HURDY GURDY GIRLS
The story goes that the hurdy gurdy girls originated in the German state of Hessen (Hesse), then an independent country, in the early nineteenth century. Hessian farmers made brooms during the winter for sale the next summer. This cottage industry grew very quickly, especially when the makers discovered that ‘sex sells.’ Pretty young ladies dancing to the loud and piercing sound of a hurdy gurdy attracted customers like nothing else. The idea quickly spread and before long hurdy gurdy girls, also known as ‘hessian broom girls’, were becoming a nuisance on the city streets of Europe, America and Australia.
From at least the 1850s, descriptions of hurdy gurdy girls begin to appear in the Australian press. They were in Melbourne in 1857 and Cowra in 1861. In 1860 they were in Bathurst
There is nothing new to be seen in Bathurst-everything is tame and uninteresting. Those ubiquitous. German girls with cracked voices and broken-winded instruments, parade the streets from daylight till dark, and become a pest to anyone who has once been soft enough to reward their excruciating melodies. [i]
In the early years of Forbes the girls were part of everyday life:
Tens of thousands of miners went out to their work at sunrise, land returned at 6 in the evening. Then, many thousands of fires were lighted, and the diggers prepared their evening meal. Comparative quiet reigned while they were partaking of it; but, that over, all is bustle again, for, with few exceptions, the diggers betook themselves to the theatres, concert halls, dancing saloons, or public-houses, and many did not return to their tents until dawn. The shepherds swanned out at sunrise, and in again at midday. Scores of shoeblacks took up positions in the streets, and did a wonderful trade; hurdy-gurdy girls and other itinerant musicians played and sang, and reaped a rich harvest; mounted troopers and policemen (under Sir F. Pottinger) moved to and fro among the masses; coaches were running at all hours, and in all directions, while occasional visits to the district of the notorious bushrangers— O'Malley, Gilbert, and Ben Hall— added to the general excitement. Six theatres, as well as various concert balls and dancing saloons, were crowded nightly. [ii]
Hurdy gurdy girls were a feature of goldfield dance halls and saloons where they were sometimes known as ‘hurdies’. By now though, the originally innocent hurdy gurdy girls had fallen prey to the sex trade. Unscrupulous agents would convince their parents to allow the girls to travel with them in return for a share of their earnings. Rightly or wrongly, the hurdy gurdy girls were held to be of low moral character, though men visiting dance halls considered it a great honour to win a dance with one of these dancing damsels.
The most consistent theme in descriptions of the hurdies is the discordant sound of their instruments. The hurdy gurdy is a medieval instrument played by turning a rosined wheel that rubs along a number of strings, including drones, in imitation of a fiddle bow. There is a basic keyboard along the outer side of the instrument, which is very loud. Ideal for street music and attracting attention to whatever wares might be on sale. By the time they reached Australia, hurdy gurdy girls might be playing the less audibly confronting and easier to manage concertina or, according to some accounts, street organs, though they continued to dance to the ghost music they made.
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