winter in a tent. As platypus pelts were fashioned into expensive jackets and rugs for the wealthy, it’s no wonder that platypus are so rarely seen in the wild these days.

The Sovereign Hill Museums Association has many pieces of clothing and jewellery in our collection of artefacts from the 1800s; however, they are mostly the fanciest items that people treasured, rather than everyday items. That’s why Eliza Perrin’s dress is a particularly special piece in our collection – watch a video about it in Chapter 6 of our ABC Education ‘digibook’ here. You can also learn about the popularisation of white wedding dresses here, fashionable 1850s hair dos here, how the Sovereign Hill Costume Department researches and makes our 1850s clothing here, the differences between clothing now and 19th century clothing here, and typical children’s clothing from the goldfields era here.

Ruffles, ribbons, fringes and extra details on outfits showed off one’s wealth in the late 1850s. Reproduced with permission from the Gold Museum (these Ballarat women are unidentified).

Links and References

A brief history of the ‘rush’ to Ballarat: http://education.sovereignhill.com.au/media/uploads/SovHill-lifeonthegoldfields-notes-ss1.pdf

Wikipedia on crinolines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinoline

A Gold Museum blogpost about another interesting dress in our collection: http://www.goldmuseum.com.au/a-victorian-dress/

Wikipedia on corsets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corset

The history of men’s white shirts: https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-the-mens-white-shirt-26312

BTN on the amount of modern clothing Australians waste: http://www.abc.net.au/btn/story/s4663466.htm

A platypus fur cape in the National Gallery of Victoria collection: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/fashion-detective/