The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (39 page)

Why should we not go the whole hog 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?
¹⁹

The new licensing law made its own kind of sense: it had been designed to control the distribution of alcohol, based on the logic that women were more likely to regulate men's behaviour and run establishments that were more domesticated, offering food and accommodation, rather than exclusively devoted to drinking. This was a principle that had been applied in Australia since the granting of licences in the penal settlement of Sydney in the 1790s. But this journalist's curious, slightly paranoid response managed to see the legislative change as part of goldfields women's collusion to restrict male liberties. Perhaps this suggests that women's wider ‘agitations' were having an influence on the public domain. At any rate, the law had the undisputed effect of catapulting women into the epicentre of social and economic life: the pub.

Enter Catherine Bentley, stage right.

In July 1854 James and Catherine Bentley were in pole position when the goldfields authorities reversed the ban on issuing liquor licences on the diggings. They had come prepared to capitalise on this new opportunity to mine for liquid gold. James had sureties from leading bankers and merchants in Melbourne. He had the sufficient confidence of creditors 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 he had the pre-emptive right to a section of Crown land, secured and signed for in Catherine's name on 13 June that year.
²⁰

Ballarat was still a tent city, to be sure. But with a population of twenty thousand, the occasional whopping nugget still being pulled from the ground, a host of shops selling everything from fresh ground coffee to preserved hare to Havana cigars, 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 district, 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 fledgling Licensed Victuallers Association of Ballarat. His network of local associates included leading merchants, auctioneers and bankers.

On 15 July, the
BALLARAT TIMES
announced the opening of Bentley's Eureka Hotel:

Placards had been circulated and 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.
²¹

Bentley may have been an ex-con with a limp, but he had hit the ground running.

By August, the Bentleys' stock orders included twenty-five dozen bottles of champagne, forty dozen bottles of sherry and port, twenty-five gallons of whisky and two thousand cigars. Catherine purchased electroplated silver cutlery. A chandelier bathed the hotel in a dreamy light of candlelit opulence. The main public bar had a sixty-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 ninety-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 vermillion.

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. Jacques 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.

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 Free Trade run by Alfred Lester, the London run by Hassell Benden and Robert Monkton, the Star run by William McRae, the Turf Inn run by William Tait, 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 Spanake, the nineteen-year-old English 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 said the publican at the Prince Albert was
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, Bath's, the Clarendon and the George.

Women like Mrs Spanake 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.

Prostitution is notoriously hard to research. Reconstructing the lives of prostitutes on the mining frontier—a history that has been either suppressed by Victorian-era prudery or distorted by modernity's obsession with the salacious—is a research project all of its own. American historian Marion S. Goldman has completed the rare undertaking brilliantly.
²²
Her 1981 book
Gold Diggers and Silver Miners
examines the history of prostitution on the Comstock Lode in Nevada circa 1860–80. Goldman set out to gracefully bury the legend of the frontier prostitute as the ‘harlot heroine', whose beauty, wealth, luxurious surroundings, adoring male companions, envious female rivals and eventual mobility into respectable affluence has been the mainstay of novels, films and other popular historical representations. The legend of the whore with a heart of gold, argues Goldman, rests on a primordial male ambivalence towards women's sexual power, which has the capacity simultaneously to comfort, manipulate and destroy. The idealised frontier prostitute also appealed to women, suggests Goldman, as ‘she epitomised feminine strivings for adventure and autonomy at a time when most women were constricted by economic discrimination and custom'. Over the course of her book, Goldman demolishes the myth of the good-time girl and replaces it with the reality that most frontier prostitutes led miserable lives of poverty, degradation, disease and violence.

Goldman was lucky. Nevada is the only American state where prostitution, along with gambling, is legally tolerated. Organised sexual commerce, as she calls it, was thus a visible and documented part of everyday life, and she found ‘information about it everywhere'. Ballarat is another story.

Ballarat's red-light district centred around Brown Hill, Specimen Hill, Esmond and Arcade streets and Main Road. Prostitution enterprises were female-run small businesses that, unlike shopkeeping, could always continue to operate on a small scale—well after businesses with greater access to capital had muscled out smaller competitors.
²³
The clandestine diversions and opportunities for orgies were not lacking
, Charles Eberle wrote in his diary.
It could not be otherwise in a populous environment composed of men with often very loose morals
.

Now, an orgy can mean simple drunken revelry, but its more common connotation of excessive sexual indulgence is apparent in Eberle's account. There was certainly nothing clandestine about a standard piss-up on the diggings. He goes further.

The thirst for gold led to that for pleasure and there were always traders ready to promote this leaning, by means of establishments, more or less dubious, where the diverse passions of this still undisciplined population found satisfaction.

Pleasure. Passion. Satisfaction. Eberle talks openly about hotels and sly-grog shops; the nature of the establishments he politely alludes to is obvious.

It's also possible to identify some of Ballarat's more notorious prostitutes. Mary Clarke alias Margaret Clarke alias Margaret Allen was known to all and sundry as the
Bull Pup
. On 20 January 1854, she was charged with being
an idle and disorderly person
, a quaint legal euphemism for a street hooker. Poor Margaret got herself nicked by coming to the Camp in her cups to press charges against another woman. Margaret was drunk at the time, and Sergeant Major Milne remembered seeing her previously on the side of the road with
her clothes above her head
. In 1854, the Bull Pup spent two stints in the Ballarat lockup, the first time for two months, the second for six months, for being idle and disorderly.
²⁴
She later moved to the Brown Hill diggings, east of Eureka, where Henry Mundy spotted her.
All the pleasures and amusements common in Ballarat were to be found
, wrote Mundy,
a theatre, dancing saloons, bowling alleys, gymnasiums, concert
rooms, Hobart Town Poll with her bevy of girls, Bones, the Bull Pup, Cross-Eyed Luke etc and grog shanties galore
.