Saturday 5 May 1883
Menzies Hotel, Melbourne, Victoria

Charlie O’Reilly stood, ignored, by the door of the most talked-about event in Melbourne, overwhelmed by the knowledge that despite her beautiful dress and her kindly patrons, she did not belong. What would her mother say? Something about silk purses and sow’s ears?

In her last term at the East Melbourne Academy for Young Ladies, Charlotte O’Reilly—Charlie to her closest friends and family—had no idea how her benefactress Eliza McLeod had secured her an invitation to the social event of the year, a party thrown by the prominent member of the Legislative Council, Caleb Hunt, and his wife Adelaide to celebrate both the safe return of their eldest son, Daniel, from his travels abroad, and his coming of age.

When the invitation arrived, Charlie had cracked the seal on the heavy cream envelope and withdrawn the stiff, gilt-edged card with Miss C. O’Reilly inscribed in copperplate at the top. Her school friends oohed and ahhed and told her how lucky she was, but she knew that behind her back they probably laughed and sneered.

Eliza McLeod had taken her to a dressmaker in Collins Street, as excited as any Mama would be about a daughter’s first proper ball. Madame tutted at Charlie’s height—‘Too tall!’—and lack of feminine proportions—‘Too thin!’—but the green silk evening dress she produced was the most beautiful thing Charlie had ever owned. Eliza smiled and said it brought out the green in Charlie’s eyes. Eliza’s nine-year-old daughter, Cecilia, who had accompanied her mother on the shopping expedition, clapped her hands and declared that Charlie looked like a princess.

On the night of the party, those of her schoolmates not invited helped her dress. They twisted and curled her hair into fashion-able ringlets and gushed over the lustrous emerald earrings and necklace that Eliza McLeod had loaned her. For all her physical failings Charlie thought, as she turned to admire herself in the mirror, she had scrubbed up quite well. Her mother would not recognise her.

But nothing in her rough-and-tumble upbringing or even the years at the academy had really prepared her for such a high-society party. Several girls from the school were there, dancing attendance on the scion of the Hunt household, but even with Eliza and her husband Alec McLeod beside her, Charlie felt awkward, out of place and alone.

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