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Lola Montez, Star Attraction
When gold fever gripped central Victoria in the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of people arrived from all over the world, including Africa, the Americas, China, Europe and India.
The tent cities that appeared overnight brought people together regardless of whether they were rich or poor, aristocrat or convict, man or woman, lucky or unlucky. Everyone co-existed side by side, creating a society in a state of flux. With roles less fixed, it was a relatively liberal time.
But by 1856 the teeming, transgressive society began to settle. Ballarat was becoming an established town where men were comfortable to bring their wives and families. The process of social stratification, and the rise of associated moral agendas, began to take hold.
It was into this atmosphere that international sensation, Lola Montez, arrived.
Montez was born Maria Eliza Dolores Rosanna Gilbert in Ireland in 1818. Self-made, creative and charismatic, she mixed with notable figures of her day, including George Sand and Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. She was politically influential, and the consort to King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Countess of Landsfeld. Her other lovers included composer Franz Liszt and writer Alexandre Dumas.
Montez was hugely popular and controversial, just as pop star, Madonna, was a century later. Crowds descended on the Victoria Theatre in the Goldfields to witness her notorious 'Spider Dance', a titillating version of a tarantella.
Through Montez and her 'Spider Dance' (as represented by the interpretive theatre presented at the Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum), this story explores the broader social forces at play on the goldfields at the time she visited.
The story also includes several moving postcards, giving snapshots of life on the goldfields in the nineteenth century.
Print - Lithograph adapted from painting by Joseph Karl Stieler, 'Lola Montez', c. 1847, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
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Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, 1825-1848, commissioned this portrait of Lola Montez. This lithograph, held at the Sovereign Hill Museum, is adapted from the original painting by Joseph Karl Stieler (1781 – 1858), a German portraitist, who worked mainly in the service of the Bavarian court.
Lola Montez was born Maria Eliza Dolores Rosanna Gilbert in Ireland in 1818. Her father was in the military and the family travelled to India, Scotland, London, Paris and Bath. When she was 18 years-old, Montez’s mother tried to marry her to a 60 year-old judge in India. Lola eloped with a young Lieutenant and they married in Ireland, but he soon left her for another woman. Montez then went to Spain where she learnt Spanish dancing, which enabled her to travel the world and gain access to people of power and influence, both politically and culturally.
Most notably, Montez was friends with George Sand (with whom, wearing male attire, she smoked cigars); a lover of Franz List, Alexandre Dumas and Alexandre Dujarier. She discussed matters of the state with Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and around 1845 became the lover of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Her influence on Ludwig helped the push to overthrow the conservative Jesuit-led bureaucracy, but with Europe in turmoil, Ludwig abdicated and Montez fled.
Having had her Bavarian rights annulled, Montez commenced a performance tour, taking the Spider Dance to the Californian goldfields, and then to the Victorian goldfields, where her performances and radical behaviour caused a sensation. Eventually, she returned to America, where she lived penniless for a number of years before dying alone in her early 40s, in a New York boarding house.
Text based on A Lover and A Fighter; Clare Wright on the trouble with Lola Montez, Overland 2009, p. 195.
Film - 'Lola Montez and her Notorious Spider Dance', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
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.
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In this video, performers and creators of the interpretive theatre at Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum and academics discuss Lola Montez and her infamous 'Spider Dance'. The dance was performed on the goldfields in 1856 in the Victoria Theatre, attracting both showers of gold nuggets and moral outrage.
Film - 'Lola Montez Star Attraction at the Ballarat Goldfields', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
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.
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This video explores the social forces at play when Lola Montez arrived in the new colony and performed the 'Spider Dance'. With the influx of people for the goldrush beginning to settle, the radical and fluid nature of the goldrush towns was shifting toward the more conservative morals associated with a clearly stratified society.
Film - 'Lola Montez 19th Century Radical', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
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...
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In this video the complex and fascinating life of Lola Montez is discussed, covering her activities as a dancer and as a significant political force in the royal courts of Europe.
Film - 'The Victorian Goldfields - Slim pickings for Women', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
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.
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In this video, academic Clare Wright discusses women on the Victorian goldfields: their presence, their opportunities and their roles.
Film - 'Trying on a bonnet in the Criterion Store', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Trying on a bonnet in the Criterion Store', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music Plays]
No dialogue.
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This moving postcard is based on a lithograph by Francois Cogne from the mid-1800s. It is set in the Criterion Store on Main St Sovereign Hill, where a range of 1850s clothing and household linen are exhibited.
The presentation is part of a series of interpretive theatre displays at the Sovereign Hill Museum.
The Sovereign Hill Museum tells aspects of the story of the gold rushes in central Victoria in the mid-19th century that did so much to change Australia’s development.
Film - 'Redcoats', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Redcoats', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music plays, gunshots fired]
No dialogue.
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This moving postcard features the Redcoats of the 40th Regiment of Foot firing a volley. The presentation is part of a series of interpretive theatre displays at the Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum.
Film - 'Dilges's Blacksmith', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Dilges's Blacksmith', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music Plays, blacksmith hammering]
No dialogue.
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This moving postcard shows a blacksmith using an anvil to hammer iron. It is part of a series of interpretive theatre displays at the Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum.
Film - 'Gold Panning', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Gold Panning', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music Plays, sound of running stream]
No dialogue.
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This moving postcard shows the process of panning for alluvial gold. The presentation is part of a series of interpretive theatre displays at the Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum.
Film - 'Steam Boiler', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Steam Boiler', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music plays, industrial sounds]
No dialogue.
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This moving postcard shows the stoking of the fire in a Cornish boiler. The fire creates heat to make steam, which drives a heritage steam plant. Steam power came into use in the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. Steam power was used extensively in goldrush Victoria.
Film - 'Sewing in the Women's Parlour', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Film - 'Sewing in the Women's Parlour', 2011, Sovereign Hill Museums Association
[Music Plays]
No dialogue.
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In this moving postcard volunteers demonstrate domestic skills in the Women's Parlour of the Charlie Napier Hotel. The presentation is part of a series of interpretive theatre displays at the Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum.
Victorian Collections acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands
where we live, learn and work.