Hungry Horse Dam

• “Women are allowed an amount of latitude here,” concluded a contemporary newspaper report.
• I was reminded of Hobart Town Annie and Tipperary Poll – keepers of a house “not of good repute” – when watching the new ABC series Gold Diggers.
• As a screen representation of history, Gold Diggers is often refreshingly accurate.

Golden girls

• This puts them among the many with convict origins who flocked to the goldfields, embracing the opportunity for riches and reinvention.
• In Dead Horse Gap, Gert and Marigold think themselves the only single ladies expecting to claim a pair of well-heeled husbands (“newly minted dumb-dumbs”).
• In reality, the sisters would have been among the boatloads of single women who travelled to the Victorian goldfields to secure a new husband and a new life.
• Played as a farce (reminiscent of theatricals common on the goldfields) Gold Diggers is almost accidentally accurate in its extremes.

‘Wife material is a heavy fabric’

• Feminist historians of the goldfields are working to relocate women back into their own stories.
• As the colonial newspaper reported of Hobart Town Annie and Tipperary Poll, women were often allowed an amount of latitude on the diggings.
• My own research focuses on the goldfields as a domestic landscape, a place of women and home and family.
• In February 1852, for example, Englishwoman Mary Ann Allen travelled to the Forest Creek diggings with her husband and eight children.

Girls like us

• Subsequently, the goldfields became a microcosm of a diverse society.
• All living cheek-by-jowl, all intent on leveraging an opportunity they may not be presented with again.