Late Nineteenth Century Australia Research Articles

Miles Franklin’s Growing Voice

Rather than any of her more mature writing, Miles Franklin’s debut romance, My Brilliant Career, has been cemented into the canon of Australian literary nationalism. The novel received ambivalent immediate responses upon its publication in 1901 for its unflattering representation of the author’s kin and society. Subsequent criticism soon accepted Franklin’s oeuvre as part of the dominant male discourse of late nineteenth-century Australia, but after the 1970s her writing came under new scrutiny from a feminist aspect. Recently, she has been placed in a long tradition of female writing and discussed for gendered ventures. Nonetheless, however dedicated a feminist Franklin later became, she did not yet search for women’s greater self-realization in her debut but for her own identity and place in the world as an adolescent. This article argues that although Franklin’s classic has become an icon of both nationalist and feminist literature, the dichotomy of these readings can best be appeased through the adolescent ramps of its protagonist. It is an adolescent novel, in which a growing voice argues with her superiors, peers, and self, thereby exploring her authorial, gendered, and national identity. (GTE)

Surfacing black and brown bodies in the digital archive: domestic workers in late nineteenth-century Australia

This paper examines the potential for the digital turn, particularly the extensive and ongoing digitisation of nineteenth-century newspapers, to enable scholars to rethink the experiences of individuals previously marginalised and hard to find in historical sources. The rapid digital turn in historical research has prompted scholars to argue for conversations in which to consider the implications of digital technologies in historical research practices. Yet in historical geography, though scholars work with and make digital data in a multitude of ways, there has been little formal reflection on the concerns, challenges or methodological opportunities presented by the formation of digital archives. To do so this paper takes as its focus ‘coloured’ workers employed in forms of domestic service at the end of the nineteenth century in Australia. Firstly, by resurfacing ‘coloured’ workers through their presence in newspaper advertisements the paper illustrates that digital methodologies enable the identification of individuals missed through previous forms of data analysis. Secondly, the paper seeks to illustrate how their reappearance can frame a rethinking of domestic labour and colonial identities, gender roles and the ethnic complexities of ‘coloured’ labour in the British Empire. The paper argues that though newspaper advertisements for employment are brief and impersonal, and their meanings, as mediated through form and time, are at times hard to decipher, gathering them together into a new archive supports a more complex reading of diversity across national, regional, local and imperial geographies.

James Green (‘De Libra’) and “Sydney Architecture Aesthetically Considered”

ABSTRACTAmong the various voices in the ferment of architectural discourse in late nineteenth-century Australia that of James Green is perhaps one of the least understood. This, despite the fact he was a prolific writer, edited one of Australia’s most widely circulated building journals and was a prominent commentator on modern American architecture. This paper sheds light on the contribution Green made to architectural discourse in Australia by focussing on two of his most significant interests, that of the architecture of Sydney and the so-called “American Romanesque”. The paper argues that Green’s critical evaluation of these subjects holds the key to understanding his theoretical and intellectual position on modern city architecture. Specifically, it was Green’s nine-part series entitled “Sydney Architecture Aesthetically Considered” published in the Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News in 1890 in which he articulated the principles he thought should guide the elevational composition and treatment of city buildings. As the paper shows, this series served as a platform enabling Green to exercise a critical voice on other architectural matters, including the topic of American Romanesque architecture and its influence in Australia.

The Price of Prejudice: Women’s Work and Labour Force Discrimination in Australian History

This article examines changes in women’s participation in the workforce and female wage rates in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia, focusing on the period of boom, depression and recovery from 1890 to 1910. Instead of explaining the trends in terms of family income or labour market segmentation, it is argued that the changes observed can be explained on the basis of sex-based discrimination in the labour market. Evidence from Victorian manufacturing during this period supports the discrimination hypothesis. Statistics for manufacturing industry in Brisbane during this period also give support to the discrimination hypothesis. As the economy slipped into depression and the general level of incomes fell, people were less willing to pay the price of prejudice against women workers. Both employment discrimination and wage discrimination against women were temporarily alleviated. Consequently there was the concurrence of rising employment of women relative to men and rising women’s wages relative to men’s wages.

Sea stories and sea pictures: George Gordon McCrae and late nineteenth-century maritime Australia

From the 1850s through the early 1900s, the Victorian artist George Gordon McCrae kept a close eye on the shipping entering Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne. In addition to merchant vessels and private pleasure craft, McCrae recorded the visits of foreign warships in hundreds of lively pen, ink and watercolour sketches. But McCrae was a writer as well as an artist, whose mind was as much concerned with the past as the present. McCrae juxtaposed images of modern vessels with written and visual descriptions of ships central to the European “discovery” of Australia. This essay explores McCrae’s representations of both contemporary and historical maritime scenes in sketches, with some attention to poems and historical articles, to illuminate how the sea influenced the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century Australian settlers. While the scope of McCrae’s response was perhaps unique, the themes he developed (awareness of the ongoing relevance of the sea as a means of both actual and imaginative transport, reverence for British and other European “discoverers” of Australia as role models for the new nation) were shared by his contemporaries. McCrae’s images help us to understand the maritime dimension of late nineteenth-century Australia and its importance for settler society.

Wobblies on the Wallaby

This article draws attention to the dominant but neglected rural dimension of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia. We argue that wandering bush workers formed the bulk of the IWW in Australia, whereas most studies have emphasised the role of the IWW’s Sydney “Local.” In overturning the dominant interpretation of the composition and character of the IWW in Australia, this article also shines light on an under-examined demographic feature of early twentieth-century Australia. By clarifying that the majority of Wobblies worked in the bush, we also show how the swagman, the itinerant worker of rural life, so prominent in our understanding – and our imaginations – of late nineteenth-century Australia, remained a prominent feature of the New South Wales and Queensland rural workforces during the early decades of the twentieth century. To put it simply, Australia had not settled down and neither had its most revolutionary unionists.

“A Little Maid-Errant”: Ethel Turner's Suburban Colonial Girl

This article reframes debates about the figure of the colonial girl by examining her changing representation in Ethel Turner's fiction. Turner reacted critically and self-consciously to the cultural mythologization of the bush and what it meant for the confines of Australian writing for girls. She sought to reshape Australia's literary imaginary, while creating a distinctly Australian children's and, in particular, girls' literature. Turner is now primarily remembered for her creation of an iconic Australian Girl in her first and most successful book Seven Little Australians (1894), but Judy Woolcot dies young. The much debated death scene, however, constructively informs Turner's subsequent novels. As the Australian Girl's complex relationship to domesticity, national identity and femininity is being revisioned in the figure of Judy's younger sister in The Family at Misrule (1895), this girl's heroism is not simply grounded in the everyday life of late nineteenth-century Australia's rapidly expanding metropolitan spaces, but it also critically investigates traditional gender norms and gender stereotyping. Turner's continuous modification of the fictional Australian Girl in the 40 years in which she published fiction maps out her critical engagement with different pressures and opportunities at a literary marketplace that reached across the British Empire.

The use of memory and material culture in the history of the family in colonial Australia

This article explores the use of memory and material culture in the history of families who travelled between Britain and Australia and settled in the early colonies from 1788 until 1901. It draws on diaries, memoirs, letters, and objects belonging to a variety of cultural institutions including the Museum of Childhood in Perth, Museum Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, as well as those within private collections, to explore some of the meanings of objects brought by families from Britain to Australia. Certain objects connected their owners with past lives back in Britain, reminded them of home, family ties and duty and were transferred to new owners to remind the next generation of their journeys round the world. It argues that a focus on material culture enriches our understanding of the economic, social and cultural history of the family in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and Australia and allows us to appreciate the labour of mothers in creating family histories.

Municipalisation in Australia: The Case of Launceston 1880–1914

This article expands upon the crucial role of the state in the provision of infrastructure in late‐nineteenth century Australia by examining the hitherto overlooked role of local government, and in particular, the provision of municipal services in Launceston, Tasmania's second largest city. From the 1890s, socialist groups across Europe actively sought to control councils, believing “good” local government the key to social reform. Municipalisation in Tasmania had more pragmatic origins. Colonial governments encouraged local‐level service provision to prevent the draining of their own finances. In Launceston an ideological element occasionally surfaced. But municipalisation was driven by resentment of a neglectful Tasmanian government, by the desire to modernise the town, by intent to secure new sources of revenue, and by the strong civic pride of businessmen.

Pathologising White Male Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century Australia through the medical prism of excess and constraint

This paper will explore the constructions of white male sexuality in late nineteenth-century Australia by the medical profession. In a period where female sexuality was always suspect, male sexuality, too, was brought into question, and the male body was increasingly constructed as vulnerable to sexual excess and sexual pathology. If male sexuality was to be active and dynamic, this could readily go too far, rendering men merely a slip away from deviance. Here, I will consider these notions of excess and constraint through an examination of sexual norms and perceived perversions, including sexual excess, sodomy and masturbation.

Re‐considering managerial use of child labor

PurposeMuch research has focused on the reasons for child labor. This paper, in examining the experiences of late nineteenth century Australia seeks to ask the alternate research question: “What are the factors that cause managers to desist from the use of child labor during periods of initial industrialization, even where the society is characterized by a youthful demography and low levels of manufacturing productivity?”.Design/methodology/approachThis study measures the incidence of child labor in Queensland, Australia's third largest state, through an examination of the censuses for 1891 and 1901. It then locates the results of this analysis in the nineteenth century Australian peculiar pattern of economic investment.FindingsIt is found that industrializing Australia had an extremely low incidence of child labor. This is attributed to the highly capitalized nature of the Australian rural and mining sectors, and the linkages between these sectors and the wider economy. This suggests that counties, or regions, with a highly commercialized primary sector, and with manufacturing establishments with high skill requirements (even if characterized by low productivity), will have a low incidence of child labor.Practical implicationsThe most effective policy for reducing the incidence of child labor is to enhance capital investment in the primary sector and enhance the need for workplace skills in the secondary sector.Originality/valueThe International Labor Organisation suggests that there is currently a revival in child labor. This paper suggests that the most effective policies for reducing the incidence of child labor are ones that seek to foster increased levels of capital investment in the primary sector, rather than ones directed towards legal restriction or poverty alleviation.

Leary Kin: Australian Larrikins and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy

This article explores the relationship between minstrelsy and rough Anglo-Celtic youths, or larrikins, in late nineteenth-century Australia. It shows that in the 1880s, larrikins were drawn to blackface minstrel characters, especially dandy characters, who carried themselves with a deliberately burlesque panache. There were definite similarities here between Australian larrikins and the poor Irish-American workers discussed by historians of minstrelsy in 1830-40s New York. Like these American workers, larrikins used minstrelsy to identify with a symbolically black masculinity at the same time as they attempted to assert superiority over non-white peoples. Nonetheless, the racial and social conditions in late-colonial Australia were not the same as those in New York earlier in the century. Much of this article is thus an attempt to think through the particularities of larrikins' relationship to minstrelsy. Above all, I suggest, the economic boom taking place in eastern Australia is necessary to explain the emergence of larrikinism in the 1870s and 1880s. It is also necessary to explain larrikins' attraction to minstrel dandies. Larrikins were involved in a combative relationship with boom culture, especially the ebullient working-class liberalism then flourishing in eastern Australia. Minstrel dandiers allowed larrikins to express something of this combative relationship, influencing their dress and behaviour. As symbols of a flamboyantly rough masculinity, they also represented a modern 'take' on bushranger and Newgate anti-heroes in Anglo-Australian popular culture.

A man of civic sentiment: the case of William Guthrie Spence

Gender historians of late nineteenth-century Australia have conventionally said a great deal about masculinity in the bush and inner-city bohemia. In both sites, we hear, a rugged ‘mateship ethos’ predominated, often identifying itself as working-class. But not all historians have restricted themselves to this mateship ethos: witness recent work by Marilyn Lake and Martin Crotty, both of which explore the ideal of manliness to be found in progressive institutions at the end of the century, or in middle-class suburbs and schools. In this paper, I contribute to this rising interest in Australian manliness, but shift the focus to the provincial town – particularly the Victorian goldfield towns. Using the labour leader William Guthrie Spence as a case-study, I show that provincial men from a middling social strata nurtured a distinctive gender ethos, perhaps best described as the manliness of civic sentiment. Highly devoted to civic service, sympathetic to the labour struggle, committed to family values and a sentimental style of address, this form of manliness played an important role in turn-of-the-twentieth century Australian politics and culture. It should thus figure more prominently in understandings of Australian manhood in this period.

Miles Franklin on American Manhood and White Slavery: The Case of ‘Red Cross Nurse’

On the eve of the First World War when Stella Miles Franklin was distressed by work, love, and a world gone mad, she wrote a 'curious story' (Coleman 165) titled 'Red Cross Nurse and Armored Chauffeur', amended in her handwriting with the subtitle 'Confessions of a Frustrated Grandmother' and known simply in discussions of Franklin's work as 'Red Cross Nurse'. Here the nameless protagonist tangles with the staples of the Franklin's feminist project: gender politics, sexuality and desire, the inadequacies of manhood, and the slavery of women in marriage and relationships. The heroine of 'Red Cross Nurse', however, is not the innocent Sybylla Melvyn of 'My Brilliant Career' (1901), narrating a story of gender and nationalist politics in late nineteenth-century Australia. She has grown into a modern heroine, the urban 'New Woman' who models female sexual autonomy and critiques gender relations in early twentieth-century America. Like her contemporaries Sybyl Penelo of 'On Dearborn Street' (1981) and Constance Roberts of 'The Net of' Circumstance' (1915), the heroine of 'Red Cross Nurse' is an independent working woman, faced with decisions about suitors and marriage. She chooses a different path from these heroines, a choice that provides strong critique of American manhood and sheds new insight on Franklin's personal and political passions during a decade of involvement with the National Women's Trade Union League (NWTUL). This essay focuses on cultural anxiety associated with gender and American manhood, with particular reference to fears of the white slave trade, as depicted in Franklin's 1914 unpublished short novel, 'Red Cross Nurse'.

American Liberalism and Labour Politics: Labour Leaders and Liberty Language in Late Nineteenth Century Australia and the United States

It has long been argued that the prevalence of liberal values is one of the main reasons why there is no labour party in the United States. This article seeks to reassess these arguments by comparing the United States with Australia, where the influence of liberal values was also strong. It focuses on the early 1890s, when Australian unionists established an electorally successful labour party, and when their American counterparts came closest to doing something similar. The article tests the claim that the prevalence of the idea of individual freedom was a constraint on the emergence of a labour party, by examining how labour leaders themselves responded to this idea and made use of it. It finds that, far from being a constraint, the prevalence of the idea of individual freedom was treated as an ideological opportunity by those who were seeking to establish a labour party.

Women Teachers in Western Australian “Bush” Schools, 1900-1939: Passive Victims of Oppressive Structures?

Demography, distance, and die expansion of settlements created problems for the State Department of Education in Western Australia and other Australian states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Educational administration in Canada and parts of the United States faced similar issues with regard to the provision of schools. A common response was the establishment of one-teacher rural schools, frequently run by young, and sometimes unclassified, female teachers. In the United States locally elected school boards were the primary source of regulation, but in late nineteenth-century Western Australia such local boards had been stripped of their powers and were answerable to the newly established, highly centralized Education Department. Formal regulated teachers. The masculinized system of the Department and its inspectorate. All the same, however, the local community still exerted informal controls over the lives of teachers working and living in small settlements.

Reflecting the Detectives: Crime Fiction and the New Journalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

Reflecting the Detectives: Crime Fiction and the New Journalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

Making Working-Class Heroes: Labor Cartoonists and the Australian Worker, 1903-16

The establishment of union-based papers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia created a base for professional cartoonists whose sympathies (and mostly origins) were strongly working class, though their mode of employment placed them as intellectuals. The paper looks at cartoons published in Tocsin, Labour Call, and the Australian Worker, notably those of Claude Marquet. Marquet and his fellows created a populist representation of organised labour which shaped class imaginings of the ideal Australian worker as male, muscular, and white. The homoerotic aspect of these representations is read here as generating the desire which moves the images towards the mythic.

Rose Summerfield's Gospel of Discontent: A Narrative of Radical Identity in Late Nineteenth Century Australia

Rose Summerfield (1864-1922), feminist, labour activist and radical, spread 'the gospel of discontent' amongst the Sydney working class in the 1890s. Discontent was a defining metaphor of fin de siecle radicalism, a condition of restless proselytising expressed in a range of experimental political, religious and cultural organisations and movements. Rose Summerfield fitfully embraced secularism, women's suffrage, temperance, labour mobilisation and radical politics. In key texts and performances such as the 1892 Master and Man lecture Summerfield dramatically personalised the sufferings and fears of the working class. Summerfield's radical texts and performances represented an expression of narrative identity, identifying her subjective sense of self and alienation with the injustice inflected upon women and the working class. Summerfield's strident racism reflected a need for self definition and social integration, a vilification of the other designed to secure the self in a racially homogeneous and economically stable society. Yet race reflected the turbulent and destabilised nature of Rose Summerfield's gospel of discontent.

In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses: Women Preachers and the Redefinition of Gender Roles in the Churches in Late Nineteenth‐Century Australia

The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth‐century struggle for women’s rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize both their presence and their message. A more critical reading of contemporary reports would suggest that the way in which female evangelists were reported should be seen as intrinsic to the attempt by church leaders to contain and control women’s expanding role. The success of their endeavours rendered female evangelists largely invisible but the lengths to which they went to discount the challenge the female evangelists mounted to conventional constructions of gender, provide evidence of its power.