Popular culture would have us believe women of the goldfields were sex workers or saucy barmaids, and history is patchy about how women of the era lived, but a talk in Cromwell will address these misconceptions next week.

Central Otago Heritage Trust’s (COHT) is bringing Dr Charlotte King to speak on ‘Women on the Otago Goldfields - More than just objects of Scandal’.

Due to the level of interest, the final winter series event will be held at the Cromwell Museum twice. You can still register to attend the second session. 

Dr Charlotte King, a lecturer in the Department of Anatomy at University of Otago, specialises in using chemical analysis of human tissues to understand diet and human mobility in the past.

She has published several papers on Otago’s early European settlers, covering how they lived and died and what we can learn from bioarchaeology (the study of human remains in an archaeological context).

In her blog, Charlotte said even the ‘respectable’ middle-upper class married women on the goldfields rarely had a voice in society.

She wrote “newspaper accounts never tell the full story… often single women came to work at the goldfields hotels, as laundry maid, seamstresses, barmaids, dancing girls or housekeepers.

“These were independent young women, who made good wages but worked extremely hard to do so. Some… even became business owners, running local institutions like the Masonic Hotel in Lawrence.”   

Drybread cemetery in Central Otago, where the Southern Cemeteries Archaeology project (which Charlotte is a part of) has excavated graves to reconstruct stories of life in the Otago goldfields

Entry is by koha, and sessions are Wednesday August 24, 6.30 - 7.45pm and Thursday August 25, 10.30 -12.00 noon. Proceeds go to the museum. 

Read more about Charlotte’s work on her blog here.