Originally in the 1800s, Bachelors and Spinsters Balls were formal events held in a local hall to mix singles from the countryside.
They were chaperoned and had a lot riding on family reputations and futures, considering there was no contraception to prevent shameful out of wedlock pregnancies. It was back when human feet, and horse and carts were the only means of transportation, leaving many farms isolated by distances that took half a day to cover, which a car can now cover in minutes.
Farm life can be hard, but it was harder back then. The men worked dawn to dusk, mustering stock, calving, shearing, ploughing and planting by hand and horse drawn machinery. The women were generally stuck alone in the house with nothing but hard work—screaming kids, chopping wood, making meals, dealing with Coolgardie safes, carting water and wishing for female company. You didn’t get a wage for working on the family farm, it was just the reality that if you lived on the farm, the profits of anything sold went back into the farm to keep it running and feed and clothe yourself and your family. You had to find other ways for personal money, like selling rabbit skins, but it wasn’t a real disposable income.
It was also in the days before the diagnosis of depression, but it wasn’t uncommon to hear of a woman wandering off into a dam and never resurfacing, or for a man to his gun on himself. Matchmaking and socialisation took a real effort, and thus the original B&S ball was a concerted effort to create new family units and keep country society together.
The balls have evolved with Australian society. Gone are the days of rigid dance steps, set on formality and religious fears, and women being banned from drinking in pubs with men. And largely the societal shame of unmarried pregnancies has gone. And while it might be unpopular with some hot heads, feminism, capitalism & advances in technology are the three big reasons that the B&S balls have their own brand of sexual revolution. If the suffragettes hadn’t started the efforts for equality by fighting for the right for women to vote, and the World Wars hadn’t pushed women into the workforce, and the feminists hadn’t then fought to stay in the workforce and give the woman the opportunity to become educated, and give women a (mostly) equal standing in society, then when the pill and condoms came along, their use would still be restricted to married couples only. Sex outside marriage would still be an absolute taboo rather than fun for consenting parties, and the resulting pregnancies would still be scandalous. The burden of shame would still be dumped on the woman, despite the man’s equal part in conception. There would still be mothers homes and quiet adoptions, backyard abortions and unhappy forced marriages. And woman would still be banned from drinking in the pubs.
Add in how capitalism has changed society so much that the right for men and women to work is not really a choice but now an equal necessity. But in doing so, it has given many people the economic freedom and disposable income to spend on things like pimping out utes, dolling up in RM Williams and paying for the fuel and ticket to attend a B&S ball.
It also means being able to afford the advances in technology like your computer or smart phone to look up the list of balls on a Facebook page and call or text your mates on the other side of the state and organise a convoy. The advances in technology has brought ball goers the petrol and diesel combustion engines to cover the distance in hours that would have taken days for a horse and cart to traverse, and now the local BNS’s are opened up to anyone in the state or further afield.
Without capitalism, feminism and the advances in technology, the closest thing to the BNSs of today would be a bunch of blokes standing around drinking, scratching themselves without a root insight. And the women would still be banned from drinking in the pub.
Without capitalism, feminism and the advances in technology, the closest thing to the BNSs of today would be a bunch of blokes standing around drinking, scratching themselves without a root insight. And the women would still be banned from drinking in the pub.
But in reality, a B&S is equality in action, the way the women can drink with the best of the men, get just as loud, behave just as badly or better, drive their own bushpig utes and be as forward in pulling a root into their swag. Or they can just go hang out, not root anyone, not get raped and have a great time with their BNS compatriots.
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