Two governors were more or less recalled (Darling and Bowen), one was driven to death through overwork (Hotham), a fourth left widely condemned as a failure (La Trobe). Marguerite Hancock, having experienced first-hand the work of a contemporary vicereine, as secretary to three of them, has written a study of the wives of the first ten governors. It is a companion to an earlier work on the governors themselves by Dr Davis McCaughey and is a handsomely produced book.

The author set herself two questions: who were the vicereines and what did they do? A third question – what were their relations with colonial society? – might not have gone amiss. As far as colonists were concerned, it was the question. Despite Victoria’s radical reputation, the colony as a whole had an insatiable if inconsistent appetite for attention from its governors and their wives, as well as for honours from the Crown, while Society – the local equivalent of the upper ten thousand (divided and embattled though it was) – expected even more from the viceregal incumbents. Being generally conservative, Society rallied to the governors when they were under attack from liberals and the people; equally, it turned against governors who supported liberals during constitutional crises.

The life of a vicereine was not easy – many were not bred to rule and few had the personality or social gifts to bridge the gap between themselves and their subjects (often fractious, touchy, vulgar and self-important). The most vivid pictures of these official women are from the pens of old colonial hands, invariably conservatives. After a portrait of the homesick Mrs La Trobe (not a governor’s wife until 1851), which sets a rather lowering introductory tone, the book settles down to a systematic review of the wives and their interests, especially their patronage of philanthropy and the arts. Their attendance at the opera and the theatre is well documented; it gave financial encouragement to those artistic companies which ventured to Melbourne. Similarly, their patronage of charities enhanced institutions at a time when such bodies often relied on support from the churches and voluntary organisations. In the moral department, the vicereines were all that Queen Victoria would have wanted, although perhaps even the Queen might have preferred a little sparkle at times.

Sparkle is provided in spades by Lady Bowen, born Contessa Diamentina di Roma, a member of the Italian aristocracy of the island of Zante, then part of the seven Ionian Islands ruled by Britain. Lady Bowen, Australia’s most famous nineteenth-century Greek, was a woman of great dash, musical ability, charm and hospitality. Her popularity even survived the Governor’s fall from conservative grace, when he was judged to have aligned himself too closely to the liberals and, above all, when he signed the notorious order dismissing the cream of the old Civil Service, known as Black Wednesday. When Bowen was in effect recalled, the ladies of Melbourne presented her with a diamond tiara and a diamond and pearl pendant. (One assumes, though it is not spelt out, that the ladies were those in Society and not merely the wives of liberal politicians.)

Equalling, if not exceeding, Lady Bowen in popularity, was Lady Loch, who seems to have inherited the charm and address which had made her family (the Villiers) royal favourites ever since the shapely legs of George Villiers caught the experienced eye of James I. Like her husband, Elizabeth Loch suited the boom period of the 1880s. Even the Governor is supposed to have speculated, and the Lochs entertained on a large scale. Generous entertainment was the sure way to the colonial heart. How the Lochs afforded the outlay of expenditure remains a mystery, despite the assiduous research of the author. Their hospitality certainly contrasted with the ‘frigid parsimony’ of the Normanbys, a much richer family of grandees and the previous viceroys.

For modern readers unacquainted with nineteenth-century etiquette and with the conventions of a viceregal court, the book offers a thorough introduction to At Homes, Small and Earlys, the Birthday Ball, the levee, the day when the vicereine received and the claustrophobic high official circle in Melbourne, while the vexed questions of where to draw the line, and whom to visit, and the different rules relating to town and country are aired. Connoisseurs of colonial society may question the judgments exhibited on Lady Clarke on pages 135 and 167, and wonder whether a Snodgrass would need viceregal approval – unless, of course, to outflank the pastoral dynasties of lower origins.

One may regret that more is not made of the problems posed to governors and their wives by such a mixed society as that of nineteenth-century Victoria, but the appearance of so lengthy a work suggests how far the study of Australian history has progressed in the last thirty-five years. When I first tried to write what became Port Phillip Gentlemen, in 1967, my then supervisor dismissed the topic as ‘frivolous’.

Colonial Consorts does not altogether escape the hushed formality of the court memoir (how tedious most courts must have been in reality); nor does it endow the women (apart from Lady Bowen and Lady Loch) with that interest which so many pioneer women so vividly convey. Many remain dim, isolated and somewhat sickly shadows of husbands trying to carry out a difficult job. The study makes the due nod towards the ubiquitous Leonore Davidoff (what is her secret?) and her tribe, but it is a useful addition to the growing bookshelf of works on upper-class Australia, and it generally avoids the solecisms and anachronisms committed by those in thrall to the sociological and ideological schools of thought.