What would history look like if women were the main characters? Gold Diggers gives us a very funny, refreshingly accurate answer
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Tuesday, July 11, 2023
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“Women are allowed an amount of latitude here,” concluded a contemporary newspaper report.
Key Points:
- “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.