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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.