Three sites to learn more about WA’s social history

If you enjoy reading about the less well-known aspects of Western Australia’s social history, here are three great sites that I recommend. They are all carefully researched, well written and full of fascinating details.

Hay Street looking east towards Town Hall, Perth, c 1880s. Image from Museum of Perth
Hay St looking east, c 1880s

The Dusty Box

I’ve mentioned this site before. Jessica Barratt takes unusual and quirky newspaper articles from the past, then digs out the details using Trove, the State Records Office and other sources. The stories she tells offer intriguing glimpses into West Australia’s social history and people of the past. Disappearances, tragedies, ghost stories, eccentric characters, and long-forgotten social events all find a place. Jessica aims to “sweep away the cobwebs and blow away the dust so that the stories and history of the past can once again be shared with the world”.

Outback Family History

The focus of Moya Sharp’s website is the eastern goldfields, with its rich and diverse history. The site, which has been going since 2009, provides a wealth of information, on topics such as hospitals and hotels, miners and marriages, schools and cemeteries. It has extensive, searchable indexes of places and people. (The list of place names includes nearly 150 locations – it’s not just about Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie and Boulder.) It also offers a list of links to sites that are useful to anyone researching their own family history. Once a week Moya publishes her newsletter and blog, with three or four stories that are always worth reading.

Dodgy Perth

This apparently anonymous site hasn’t been updated for a while. But if you’re looking for stories about some of the more offbeat aspects of Perth’s history, try browsing here. “We aim to bring you the unusual, the weird, the disreputable, and the outright scandalous” says the author. Probably not suitable for the tee-totaller.

These certainly aren’t the only sites that offer stories about Western Australian social history. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to recommend another site or blog.

Alice Mitchell as Mrs Gamp

On 16 March, 1907, the Western Mail newspaper published this full page cartoon, portraying Perth woman Alice Mitchell as Mrs Gamp.

Cartoon from Western Mail, 16 March 1907
(Click on the image to see it in more detail in it’s original setting).

The cartoon, penned by Ben Strange, created some controversy. At the time, Mrs Mitchell was sitting in prison, awaiting trial for the murder of baby Ethel Booth. John Norton, the editor of the rival newspaper Truth, claimed that it amounted to contempt of court. Or as he put it:

This woman, now literally lying in the shadow of the gallows, is caricatured in a most callous and cruel manner. A more wicked and wanton attempt to interfere with the due administration of Justice, and to deliberately prejudice the case of a person awaiting trial on a criminal charge, was never committed by a newspaper published within the jurisdiction of a British Court of Law, than that made in the Perth “Western Mail” of the 16th inst…

Given that his own newspaper had printed several scandalous articles about the case, Norton was being somewhat hypocritical.

But he did have a point. Mrs Gamp, otherwise known as Sairey Gamp, was a comical figure from Charles Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens described her as a rough, red-nosed woman, smelling of alcohol. As a self-proclaimed but untrained nurse, she “went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish”. She was not the sort of character that Alice Mitchell’s lawyer wanted associated with Alice in the minds of the jury or the public.

Angel Making

The caption, “Hush-a-bye baby, don’t you cry, you’ll be an angel by-and-by” was equally controversial. The phrase “angel making” was in common use to describe murderous baby farming practices. Australian newspapers also sometimes used “angel making” as a euphemism for abortion. Either way, it suggested something disturbing about Alice Mitchell’s activities.

Alternatively, Ben Strange, the cartoonist, might have been thinking of a racist song written by Monroe Rosenfeld in the United States in 1884, with the title “Hush little baby, don’t you cry”. The chorus included the phrase “You’ll be an angel bye and bye”. It occasionally appeared on Australian song lists in the 1890’s.

Was Strange making a statement about Alice Mitchell’s guilt? Or did he perhaps want to make a more subtle point about the portrayal of Alice in the press and in public discussion? Either way, his cartoon was quite startling.