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

18. Austin, / Can Picture the Old Home, 71.

19. Haebich, Broken Circles, 18; see also Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home, 60-61.

20. McGrath, "'Spinifex Fairies': Aboriginal Workers in the Northern Territory, 1911-39 " in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle (Melbourne: Fontana, 1980), 256-7 (quoting undated letter in AA, CRS A3, NT 17/277 0.1914-15)

21. see Austin, / Can Picture the Old Home, 51-2, 205. It was an indicator of the "official disdain and neglect" that characterized the first phase of Commonwealth Aboriginal administration, according to Austin.

22. Stott to J. C. Cawood, 10 March 1927: "Half Castes Employed Outside NT" AA CRS Ai 1936/7846, Australian Archives, Canberra.

23. Memo, Home and Territories Department, 8 March 1923: AA CRS Ai 1927/2982. The previous administrator, fames Gilruth, had left the civil service in disgrace after a Royal Commission in 1920 into the Aboriginal Department showed corruption and inefficiency, and, in the case of the Bungalow and the Darwin Compound (a similar institution established hi Darwin), cause for condemnation; see Austin, / Can Picture the Old Home, 66-69.

24. Memo, Home and Territories Department, 8 March 1923: AA CRS Ai 1927/2982. The two reports, one in 1920 and the other in 1921, both objected to the location of the unsecured institution beside the Stuart hotel. The hotel's back fence gate to the toilets opened directly onto the Bungalow block. Supervision of the girls at night by Topsy Smith, who was left on her own to protect them against constant attempts by white men to approach or abduct them, was considered totally inadequate; the dangers of housing adolescent girls so close to men who had been drinking, one of the reports stated, "need not be commented upon." This report had advised that the girls instead should be trained for domestic service; Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home, 72-74.

25. Memo, Home and Territories Department, 3 June 1924; Prime Minister to Premier, SA, é July 1924 (copy): AA CRS Ai 1927/2982. The boys were to remain in central Australia in local employment.

26. Premier, SA, to Prime Minister, 13 August 1924 (copy): AA CRS Ai 1927/2982; Austin, / Can Picture the Old Home, 72-76.

27. Report of a Conference, January, 29,1925; AA CRS Ai 1927/2982.

28. Leane (Deputy NT Administrator), Darwin 201 to secretary, Home & Territories Dept, 9 April 1925: AA CRS Ai 1936/7846.

29. Memo, Home and Territories Department, February 20,1925, including initialed note (initials illegible), 21 February 1925: AA CRS Ai 1936/7846.

30. Stott to Major Dudley, Police Commissioner, Darwin, 13 November 1924: AA CRS Ai 1936/7846.

31. Maude H- was quite a lot older than the other girls, aged twentyseven in 1926: "Statement showing the names, ages and sex of all Halfcastes, Boys and Girls at present employed in the State of South Australia," October 28,1926: AA CRS Ai 1936/7846. Of the other seventeen names listed, two were fourteen-year-old boys employed on the same pastoral station, the rest were girls, the youngest thirteen, a number aged between fourteen and twenty years, and one twenty-four.