Force and Fraud Read Free

instance, that his deputy, Patrick Whyte, had grossly insulted him by leaving the ‘Esquire’ off Davitt’s name on an envelope; thus implying that the Principal was no gentleman. Whyte retorted: “in all my experience I have never been associated with a man with whom it is so difficult to act harmoniously”. 18
    Davitt was undoubtedly difficult, but he was also dying – in an environment that would have driven a healthy man to distraction. Relations with the Board, and with staff, steadily deteriorated throughout the late 1850s. It was at this point that the political climate of Victoria changed, with the goldfields boom time declining to a recession. The supporters of the Denominational system in the name of cost-cutting slashed the budget of the National Board of Education.
    There were thus insufficient funds to run the Model School in the style to which it had been accustomed. The Board chose to abolish teacher training at the school and also the positions of the Davitts. They were given the option of continuing at the school for one final year, at reduced salary, or being discharged with the sum of £500. The couple chose the latter, although they felt a proper compensation would have been double that amount. 19
    Ellen Davitt’s response to the dismissal was energetic and combatant. She signed the discharge form under protest, asserting her ‘right of appeal to another and a higher tribunal’. The retort was sent from Granite Terrace, Carlton Gardens; where she opened, several months after the dismissal, the grandly titled Ladies’ Institute of Victoria. This school was advertised in Melbourne papers of 1859, as open for boarders and day pupils, and also offering evening classes, and training for governesses.
    Girls’ schools might have been Ellen’s employment, but she could also poke fun at them. A character in her novel The Wreck of the Atalanta complained that a Ladies Seminary meant: “Weak tea, and bread and butter, and girls in short frocks making curtsies when they enter the room, and a piano always stunning one to death.” 20
    The private education market in Melbourne was highly competitive, and similar establishments included the Ladies’ College, run by Mr and Mrs Vieusseux. Ellen Davitt and Julie Vieusseux had coincided before, in the world of art. In 1857, both had work hung in the Victorian Society of Fine Arts’s first exhibition; amongst a stellar gathering including Strutt, Von Guerard and Chevalier. The only other woman exhibiting was Georgiana McCrae, better known as a diarist. Ellen submitted a Saint Cecilia, for which it is recorded several girls at the Model School posed.
    It was clearly large – the price was £105 – but also over-ambitious. The critics were merciless: “a tremendous thing for a lady to do, but it had much better have been undone.” 21 Vieusseux and McCrae had kinder treatment, although their submissions, being a copy and miniatures respectively, would have more suited the conventional view of women’s abilities.
    Ellen Davitt had no luck as an artist, nor with her Institute. The private school market was overstocked and, as Marjorie Theobald has observed, Ellen’s Catholicism would have been a disadvantage. It seems that it rapidly failed, taking with it the Davitt’s severance pay. 22
    Arthur was apparently too ill to be involved in the venture. He had gone to Geelong for the sea air, where he died, on 24 January 1860. Fifteen years later, the memory still enraged Ellen enough for her to refer to her husband’s ‘murder’. She alleged:
    I will boldly say that from the moment that notorious bigot, Sir James Palmer, knew that my husband was a Catholic, he made every attempt to deprive him of his office [...] and being unable to find a fault – the office was abolished. 23
    Sir James Palmer was the Chairman of the National Board of Education, and a prominent Anglican