"Dirty domestics and Worse Cooks": Aboriginal women's agency and domestic frontiers, Southern Australia, 1800-1850

Frontiers

Volumn 28, Issue 1-2, 2007, Pages 18-46

  Russell, Lynette ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547531210     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (112)

1. The quoted title of this article comes from William Hovell, Journey of Discovery to Port Phillip, N.S.W., in 1824-1825. State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts, MS 8459. See also Bill Mollison, A Chronology of Events Affecting Tasmanian Aboriginal People since Contact with Whites 1772-1976 (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1987), compiled with C. Everitt, entry for January 1827, np.
2. Jan Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers 1834-1848 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 223.
3. Cf. Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), ch. 1.
4. See also Ann McGrath, "Sex, Violence and Theft," in Creating a Nation, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994), 135.
5. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5.
6. My interest in hybridity owes a debt to the work of Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 36-39.
7. I have found the work of Ann Laura Stoler to be particularly useful in thinking about these issues. Her observations on "cultural hybridity and the politics of refusal" as well as her engagement with the category metissage have powerful parallels with my own work. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 110-11.
8. Earlier explorers of Australia were given instructions to secure Indigenous people's consent before claiming Australia as a British colony. Captain James Cook received instructions from the Royal Admiralty and Governor Arthur Philip was given orders from the Colonial Office that Australia was to be settled by negotiation. See Richard Broome's Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Domination, 1788-1994 (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 26-27.
9. Postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha, in his influential book Location of Culture, explores the conceptual and theoretical possibilities of hybridity or third space. The third space is derived from the notion that there is a disjuncture between the "subject of a proposition" and "the subject of enunciation."
10. For an interesting recent approach to this challenge, see Bain Attwood's Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 7.
11. It is most likely that this was actually their great-great-great- grandmother and that, like many families, they have compressed their understandings of their generational history.
12. For further discussion, see my Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishers, 2001);
13. see also "Introduction" in Colonial Frontiers: Cross Cultural Interactions in Settler Colonies, ed. Lynette Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001);
14. Lynette Russell, "The Instrument Brings on Voices: Life Story Narratives and Family History," Meanjin 3 (2001): 145-152;
15. and Lynette Russell, A Little Bird Told Me: Family Secrets, Necessary Lies (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2002).
16. Despite having this heritage, I make no claims for special knowledge or cultural understandings; it is the privilege as an academic historian trained in anthropological and archaeological ways of scholarship that I claim. I note that this is not a denial of other ways of knowing but an engagement with the material in a particular (academic) manner. The position I articulate, which draws extensively on the work of Homi K. Bhabha and others, has received mixed responses. I have encountered scholars who embrace and celebrate the liberatory nature of such a position, and others who condemn it. For example, Mark Minchinton, in a conference paper delivered at the Dialogues across Cultures conference in November 2004, discussed his web-based writing project, Void: Kellerberrin Walking, and stated that he shared my concerns about labelling identity, and consequently he, too, was neither Aboriginal nor non-Aboriginal. A contrary view was generated by white academic Jennifer Jones in her review article, "Indigenous Life Stories," Life Writing 2 (2004): 13-16. Jones, misreading the intention of my position, considered my concern for this particular way of framing my subject position to be an implicit statement of loss rather than an assertion of recovery. Needless the many (if not most) Aboriginal people who choose to identify themselves first and foremost as Indigenous might read my position as critical. It is not intended as a form of critique; rather, my desire is to show (through lived experience and historical research) that for some people the issue of identifying as one thing or another is complex, and that such complexity existed in the past as well.
17. Iain Stuart, "Sea Rats, Bandits and Roistering Buccaneers: What Were the Bass Strait Sealers Really Like?" Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 83, part 1 (1997): 47-58;
18. Karen Townrow, "An Archaeological Survey of Sealing and Whaling Sites in Victoria" (unpublished report, Melbourne: Department of Conservation and Environment, 1997);
19. Rebe Taylor, "Savages and Saviours: The Australian Sealers and Aboriginal Survival," Journal of Australian Studies 66 (2000): 73-84;
20. Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2002).
21. It appears that only male sealers arrived in southern Australia in the early nineteenth century. Despite extensive archival research, I have not yet located references to women sealers, apart from one "Bengali" woman who accompanied her husband and those Indigenous women (of Australia and New Zealand) who were enticed to join the European sealers.
22. For detail on the tribal groups of Australia, the reader is directed to David Horton, ed., Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (Canberra: AIATSIS Press, 1994).
23. See Dianne Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2001).
24. James Kelly in 1815 was shown how the Aboriginal women of Bass Strait hunted the seals. From this description it is clear that the women were very competent hunters and that they appear to be in control of the process. See K. M. Bowden, Captain James Kelly of Hobart Town (Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 1964), 40-41.
25. Lyndall Ryan, "The Struggle for Recognition: Part Aborigines in Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century,"Aboriginal History 1-2 (1977): 27-51;
26. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 (Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 71-80;
27. Keryn James, "Wife or Slave? The Kidnapped Aboriginal Women Workers and Australian Sealing Slavery on Kangaroo Islands and Bass Strait Islands" (BA honors thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, 2001);
28. Sue Wesson, An Historical Atlas of the Aborigines of Eastern Victoria and Far South-Eastern New South Wales (Melbourne: Occasional Publications in Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, 2000);
29. for a fascinating comparison see Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfella's Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 39;
30. Martin Gibbs, "Colonial Boats and Foreign Ships: The History and Archaeology of Nineteenth Century Whaling in Western Australia," The Archaeology of Whaling in Southern Australia and New Zealand (Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, The Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology Special Publication no. 10, 1998), 36-47;
31. Martin Gibbs, "Conflict and Commerce: American Whalers and the Western Australian Colonies 1826-1888," Great Circle 22 (2002): 3-23;
32. and Martin Gibbs, "Nebinyan's Song: The Aboriginal Whalers of Southwest Western Australia," Aboriginal History 27 (2003): 1-15.
33. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Ringwood: Penguin, 1982), 175.
34. See Atwood, "Genocide," in Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2005), ch. 4, 87-105;
35. also Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne, Australia: F.W. Cheshire, 1948);
36. Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996).
37. Lyndall Ryan, "Post Colonialism and the Historian: The Aboriginal History Wars," Australian Historical Association 92 (2001): 31-37;
38. Keith Windshuttle, "Doctored Evidence and Invented Incidents in Aboriginal Historiography," in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster (Canberra: The National Museum of Australia Press, 2003), 99-112.
39. The source of most of these debates is the privately published book by Keith Windshuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003);
40. the debate is most succinctly and effectively dealt with in Bain Attwood's latest book, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2005).
41. The inspiration for my approach comes from Daniel Richter's brilliant Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001).
42. Although one encounters the term "frontier" in contemporary records of the nineteenth century, its current use can really be traced to the work of Henry Reynolds, in particular his Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788-1939 (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972) and his acclaimed volume The Other Side of the Frontier (Ringwood: Penguin, 1990). These two books can be seen to have inspired a generation of historians working in the area of Australian Indigenous history.
43. I use these terms as Bruce Trigger did in his Natives and Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1982).
44. The term "encounters" owes a debt to Greg Dening's Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land; Marquesas 1774-1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980),
45. Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the "Bounty" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
46. and The Death of William Gooch: A History's Anthropology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995).
47. Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke, "Negotiating Difference: Practice Makes Theory for Contemporary Archaeology in Oceania," in The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Entanglements in Oceania, ed. Torrence and Clarke (London: Routledge, 2000), 1-31.
48. See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 43.
49. Philippa Levine, "Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?" in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine, The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8.
50. Rosalie Redwood, "Early Sealing Days," Walkabout 9, no. 3 (1943): 5-8;
51. and also Forgotten Islands of the South Pacific: The Story of New Zealand's Southern Islands (Wellington: Reed, 1950) has noted that the rush to the straits to pursue sealing was similar to the gold rush of the second half of the nineteenth century.
52. Irynej Skira, "Tasmanian Aborigines and Muttonbirds: A Historical Examination" (PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 1993), 50; see also Barbara Little, "The Sealing and Whaling Industry in Australia Before 1850," Australian Economic History Review 9, no. 2 (1969): 109-127.
53. Victoria, the First Century: An Historical Survey, compiled by The Historical Sub-Committee of The Centenary Celebrations Council (1934).
54. Frederick Rhodes, Pageant of the Pacific: Being the Maritime History of Australasia (Sydney: F. J. Thwaites, 1934), 128.
55. Stuart, "Sea Rats, Bandits and Roistering Buccaneers," 47-58;
56. see also Taylor, Unearthed; interestingly, although many have characterized the sealers as escaped convicts, Taylor has shown that this is a gross exaggeration based on a persistent representation of the sealers as lawless and violent.
57. Taylor, Unearthed, 51.
58. Stephen Murray-Smith, "Beyond the Pale: The Islander Community of Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century," Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association 37 (1973): 37-127;
59. see also Stephen Murray-Smith, Mission to the Islands: The Missionary Voyages of Canon Marcus Brownrigg, 1872-1885 (Hobart: Cat and Fiddle Press, 1979).
60. Probably the definitive reference to the historical circumstances and development of the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal communities can be found in Lyndall Ryan's work, in particular her 1977 article, "The Struggle for Recognition: PartAborigines in Tasmania in the Nineteenth Century," in Aboriginal History 1 (1977): 27-51;
61. and her revised and updated The Aboriginal Tasmanians.
62. Hughes cited in Taylor, Unearthed, 51.
63. J. S. Cumpston, Kangaroo Island, 1800-1836 (Canberra: Roebuck, 1970).
64. See references to this in Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 67;
65. and Taylor, Unearthed, 30.
66. Taylor, Unearthed, 30.
67. In an interesting contrast in New Zealand's south (especially around Stewart Island and Codfish Island), Rosalie Redwood notes that "while sealing gangs were stationed in the Foveaux Strait areas, their attentions to the native women were a source of annoyance to the Maori tribes, so that the chief Tukete proposed that the white men should settle down permanently at Sealers Bay on Codfish Island, where they would be protected by their Maori wives" (Redwood, Forgotten Islands, 68).
68. Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfella's Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 33.
69. Helen Mico, King Island and the Sealing Trade, 1802 (Canberra: Roebuck Society Publications, 1971), 14. This is a translation of chapters 22 and 23 of the narrative by François Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, 1800-1804.
70. Although I have found references to women coming from places other than Australia, I have yet to locate a single reference to European women being involved in the sealing industry.
71. In a perhaps simplistic description of the situation, Robert McNab, writing from New Zealand, observed that at first the sealers captured, traded, and bartered with the women for sex but later found them to be essential companions, as they could hunt wallabies and seals and collect all manner of other foods. Robert McNab, Murihiku and the Southern Islands: A History of the West Coast Sounds, Foveaux Strait, Stewart Island, the Snares, Bounty, Antipodes, Auckland, Campbell and Macquarie Islands, from 1770 to 1829 (Invercargill: William Smith Printer, 1907).
72. To appreciate the strength, skill, and capacity of the women as seal hunters, see the description of the women seal hunting in Keith Macrae Bowden, Captain James Kelly of Hobart Town (Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 1964), 40-41.
73. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 67.
74. See Mollison, A Chronology, entry January 1827.
75. William Hovell, Journey of Discovery to Port Phillip, N.S.W., in 1824-1825, emphasis added. State Library of Victoria, Australian Manuscripts, MS 8459.
76. Skira, Tasmanian Aborigines, 52. It is a commonplace and erroneous assumption that Tasmanian Aboriginal people lost their culture and their Aboriginal identity. Ever since the colonial fantasy that the Tasmanian Aborigines became extinct with the death of Trugannini, the Indigenous people of Tasmania have had to fight for recognition. Statements such as those made by Skira can be seen to resonate with false assertions that have their genesis in the ways that Aboriginal men and women were depicted from the sealing period onward. Invariably such reflections remove agency and, for the women in particular, subscribe the status of victim.
77. Bowden, Captain James Kelly, 42-43;
78. see also Historical Records of Australia, vol. 3 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1815), 462.
79. Bowden, Captain James Kelly, 37.
80. James Kelly, "First Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour," Paper and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania (1920): 160-81.
81. See N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966).
82. See numerous references in Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, and in Plomley, Friendly Mission.
83. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 191;
84. see also 150.
85. Ibid., 191.
86. Skira, Tasmanian Aborigines, 52.
87. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 191, 150.
88. Murray-Smith, "Beyond the Pale."
89. Australian, March 9, 1826, 2.
90. See Taylor, Unearthed.
91. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 301.
92. George Augustus Robinson called the sealers "Islanders," because very little sealing was going on. See Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987), 677.
93. Plomley, Weep in Silence, 378.
94. Ibid.
95. Archives Office of Tasmania, CSO 1/330/7578, April 29, 1831.
96. Aboriginal motherhood has been denigrated, and Aboriginal families have been maligned and separated throughout much of Australia's history. The emergence of what is colloquially known as the "stolen generations" debate has brought these issues to the forefront. This is not the place to go into detail; however, the reader is directed to Anna Haebich's excellent book, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 (Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).
97. See C. N. Starke, The Early Sociology of the Family, vol. 4, The Primitive Family (New York: Keagan Paul, 1889).
98. The difficulty that this gave the courts and lawmakers is evident, and traditionally courts have been very sympathetic to mothers accused of infanticide. The history of infanticide and the widespread nature of its practice, along with the ways that these were affected by economic factors, has been explored in great detail by Lionel Rose in his 1986 book The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800-1938 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 70.
99. Count Strzelecki's claims are detailed in T. R. H. Thomson, "Observations on the Reported Incompetency of 'Gins' or Aboriginal Females of New Holland, to Procreate with a Native Male after Having Borne Half-Caste Children to a European or White," Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 3 (1854): 243-46.
100. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 301.
101. Gillian Cowlishaw, "Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia," Oceania 48, no. 4 (1978): 266.
102. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 308.
103. Pamela Scully, "Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa," Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 88-105.
104. Ibid., 100.
105. Cowlishaw, "Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia," 267-280.
106. Crawford Pasco, A Roving Commission (Melbourne: George Robertson and Co., 1897), 146-148.
107. Robert Elwes, A Sketcher's Tour Round the World (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854), 253-54, emphasis added.
108. Elwes, A Sketcher's Tour, 256-57.
109. Archives Office Tasmania, CSO 1/330/329.
110. An obituary for Lucy Beedon, Tasmanian, October 2, 1886.
111. See Richter, Facing East, ch. 1, 11-40.
112. See numerous references in Taylor, Unearthed, 61-70.