Patricia Grimshaw

Colonial women on intercultural frontiers: Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker∗

In a way unusual for their sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three colonial women, Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker, contributed in minor but not insignificant ways to knowledge of Australian settlement. The dominant colonial discourse obscured white cruelty on the frontier and denigrated Aborigines and their culture. Praed, Bundock and Parker, squatters’ daughters and pastoralists’ wives, made a bid for public recognition, one as a novelist, two as ethnographer and folklorist. While undeniably aligned to the colonists’ value systems, the women challenged accepted wisdom to affirm aspects of Aboriginal lives and cultures, while questioning white behaviour and practices.

Federation as a turning point in Australian history

Popular commemoration of Federation in the centenary year was marked by positive evaluation of the emergence of Australia as a nation state. The historical narratives upon which speakers and writers drew reiterated representations of events that disguised colonial denial of the human and civil rights of Aborigines. Both formally in the Constitution and in subsequent legislation establishing political rights, and administratively in the management of Indigenous concerns, settler governments removed existing rights and simultaneously applied new controls on Aborigines’ entitlements to compensation for lost land and to personal autonomy. A close look at some Victorian Aborigines’ assertion of rights at the turn of the century and the frustration of their endeavours complicates the story of the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia in equality, democracy and respect for human rights.

Colonising motherhood: evangelical social reformers and Koorie women in Victoria, Australia, 1880s to the early 1900s

Abstract This article examines the separate worlds of evangelical social reformers of the Worlds Womans Christian Temperance Union and mission-based Indigenous women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the colony of Victoria. The Womans Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) activists, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, claimed maternal moral authority to promote for their sex a legitimate place in public life and full citizenship. Simultaneously Koorie women on the scattered mission stations of the colony, their lives under increasingly intrusive surveillance, were forced on painfully unequal terms to negotiate with mission managers and colonial officials for the right even to raise their own children. Unable to perceive the plight of Koorie mothers, the WCTU reformers, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, aligned themselves with the so-called ‘civilising’ endeavours of their fellow evangelicals, the missionaries, oblivious...

Caring for Country: Yuwalaraay Women and Attachments to Land on an Australian Colonial Frontier

Focusing on colonial Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century, we read the texts of a white ethnologist, Katie Langloh Parker, to explore the ways in which Yuwalaraay women of northern New South Wales sustained their links to land and culture. The wife of a pastoralist who held a government lease on a huge tract of former Aboriginal territory and mistress of numerous Aboriginal domestic servants, Parker was complicit in colonialism. Given her childhood experiences of Aboriginal playmates and an intellectual curiosity about the Yuwalaraay, she was at the same time more sympathetic than the majority of colonial commentators in her portrayal of indigenous lives, par-ticularly of indigenous women whom male anthropologists seldom secured as informants. The complexities of utilizing a white womans writings as sources for understanding Aboriginal women are multiple: in this instance, Yuwalaraay womens experiences of necessity reached readers through the lens of a colonial womans perceptions. Nevertheless, we argue that, given the paucity of other literary sources for the period, Parkers writings warrant serious attention, principally for the insight they offer into Yuwalaraay womens continued care of their land and maintenance of the cultural practices so closely related to it. Parkers accounts of the Yuwalaraay become especially significant in light of the long overdue land rights legislation of the 1990s, under which Aborigines have been forced to prove continuing historical attachments to former tribal lands in order to claim title or usage.

Introduction: reading the lives of white mission women

In this special edition of the Journal of Australian Studies, nine contributors consider the work of missionary women of British, Irish and European origin who worked in the Australian mission field over a period from the 1860s to the 1980s. The articles were first delivered as papers at a workshop held at parliament house in Brisbane in March 2013 to mark International Women’s Day that the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Griffith University sponsored. As the organisers, we hoped that the conjunction of senior and early career historians with several missionary descendants and practitioners from inside the churches would widen discussion of an area of women’s history that warrants closer examination. Ideologically, these mission women were situated within the cultural values of a western humanitarian Christian understanding of their duties and responsibilities to their fellow human beings in non-western societies. Humanitarians across Britain’s settler and ex-settler colonies shared a commitment to defend the interests of the weak and exploited. As historians have noted, they did not necessarily oppose colonialism itself. They thought that colonisation facilitated the transmission of the Christian faith and exposed nonChristian peoples to the benign influence of the true religion. The humanitarian enterprise thus had a dual edge: it posited indigenous peoples as equal human beings in the eyes of God, but saw them as being in need of assuming their full humanity through embracing Christianity and Christian civilisation. The critical scholarly recovery of humanitarian women that emerged in western historical literature with the resurgence of the women’s movement in the 1970s has

Rethinking approaches to women in missions: The case of colonial Australia

This paper focuses on three women in Protestant missions from the later decades of the nineteenth century to the 1920s, examining the circumstances that made cross-cultural exchanges of faith, learning, family and work on Australian missions distinctive. On sites where missionaries, Indigenous residents, government bureaucrats and neighbouring settlers were all stakeholders with competing interests, the white mission women held out the promise to Indigenous Christian women of creative new life opportunities. They believed, mistakenly, that they could deliver on their promises, despite living in the midst of a society and working within settler governmental regimes that were thriving on Indigenous dispossession. The article considers fragmentary glimpses of these concerns as they emerged within the writings of white and Indigenous Christian women in Manunka (South Australia), Mapoon on Cape York (Queensland) and East Gippsland (Victoria). This article has been peer-reviewed.

Reading the Silences: Suffrage Activists and Race in Nineteenth-Century Settler Societies

In December 1894 a majority of men in both houses of the legislature of the colony of South Australia passed an Act granting women 21 years and over the right to vote and stand for Parliament. This was without doubt progressive liberal legislation, through which South Australian women became among the first women in the world to enjoy full political rights. Since the 1894 Act had no race bar, Aboriginal women received the vote along with white women, just as Aboriginal men had in effect been enfranchised in 1858 when South Australia brought in universal male suffrage. The vote had done nothing to improve Aboriginal men’s situations, nor the life chances of their families. Aborigines’ problems were multiple; they were by far the most disadvantaged people in the colony though a small group of Chinese, Indian and other non-white immigrants also suffered from white settler racism. The Aborigines, the survivors and children of survivors of the early tragic acts of colonial dispossession, had become increasingly marginalized and impoverished as white settlement flourished.

In pursuit of true Anglican Womanhood in Victoria, 1880-1914

Abstract As colonial women sought to extend their sphere of moral influence they encountered opposition from the Churches, which saw themselves as the proper guardians of public morality. This paper examines the attitudes of the Anglican Church at the turn of the century in regard to the ‘woman question‘, and argues that the Church acted to contain the threat posed by womens expanding sphere while continuing to benefit from, and indeed depend upon, womens fund-raising and administrative activities.

Equal subjects, unequal rights

This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlements in place by 1910. Drawing on a wide range of sources, its comparative approach provides an insight into the historical foundations of present-day controversies in these settler societies. The assertion of exclusive control over the land and the need to contain indigenous resistance meant that the governments preferred to grant citizenship rights to those indigenous peoples committed to individual property and a willingness to abandon indigenous status. However, particular historical circumstances in the new democracies resulted in very different outcomes. At one extreme Maori men and women in New Zealand had political rights similar to those of white colonists; at the other, the Australian parliament denied the vote to all Aborigines. Similarly, the new South African Government laid the foundations for apartheid, whilst Canada made enfranchisement conditional on assimilation. These differences are explored through the common themes of property rights, indigenous cultural and communal affiliations, demography and gender. This book is written in a clear readable style, accessible at all levels from first-year undergraduates to academic specialists in the fields of Imperial and Colonial History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies.

Women in conversation: a wartime social survey in Melbourne, Australia 1941-43

Abstract This article examines the gendered dimensions of relationships in the conduct of a major academic Australian social survey in Melbourne in the early years of the Second World War. Despite its grounding in methodology current in Britain at the time, its execution and outcomes mirrored the gendered and classed nature of the survey, with its male direction, middleclass female interviewers, and largely working-class respondents. The value of ‘womens conversations’ was reflected in the fullness of the findings that were made publicly available in subsequent years.