We Are the Rebels (16 page)

Mundy also observed:
Rum, gin, brandy, beer and stout have been known to run down
Camp Hill from Lydiard Street in streams
, and he was speaking literally. The police
poured away rivers of contraband alcohol, draining it into the dirt. The terrible
waste of a valued commodity was seen by the impoverished community as flagrant provocation.

Meanwhile, legitimate publicans in the township were increasingly angry about illicit
competition from the sly-groggers on the diggings.

Something had to give, and so a new law was proclaimed on 1 June, just before Governor
Hotham's arrival. Publicans'
licences would now be granted on the goldfields, exclusively
to
owners of substantial houses
: the big-time grog sellers. It was a licence not
just to sell booze but to print money, and the government knew it. The annual fee
to sell spirits was set at a whopping £100, with an extra £50 to occupy Crown lands
for the purpose.

The good news for the government was that opening the floodgates to legal liquor
sales would generate much-needed revenue. The bad news was the new law was nearly
as big a mess as the old one.

There were loopholes allowing magistrates to issue licences to smaller operators,
thus setting the scene for a tragic turf war between the owners of licensed public
houses (which, by law, had to provide accommodation and meals), licensed tents (which,
the legislation said, merely had to be
good tents
—whatever that meant), the remaining
illegal grog sellers (selling out of their coffee houses, refreshment tents and stores)
and the already-hated local authorities, who were supposed to act as umpire.

And there was a startling twist.

In July, a further qualification was introduced. Applicants for a publican's licence
had to show their marriage certificates. No single men would be eligible for a licence.

This criterion made its own kind of sense. The idea was to control the distribution
of alcohol, based on the logic that women were more likely to make men behave themselves,
and to run establishments that were more domesticated, offering food and accommodation,
rather than exclusively devoted to drinking. It was a principle that had been applied
in Australia since liquor licences were first granted in the penal settlement of
Sydney in the 1790s.

But the humorous, slightly paranoid, response of one Melbourne journalist suggests
the move may have raised eyebrows.
Why should we not go the whole hog
, he wrote,
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?

People rarely make satirical jokes about non-issues. Was ‘women's place' becoming
a source of anxiety in the public domain? At any rate, the law had the undisputed
effect of catapulting women into the dead centre of colonial social and economic
life: the pub.

Enter Catherine Bentley.

THE EUREKA HOTEL

In July 1854 Irish Protestant Catherine Bentley was in pole position when the goldfields
authorities reversed the ban on liquor licences on the diggings. With her husband
James and toddler in tow, Catherine had come prepared to capitalise on this new opportunity
to mine for liquid gold.

James had done well. He'd been transported as a convict to Norfolk Island some years
before. Now he had sureties from leading bankers and merchants in Melbourne. He had
the confidence of creditors, sufficient 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 the
couple had the pre-emptive right to a section of Crown land, secured and
signed for in Catherine's name on 13 June that year.

Ballarat was still a tent city, to be sure. But with a population of 20,000, the
occasional monstrous nugget still being pulled from the ground, a host of shops selling
everything from fresh ground coffee to French cheeses, 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 township, 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 new Licensed
Victuallers Association of Ballarat. His network of local associates included merchants,
auctioneers and bankers.

On 15 July, the Ballarat Times announced the opening of Bentley's Eureka Hotel.

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.

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

The Bentleys' enterprise was opulence itself. A chandelier bathed the hotel in a
dreamy glow of candlelit luxury. The main public bar had a 60-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 90-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 vermilion.

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. 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.

LIQUID GOLD

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 Turf Inn, run by William Tait, the Free Trade,
run by Alfred Lester, the London, run by Hassell Benden and Robert Monkton, the Star,
run by William McRae 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 Spanhake, the 25-year-old 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 described the publican at the Prince Albert as:
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, Baths, the Clarendon and
the George.

Women like Mrs Spanhake 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.

THE ADELPHI THEATRE

Catherine wasn't the only woman making her mark on the cultural landscape of Ballarat.
The State Library of Victoria holds a magnificent watercolour by an unknown artist
entitled
Interior Adelphi Theatre, Ballarat 1855
. The painting shows a large canvas
tent with a high roof. Wooden benches are arranged in neat rows before a timber stage.
The stage holds several sections of painted sets, depicting European scenes (a Grecian
temple? A Roman villa?). Five men are working at various menial tasks and, on their
right, a woman stands proudly overseeing her terrain. She is tall and solidly built,
her hair swept up in a bun. She stands straight-backed in her striking blue gown,
with her hands clasped in front of her: regal, haughty. The artist has captured the
Adelphi's owner, Sarah Hanmer, at a moment when her notoriety was at its peak: after
her theatre had become the venue for show-stopping political rallies that would change
the course of Australian history.

Sarah Hanmer—Mrs Leicester Hanmer, as she was known professionally—was one of Ballarat's
first and most successful businesswomen. She arrived in Victoria with her twelve-year-old
daughter, Julia, and her brother, William McCullough, in August 1853. By early 1854,
mother and daughter were working as actresses in the Queen's Theatre and by May
she was not only
the chief, if not sole attraction of the Queen's Theatre
—she was
about to open her own establishment, the Adelphi.

In the Victorian era the theatre was almost respectable but still exciting, and people
were mad for it. Everyone from the highest-ranking official to the street sweepers
flocked to see the latest production. It was also one of the few trades in which
a woman could get ahead, and Sarah Hanmer made very sure that she did.

She had learned to use shrewdly the femininity expected of her. When she was establishing
the Adelphi, one business associate said,
She wished to pay in promises and smiles,
which I did not consider legal tender, so I closed the theatre.
A young admirer
stepped
in to help financially and when he had served his purpose (it was implied) Sarah
cast him forcefully aside:
sans promises, sans smiles, sans money, sans everything
but a horsewhip.
A dash of leather prompted the young man to move on.

Sarah Hanmer now had the Adelphi on her own terms, and soon advertised its imminent
opening with herself as its
lessee and directress
. She placed an ad for a
leading
man and light comedian,
declaring without false modesty:
Applications from ladies
will be unnecessary, as the Press have declared, without hesitation, she
[Sarah]
possesses the best female talent in the country.

The troupe included young Julia and several other American actors and actresses.
By early June, Ballarat finally had a first-rate theatre company, the Adelphi Players.
The Ballarat correspondent to the Geelong Advertiser reported in the first week of
winter:
The Adelphi, under this lady's superintendence, has achieved a position hardly,
if anything, inferior to any theatre in Victoria
.

Once established as its indisputable boss, and pulling in rapturous crowds, Sarah
Hanmer regularly offered her theatre to hold charity events, such as benefits for
the Miners' Hospital.
Mrs Hanmer and her daughter are immense favourites on the diggings,
said the Ballarat Times,
and we do not wonder at it, for there are none here who
have more earnestly strove to gain the good-will of the digging community…her endeavours
to please deserve every success.

Sarah wasn't afraid, however, to risk her reputation for feminine benevolence by
going after someone who had offended her. At the end of winter, she wrote a letter
to the editor of the Ballarat Times defending herself against some slight—we don't
know what, because it was not aired in the papers. Signing herself off as
the Public's
Obedient Servant
, Sarah
took the fight up to her accuser, a former employee called
Bartlett who
has been
cowardly
enough to insinuate what he dares not speak out openly
about—my character.
Showing no such spinelessness herself, Sarah went public with
her moral indignation, daring Bartlett to be man enough to do the same.