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

We might indeed attend closely to the domain of domestic service, representing, as Ann Stoler might say, "not a supplementary point of entry into the subtle injustices of the colonial order, but a charged space of colonial tensions."153 The narrative of the Visitor campaign reveals not only the gendered fissure in the Aboriginal reform movement, but highlights the sticky skeins of power relations woven across this volatile site. In an attempt to assert their own power as women, McKay and the WNPA instead helped articulate a new era of bureaucratic control over Aboriginal women, as firmly monopolized by white men as ever. The struggles of that campaign by the women's group to assert its authority over the domain of the home would see the solidification of government power here instead. We may see that the home was, indeed, a dynamic site of colonial contests and negotiations in its own right, and in this forgotten rehearsal for the Women Protector campaign, we may see it in many ways as the more crucial point of colonization's grasp.

NOTES

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the two anonymous readers, as well as of Susan Gray, Gayle Gullett, and Gordon Briscoe, in the preparation of this paper. Sincere thanks also to Pearl Ogden, Françoise Barr, Carolyn Newman, and Rob McDonald for their assistance locating the image that accompanies this paper.

1. A prominent Australian women's political organization that started in 1909 and later changed its name. see Vivienne Szekeres, "A History of the League of Women Voters in South Australia 1909-1976" (BA honors thesis, University of Adelaide, 1976).

2. Lake coined the term in 1996 to encompass the distinctive preoccupation of the early Australian feminist movement with "domesticating" and settling a dangerously mobile white manhood on the harsh, remote frontiers of Australian settlement: see Marilyn Lake, "Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man," Journal of Australian Studies: Australian Frontiers 49 (1996): 12-20; see also Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Alien and Unwin, 1999), 110-135.

3. Lake, "Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man," 15,17.

4. Fiona Paisley,"No Back Streets in the Bush: 19205 and 19303 Pro-Aboriginal White Women's Activism and the Trans-Australia Railway," Australian Feminist Studies 12, no. 25 (1997): 122 (my emphasis); see aiso Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women's Rights 1919-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000).

5. Alison Holland, "The Campaign for Women Protectors: Gender, Race and Frontier between the Wars," Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001): 31,39,28,

6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103.

7. Victoria Haskins, "On the Doorstep: Aboriginal Domestic Service as a 'Contact Zone,'" Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001): 13-25, 21.1 have explored this in detail with regard to policies carried out hi New South Wales, where the Aboriginal authorities were explicit in stating that the aim of the so-called "apprenticeship" and child removal policies was the "absorption" and disappearance of the race and the dispersal of the Aboriginal communities: they were less forthright on what that entailed in practice. The implicit assumption, however, was that girls in service would meet and reproduce with non-Aboriginal partners, and that they would be actively encouraged to look forward to the prospect of producing fairer-skinned children, who would then produce an ever fairer child-"being exhorted to effect their own disappearance" (p.19). Despite the rhetoric of moral protection and rescue, in practice the impregnation of girls hi service was condoned and their babies removed to be brought up as "white " Any defiant or resistant behavior was met by institutional incarceration. see also Victoria Haskins, "CA better chance'?-Sexual Abuse and the Apprenticeship of Aboriginal Gu-Is under the NSW Aborigines Protection Board," Aboriginal History 28 (2004): 33-58.