Finding Fanny Finch

What if the most remarkable of all your ancestors was the one left out of the family tree? Historian Kacey Sinclair and two of Fanny Finch’s direct descendants reconstruct the life and legacy of a Victorian goldfields trailblazer, a woman of colour whose story was hidden for generations.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  What if the most remarkable person in your family was someone you'd never heard of? Fanny Finch was a woman of African heritage, a goldfields pioneer, and one of the first women to vote in Australia. Father and daughter Bill and Alice Garner, both historians and actors, discovered that they are direct descendants of Fanny Finch. Not that we knew, Bill.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Not a clue.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  And helping them to uncover their family history is Casey Sinclair. But Casey is the expert who's completing a history PhD on this topic.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Like Fanny, I'm a woman of colour. And 150 years after she did, I also moved to Castle Main.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Welcome to ABC Rewind. I'm Hilary Harper and today we are finding Fanny Finch.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Early in 1852, a woman pushing a wheelbarrow joins a long line of diggers on the track to the central Victorian goldfields. Fanny Finch, then 37, is a big, strong woman. She's heading for a camp packed with thirsty miners, where grog prices are sky high.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Fanny had come out to South Australia as a domestic servant in 1837, just one month after Colonel Light surveyed the site for Adelaide. There, she married Joe Finch, a chainman from the survey party. But leaving him behind in 1850, Fanny took their children with her to Melbourne, children she now had to board out before leaving for the goldfields. It took Fanny four days to get to the Forest Creek diggings, where she set up a tent that soon became popular.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  The head centre and general resort of everybody, the only place of entertainment on the creek.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Long after she's gone, someone writes, "If anyone would hear Fanny's name now, no doubt they'd remember the many memorable nights had by her tent."

• 2:20Speaker 01

  That's Castle Main band, Friends of Wendy Cotton. They're coming with us.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Sly grogging, or selling alcohol without a licence, was illegal. It was profitable, but risky. The punishment was a hefty fine. But first, the tent was burnt down. Fanny's tent was destroyed twice in one week.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Each time the police burn it down, the diggers put up another one.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Fanny prospered at Forest Creek. In 1854, she moved her business into Castle Main, expanded it, and placed a notice in the local paper. Baths? Baths? Baths?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Baths, baths, baths! What are you...

• 3:04Speaker 02

  What does Fanny sound like? What's her voice?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  You're an actor.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Mrs. Fanny Finch begs respectfully to inform the inhabitants of Castle Main, and diggers generally, that she has taken the under-mentioned extensive premises, which she has furnished as a bathing establishment.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's good. May I?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Please.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  In offering this great summer luxury to her friends, Mrs. F begs to assure them that no expense has been spared and that every regard has been paid to the comfort and convenience of bathers, and hopes to meet that encouragement and support which such an undertaking deserves.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  A refreshment and reading room is attached, where all the leading periodicals will be found. Ladies and children carefully attended to by Mrs. F personally.

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  Note the address: Templeton Street, next door to Mrs. Pye & Co.'s Lemonade Manufacturing.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  The bathing establishment proved costly. Then she got a heavy fine for selling grog. She boldly proposed a solution for her money worries in a letter to the Mount Alexander Mail.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  If those who are in my debt would come forward, each with one-third, I would be relieved of all... All debts, have a good home for my family and cash to put in my pocket. I also beg to state that in spite of what enemies I may have, I intend to keep throughout the winter, ready cooked ham, beef soups à la mode etcetera, from seven in the morning till seven at night.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  She does not miss a chance.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  She's not shy. Listen to this. A coloured lady attired in bright blue silk and artificial flowers. How good would it be to find a picture of that?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Any picture of her.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Fanny Finch must have been brave. Late one night, walking home from her restaurant, she heard screaming coming from inside a shop.

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  She bursts in and makes her way through to a bedroom.

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  She sees a man attacking a woman. She drags him off. She pushes him out of the room.

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  She bounces him on the counter. She holds him until the police get there.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  The story appeared in the Mount Alexander Mail. Everyone in Castle Main heard about it. Fanny was known to be a defender of women and children. Even back in Melbourne, in Burke Street, where she witnessed the continuing abuse of seven-year-old Mary Anne Bamford at the hands of her drunken parents.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Don't murder your child. You neglect her sufficiently without being so cruel to her.

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  She offers to pay for medical attention for Mary Anne.

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  I'll carry her to the hospital myself. I'll get the police if you don't help her.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  By the time the parents take her to a doctor, it's too late.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Fanny testified at the inquest and then at the mother's trial for murder.

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  To see children abused, I will say my piece.

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  A strong-minded woman with a genuine tenderness of heart, which led her to be ever ready to serve another in distress, and that too without the slightest ostentation.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  One said that.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  It's your obituary. No face was more welcome at the Castle Main Hospital, and not anyone perhaps was more charitable to its inmates. She was continually supplying them with creature comforts, and regularly as Christmas came round, she furnished the whole female ward with a first-rate tea with all the necessary concomitants.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Not that it helps me when I end up there. I don't know where all the subscription money goes because the place is filthy. Holes in the floor, mice running everywhere. The matron is a monster, but nothing compared to that quack in charge.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  What was wrong with you?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  A disease I won't mention. And then I go back in with a cough, and they keep me there for more than two months. Inflammation of the lungs, they say. I don't know how I recovered.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  You didn't. You died.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Not yet. I've just got started.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Fanny Finch died at the Castle Main Hospital in 1863.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  That quack killed me.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  She was buried at Campbell's Creek, but without a headstone.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Like a pauper?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  There's a proper headstone now, a beauty, paid for by the government.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  On my grave?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  The governor did that?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Not the governor, the government, the Minister for Women.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  There's a Minister for Women?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  While running her business at Forest Creek, Fanny kept her daughters in boarding school in Melbourne.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  But later the kids are with her in Castle Main. Did they help with the sly grog?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  It is a restaurant.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Sorry, restaurant?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Thank you, young man.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Fanny Finch was big on correcting the record. A notice in a local paper said she was required to apologize for insulting Miss Miller.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  I never.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  She belts out a letter to the miners' right.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Sir, in the first place, I am not acquainted with a Miss Miller. In the next place, I am not in the habit of using any expression likely to injure the character of any female, as even to require a private, let alone a public apology. So I will thank you to rectify the assertion to my satisfaction in next, Fanny Finch.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  She's defiant.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  They cause me endless trouble.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  There was a sustained campaign against sly grogging during the 1850s, not because it was considered such an evil. The £50 fine provided substantial revenue.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And the troopers get a cut.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  She's charged with sly grogging again.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Apart from a heavy fine, Fanny faced four months' jail for failure to pay.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I had a lawyer.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  She always had a lawyer.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Fanny was tried in the police court.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  The Melbourne Argus calls Fanny "The Notorious Mrs Fanny Finch".

• 9:56Speaker 00

  It's not just the sly grog charge.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  The Mount Alexander Mail says, "The fair Fanny invited two policemen into her tent."

• 10:05Speaker 00

  They were acting under orders, of course they were.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  We're playing four in hand, and the police join in. Goes on for three and a half hours. They're playing for lemonade at first, then they ask for a couple of nobblers, brandies. I know their game.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  The police said Fanny produced a bottle from under the sofa. That wasn't a crime, as long as she received no payment. Her lawyer insisted that Fanny wouldn't be so stupid as to take money for grog from police in uniform.

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  They swore they paid me after everyone else had left.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  They were lying.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  The bench accepted the police story.

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  I appealed immediately.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  At her appeal, Fanny was represented by her friend, Maurice McDonagh.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  I loved Maurice. A real fighter in court. Very good comic actor, too. Drank himself to death very young.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  McDonagh's main line of argument was entrapment. He asked the police who sent them on the job. The judge told them not to answer.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Jackson.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  The judge was likely protecting Edmund Jackson, the licensee of the Victoria Hotel, next door to Fanny's restaurant.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  He pays people to dob in sly groggers.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Maurice says, "How can police spies be compared with someone of my good reputation?" He accuses them of being vandemonians.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  We call them Tasmanians now.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Why?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  To clean up their reputation.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Vandemonians?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Fanny insisted a police constable had told her, "If they couldn't get her on the sly grog charge, they'd start a row and get her for keeping a disorderly tent."

• 11:55Speaker 00

  My tent is never disorderly.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  A disorderly tent was code for a brothel.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  They want to drive me out of Castle Main.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  If my word is not to be believed, and the police continue to perjure themselves, then all I can do is appeal to the people of Castle Main.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  She writes to the Mount Alexander Mail.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Sir, I can scarcely tell you what I want to say. But write this letter as coming from myself, making notice of the time, which is since the diggings first opened, my having house, and at one time the only one either the commissioners or diggers could be accommodated in. I have held a licensed refreshment tent ever since the diggings commenced, and can prove by any of my former neighbours that they're never, and I believe the only, tent that there was never, even a quarrel in, and always conducted by myself. My neighbours on my right and at the back say they do not wish for a better neighbour,

• 13:04Speaker 00

  as does every neighbour that I have had before, and are willing to prove it.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Except the neighbour on your left.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Everyone knows that.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Edmund Jackson.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Jackson's preferred target was unprotected females.

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  His own lawyer sues him for unpaid legal fees.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  For prosecuting sly groggers.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  To whom must I look for protection? I am compelled to seek it from someone but cannot tell who. The head of police should certainly see into these sort of affairs and not allow, if two or three have a spite against an individual, to be crushed just as they please. For I positively deny ever taking one shillen from the two constables for grog in any shape.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  In the week following Fanny's appeal, a long letter appeared in the mail, under the pen name Constant Reader. Its writer insisted Fanny was being persecuted.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Mrs Finch has a family to maintain and provide for and should be allowed every legitimate means of doing so, as well as any other person. Means have been taken to entrap her into a violation of the law. I believe I state correctly when I say that war is declared against her.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Someone finally says it in public. Was it Gus? Gus Yandle was often at my tent.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Well, he remembers Fanny with affection. The good times at Forest Creek.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Would you be free for this dard, Mrs Finch?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And, and, round.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Who's leaving?

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Oh, Mr Yandle, I'm leaving.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I hope that other persons will corroborate my statement, as public opinion biased by the police report may injure her business and family.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  With such support, Fanny stepped up her public presence. In 1856, at the first Castle Main municipal elections, she and another woman, whose name we don't know, filled out ballots. Although women as a class couldn't vote in the colonies, as a ratepayer, Fanny was eligible to vote in local elections.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Edmund Jackson's on the ballot.

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  It's a pleasure to put a line through his name.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  But election officials refused to count Fanny's vote, or that of her female companion.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  They threw out our votes. We're ratepayers. They say we have no right because we're women.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Parliament then ruled that only male ratepayers were eligible to vote. But thrown out or not, Fanny's vote was one of the first ever cast by a woman in Australia. Her voting slip is on display in the Castle Main Art Museum. Someone kept it.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  A few months later, the bailiff raids Fanny's place.

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  They trash everything.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  She writes to the paper again.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Sir. I have no doubt that you will not allow an oppressed woman to be treated with the cruelty I have experienced a few days since. Imagine, sir, the sheriff sending down the bailiff to seize upon my goods, and after almost ruining me, quietly saying that he had mistaken me for a person of another name.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Mistaken identity was a ploy to intimidate Sligh Groggers, even if charges were later withdrawn.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  How could anyone mistake the notorious Fanny Finch for somebody else?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Everybody knows who I am.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Notice: Whereas a pretty little spaniel dog followed me home last Saturday week, the owner can have it back by paying me one pound and the expenses of this advertisement. If he does not pay me by Monday, I shall sell it, as I was offered five pound for it, and I cannot afford to keep it.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  The owner lodges a complaint against Fanny for illegally detaining his dog.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  In December 1858, police identified two haunts of prostitutes in Castle Main, Mrs Blossman's and Mrs Finch's.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  The goods and chattels at Littleton Street are auctioned off to pay back rent.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Sold up on Christmas Eve!

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Klaus the chemist sued her for non-payment of goods.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  During the proceedings, his lawyer said he would become jealous if Mrs Finch continued making private remarks to the judge.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  I would rather Adele talk to the judge than to him.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Bet that got a laugh in court.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  It did.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Following a new gold rush, Fanny went to Amist, but her new restaurant there burnt down. She lost everything.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  My little John died there. He was 12.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Fanny went back to Castle Main. Records show her in the company of a number of Castle Main businesswomen who ran so-called gay houses. It was not a fresh start.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  We were getting by, me and the children. Then I go into hospital with that cough, and you tell me I die.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  That's right, 1863.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  I'm, what, 48?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  But what a life!

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Oh Fanny, queen of the main, You fed them and gave them a fine place to stay. You sat at the table, but they wouldn't let you play. So you took ours and you showed us the way.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  On her death certificate, Fanny's father is Captain Francis Jackson, Navy. Her mother is Cecilia Hotham. But actually, her mother was Lydia Holloway, a servant. Her father was a footman named John King. They were unmarried and placed their baby in the London Foundling Hospital. But her name was not Fanny, it was Louisa King.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Louisa?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  And we even know when and where she was conceived.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I don't even know where Alice was conceived!

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Bill! The process of admission to the Foundling Hospital meant Fanny's mother Lydia had to tell them everything. Although Fanny was of African heritage, there was a policy of colour blindness, so no record was made of her parents' race. Fanny seemed to think they were both coloured. The girls in the home all sewed samplers, and embroidered on Fanny's were two persons of colour, one on each side of a house. On the back was written, "Francis Coombe, Foundling Girl, 15 years of age, 1830."

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Coombe?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Baby Louisa King was rebaptised Francis Coombe by the Foundling Hospital. It was standard practice. Fanny just made up Captain Jackson and Cecilia Hotham.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yet, they're in the family tree.

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  But not Fanny.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  How long was she in the Foundling home?

• 21:10Speaker 00

  I was there for 15 years.

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  Couldn't have been happier.

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  How else would I have learned to read and write?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  The hospital took pride in educating children for a useful life. At 15, Fanny started an apprenticeship in household management. Six years later, she gained a labourer's free passage to South Australia.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Frances Coombe arrived at the tent town of Adelaide in 1837. She was 22. Two years later, she married Joseph Finch. Four children survived seven pregnancies. After she left Joe, Fanny declared him alive or dead as it suited her purpose. For a debt, he was alive; a social matter, she was a widow.

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  I tell people, Mrs Finch begs to inform the local inhabitants that henceforth, she will carry on business for her children. I am a woman endeavouring to support my children in decency.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  By running a brothel, it seems.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  You try raising four kids on your own and see what you do.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Respectability was out of reach for Fanny, but maybe not for her daughter, Mary Julia. In 1858, at the age of 15 or 16, Mary Julia met a public servant named Oliver Warren Collins.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  He spouts Latin. The father's a rector in West Yorkshire. There's Church of England ministers in the family for 350 years.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Two years later, Mary and Oliver were married at the most fashionable church in Melbourne. Fanny recorded her written consent, but there was no mention of her in the wedding notice.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Maybe I was across the street, watching.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Joe got a mention, but it said he was dead. Joe didn't actually die for another 35 years. In 1853, he was convicted at Bunningong of robbery in company and sentenced to 10 years on the roads, the first two in chains. At the time of the wedding, Joe was a ticket-of-leaveman stuck in Gippsland.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Some people come out as convicts. In our family, they come out and become convicts.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Fanny takes Joe and herself out of the picture. She's constructing a new family.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  A white one.

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  The one we thought we were.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I find it hard to believe that someone so vividly present in her own life would erase herself like that.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  That's my family history, Bill. Look, I think it's great that we live in a time where not all white people see shame in connection to a coloured heritage. But it becomes more complicated when you look at it from the other side.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  At least you know who you are, Casey.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  No, I don't. You think colour makes it clearer? My Indian and Sri Lankan heritage might be evident in my skin, but just like yours, Bill, my family history was whitewashed. It's the only reason my mother and father's families were ever accepted into Australia. They had to prove they possessed as much white blood as they did South Asian. I have white privilege, just like you, and it was leveraged for gain, just as it was for you.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Alice and I haven't lived as persons of colour. The danger for us is a temptation to be self-congratulating about finding African heritage. But can you be charged with appropriating your own family history?

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, there's one thing we do agree on. Fanny was a remarkable person. She defended women and children. She insisted on her right to vote. She spoke up against corruption and abuse of power. I haven't heard anything like that about any of our other ancestors.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  No, no one.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Frankly, it's a relief to embrace a brothel keeper after all that Anglican respectability.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  We're all freer to claim Fanny now.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  But we lost her for a long time.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  I'm here, young William.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I'm so happy to have you in my family.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  I'm happy you're in mine. I'm a great, great, great, great grandmother now, I believe.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  I'm so happy I found out about you before I died.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Turns out you can find out lots of things after you've died.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Not just a family story though, is it?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  You were famous on the Goldfields, Fanny Finch. Probably the first woman to publish in the local press. And one of the first women to cast a vote in Australia.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  They threw out my vote.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  You were unfailingly kind too, and supportive of other women. And yet, until recently, and perhaps still in some people's minds, the tane of sex work clouds your reputation.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  I was a ratepayer.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Your story isn't finished.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  They tried to drive me out.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  There are still so many gaps. Ambiguities. Mysteries.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  I was lying in an unmarked grave.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  With a headstone now.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  What does it say?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Brave? Outspoken? Castle Main's first businesswoman.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  A pioneer of the district.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  I can't tell you how important it is to find you.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you for looking for me.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Finding Fanny Finch was adapted from the stage play, based on research by Casey Sinclair, written by Bill Garner and Sue Gale, and performed by Bill Garner, Alice Garner and Casey Sinclair. Castlemain band Friends of Wendy Cotton original music was recorded by Casey Rice. It was produced for Radio National by Miyuki Yokiranta. The sound engineer was Angie Grant, with additional music mixing by Brendan O'Neill. I'm Hilary Harper. Thanks for your company on Rewind, a production for ABC Radio National.