Physical description

Digitised video (2.66GB)
Duration: 51 minutes.
Recorded August, 2022
(Video is available for viewing at Ringwood & District Historical Society Archives by appointment)

Inscriptions & markings

Presenter: Louise Blake is a writer and historian with an interest in the stories of women, families, and communities on the nineteenth-century goldfields in Australia and New Zealand. Inspired by her family connection to the gold mining settlement of Woods Point, Louise completed a PhD on Women and Community on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields in north-east Victoria in 2019. In this talk Louise will share her research on Lawrence and Esther Chubb, who lived and worked at Gaffneys Creek on the Upper Goulburn Goldfields in the 1870s and 80s. In a series of letters Lawrence wrote to his family in England, and now held by the State Library of Victoria, Lawrence shared his early struggles as an independent miner on the central Victorian goldfields, his protracted courtship with Esther, the ordinary intimacies of their life at Gaffneys Creek, the work that Esther did to support the family in this remote mining region, as well as the material and emotional support provided by and to family, friends and neighbours. A rare and revealing source, these letters help to expand our understanding of the lived experience of mining families, particularly the work that women did to sustain families and communities, in this period of waged labour and tribute mining in Victoria.