Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (review)

Abstract

Joy Damousi's Depraved and Disorderly is a major landmark in the historiography of colonial Australia. Hers is a revisionist study of gender and convictism in New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land from 1820 to 1840. With a lean, dense narrative bristling with important historiographical debates, she suggests nothing less than a complete revision of tired, and by now tiring, questions about convict women that have preoccupied generations of [End Page 696] historians of the colonial period. Were the convict women criminals or skilled laborers, whores or respectable wives, victims of patriarchy or beneficiaries of opportunities unavailable in Britain? For Damousi, these questions are narrow, presentist, and context-blind.