‘Hats off, gentlemen, to our Australian Mothers!’ Representations of white femininity in north queensland in the early twentieth century

Abstract

This paper examines some representations of the anxiety and uncertainty about ‘white woman's place’ in tropical North Queensland that were present in medical and general discourse in the early twentieth century. It focuses on white women's work in the private sphere as both the source of and the solution to these anxieties. Although ‘White Australia’ had been legislatively established in the ‘public sphere’ by the 1920s, through the passage of the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897, and the Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in the tropics there was still public concern about how it would be established in the ‘private sphere’. This was because even though the conventional wisdom that a white man could not work in the tropics and remain healthy had been successfully challenged by the early twentieth century, the same could not be said about such wisdom as it applied to white women and children. This paper looks at some of the ways that ideologies of race and gender intersected in the early twentieth century to construct white women and children as a group that could bring down the successful establishment of ‘White Australia’, and this group was specially targeted for surveillance by the ‘new experts’ of medicine, sociology and domestic science.