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's concern about the Bungalow girls working in Adelaide, however, was connected to their recent and rather disastrous foray into the area of Aboriginal policy reform. WNPA interest in the Bungalow Home at Alice Springs had been aroused in the first instance by reports of a public talk given in Adelaide in August 1924, by a Mrs. Harry Dutton, down from central Australia, who spoke of the need for "properly organised homes" for the "half-caste" children there-"Might not such work be undertaken by a band of women?" she had asked.44 Inspired, the WNPA had invited one of their own members, Ida McKay, a former resident of Alice Springs between 1908 and 1916, to present a public address on the Bungalow.45

McKay was recognized somewhat as WNPA's expert on Aboriginal matters, her husband having been the sub-Protector of Aborigines at Alice Springs before the Commonwealth (federal government) takeover in 1911.46 He proposed in 1909 enforcing Aboriginal birth registrations so as to make prosecutions of white men for under-age sex practical, at the same time taking all the mixed-descent girls under the age of seven from the town camp to Adelaide for domestic service training-otherwise "eventually... we will have white women living as savages"-but had been successful in neither.47 Such concerns for the regulation and prevention of interracial sex between vulnerable Aboriginal girls and white men, which his wife presumably shared, were viewed sympathetically in the AVNPA. While their involvement in Aboriginal matters was quite recent,48 the WNPA had nominated McKay in 1923 for the body that advised the Chief Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, the Advisory Council for Aborigines, alongside one of its most prominent members, Harriet Stirling.49 When both nominees were rejected, McKay led a WNPA deputation to the Protector that had argued-also without success-that it should be a criminal offence in South Australia, as in the territory, for a white man to cohabit with an Aboriginal woman, that the consent of the Chief Protector should be a prerequisite for their marriage, and further, all Aboriginal women should be treated as children in law, with no age of consent being recognized.50

McKay's public talk for the WNPA in September 1924 on the "shocking conditions" at the Bungalow caused a sensation.51 Charging "the Federal authorities with inhumanity," McKay had departed from her husband's position in explaining how the "good tribal law" of girl child betrothal-enabling mixeddescent girls to be married under customary law-had been put aside by the establishment in 1914 of "a galvanized shed" in the town's center, "erected against the backyard of a public house." She argued the system of police protection was not practical (police being both prosecutor and protector) and reiterated her argument for the abolition of any age of consent for women who "without Christian teaching, surrounded by vice" could hardly be expected to "know right from wrong at 18," and for whom an exact age could not be ascertained. McKay focused on the plight especially of the older mixed-descent girls: "My sympathy is always with the unfortunate half-caste girl. She feels she is superior to her black sister, yet she is treated with contempt by the average white woman. She will not marry a black man, and the average white man thinks marriage with her impossible: yet many of them are despicable enough to create quadroon and octoroon children." A "few" girls had been licensed to work in Adelaide, "but no one has been appointed to watch over their interests. Is that giving them proper protection?"52