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Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism: The Call for a Woman Visitor to "Half-Caste" Girls and Women in Domestic Service, Adelaide, 1925-1928
Frontiers, 2007 by Haskins, Victoria
There is no doubt that Goode was the WNPA's ideal candidate, and their nomination of her as their Visitor signaled their determination to assert an authoritative and public voice for the WNPA in Aboriginal matters. However, their somewhat clumsy allusion to bias is worth comment. As a State Children's Council member, Goode did employ "state children" in her home occasionally,73 though I have seen no record of her employing an Aboriginal girl. We must assume that the WNPA viewed Aboriginal domestic service as particularly precarious, a potentially volatile site of conflicts between white mistress and Aboriginal servant; yet there is also a hint of apprehension regarding McKay herself. For in directing that a Visitor should not be also an employer, the WNPA was ensuring not only that Kelsey could not play such a role, but neither could McKay.
Although McKay had demonstrated some acumen in getting the Protector to receive a much-awaited WNPA deputation on Aboriginal issues in 1923, she did not necessarily inspire the confidence of the WNPA. Any reservations they held might be most simply ascribed to the parochialism and snobbery of an elite women's organization. Unlike the other members-the "cream of Adelaide women," as a former member described them74-McKay's background is obscure, and though she was originally from Adelaide, now living in one of Adelaide's wealthier suburbs, she and her husband were almost certainly of modest middle-class origins. Without the sureties of class, her performance as a "goodfella missus" might have backfired to some extent, her fervent expressions of "sympathy" for the "half-caste girl" and of unreserved willingness to believe anything a "black servant" told her then perhaps rather alarming to the more refined executive members.
McKay's personal position on Aboriginal domestic service was ambiguous, even contradictory. Her representation of the positive benefits for mixeddescent girls of traditional child-betrothal, particularly, was in direct conflict with the ideology of child rescue that justified the placement of girls, like the ones who worked for her, in white homes, and was a radical endorsement of the treatment of women in Aboriginal culture for her time and even to the present today.75 McKay was apparently on good terms with the advocate of the Model Aboriginal State, J. C. Genders, joining the missionary group known as the Aborigines' Friends' Association alongside Genders in February the year before.76 She supported Genders's idea of a self-governing state for Aboriginal people from which white people other than select missionaries would be completely excluded,77 and its fundamental premise-segregation of white and black-was simply not consistent with a policy of bringing Aboriginal girls into suburban homes.78 McKay might even have had something to do with a strongly critical article on the subject of the girls brought to Adelaide that appeared in Genders's own newspaper the month before she spoke to the WNPA, accusing those "city matrons" who took them as domestics of being "selfish."79 But McKay was not the only WNPA member to support Genders's Model State-Goode, too, signed his petition in 1925, as did a number of other WNPA members, including the president, Cooke80-and if it was unclear whether McKay wanted improved mechanisms in place to both control and "protect" these workers or whether she was actually opposed to the system altogether, the WNPA's position was similarly never patently one way or the other. More likely, there was just a vague sense of uncertainty among the leading WNPA members concerning McKay's commitment to the group and to women's activism, over and above her interest in the Aboriginal cause, a question mark that could never be raised in Goode's case. If anything, the WNPA seemed pleased to have McKay provide them, through her membership in the Aborigines' Friends' Association, with their link to the Aboriginal reform movement.
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