Victoria Haskins

Sex, race and power: Aboriginal men and white women in Australian history

Nearly every recent history of Aboriginal peoples in Australia makes some reference to relationships between Aboriginal women and white men, but virtually none mentions the inverse relationships between Aboriginal men and white women. The present paper examines these historically obscure and erased interracial relationships. These relationships represent a myriad of experiences, any study of sex and love across racial boundaries being a revelation of devotion, fear, triumph and pain, as well as of broader cultural and gender issues, legal and political struggles. A collaborative methodology and approach recognises the significance of race and gender perspectives in researching and writing interracial history.

From the centre to the city: modernity, mobility and mixed-descent Aboriginal domestic workers from central Australia

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a number of young Aboriginal women, of mixed descent, were brought down from Alice Springs in central Australia to the city of Adelaide, to work as domestic servants. Their mobility was a product of the colonizing project, inextricable from the very modernity that was discursively denied Aboriginal people at that time. Indeed, these domestic workers were young women whose journeys crossed all kinds of boundaries and frontiers, and whose very presence in the households of the colonizers was inherently destabilizing. While their journeys from the centre to the city have been all but invisible in feminist historiography of the frontier, this article argues the historical significance of a different kind of moving female frontier—one in which Aboriginal women made mobile by colonization were themselves active historical agents.

'Could you see to the return of my daughter': Fathers and daughters under the New South Wales Aborigines protection board child removal policy

In 1939 an Aboriginal father approached the secretary of a Sydney‐based organization agitating for Aboriginal citizenship rights, to seek her assistance in locating his daughter who had been taken from his care by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board. He was not alone, but one of a number of concerned parents who sought the return of their daughters through the Committee for Aboriginal Citizenship. The fact that Aboriginal fathers were involved in this campaign challenges the stereotype of the ‘fatherless’ mixed‐race child that underpinned the states presumption of a patriarchal authority over Aboriginal girls and unmarried women—a stereotype that endures. The following article exposes the maladministration of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board and highlights the assumptions about race and gender that are embedded in the history of the Stolen Generations.

A better chance

The apprenticeship scheme for Aboriginal children drew on a 500-year tradition of forcing the children of the poor and itinerant into domestic ‘apprenticeships’ for which they received little or no wage. With the rapid upsurge of enclosures of the common land in England from the early eighteenth century, there was an equally rapid rise in rural dispossession and poverty. The system of Poor Relief became a customary source of cheap domestic labour as pauper children could be obtained as ‘apprentices to Housewifery’ at the cost of providing their lodgings, food and clothing, and the use of institutions and such apprenticeships in tandem provided the system for state and charitable care of destitute children. In the colony of New South Wales, where the assignment system represented the only source of domestic labour from the establishment of the colony in 1788 until well into the nineteenth century, the apprenticing of children from institutions was inevitable. Yet by the time the Board secured a legislative base to compel Aboriginal girls into service, the practice of institutionalization followed by apprenticeship had fallen into disfavour for the children of poor white people — and especially with regard to girls.

& so we are ‘slave-owners’

In May 1934, Ming was thrilled to be introduced to a real flesh-and-blood ‘little Missus’. She was at a fund-raising bridge party for the Sane Democracy Association, a right-wing, anti-Communist group. An elderly woman, Mrs Tenny, had previously lived in the Northern Territory — ‘the only white woman for hundreds of miles’. Having ‘at once asked [her] about my beloved Aborigines’ and expecting an equally fond rejoinder, Ming was shocked by Mrs Tenny’s response. Mrs Tenny’s husband had been the manager of a Bovril meat works, and she told Ming that ‘we always had them working on our Stations …. We had a string of Stations from the Territory to Adelaide & they worked for us in hundreds’.

Down in the gully & just outside the garden walk: white women and the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women on a colonial Australian frontier

At the close of the nineteenth century, the accusation that three young white women had colluded in their uncle’s sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women in the northwest of Western Australia caused consternation for the authorities. Unlike the accusation of ‘immorality’ levelled at station-owner Walter Nairn, the charge of complicity against his three nieces is a rarity in the Australian colonial archive. The ensuing investigation in 1898 revolved around whether the white women’s alleged role was common talk in the local community and whether the Aboriginal women who lived and worked in the Nairn household slept in the bedrooms of the white women. It culminated in the unlikely finding that the white women in question were oblivious to what was going on ‘down in the gully & just outside the garden walk’. Tracing the story of this investigation provides an insight into the different expectations for women and men, both Indigenous and white, the gendered anxieties that attended the employment of Aboriginal women as domestic servants in white homes and the complex and negotiated relationships that existed on the sexual and domestic frontiers of Australian colonialism. This article has been peer-reviewed.

THE CHAPLAIN'S WIFE AND THE NATIVE GIRL: Re-envisaging a Cross-cultural Female Relationship in the Contact Zone

Abstract The relationship between Boorong, a young Aboriginal girl, and Mary Johnson, the wife of the first colonial chaplain in New South Wales, has been typically cast as a maternalist relationship, despite the fact that historians have thoroughly deconstructed the longstanding colonialist representation of white women as kindly maternal guardians towards child-like black women. Recognising the colonialist agenda in the sources when it comes to representing white women as well as Indigenous women, we must be cognisant of the constraints and silences of womens self-representation. Undoubtedly, relationships between women in colonial contact zones were more complex, and uneasy, than the surviving records by colonial male authorities admit. In this essay, the possibilities and limitations of this earliest female relationship are considered, to illuminate the potential for reconsidering how we read the evidence for such relationships in ‘the contact zone’ more generally.

Women’s Work and Cross-Cultural Relationships on Two Female Frontiers: Eliza Fraser and Barbara Thompson in Colonial Queensland, 1836–1849

This chapter compares the experiences of Barbara Thompson and Eliza Fraser, two white women who lived with Indigenous people on the other side of the frontier in colonial Queensland, to foreground their relationships with Indigenous women. It considers how they negotiated Indigenous women’s worlds, and how Indigenous women negotiated their intrusion. It treats their meeting and adoption into Indigenous women’s networks, speculates on the ways Indigenous women positioned the intruders, and details intimate relationships between white and Indigenous women. Through work, Thompson became a part of the Kaurareg community; through refusal to work, Fraser remained alienated from the Butchulla. This understanding provides a basis for a revised historical and reconciliation practice that both recognises Indigenous women’s work and seeks to reciprocate.

Australian Nurses and the 1918 Deolali Inquiry: Transcolonial Racial and Gendered Anxieties in a British Indian War Hospital

In May 1918 an inquiry was held into the conduct of several Australian Army nurses based at a hospital at Deolali, India. An English doctor had charged that the women had been engaged in inappropriate familiarities with British officers and, in the case of one, in intimate relations with both patients and an Indian orderly. The ensuing investigation found the charges to be mostly false, but the Deolali Inquiry reflected the ways in which anxieties about Australian women’s intimate contact with non-white men were intensified during the Great War. Young unmarried single women travelled as nurses to far-flung places, including India, where the nurses of the Australian Army were not only brought into close contact with Indian people but were required to nurse Turkish prisoners of war. Exploring the complexities of the this curious (and, at the time, suppressed) case highlights how such volatile wartime international cross-cultural encounters served to both threaten colonial hierarchies, and to strengthen the Australian identification with the privileges of global whiteness, played out as a struggle over the honour and respect due to the nurses as white women.

The girl who wanted to go to war: female patriotism and gender construction in Australia’s Great War

Abstract On the very first Anzac Day commemoration, a young coal miner’s daughter from Kurri Kurri in regional NSW was arrested and charged for illegally wearing the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) uniform. This was the third time that Maud Butler had impersonated a soldier: on the first two occasions, she had actually managed to get aboard a troopship before being discovered by the authorities. Butler’s ‘nonsensical escapades’ (as one reporter termed them) offer an insight into the unstable constructions of gender difference and female patriotism during wartime. This article considers the controversies that surrounded her thwarted attempts to ‘pass’ as a male soldier, in the wider context of patriotism, masculinity and militarism during the First World War. Dissent of anti-war women in Australia in this period challenged masculine control of public space, but it is clear that the activities of pro-war women could do the same. As the authorities’ bemused interventions and the discussions that ensued highlighted, such female enthusiasm for the war effort that Butler displayed threatened existing gender norms and social order. Reframing Butler’s actions to shame reluctant men into enlisting could only imperfectly resolve the challenge her transgressions posed to Australian society, at a time of profound social change and upheaval.