Untrodden dresses, loose trowsers, and trailing skirts: walking through colonial space

Abstract

Women who wrote about leaving the British Isles for Australia during the nineteenth century call attention to the spatial syntax within which an “I” constitutes herself as she moves around, never forgetting that the dress of her body is coded within a syntax rigorously gendered. Prescriptive though the ideology in which they were situated, the women's itineraries were not identical, as evidenced in three autobiographical accounts of life in the colony of Victoria during the years of mid-century: Clara Aspinall'sThree Years in Melbourne(1862), Ellen Clacy's A Lady'sVisit to the Gold Diggings of Australia(1853), and TheJournal of Annie Baxter Dawbin(1858-68). This article employs the figure of “walking” in autobiographical texts to ask what spatial practice reveals about the textualising of female agency