The Gippsland ‘giants’ and the roadshow that made them famous
Gippsland’s Snell family turned public curiosity about their size into a venture that saw them travel the world and amass a small fortune as the ‘Australian Giant Family’.
Victoria
Don't miss out on the headlines from Victoria. Followed categories will be added to My News.
In June 1914 the small Victorian town of Bunyip was preparing for a funeral unlike any they had ever seen.
The coffin was almost twice as big as normal.
Seven feet long, three feet wide and two feet deep, there was no way it would fit in the town’s horse-drawn hearse.
Instead it was heaved onto an open cart, which followed behind the hearse to the final resting place.
It took eight men to lift the coffin into the grave using twice as many ropes as usual.
Standing at the graveside was the deceased’s sister. She weighed almost 200kg.
But even she was smaller than Clara Snell, the woman whose body occupied the coffin.
Well over six feet tall, Clara had weighed more than 250kg at her heaviest.
Her unusual height and weight, characteristics shared by her siblings, had made her famous the world over.
Now she was dead at the age of 38.
Before the soil was tipped into Clara Snell’s grave, a banner that had been used as an advertisement during her world tour was placed on the coffin.
These days, the Snell siblings would be considered taller than average and struggling with obesity.
But to the townspeople of Bunyip in 1914, in a time when the average height and weight was lower, there was no doubt.
They were burying a giant.
BIG CHILDREN
Clara Snell was the eldest of three siblings born in Bunyip in the late 19th Century.
By the time she was in her early teens it was clear the Snells were not like other children their age.
Clara, her brother Tom and sister Anna kept getting bigger and bigger, in height and girth. And it didn’t seem to make any sense.
The children’s mother and father, William and Elizabeth, who ran a Gippsland bakery, weighed no more than about 65kg their whole lives and were normal height, according to reports.
That made the size of the children a public curiosity. Before long they were well known in the region as ‘giants’.
That was when their parents were approached by the manager of the Melbourne Waxworks in the city.
The waxworks was a hall of amusements in Bourke St that was home to uncanny wax figures, macabre exhibits and a series of sideshows and illusions in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
People of unusually small or large stature put on performances alongside magic acts, such as the ‘half woman’, who used an optical illusion to appear as if her lower half was missing.
In one show a Hungarian man put on an incredible starvation act by sitting in a glass cabinet for 53 days straight at the waxworks, living off nothing but soda water and cigarettes.
The Snell children were asked to take part in an exhibit – and their parents agreed.
They exhibited in Melbourne in the 1880s around the same time as ‘Chang the Giant’, a Chinese man who was about eight feet tall.
At their first showing, Clara was in her teens and Anna was younger than 10. By today’s standards such exhibits were demeaning.
But the Snell siblings, who loved music and dancing, became immensely popular and evidently enjoyed their fame. After successful shows at the Melbourne waxworks they toured the country, then the world.
Before long they were travelling around the globe as ‘The Australian Giant Family’.
It was written in Australian newspapers that the Gippsland Giants, who received favourable reviews and were widely loved across Europe and America where they were hosted in all the major exhibitions, had done more to advertise and promote Australia to the world than highly paid commissioners and diplomats.
But travel was not without its challenges.
Train carriages of the time could not accommodate the large Snell siblings.
They were forced to travel in the guard carriages, which had wide double doors.
RETURN TO GIPPSLAND
After years on the road, the Snell sisters Anna and Clara had amassed a small fortune.
They used it to settle down in the Gippsland town of Drouin where they purchased and operated the well-known Robin Hood Hotel.
Clara, always the largest of the siblings, died in 1914.
Anna married a man named Small and, remarkably, became Mrs Small. She died in 1930.
Their brother Tom, who gave up touring as a giant in his early 20s, became a store owner in Nat Nar Goon and lived into his 70s, dying in 1949.
MORE NEWS
PIRATES AND KILLERS ON BASS STRAIT