Danielle Walker

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Tuesday, July 11, 2023

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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