Radical Actions: Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Women’s Temperance Activism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Australia

Abstract

In the 1980s, Indigenous Aboriginal women in Australia began to agitate against liquor outlets perceived as affecting the remote communities in which they lived, and mobilized in a series of fluid grassroots public demonstrations against alcohol availability. The women supported dry zones, local prohibition, and abstinence and were opposed to reforms designed to improve drinking places and promote “social” drinking. In these and many other ways, Aboriginal women’s activism and ideology resembled that of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Australia decades earlier, despite there being no direct influence from the WCTU. This article explores the commonalities in the tactics and strategies deployed by these “old” and “new” temperance movements and argues that for Aboriginal women, their dissent necessitated a complex negotiation around the social and cultural norms of their society.