FRIDAY APRIL 5
THREE-RING CIRCUS: The dramatic, mysterious and tragic life of Mabel Worley, a Destitute Asylum Girl.
Corinne Ball
Mabel Worley was at first glance a nobody – a working-class girl who had an illegitimate child at 16, fell into a life of booze and crime and died alone as a sad old woman. But Mabel’s life was much more than these bare bones. As a ‘bad girl’ making her way as best she could, Mabel lived an extraordinary life that was in many ways typical but in others so very different. She was a sinner, a strumpet, and a circus star, in a world that chewed poor women up and spat them out, but still, she persisted: she adapted, she dissembled, she acted, and she endured.
Corrine uncovers Mabel’s sensational story of love, family, rebellion, loss, sex, secrets, and circus, and untangles a family mystery left unsolved for over 100 years. Mabel’s story will give you an insight into a lost world of public and private lives and show how one woman’s lifetime encompassed the snowballing changes happening in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia and beyond.
About the speaker: Corinne Ball is a senior curator at the History Trust of South Australia with a particular interest in social welfare history, migration, women’s history, and disability. She was one of the curators who produced the MAGNA award-winning exhibition In this place: a history of the Migration Museum site in 2016, and continues to research, and write about, residents of Adelaide’s Destitute Asylum.
MONTHLY TALKS are held at 7.30pm sharp at the BURNSIDE CITY UNITING CHURCH, 384 Portrush Rd, off Fisher St.