Join us for the first Talking History of 2025 where Janet McCalman AC examines the convict underbelly of Buzzwinker’s Ballarat. ‘Buzzwinker’, alias Ellen Watkins (nee Miles), was a voluble brothel madam in Esmond Street, so notorious that the diggers named a local wobbling steam engine after her. She was one of many former convicts from Van Diemen’s Land who made their mark or made their fortune or simply made a living in the Golden City. The successful had to conceal their past amidst secrets and lies. Others, like Ellen, had no means of earning a living other than what was considered by polite society to be sin and crime. As invisible or visible Vandemonians, ‘Old Lags’ were an integral part of Ballarat’s golden history.
Janet McCalman AC is the author of the award-winning ‘Vandemonians: the repressed history of Colonial Victoria’ (Miegunyah Press, 2021). Her other books are ‘Struggletown’ (1984), ‘Journeyings’ (1993) and ‘Sex and Suffering’ (1998) on the Royal Women’s Hospital. She taught interdisciplinary history at the University of Melbourne for over twenty years. In 2020, with Emma Dawson, she published ‘What happens next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID 19’.
This talk is based on the Founders and Survivors Ships Project that drew on the skills of family historians, including researchers from Ballarat and its environs, to reconstruct the life stories of 24,000 men, women and children transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1853. You can search for a convict and the life stories of those we were able to find at https://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/ and follow the instructions.
Attend Talking History in person at the Eureka Centre (no booking required). Past lectures can be viewed on YouTube by clicking this link.
Image: Ellen Miles, 1896. Public Record Office of Victoria, VPRS516P2.
