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

McKay's profession of "sympathy" for the "unfortunate half-caste girl" can be read as an assertion of her own class status and a legitimation of her right to intervene. In her years at Alice Springs before 1916, she would have relied on the domestic labor of Aboriginal women,53 and since returning to Adelaide in 1916, she had employed a number of girls from the district, as she herself stated, presumably Bungalow girls,54 and actually employed a Bungalow girl under one of Stott's contracts around this time.55 Her experience enabled her to perform a particular role of womanhood popular in Australia at the time. The "goodfella missus legend" that emerged in Australian culture from the late nineteenth century and was popularized in a range of publications aimed at middle-class white Australian girls and women, portraying white women "as kind mistresses and [Aboriginal women] as objects of their maternal care,"56 delineated the respectable white middle-class "pioneer" woman, whose appearance in the colonies had heralded the arrival of civilization, both from "degraded" Aboriginal and from convict women. McKay's expressed concern for the moral well-being of mixed-descent women was part of this performance of white Australian womanhood. As Heidi Tinsman points out, sexuality is still "a critical matrix surrounding service relations," and "the mistress's attempts to limit maids' relationships and reproduction together with the master's assumed access to serving girls' sexual services are central to defining the boundaries between those who serve and those who are served."57 In the context of Australian colonization, this aspect of service relationships was extended more generally: the respectable white wife was expected, by the very fact of her elevating presence on the frontier, to end the widespread "concubinage" of Aboriginal women by white men who presumed their availability, transforming the Aboriginal woman's role to domestic service proper, in theory, at least, if not in practice.58 Such maternalism not only masked the exploitation of black women by white; it ascribed a virtuous and apparently powerful role for white elite women within the nation and so provided a harmonious accompaniment to white women's political entry to federated Australia. Thus in stating that "personally, she had never in her life had reason to doubt the word of a black servant,"59 McKay would have assumed her audience of privileged, white Adelaide women not only understood her claim to be one of their class but also may have recognized a call to political action.

McKay's talk galvanized the WNPA. They wrote immediately to the federal government urging the relocation of the Bungalow, and for the first time the appointment of "a woman protector for the aboriginal and half-caste women and girls in the northern area," to be based at Alice Springs.60 Apparently seeing an opportunity for leverage, the Minister for Home and Territories promptly, if not cogently, responded by stating that the South Australian government had refused his request to take female children from the Bungalow. The WNPA then sent a deputation to the South Australian authorities to ask that "the whitest children" from the Bungalow-"about two years of age"-be placed in foster homes under the care of the State Children's Council in South Australia.61 To their dismay, this only resulted in an outraged public response.62 In March 1925, at the first general committee meeting for the year, members learned that three executive members had called at press offices late last year to protest against the damaging "false statements" appearing in the papers.63