Film - 'Lola Montez and her Notorious Spider Dance', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

Performer: I promised to open my theatre with an act of world renown.

Tonight, I bring you the wonderful, the talented Contessa Lola Montez.

♪ Soft piano music

Barry Kay: We've developed this piece where Lola offers a chance for a preview to the people of Ballarat of her Spider Dance as a bit of a teaser. It would be like a trailer in a movie house, I suppose.

It's not a re-enactment. I don't think she did that sort of thing. I don't think she needed to.

(Cheering and applause)

Tim Sullivan: I would love to have met Lola.

I would love to have been at that... that night at the Victoria Theatre when she performed the dance for the first time.

(Castanets tap rhythmically)

Of course, there's no film footage, or even photography that we can rely on in interpreting the dance.

So we've had to go by interpretation of newspaper reports about what the performance entailed.

Eloise Gooding: It did have a Spanish feel and she did train in Spanish dancing, even though she wasn't Spanish at all.

She liked to let people think that.

So the skirt was at knee length, which again is quite risqué, and she would raise them up and flick her skirts around, and she would touch her legs sensually and slowly, and the music would get faster and faster.

The idea of her touching her legs was that there were spiders on her, and she had to try and shoo the spider out of her petticoat. So she was flicking, but the music got more feverish, and a big build-up in the climax is when she found it and she stomped on it.

(Clapping and cheering)

Tim: The descriptions of the response of the diggers when they were showering her with gold nuggets - just imagine what that would be like today, if you had a performer on stage being showered in gold nuggets in appreciation.

Wow!

You can just imagine, that would've absolutely scandalised so many people.

Dr Clare Wright: And the audience is either thrilled and going along with it, or incensed and out of their mind with moral indignation.

Eloise: By our standards, it's nothing, any worse than, you know,

Madonna might do, or any of the other women out there performing. But for the day, it was quite confronting.

Barry: It was only very recent that women were being allowed to perform on stage, and the acting professionals performing arts were, you know, not much more than vagabonds and thieves.

So here's a person who is in a not very respectable profession, but who is also, if you like, blatantly flaunting... sexuality.

Clare: She was dancing for the male audiences. She was unabashed about that.

So she was seen as being dangerous in that kind of way, although there was nothing that we would consider that was particularly lewd about her dancing. But she was definitely provocative.

Film - 'Lola Montez Star Attraction at the Ballarat Goldfields', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

Dr Ann Beggs-Sunter: Lola Montez was one of a number of star attractions that came to Ballarat.

We had many Europeans, British performers, there were Americans, who really saw the goldfields as a great pot of gold for entertainers to make their fortune.

Dr Clare Wright: When she comes to Ballarat, we have to understand the context in which she arrives.

Anne: Life was pretty free and easy on the goldfields.

There'd been no time for the typical structures of a civilised society to build up. It was very much that...that wild frontier.

Claire: There's so much social flux. I mean, people's roles are being expanded – Jack is as good as his master.

Suddenly, men who had nothing have riches.

Men, who in England, had had quite high roles in society, had been well-respected professionals, are now diggers down on their luck.

Anne: Writers talk about the clay-covered democracy of the early goldfields, when everybody was really equal.

If someone was a doctor, or a lawyer, or a painter from the courts of Europe, they were absolutely equal with the ex-convicts who might have come over from Tasmania.

And women who were supposed to accept any marriage proposal that was come to them and be grateful for it, now were finding, in Australia, that because there was this huge disproportion of the sexes, they could choose who they wanted to marry. And this was unheard of. And there's all sorts of anxiety at the time around these gender power imbalances and reversals.

And so Lola arrives right at that moment, and, in a way,she becomes a lightning rod for all of that controversy and all of that social anxiety about place - about women's place, about class. So she was used in a sense as a way for society to be able to explore the tensions that were going on.

Anne: There is this change occurring around the time that Lola came.

There's... More and more women have settled in Ballarat, so there's more families. There's beginning to be a much greater concern about propriety in the behaviour of women, and modesty of dress and these kinds of matters.

Clare: And so there's a lot of outcry, public outcry, about the more out-there aspects of her performances.

And interestingly, it's not the political aspects of her performances that are really focused upon. There's much more concern that Lola is lifting the heights of her skirts, that she's being lewd, that she's testing the boundaries of morality.

Anne: Of course, the diggers loved it.

But it's this... the beginnings of the stratified society, the emergence of class structures basically, that meant that it's the upper classes that are tending to suddenly look down their noses morally at the behaviour of Lola Montez.

Film - 'Lola Montez 19th Century Radical', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

Barry Kay: She's not born Lola. She's born Eliza Gilbert. From memory, she's not born into a wealthy family. I think she was smart and ambitious, and I think she just grabbed opportunities as they came to change her circumstances and see what would happen.

Dr Clare Wright: The opportunities for women to have a role in public life were very few and far between in the mid-19th century.

And being on stage, being an actress or a performer in some way was one of the few avenues that women could really take centre stage and get attention for themselves.

She takes herself off to Spain and decides to learn a bit of Spanish dancing. I don't think she was there very long. But then there's this woman called Lola Montez who's performing in London and causing a sensation with her Spider Dance, which is certainly a much racier version, I would imagine, than any other tarantella that you might have seen at that particular time. And so that was her meal ticket - dancing.

But really what she loved was power and politics. And because she was able through her dancing to open doors to herself into the royal courts of Europe - and she danced all over Europe - she came to find that where she was most comfortable was talking politics with the men.

And interestingly they came to find that they really enjoyed talking to her too and that she had radical ideas.

Now, the first time we get a sense that Lola is having an influence on politics is when she becomes the lover of King Ludwig of Bavaria.

And she becomes one of the prime movers in shifting the Jesuit-led bureaucracy of the monarchy there. And she made a lot of enemies because of that. But she was really in step with the people's mood at the time.

So she was a political animal, and it was those ideas that informed the theatre that she started to write for herself and informed her very idea of herself as a modern woman.

Eloise Gooding: I think she was quite incredible, because, for the day, she was self-employed, she had to look after herself, she had to... Many a time she was bankrupt and it was only up to herself that she built her name back up again, maybe reinvented herself as well.

She was just... yeah, amazing.

Not just a performer and able to manipulate - which we do know she was able to manipulate people - but also there was an intelligence behind it and she was doing it to further her career, and to look after herself.

Who of us wouldn't want to do that?

I really like her and admire her for challenging society and the role of women in the 1850s.

She's the first woman to be photographed smoking a cigarette, which was massive taboo.

She was known also she would wear trousers occasionally.

Dr Anne Beggs Sunter: She does appear as quite a strong feminist.

She was very assertive, that it was totally right and proper for her as a woman to have this role in the public sphere as a performer. That she was not going to be trapped into any kind of domesticity.

She was going to lead a full and active life, as she had led when she was involved with the royal court of Europe.

Dr Clare Wright: What I find really fascinating is that if you were educated in Europe, you would actually have some idea from your high school education that Lola Montez played an important role in modern political history.

Whereas in Australia, we really just understand Lola Montez as a showgirl. And as a showgirl, she becomes symbolic of all sorts of other things - she was a bad girl, she was louche, she was immoral.

And it's so underselling Lola. By just seeing her as a showgirl, by just a goodtime girl, we undermine all of that power in her story.

Performer: Madame, are you upset with me because I can perform deeds that have left their mark on society, or that you cannot?

I'm not merely consisted of living a life that contains drinking tea, powdering, flirting, going to the opera, and sleeping.

Those women that do... Not you, of course, my dear.

Those women that do are inane pieces of human waxwork, and this conventional femininity, I believe, only invites men's scorn.

You're upset with me because I possess the independence and the power of self-reliant strength to assert my own individuality, while you, ma'am, you do not.

Until tonight, my friends, until tonight...

Film - 'The Victorian Goldfields - Slim pickings for Women', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

Clare Wright: In the first couple of years in the gold rush it was slim pickings for women. There just weren't that many around.

But very soon, by 1853, there was an exodus of women from Melbourne and from Europe and from America to the goldfields. And commentators at the time noted this, that there was so many women on the goldfields, particularly in contrast to the Californian gold rushes, where there were so few women.

Women were playing a variety of roles. They were actually digging for gold, both in family groups, so helping out their husbands, but also on their own.

There is evidence that there were women who just came there to mine. There were also women who were running shops, they were running restaurants, boarding houses, theatres.

There were dancers, actresses, there were prostitutes, of course, but there were really women who were engaged in a whole range of commercial activities that were servicing this large, moveable, prosperous, and often not so prosperous digging community.

And women were supplementing family incomes.

So for all of those times where men weren't finding gold, and for most of the time they weren't, women were the ones who were actually supplementing the income.

And that's a really important historical detail that has been left out.

Because I think that that really becomes one of the reasons why men are so frustrated on the goldfields and why there's so much tension and anger and disappointment, is because the men felt that they were going to be able to provide for their families and provide this whole new independent life, whereas actually it was the women who had developed this independence, who had come to this point of self-reliance, because they now were economic beings.

And they also had a lot of power in their family economy because they were the ones who were the providers.

Film - 'Trying on a bonnet in the Criterion Store', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music Plays]

No dialogue.

Film - 'Redcoats', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music plays, gunshots fired]

No dialogue.

Film - 'Dilges's Blacksmith', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music Plays, blacksmith hammering]

No dialogue.

Film - 'Gold Panning', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music Plays, sound of running stream]

No dialogue.

Film - 'Steam Boiler', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music plays, industrial sounds]

No dialogue.

Film - 'Sewing in the Women's Parlour', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association

[Music Plays]

No dialogue.