Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism: The Call for a Woman Visitor to "Half-Caste" Girls and Women in Domestic Service, Adelaide, 1925-1928

The WNPA moved on to the campaign to protect Aboriginal women from white men along the new railway line in central Australia with barely a backward glance. McKay herself declared in an interview in Genders's 1927 paper that the aim for "thinking women" must be to "put an end to the creation of half-castes" on the frontier, and mixed-descent girls, bearing "the brand of a despised race," should be left in the country, away from the insults of "larrikins."142 In 1930, however, Constance Cooke would point-briefly-to South Australia's "honorary woman protector" in Adelaide as an instance of what women could achieve.l43 Technically true, but something of an inflation of the actual achievement.

Officially invested with the formal powers of a protector, the AFA's appointed female Visitor had little actual faculty to "protect" or otherwise assist the Bungalow girls. Her powers were symbolic and subordinate to her monitory function. Though three older Bungalow girls did take the opportunity afforded by her first visit to ask the Chief Protector for their "freedom," the "Lady Visitor" had no authority or real influence to affect his decision either way.144 And, more significant in terms of the purposes of the WNPA, with only one visit a year provided for each worker, her ability to "protect" the girls would be necessarily limited; Owen and then Hunter filed perfunctory and uniformly positive annual reports.145 The position was created just as the federal government appointed a new and enthusiastic Chief Protector for the Territory, Dr. Cecil Cook, ushering in a new era of "purposeful" policy development aimed at racial absorption, whose major component would be systematic and extensive removal of mixed-descent children and young women.146 In the end, the campaign for the Visitor appointment had only entrenched and refined a system of placing young mixed-descent women in white homes as domestic servants while providing them with little real support of any kind-female, feminist, or otherwise. The Visitor was an unlikely model for the Woman Protector campaign, and one we might guess was skipped over lightly in Cooke's talk.

Though Cooke and others were greatly encouraged by the publication of a major federal government report on the condition of Aboriginal people in central and northern Australia in 1929 by J. W. Bleakley (in support of appointing married men as protectors, he had stated that "one good white woman in a district will have more restraining influence that all the Acts and Regulations"),147 during the 19305 the federal government grew increasingly unreceptive to the whole Woman Protector project.148 At the 1937 State and Commonwealth Aboriginal Authorities' Conference on Aboriginal Welfare, the collective authorities resolved definitively that "while the use of women protectors or inspectors for the supervision of female natives in populated areas may in places be desirable, the general appointment of women is not considered practicable, because of the very scattered nature of native camps, the difficulties of travel and the isolation."149 For historian Barbara Cummings, this reveals that the federal government's interest in Aboriginal women was secondary to the concern for white women's security.150 But underlying the desire to "protect" white women was a fear of independent and assertive women who did not know their place: "that class [ of women] that we find arrogant in their demands whilst acting as generally meddlesome busybodies," as one federal bureaucrat would describe them.151 The authorities' qualified acknowledgment in 1937 that the use of a woman protector for managing "female natives" in populated areas might be countenanced in some circumstances shows how hesitant they were in admitting any autonomous authority for women whatsoever. Holland and Paisley argued that administrators who saw the value of a white female presence identified her role as subsidiary to male authority, either as a wife or daughter, or a matron or nurse.'52 The Visitor campaign shows this held for the domestic frontier as much as the outback. A woman's proper place was in the home, indeed-under male control and guidance, where any troublesome and unsatisfactory tendencies to interfere might be safely contained and, possibly, even made useful.