Karen Hughes

Federation’s children—white women’s ‘entangled lives’ in interwar Australia: Ruth Heathcock and Phyllis Flower

ABSTRACT This article concerns two white women missionary nurses who, in the wake of Australian Federation, and its policies to instigate a white Australia, had significantly different relationships with Aboriginal people than those typically imagined in Australian culture: Ruth Rayney (1901–1994), born in rural South Australia at the stroke of Federation in January 1901, and Phyllis Flower (1889–1926), born twelve years earlier in central Queensland. The women’s trajectories connected at the Point McLeay Mission, South Australia where they worked in the 1920s. Their stories allow us to see how women’s cross-cultural relationships challenged the settler-colonial order, leaving an enduring imprint on how we understand race relations in this period. Taking a microhistorical approach I explore how such entanglements form in the everyday worlds of frontiers, despite the racialised logics of the colonising state that imperilled white women who stepped outside their bounds into the ‘third space’ of the contact zone.

Stories my Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego-Histoire

In 1997, I accompanied the oldest Ngarrindjeri person, the distinguished storyteller, Aunty Hilda Wilson, then aged 86 and becoming a staunch friend, home to Country, to the Aboriginal community of Raukkan, the former Point McLeay Mission on the southern edge of Lake Alexandrina. Aunty Hilda was born there in 1911, a year that marked the legal separation of South Australian Aboriginal and settler peoples with the passing of the SA Aborigines Act 1911.2 As we stepped onto the shore of Lake Alexandrina, she led me to a clump of rushes in the sand, where her mother, Olive Varcoe (née Rankine), once sat and picked the fine but sturdy fibres with her sisters and Country-women, weaving the famous Ngarrindjeri baskets for sale and personal use. The women washed clothes here in a kerosene-tin over an open fire, gossiped and laughed, cared for little ones, and discussed important business. Aunty Hilda soon told me of sitting patiently alongside her great-grandmother, Ellen Sumner (1842–1925), at large ceremonial gatherings near this site during the 1910s and 1920s. From Ellen Sumner, renowned composer and singer, she also learnt Pata Winema, ‘the old corroborree song’. Hilda claimed to discern the meaning of only one of its lyrics, lieuwen: to ‘lay down’, ‘sleep’ or ‘rest’. Many believe this was adapted as a sorcery song against settlers for the destruction their intrusion brought (Bell 1998, p. 155).