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

"... TO LOOK AFTER THESE UNFORTUNATE GIRLS INTERESTS ..."

Mr. Dudley Kelsey, an ex-Territorian resident in Adelaide, was a man Stott had known personally for the past forty years and had employed a "half-caste girl" the past four. Stott had asked the Northern Territory's Police Commissioner to appoint Kelsey in Adelaide to "look after these unfortunate Girls interests, and see whether they are being properly cared for etc...." in November 1924. As Stott went on, it was clear he actually needed someone to negotiate difficulties between employers and workers, and promptly, as they arose. Stott explained that he had appealed to Kelsey ßç the past to investigate complaints made "by either Employer, or Employee," and on Stott's approval, Kelsey had moved girls to "new homes" in instances where he had "found employer at fault." The young women working in Adelaide "now look upon Mr. Kelsey as their friend," appealing to him "whenever they are dissatisaed " said Stott.30

Kelsey did take an active interventionist role where there were problems with the girls' employment. He went so far as to bring troublesome girls into his own home and admonish them, backed up not by his wife as one might expect, but by his long-term worker Maude H_____, who (at 25 years of age)31 "is the Mother of them all, and gets onto them like a big dog." Kelsey thus underlined the omission of any role played by his wife ("Mrs K. joins me with kindest regards to all" was the extent of her presence). While the fact he felt obliged to mention the young Bungalow woman's assistance indicates Kelsey recognized some advantages of female guidance, white women were excluded from consideration. On this domestic frontier, the mistress's authority was discounted.32

Yet the homes into which the girls were placed in Adelaide can be seen as points in a moving, shifting female web of relations, binding workers to mistresses, with Kelsey spinning new connections of his own. The month earlier, he interviewed an employer, a man, at Stott's request: he had then taken the fourteen-year-old girl from his charge while he "looked round for a new home for the girl." "Wishing to have her close by me so that I could see what was wrong with her," Kelsey wrote to Stott, "I held off placing her until I could get some one near us." He found her a new "home" virtually opposite his own, where she had been working "on trial" for the past two weeks, and now Kelsey could report not only on the worker but also on her new employers:

They are nice people, and will take an interest in Tiny (if only she behaves herself). So far she is proving alright, but at the start she tried to play up, and I told her that if I took her away from there, she would have to go to the Reformatory for bad girls and that the police wouîd call and take her away in the police van, and told her what a hard place it was. This has had a good effect on her, and she has been much brighter since. Maudie [Kelsey's worker] said it scared the life out of her. She seems a nice little girl and I feel pretty sure that if she behaves herself, she will have a very good home with the Gills, and will grow to like them.