WOMEN'S AND GENDER HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA: A Transformative Practice

Abstract

When a new wave of women's history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women's liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of "gender relations" enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women's experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women's movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

When a new wave of women's history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women's liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of "gender relations" enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women's experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women's movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders.

Angry Voices

"Tpropose that Australian women, women in the land of mateship, the L'Ocker,' keg culture, come pretty close to top rating as the 'Doormats of the Western World.'"1 So charged the historian Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda, her excoriating study of "Woman and Identity in Australia" published in 1976. In the nation that had been the first in the world to extend full political rights to women, they now found themselves, decades later, demeaned, exploited, marginalized, and silenced. "In this proud democ- racy," thundered Dixson, "women figure as pygmies in the culture of the present and are almost obliterated from the annals of the past."2 The main objects of her wrath were the male construct of national identity and the Australian historians, mostly men, who had been complicit in its making.

When this new wave of women's history burst onto the national scene in the mid-1970s, its origins in the women's liberation movement were evi- dent. Angry in tone, unforgiving in attitude, and intent on revolutionary change, from the beginning it contained a critique of the discipline of his- tory itself. It also attracted a large audience, because it was lively, political, accessible, and engaged. It directly critiqued relations between men and women in contemporary Australia and made a strong argument that both history and the world had to change. Political and cultural representation were thought to be linked phenomena. Women were under-represented in positions of power, because they had been demeaned by a national culture steeped in misogyny.3 Australian women's history was, initially, intensely national in focus and ambition.4

Dixson's book was one of several that appeared in the mid-1970s. Their arguments emphasized the role of ideology or sexist stereotyping in women's oppression. In Damned Whores and God's Police the feminist writer Anne Summers quoted the historian Kay Daniels's elaboration of the term "sexism" (which drew in turn on the U.S. feminist Kate Millett's Sexual Politics) to provide a theoretical framework: "Sexism is a sex/ political means of identifying and then dividing people.. .the political system of male dominance, patriarchy, is the usual form of sexism in this era."5 The book's subtitle, The Colonization of Women in Australia, would prove problematic, however, especially with Aboriginal women, whose critique of feminism's complicity in colonialism and their arguments about the irrelevance of the women's movement for them appeared alongside the new women's history.6 Aboriginal women's critique was as much focused on Australian history as was white women's.

Most feminist historians working in Australia in the 1970s trained in a labor history framework, and they drew on, in order to contest, the strong traditions of labor history and left wing politics in Australia. Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon's Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work documented Australian women's long history of struggle for equal pay, while Beverly Kingston's My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann, a study of women and work in Australia, offered an exhausting account of the daily demands of nineteenth-century housework on Australian wives, mothers, and domestic servants, who were always in short supply.7 The role of Aboriginal women in domestic service had yet to be recognized.

There had been earlier works of women's history in Australia, but mostly of the heroic pioneer variety. Pioneers on Parade and the volume The Peaceful Army by Flora Eldershaw, the first woman president of the Fellow- ship of Australian Writers, were published as sesquicentennial tributes to Australia's "founding women."8 The historian Eve Pownall's Australian Pioneer Women, originally published as Mary ofMaranoa: Tales of Australian Pioneer Women in 1959, liad praised the stoicism of women in the outback.9 Individual women were popular as subjects of biographies for women's historians: Margaret Kiddle's Caroline Chisholm was published in 1950 (a new edition with an introduction by Patricia Grimshaw came out in 1990) and the writer F.J. Woodward's Portrait of Jane: a life of Lady Jane Franklin was published in 1951!° Kiddle was one of a small number of professional women historians employed in universities before the 1970s-another was the distinguished biographer of explorers, Kathleen Fitzpatrick-but their work had generally focused on the history of heroic, if flawed, men.11

The histories of Australian women inspired by women's liberation were altogether different in purpose from the commemorative volumes that came before them and more closely connected to a grassroots political movement. The book-length studies of 1975 and 1976 grew out of a lively newsletter and journal literature, as the historian Mary Spongberg, the edi- tor of the Companion to Women's Historical Writing has pointed out.12 The proliferation of often short-lived journals was "a testament to the anger and energy provoked by the nascent women's liberation movement," wrote Spongberg. "Most were produced collectively, were driven by activism and relied on 'guerilla- girl' style humour to put forward their ideas."13 In Brisbane, Shrew was followed by Hetaera; in Sydney, Me jane was joined by Refiactory Girl and the first Indigenous feminist periodical, Koori Bina; in Melbourne, Vashti's Voice was the main women's liberation newspaper until the launch of Scarlet Woman; while in Hobart, Liberaction was more self-consciously engaged with theoretical critique.

Postgraduate students in history influenced the founding of women's liberation journals and the attack on traditional history. Ann Curthoys's path-breaking essay "Historiography and Women's Liberation" was pub- lished in the Marxist journal Arena in 1970. She both interrogated history's marginalization of women and suggested the transformative ambition of a new history of women: "[It].. .should do more than restore women to the pages of history books. It must analyse why public life has been consid- ered to be the focus of history and why public life has been so thoroughly occupied by men."14 Her challenge to rethink history was taken up by the collective in Sydney that founded Refiactory Girl in 1972, which offered mocking critiques of Australian history, including earlier traditions of feminism, whose leaders were now dismissed as conservative, self-limiting "wowsers."15 In Queensland, the long-lasting journal Hecate: A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal, founded in 1975, was more socialist feminist in orientation and more interested in exploring the nexus between sexism, racism, and class in the oppression of women. It also engaged with national mythologies and its first issue include a path-breaking critique of Anzac mythology by Carmel Shute, pointing out the implications for women of the celebration of male warriors as founders of the nation.16 Its argument remains relevant still and has been reprinted a number of times since. A group of young Melbourne historians, including many postgraduate stu- dents, founded Lilith: A Feminist Flistory Journal in 1984.

The histories that followed the first books of the mid-1970s aimed to document the history of women's oppression in Australia, but also to estab- lish that women had a history worth investigating. This goal informed the path-breaking survey of Australian archives that might become the basis of a new women's history, a project directed by Kay Daniels and made possible by International Women's Year funding provided by the Whitlam Labor government in 1975. Daniels employed a team of young researchers, who compiled a two volume guide to Australian archival collections, Women in Australia: An Annotated Guide to Records, that covered repositories in all states. It remains a valuable resource. In the Introduction, Daniels insisted, like Curthoys, on the transformative aim of women's history: "We have not thought that women's invisibility in historical writing is because they have in some way 'fallen through' the fabric of society into its 'cracks and crevices' but that historical writing has been deficient in the examination of that fabric and has consequently left unrevealed the basic processes and relationships of society and the integral role of women in them."17

That women were integral to basic historical processes and relation- ships was a radical proposition and one that would shape the future di- rection of feminist history in Australia, including the production of a new national history, written from a feminist perspective, by my colleagues Pa- tricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath, Marian Quartly, and myself, called Creating a Nation.18 The backlash from the male custodians of national history was swift and savage with one taking a full page in the national daily newspaper, the Weekend Australian, under the headline "Is Feminist History Bunk?" to tell us that women should stick to family history, because it was men who had defined, built, and defended the nation.19

Collective Labors

In the 1970s and 1980s, women at work were a major focus of the new women's history, beginning with a 1975 special issue of the journal Labour Flistory that included articles on women in factories and at home, studies of women's wages and industrial arbitration, women as members of the Labor party, and as working men's wives.20 The questions animating much of this research were why women continued to earn less than men, why they worked fewer hours than men, and why they worked in different jobs than men. The sexual division of labor was investigated in all its manifestations and theorized at length. The relation between productive and reproductive labor was a key focus of analysis.

One distinctive feature of women's history in Australia was the "Wom- en and Labor conferences" that brought together older activists, veterans of political struggle, younger academics, and postgraduate students to document and celebrate women's long history of work and political and industrial activism. The first conference was held at Macquarie University, in 1978, from which a very large range of papers were published in the vol- ume, Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978.21 A second conference held at LaTrobe University led to another substantial collection called Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia. Yet another collection, All Her Labours: Embroidering the Framework followed the third "Women and Labor" conference held in Adelaide in 1982.22

By that time, the founding of women's studies programs across Austra- lia, often led by historians, had begun to provide publishers with a regular market for collections of feminist scholarship. The historians Heather Radi and Judy Mackinolty published In Pursuit of Justice: Australian Women and the Lazo in 1979, while the historian Patricia Grimshaw and the psycholo- gist and women's studies teacher Norma Grieve, based at the University of Melbourne, published Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives in 1981. Grimshaw had also begun to publish her own path-breaking research on the history of nineteenth-century family life.23 In 1983, her essay "The Australian Family: An Historical Interpretation" appeared in the collection Fhe Family in the Modern World.24 In the same year, Cora Baidock and Bettina Cass, two historians of social policy, edited a collection of essays on Women, Welfare and the State in Australia. Another expert on social policy, Ailsa Burns, joined with Grieve to edit a sequel to the earlier Grieve and Grimshaw collection, entitled Australian Women: Nezo Feminist Perspectives.

By the 1990s, the history of women's work in Australia in all its variety had been documented, analyzed, and sometimes celebrated. There were studies of the history of women tram drivers, builders' laborers, secretar- ies, barmaids, nurses, writers, housewives, war workers, laundry workers, politicians, prostitutes, publicans, postal workers, mothers, bankers, teach- ers, midwives, health workers, scientists, social workers, furniture makers, women trade unionists, and women on strike. The biographical collection Double Lime: Women in Victoria 150 Years, published in 1985 to mark the 150th anniversary of the settlement of the colony Victoria, added significantly to the detailed knowledge of the experience and work of a range of women in the past, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, urban and rural, famous and unknown. Major collective and individual biographies-of such women as Alice Henry, Catherine Spence, Vida Goldstein, Roma Mitchell, and Miles Franklin-would augment this detailed knowledge of past lives.25

Kay Daniels's collection of essays on prostitution, So Much Hard Work, was both a culmination of earlier histories of women's work and a new departure in thinking about the methodological implications of women's history. In combining meticulous scholarship and sophisticated theoretical critique, the collection demonstrated how the history of so-called marginal or minority women could tell us much about dominant ideas and social structures. It argued that in the case of women, sex and work were not sepa- rate historical categories and that the dichotomies that informed traditional history-for example between public and private-needed to be rethought.26 Daniels elaborated on the radical challenge posed to historical writing by invoking her own dichotomy between feminist history and women's his- tory, in the first issue of the journal Australian Feminist Studies, founded in 1985 by the historian Susan Magarey, whose biography of leading suffragist Catherine Spence Unbridling the Tongues of Women also appeared that year.27

In Daniels's view, women's history merely added women to historical narratives whose themes were already established, as a kind of supplement, an optional extra. Feminist history aimed "to change fundamentally the way in which history is written; that is, to challenge conventional assumptions about significance and about priorities; really to reshape history so that women are not marginal figures within it but can take up a central, and therefore appropriate, place."28 Whereas Daniels, who was trained in British history, saw most potential in the "new social history" associated with the work of the historian E. P. Thompson, the implications of feminist history for the rewriting of Australian political history were also evident, as new studies of the imbrication of masculinity in the histories of nationalist and socialist politics made clear.29 The distinction between feminist and women's history was also invoked by the historian Jill Matthews, who emphasized feminist history's explicit concern with power relations. Matthews made a major contribution to understanding historical shifts in discourses on femininity with her book Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia.30

Gendered and Colonized Subjects

Daniels's vision of feminist history as a transformative exercise began to be realized with the deployment of gender as a conceptual category of analysis. In my 1986 study of the clash of feminism and nationalism, at the end of the nineteenth century, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context," I suggested that it was time to move beyond a limited sense of women's history; it was time, indeed, that "gender became a central category of all historical analysis."31 The same year, Australian studies were published on "Gender, Class and Work" and "Managing the Gender Order" and the U.S. historian Joan Scott published her influential essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis" in American Historical Review32 Gender, histori- ans came to recognize, was implicated in the conception and construction of power itself. Ann McGrath and Regina Ganter analyzed Aboriginal-colonial relations in terms of gender, the historian Raelene Frances saw gender as crucial to the definition of skill at the workplace, while Desley Deacon and Penny Russell made gender central to their quite different investigations of the dynamics of class formation in the nineteenth-century colonies and the new Australian nation-state.33

Gender relations rapidly became the focus for new university courses and new textbooks were published to service them. Gender Relations in Aus- tralia: Domination and Negotiation, edited by Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans, was published in 1992. More specialized works followed. Raelene Frances's The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria was published in 1993. Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, published in 1995, explored the impact of World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War in shaping gender relations in Australia and constructions of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality, gay and straight. The co-editor Joy Damousi used the concept of gendered space to examine anti-conscription campaigns during World War I. Gender was also central to her understandings of the working of convict institutions in colonial Australia.34

By 1988, the year of the bicentenary of the settlement (or "invasion") of Australia, historians had made it clear that Aboriginal dispossession and displacement were central to the Australian story. New feminist work focused on the white civilizing mission.35 By the time of the Centenary of Federation in 2001, the making of Australia was understood to be a fully gendered and race-based process. Citizenship had been conceptualized as a gendered and racialized condition, as the historians Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern made clear in their collection Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories.36 The legal historian Helen Irving published extensively on the making of the Australian constitution asking if the nation had a "gendered constitution."37 If not central to the national story, women were now seen to be integral to it, and active in shaping it, as colonizers and the colonized.38 The intertwining of gender, race, and citizenship in nation-building was the focus a new wave of women's political history.39

At the same time, Australian research on gender and nation increasingly shaped international research agendas as feminist historians traveled to international conferences, welcomed overseas scholars to Australia, formed new friendships, and published their work in the new international journals, including Feminist Review, Gender and History, Women's History Review, and the Journal of Women's History. Ann Curthoys and I published articles on gender and national identity in Gender and History in the early 1990s, when we also traveled to the international symposium on "Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities" at the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Italy organized by the British historians Catherine Hall and Judy Walkowitz.40 Another conference on "Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the long nineteenth century: International Comparisons" took place in Berlin in 1998, to which I contributed a paper on the "ambiguities for feminists of national belonging."41 In such New World societies as Australia it was clear that national identities as well as feminist ones were shaped in and against imperial relations and ideas about racial difference.42 The historian and teacher of women's studies Chilla Bulbeck insisted on recognition of the colonizing role of white women in the Australian territory of Papua New Guinea.43

By the 1990s, Australian women's history increasingly employed post-colonial theoretical frameworks and became part of the larger project of new imperial history that was transforming understandings of British imperialism, colonialism, and inter-colonial relations.44 Australian women's history was also transformed by Indigenous women's distinctive historical perspectives and critiques of feminism, most notably in the historical work of Jackie Huggins and theoretical interventions of Aileen Moreton Robinson.45 Non-Indigenous women such as Ann McGrath also made major contribu- tions to the writing of Aboriginal women's history, locating them as crucial to the survival and regeneration of their own societies and to those of colonists and settlers. In Born in the Cattle, McGrath explored Aboriginal women's role in the pastoral industry; she wrote the first chapter of Creating a Na- tion ("Birthplaces"); and with the Aboriginal scholar and Canadian activist Winona Stevenson, she compared the relation of Aboriginal women to the state in Australia and Canada.46 The historian Heather Goodall examined the history of land rights claims and Aboriginal women's work as custodians and carers.47 There was extensive research on Aboriginal women's domestic labor and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women. The historian Vicky Haskins theorized Aboriginal domestic service as its own contact zone and in 2005 published her book-length study One Bright Spot and-with the historians Anna Cole and Fiona Paisley-Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History N

Paisley's research was at the forefront of an extensive body of work that examined the history of feminist engagement with Aboriginal rights nationally and internationally. Complicit with white privilege, feminist activists from the 1920s through the 1940s were yet outspoken on behalf of Aboriginal women, seeking their protection, and deploring their lack of citizenship rights and the suffering endured following the removal of their mixed descent children.49

The work of humanitarian Mary Bennett from the 1920s and her pam- phlet The Aborigine as a Human Being, published in London in 1930, became central to this burgeoning field and a new prize was named in her honor by the Australian branch of the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH) for the best article published bienially in Austra- lian women's history The whiteness of settler women and feminist politics increasingly came into focus in studies published from the mid-1990s, as did the international stage on which many feminist activists campaigned, at the British Commonwealth League in London, the League of Nations and the ILO at Geneva, and the Pan-Pacific Women's Conference in Honolulu.50

Sex, Suffering, and Desire

Women's liberation authors in the 1970s wrote of women as exploited sex objects, condemned to enforced whoredom in the convict colonies and to serve as breeders in the new nation. Nineteenth-century feminists had been cast as repressive moralists acting out their assigned role as God's Police. Changing perspectives on the history of feminism from the 1980s led to earlier generations of feminists being represented more sympatheti- cally as critics of the harmful consequences for women of unrestrained male sexuality.51 The historian Judith Allen wrote of leading suffragist Rose Scott's critique of the "animal in man" and published her biography in 1993.52

While research in the 1990s continued to document the full range of deleterious consequences for women that resulted from sexual activity with men, with studies of women's experience of abortion, venereal disease, rape, unmarried motherhood, domestic violence, and death in childbirth, scholars also became interested in documenting the history of women's passion, desire, and pleasure.53 Indeed, so attractive did these concepts become for feminist historians that they provided the frameworks in which to discuss a range of women's activities including politics and suffrage.54

New work cast women in the past as desiring sexual subjects. Daniels and Damousi described women convicts engaged in a range of rebellious behaviors and lesbian relationships.55 The history of lesbian desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was explored in relation to issues of historiography and the archives, the experience of the law and war, per- formance, romance, music, and spectatorship and the politics of passion, scandal, and crime.56 The role of cross dressing in women's lives-at work and play-was also documented.57 More recently, research has investigated lesbian transnational networks as a basis for migration.58

Histories of women's experience of the home front during World War II positioned women-both heterosexual and lesbian-not only as victims of sexual exploitation and repression, but as sexual agents with desires of their own. Australian women's pursuit of American soldiers-who were often imagined as film stars and who proved skilled in the modern rituals of courtship-was the focus of a number of studies in the early 1990s.59 New histories of birth control emphasized women's desire to enjoy sex without also having to bear children.60

The heterosexualization of women in the early decades of the twen- tieth century through new forms of work and consumption was explored in research on the occupations of barmaid, prostitute, and shop assistant and the growth of sexualized forms of advertising and consumerism. Work was published on the rise of beauty contests, the figure of the flapper, and the increasing importance of appearance in shaping modern women's subjectivities and desire.61 The cultural historian Liz Conor's work on the relations between feminine modernity and spectatorship in her influential book, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s was the subject of a special forum at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Las Vegas, in October 2012.

The history of women's multiple sexual desires is a major focus of Lisa Feather stone's new book Let's Talk About Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill, which highlights pleasure as well as regulation and the experiences of lesbian as well as heterosexual women.62 Featherstone also co-edited with the feminist scholar Rebecca Jennings a special issue of Women's History Review "Let's Talk About Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia and New Zealand." Jennings's new Australian Research Council funded research project, "Lesbian Cultures of Intimacy in Australia since 1945," draws on oral history interviews and archival sources to write a his- tory that also aims both to inform contemporary debates and to begin to heal the traumatic legacy of past social oppression.63 The historian Frank Bongiorno's The Sex Lives of Australians also charted changes in attitudes to male and female sexuality, highlighting the constraints and fears that animated much of Australian history, including colonial anxieties about the incidence of homosexuality in a male dominated society.

In Bongiorno's account, the iconic Australian figure of the bushranger returns as a gay outlaw, who dies with his lover in his arms. Since their first appearance in the 1980s, studies of the history of masculinity have flour- ished in Australia. Changing ideas about masculinity have been explored in relation to Ab originality, medical and sexual discourse, colonialism, frontier violence, migration, mateship, militarism, missions, strikes, sport, body-building, suburban life, trade unionism, and the land. A special is- sue of the Journal of Australian Studies-Australian Masculinities: Men and their Histories-featured articles on the convict system and manhood, rock 'n roll culture, "the mating game," soldiers, "lovable larrikins, and awful Ockers," and surf life-savers. In an ironic turn, one version of gender history is returning us to the preoccupation with iconic national types and male mythologies that so provoked feminist historians in the 1970s.

Conclusion: Transnational Pasts, Transformative Histories

As the gendered history of men proved to be determinedly national in focus, so feminist history became increasingly transnational in approach. In part this was a result of the large amount of research on earlier generations of feminist activists, who themselves were avid travelers and internationalist in political orientation. Feminism was always an international movement and Australian women were enthusiastic participants from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, in organizations ranging from the Interna- tional Council of Women, the International Women's Suffrage Alliance, the British Commonwealth League, and Pan-Pacific conferences, to the League of Nations, the ILO, and the United Nations. In addition, special issues of the journal Labour History have generated a body of research joining Aus- tralian labor histories with those of Canada and New Zealand.64 There is now a large women's historiography exploring past political mobilizations through these regional and international connections.65

Despite the intense national focus of women's liberation in the 1970s, Australian feminist historians, since the 1990s, have shown themselves keen to break free from national constraints and confinements. They have become regular participants in international conferences, formed new scholarly networks, and been at the forefront of producing comparative, international, transnational, and trans-colonial history. Their work has been represented at meetings of the IFRWH, the Berkshire Conferences on the History of Women, at a range of international symposia and workshops, and in international anthologies. In 1998, at a time when Patricia Grimshaw was president of the IFRWH (from 1995 to 2000), Melbourne was host to the International Federation for Research on Women's History conference on the subject of "Women and Human Rights, Social Justice and Citizen- ship," which papers were published as Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives by Palgrave in 2001.66

In 2004, Ann Curthoys and I organized a conference at the Australian National University in Canberra to explore the potential of a transnational framework of analysis to illuminate women's and other histories. There were papers on Atlantic, global, and imperial historiographies. The result- ing volume of papers was published as Connected Worlds: History in Trans- national Perspective in 2005, an e-book that has reached an audience across the world numbering in the thousands. 67 Its papers included studies of Chinese masons in Australia, Indian migrants, and Australians in India, the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s, the Americanization of romantic love, the influence of Garveyism on Australian Aboriginal politics, and the use of literacy tests in the U.S., South Africa, and Australia as instruments of racial discrimination. Curthoys had already explored the influence of Martin Luther King and South African struggles against apartheid in her book on Australian freedom rides in the 1960s.68 Since then she has published on the relations between fiction and history and between Indigenous dispos- session and colonial self-government. I continued to research international political mobilizations, focused on struggles for sexual and racial equality. In 2008,1 co-authored Draining the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Campaign for Racial Equality co-published by Cambridge University Press and Melbourne University Press.69

Following another more biographically-oriented conference on transna- tional history, feminist historians Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott edited two collections on border crossing, one published in Aus- tralia and one in the U.K.: Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World and Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity 1700-present.70 Australian feminist historians have enthusiastically embraced the transnational and trans-colonial turn. A brief summary of the very different current research projects of five younger and mid-career women's historians indicates the range of transnational connections they are investigating and building.

Kate Bagnall researches historical intersections between China and Australia, through the intimate lives of Australian men of Chinese descent (and their white wives) in both Australia and China, the administration of the White Australia Policy, and the cultural heritage of Australia's Chinese communities. Her focus is on transnational Chinese Australian family histories researched in archives, using emerging technologies that enable her to uncover and understand the complex networks of clan and kinship over time and space.71

Penny Russell, the preeminent historian of the role of manners in nego- tiating class, gender, and race relations in colonial society, whose first book focused on the role of status distinctions in shaping colonial femininities, and second prize-winning book was Civilised or Savage? Manners in Colonial Australia, is now working with Nigel Worden of Cape Town University on a trans-colonial Australian and South African project, funded by the Aus- tralian Research Council called "Empires of Honour: Violence and Virtue in Colonial Worlds, 1750-1850."72

Christina Twomey, who wrote her first book on wife desertion in the Australian colonies, has since worked on the cultural memory of war and the impact of prisoner-of-war experiences in Japanese camps in World War II on regional relationships. She has also co-authored with Mark Peel a new History of Australia. Awarded a Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council, she has begun a new project called "Detention: the Imperial and Humanitarian Origins of Internment and Concentration Camps," in which she will investigate the colonial origins of the concentration camp system.73

Joy Damousi, the prolific historian of women and socialism and war, women and bereavement, gender and elocution, and sex and psychoanalysis is now engaged on a transnational study of the impact of the Greek Civil War and associated trauma and dislocation on Greek Australian migrants, as well as a project in international history on the organization of post-war child adoption through the work of Aileen Fitzpatrick with the Council of International Social Service.74

Heather Goodall has worked with Aboriginal women in historical research and published extensively on the history of campaigns for land rights. She has also written environmental histories focused on water, rivers, and oceans that connect Indigenous relationships to country with settler uses of the land and trace the ways in which environmental issues are used in social conflicts and inter-cultural social relations. Her research has extended in more recent times to investigate intercolonial networks, particularly those between Australia and India and around the Indian Ocean, and the decolonization conflicts of the mid-twentieth-century in India, Indonesia, and Australia. In her new project, funded by the Australian Research Council, she will work with Devleena Ghosh to research the role of relations between women's movements in Australia and India 1945-1975 in countering the politics of the Cold War.75

These diverse and intellectually exciting projects suggest that not only are feminist historians leading the way in connecting Australian history with colonial, regional, and global histories, they are generously endowed with government funding to do so. This current work also shows that Australian feminist history has done much to realize Daniels's vision of a transformative history that would render women's history integral, even central, to all historical processes and relationships. No longer a specialist domain, or an optional extra, feminist history, expansively conceived, is transforming the discipline in Australia. Paradoxically, however, the more widely it ranges, the less visible and viable women's history as a separate field of enquiry would seem to be.

Transnational history also raises new questions about audience: Who are our readers? Where should we publish? To whom do we wish to speak? While cutting-edge feminist history is increasingly transnational in nature, publishing houses remain oriented to, and continue to produce, national histories for nation-based readerships. And the task of political reform- once a paramount concern of feminist historians in areas such as abortion, Aboriginal rights, child-care, pensions and wages, work, and welfare-re- mains the responsibility of nation-states. It is primarily in the domain of the nation-state that history can have an effect on politics and policy-making.76

At the scholarly level, feminist questions and frameworks of analysis now inform research into a very wide range of subjects and are driving Australian history to connect with the wider world. But in the process there have also been disconnections-from grassroots politics and public policy making-and possibly from the national audience-and it is yet to be seen whether this new feminist history will also prove transformative in the larger sense of changing the world as imagined by the politically-driven nationally-focused women's historians of the 1970s.

But in the end it is misleading to represent the current state of women's, gender, and feminist history in such dichotomous terms. Even as they engage with the transnational turn, feminist historians continue to teach in Austra- lian universities, address national audiences, publish in national journals, and write for national newspapers. While insisting that past worlds were interconnected and speaking to an international community of historians, Australian women's historians continue to engage with local concerns, one of which is to challenge the politics of border protection that leads to the demonization and appalling treatment of the thousands of asylum seekers who seek admission to our country. A history that emphasizes the inter- connections of past societies and peoples and challenges us to understand the world beyond the nation is surely now of pressing relevance to us all.

Footnote

Notes

1Miriam Dixson, The Real Nlntilda: Woman and Identity in Australia 1788 to the Present (Penguin, Ringwood: 1976 [revised 1983]), 11. "The Ocker" is a colloquial- ism for an Australian bloke; "keg culture" refers to an alleged Australian fondness for beer drinking.

2Dixson, The Real Matilda, 12.

3Ibid" 13.

4In a review article in Gender and History 9, vol.l (1997) appropriately called "The Struggle for Australian History," U.S. historian Bonnie G Smith noted that traditional history's masculinist character was hardly unique to Australia however: "Do not the halls of academe, whether in Melbourne, Oxford or New Brunswick echo with disparagement of women's history and scorn for its fanciful and inferior quality," 139-143.

5Artne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Australian Women (Melbourne, Australia: Penguin, 1975), 22.

6Bobbi Sykes, "Black women in Australia: A History," in The Other Half: Women in Australian Society, ed. Jan Mercer (Melbourne, Australia: Penguin, 1975); and Pat O'Shane, "Is There Any Relevance in the Women's Movement for Aboriginal Women?" Refractory Girl 12 (1976): 32-34.

7Beverly Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Many Ann: Women and Work in Australia (Nelson, Melbourne: Nelson, 1975); Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work (Melbourne: Penguin, 1975).

8Flora Eldershaw, The Peaceful Army: A Memorial to the Pioneer Women of Aus- tralia, 1788-1938 (Sydney: Women's Executive Committee and Advisory Council of Australia's 150th Anniversary Celebrations,1938); and Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack Pioneers on Parade (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1939).

9Eve Pownall, Many of Maranoa: Tales of Australian Pioneer Women (Sydney: FH Johnston, 1959). Eve Pownall Australian Pioneer Women, 5th ed. (Currey, O'Neill, Melbourne: Currey O'Neill,1980).

10F.J. Woodward, Portrait of Jane: a life ofTady Jane Franklin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951); and Margaret Kiddle Caroline Chisholm (Melbourne: Mel- bourne University press, 1950). Reissued with an Introduction by Patricia Grimshaw (Melbourne: 1980).

11Patricia Grimshaw and Jane Carey "Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905-1990), Margaret Kiddle (1914-1958) and Australian history after the Second World War," Gender and Histoiy 13, no. 2 (2001): 349-373.

12Mary Spongberg "Australian Women's History in Australian Feminist Periodicals 1971-1988," History Australia 5, no. 3 (2008) 1-16; and Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine, eds., Companion to Australian Women's Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

13Spongberg "Australian Women's History."

14Ann Curthoys, "Historiography and Women's Liberation," Arena 22 (1970): 35M0, quote on 2.

15"Wowsers" means puritannical kill-joys.

16Carmel Shute "Heroines and Heroes: Sexual mythology and Australia 1914-1918" Hecate 1, no. 1 (1975): 6-22; reprinted in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Centunj (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 23M2; see also Adrian Howe " Anzac mythology and the feminist challenge" in Gender and War, ed. Damousi and Lake (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 302-10.

17Kay Daniels, Mary Murnane, and Anne Picot, eds., Women in Australia: An Annotated Guide to Records (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1977), vii

18Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creat- ing a Nation (Ringwood: Penguin, 1994); reprinted in 1996 and 2000.

19John Hirst, "Is Feminist History Bunk?," Weekend Australian, 11 March 1994. For discussion see Joy Damousi, "Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating a Nation and Australian Historiography," Gender and History 11, no. 3 (1999): 612-24; Bonnie Smith, "The Struggle for Australian History," Gender and History 9, no. 1 (1997): 139-43.

20Labour History: Special Issue Women at Work 29 (1975).

21Elizabeth Windschuttle, ed., Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978 (Melbourne: Fontana and Collins, 1980).

22Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute, eds., Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982); and Margaret Allen, ed., All Her Labours: Embroidering the Framework (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984).

23Patricia Grimshaw, "Women and the Family in Australian History-A Re- ply to Fhe Real Matilda" Australian Historical Studies 18, no. 72 (April 1979): 412-21; Grimshaw "Women and the Family in Australian History" in Women Class and His- tory, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle, (Melbourne: Fontana and Collins, 1980), 37-52.

24Patricia Grimshaw, "The Australian Family: An Historical Interpretation," in Hie Family on the Modern World ed. Alisa Burns, Gill Bottomley, and Penny tools (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 31-48.

25Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: Hie Power of Pen and Voice: Hie Life of an Australian- American Labor Reformer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alison Mackinnon, "Collective Biography: Reading Early University Women from Their Own Texts," Australian Feminist Studies 7,no. 16 (1992); 94-101; Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Katie Holmes, Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardening (Nedlands, Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2011).

26Kay Daniels, So Much Hard Work: Women and Prostitution in Australian His- tory (Sydney: Fontana Collins, 1984)

27Kay Daniels "Feminism and Social History" Australian Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (1985): 27-40, quote on, 27.

28Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Longues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger,1985).

29Marilyn Lake, "The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context," [Australian] Historical Studies 22, no. 86 (April 1986): 116-31; Reprinted in Susan Magarey, et. al, Debutante Nation: Feminists Contest the 1890s, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 1-16; Marilyn Lake, "Socialism and Manhood," Labour History 50 (1986): 54-62. For later studies of gender and politics see Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890-1955, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994.

30Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: Hie Historical Construction of Femininity in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984); and Jill Matthews "Feminist History," Labour History 50 (May 1986:147-153.

31Lake, "Politics of Respectability."

32Joan Scott "Gender: A Useful category of Analysis" American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-75.

33Ann McGrath, "The White Man's Looking Glass: Aboriginal-Colonial Gen- der Relations at Port Jackson," Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 95 (1990): 189-206; Raelene Frances "Marginal Matters: Gender, Skill, Unions and the Commonwealth Arbitration Court-A Case Study of the Australian Printing Industry, 1925-1937" Labour History 61 (1991): 17-29; Desley Deacon Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989); Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Mel- borne: Melborne University Press, 1994); and Regina Ganter, "Letters from Mapoon: Colonising Aboriginal Gender," Australian Historical Studies 30, (1999): 267-85.

34Damousi and Lake, Gender and War; and Joy Damousi "Chaos and Order: Gender, Space and Sexuality on Female Convict Ships" Australian Historical Studies 26 104 (1995): 351-72.

35Patricia Grimshaw and Julie Evans, "Colonial Women on Intercolonial Frontiers," Australian Historical Studies 27,(1996): 79-85; Grimshaw and Elizabeth Nelson, "Empire, 'the Civilizing Mission' and Indigenous Christian Women in Co- lonial Victoria," Australian Feminist Studies, 16, (2001): 295-309; and Hilary Carey, "Subordination, Invisibility and Chosen Work: Mission Nuns and Australian Ab- origines c. 1900-1949," Australian Feminist Studies 13, (1998): 251-67.

36Marian Quartly, "Mothers and Fathers and Brothers and Sisters: the AWA and the ANA and Gendered Citizenship," Journal of Australian Studies: Special Issue 17, (1993): 22-30; Marilyn Lake, "The Inviolable Woman: Feminist Conceptions of Citizenship in Australia 1900-1945" Gender and Histoiy 8, no. 2 (1996): 197-211, reprinted in Joan Landes, ed., Feminism The Public and the Private: Oxford Readings in Feminism (Oxford, MA: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223-240; Marilyn Lake, "The Republic, the Federation and the Intrusion of the Political" Journal of Austra- lian Studies: Special Issue, Vox Republicae: Feminism and the Republic 20, (1996): 5-15; and Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern, eds., Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).

37Helen Irving, ed., A Woman 's Constitu tion ? Gender and History in the Australian Commonwealth (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1996). Particularly see Irving's chapter "Agendered constitution?" (98-107).

38Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and nation in Australian Women's Writing 1880s-1930s (St Leonard, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995).

39Patricia Grimshaw, "Gender, Citizenship and Race in the Woman's Chris- tian Temperance Union of Australia, 1890 to the 1930s," Australian Feminist Studies 13, (1998): 199-214; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,1999); Marian Quartly, "The Australian Women's National League and Democracy, 1904-1921," Women's History Review 15, no. 1 (2006): 35-50; and Clare Wright, "'New Brooms They Say Sweep Clean' : Women's Political Activ- ism on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854" Australian Historical Studies 39, (2008): 305-21.

40Marilyn Lake, "Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation-Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts," Gender and Histoiy 4 (1992): 305-22; and Ann Curthoys, "Identity Crisis: Colonialism, Nation and Gender in Australian History," Gender and History 5, (1993): 165-76.

41Marilyn Lake, "The Ambiguities for Feminists of National Belonging: Race and Gender in the Imagined Australian Community," in Gendered Nations: National- isms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 159-76.

42Marilyn Lake /'Between Old Worlds and New: Feminist Citizenship, Na- tion and Race, the Destabilization of Identity" in Suffrage and Beyond, ed. C. Daley and M. Nolan (Auckland University Press, 1994), 277-94; Marilyn Lake, "Between Old World 'Barbarism' and Stone Age 'Primitivism': The Double Difference of the White Australian Feminist" in Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought, ed. Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 80-91.

43Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea: Colonial Passage 1920-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

44Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortunes in London: Australian Women, Colonial- ism and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

45Jackie Huggins, "Experience of a Queensland Aboriginal Domestic Servant," Labour Histon/; Special Issue Women, Work and the Labour Movement in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand 61 (1991) 1-21; Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1994); Jackie Huggins, "A Contemporary View of Aboriginal Women's Relationship to the White the Women's Movement" in Australian Women, eds. Girve and Burns; Jackie Huggins, "White Aprons, Black Hands: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Queensland" Labour History: Special Issue, Aboriginal Workers 69 (1995): 188-95; and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin' Up to the White Woman (St Lucia, Australia: Uni- versity of Queensland Press, 2000). See also Jennifer Sabbioni "Aboriginal Women's Narratives: Reconstructing Identities," Australian Historical Studies TJ (1996): 72-8.

46Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Ann McGrath and Winona Stevenson, "Gender, Race and Policy: Aboriginal Women and the State in Canada and Australia," Labour Histon/; Special Issue Australian and Canada: Labour Compared 71 (1996): 37-53.

47Heather Goodall "'Assimilation Begins in the Home': The State and Aborigi- nal Women's Work as Mothers in New South Wales 1900s to 1960s," Labour History/ Le Travail: Special Issue Aboriginal Workers 69, no. 38 (1995): 75-101; Heather Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996); Heather Goodall and Isobel Flick, Isabel FlkkThe Many Lives of an Extraordinary Woman (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004).

48Vicky Haskins "On the Doorstep: Aboriginal Domestic Service as a 'Contact Zone,"' Australian Feminist Studies 16 (2001): 27-42; and Inara Walden "'That was slavery days': Aboriginal Domestic Servants in New South Wales in the Twentieth Century," Labour History: Special Issue Aboriginal Workers 69, no. 38 (1995): 196-209.

49Fiona Paisley, "Feminist Challenges to White Australia, 1900-1930s" in Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia ed. Diane Kirkby (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), 252-69; Alison Holland, "Feminism, Colonialism and Aboriginal Workers: An Anti-Slavery Crusade," Labour History: Special Issue, Aboriginal Workers 69 (1995): 52-64; Fiona Paisley "No Back Streets in the Bush: 1920s and 1930s Pro-Aboriginal White Women's Activism and the Trans-Australia Railway," Australian Feminist Studies 12 (1997): 119-37; Marilyn Lake, "'Feminism and the Gendered Politics of Anti-Racism, Australia 1927-1957," Australian Historical Studies 29 (1998): 91-108; and Alison Holland, "Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves? Exploring White Women's Interventions in the Politics of Race, 1920s-1940s," Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001): 27-42.

50Marilyn Lake, "Colonised and Colonising: the White Australian Feminist Subject," Women 's History Review 2 (1993): 377-86; Marilyn Lake, "Australian Fron- tier Feminism and the Marauding White Man" in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Fiona Paisley "Citizens of Their World: Australian Feminism and Indigenous Rights in the International Context, 1920s and 1930s" Feminist Review 58 (1998); Angela Woollacott, "Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific feminisms: Australian Women's International Ac- tivism in the 1920s-1930s" Gender and History 10 (1998); Nikki Henningham "'Hats off Gentlemen to our Australian Mothers!' Representations of White Femininity in Northern Queensland in the Early Twentieth Century," Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001 ); Renate Howe, "The Australian Student Christian Movement and Women's Activism in the Asia-Pacific Region, 1890s-1920s," Australian Feminist Studies 16 (2001): 311-23; Marilyn Lake, "From Self-Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining Women's Rights at the League of Nations and the United Nations" in Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (London: Pal- grave, 2001); Fiona Paisley, "Cultivating Modernity, Culture and Internationalism in Australia Feminism's Pacific age" Journal of Women's History 14, no. 3 (2002): 105-32; Jane Carey "'Woman's Objectives-A Perfect Race': Whiteness, Eugenics and the Racial Anxieties of interwar Australia" in Recovering Whiteness ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women's Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010); and Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection ? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women's Rights 1919-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000).

51Judith Allen, "'Mundane' Men: Historians, Masculinity and Masculinism" Australian Historical Studies 22 (October 1987): 617-28; and Judith Allen, "Rose Scott's Vision: Feminism and Masculinity, 1880-1925" in Crossing Boundaries: Feminism and the Critique of Knowledge ed. Barbara Caine, Elizabeth A. Grosz, and Marie de Lepervanche (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988): 157-66.

52Judith Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993).

53Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Women since 1880 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990); Barbara Baird, "I Had One Loo": An Oral History of Abortion in South Australia before 1970, ( Adelaide: Flinders University, 1990);Anne- Maree Collins, "Testimonies of sex: rape in Queensland 1880-1919" Journal of Australian Studies 15 (1991); Kay Saunders and Katie Spearitt, "Is there life after birth? Childbirth, Death and Danger for Women in Colonial Queensland" Journal of Australian Studies 15 (1991); Judith Smart, "Feminists, Labour Women and Venereal Disease in Early Twentieth Century Melbourne" Australian Feminist Studies 7 (1992); Renate Howe and Shurlee Swain, "Saving the Child and Punishing the Mother: Single Mothers and the State 1912-1942" Journal of Australian Studies: Special Issue: Women and the State 17, (1993); Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press,1995); Gail Mason, "Re- forming the Law of Rape: Incursions into the Masculinist Sanctum" in Sex, Power and Justice, 50-67; Jo Aitken, "'The Horrors of Wife-Beating Among the Masses': Feminist Representations of Wife-Beating in England and Australia, 1870-1914" Journal of Women's History 19, no. 4 (2007): 107-31; and Jessica Horton "The Case of Elsie Barrett: Aboriginal Women, Sexuality and the Victorian Board for the Protec- tion of Aborigines" Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 1 (2010): 1-18.

54Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001).

55Joy Damousi, "Beyond the 'Origins Debate': Theorising Sexuality and Gen- der Disorder in Convict Women's History," Australian Historical Studies TJ (1996): 59-71; Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Kay Daniels, Convict Women (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998). On the history of convict women as forced migrants, see Deborah Oxley, Convict Nlnids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

56Sue Davies and ARhodes Little, "History, Sexuality and Power: Deconstruct- ing the 'Lesbian Vampire Case/" Australian Cultural History 12 (1993); Sylvia Martin, "Rethinking Passionate Friendships: The Writing of Mary Fullerton," Women's History Review 2, no. 3 (1993): 14-28; Susan Sheridan, "The Woman's Voice on sexuality" in Debutante Nation; Ruth Ford, "'Lady-Friends' and 'Sexual Deviationists': Lesbians and Law in Australia, 1920s-1950s" in Sex, Power and Justice, 33-49; Ruth Ford, "Speculating on Scrapbooks, Sex and Desire: Issues in Lesbian History" Austra- lian Historical Studies TJ (1996): 395M06; Lucy Chesser, '"A Woman Who Married Three Wives': Management of Disruptive Knowledge in the 1879 Australian Case of Edward De Lacy Evans" Journal of Women's History, 9, no.4 (1998): 53-77; Lucy Chesser. "'When Two Loving Hearts Beat as One': Same-Sex Marriage, Subjectivity and Self-Representation in the Australian Case of Marion-Bill-Edwards, 1906-1916," Women's History Review 17, no.5 (2008): 721M2.

57Ruth Ford and Lucy Chesser, "'Woman in a Suit of Male': Sexuality, Race and the Woman Worker in "Male" Disguise, 1890-1920" Australian Feminist Studies 23 (2008): 175-204; and Lucy Chesser, Parting with My Sex: Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008).

58Rebecca Jennings, '"It Was a Hot Climate and it Was a Hot Time': Lesbian Migration and Transnational Networks in the Mid-Twentieth Century" Australian Feminist Studies 25 (2010): 31M5.

59Marilyn Lake, "Female Desires: The Meaning of World War II" Australian Historical Studies 24 (1990), reprinted in Gender and War, Damousi and Lake, 60-80; Marilyn Lake, "The Desire for as Yank: Sexual Relations between Australian Women and American Servicemen during World War II," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 4 (1992): 305-322; Kate Darian-Smith, "Remembering Romance: Memory, Gen- der and World War II," in Gender and War, Damousi and Lake, 117-133; Ruth Ford, "Lesbians and Loose Women: Female Sexuality and the Women's Services during World War II" in Gender and War, Damousi and Lake, 81-104; and Kay Saunders "In a cloud of lust: Black GIs and sex in World War 11" in Gender and War, 178-90.

60Nicole Moore, "Treasonous Sex: Birth Control, Obscenity, Censorship and White Australia," Australian Feminist Studies 20 (2005): 319M2; Kate Murphy, "'Very Decidedly Decadent': Elite Response to Modernity in the Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth rate in New South Wales, 1930-04" Australian Ftistorical Studies 37. (2005): 319M2.

61Gail Reekie, "'Decently Dressed'?: Sexualised Consumerism and the Work- ing Woman's Wardrobe 1918-1923" Labour Histon/ Special Issueôl (1991): 15-27; Gail Reekie, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993); Lyn Finch, "Consuming Passions: Romance and Consumerism during World War II" in Gender and War, 105-16; Liz Conor "The Flapper in the Heterosexual Scene" Journal of Australian Studies 26, (2002): 41-57; and Liz Conor "The City Girl: Appearing in the Modern Scene" Lilith 11 (2002): 53-71.

62Lisa Featherstone, Let's Talk about Sex: The History of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars press, 2011).

63Lisa Featherstone and Rebecca lennings, eds., Women's History Review 21, no. 5 (2012).

64Raelene Frances and Melanie Nolan, "Gender and the Trans-Tasman World of Labour: Transnational and Comparative Histories" Labour History 95 (2008): 25-42.

65In addition to references listed at endnote 49, Patricia Grimshaw, "Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples and Woman's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii" in Globalizing Feminisms, 1789-1945, ed. Karen Offen (New York: Routledge, 2010).

66Grimshaw, Holmes, and Lake, eds., Women's Rights and Human Rights.

67Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transna- tional Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University press, 2005).

68Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002).

69Marilyn Lake, FAITH: Faith Bandler: Gentle Activist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

70Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008); Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity 1700-Present (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2010); see also Angela Woollacott, Race and the Modern Exotic: Three Australian Women on Global Display (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2011).

71Kate Bagnall, "Across the Threshold: White Women and Chinese Men in the White Colonial Imaginary," Hecate 28, no. 2 (2002): 9-29; Kate Bagnall, "T Am Nearly Heartbroken About Him': Stories of Australian Mothers' Separation from Their 'Chinese' children," History Australia 1, no. 1 (December 2003): 30M0 ; Kate Bagnall, "'He would be a Chinese still': Negotiating Boundaries of Race, Culture and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia," in, After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940 ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004), 153-70; Kate Bagnall, "Ajourney of Love: Agnes Breuer's Sojourn in 1930s China," in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woolacott (Canberra: Australian National University EPress, 2008); Kate Bagnall, "Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia", Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (March 2011), 62-77; Kate Bagnall, "Crossing oceans and cultures," in Australia's ,4sia: Prom Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2012).

72Penny Russell, Civilised or Savage? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney: New South, 2010).

73Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Co- lonial Welfare (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002); Christina Twomey, Australia's Forgotten Prisoners: Australian Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mark Peel and Christina Twomey, ,4 History of Australia (London: Palgrave, 2011).

74Joy Damousi, "The Greek Civil War and Child Migration to Australia: Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service" Social History 37, no. 3 (2012): 297-313; and Joy Damousi, "Legacies of War and Migration: Memo- ries of War Trauma, Dislocation and Second Generation Greek-Australians," in Mi- gration and Insecurity: Citizenship and Social Inclusion in a Transnational Era, ed.Niklaus Steiner, Robert Mason, and Anna Hayes (London: Routledge, 2012), 31M7.

75Heather Goodall and AJ Cadzow, "Salt Pan Creek: Rivers as Borders Zones Within the Colonial City" in Water, Sovereignty, and Borders: Fresh and Salt in Asia and Oceania, ed. Devleena Ghosh and Heather Goodall (London: Routledge, 2008), 189-209; Devleena Ghosh and Heather Goodall, "Unauthorised Voyagers across Two Oceans: Africans, Indians and Aborigines in Australia" in African Communities in Asia and the Mediterranean: Between Integration and Conflict, Continuum International Publishing, ed. Abadu Minda Yinene and Ehud R Toledano (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing, 2010); and Heather Goodall, "Shared Hopes, New worlds: Indian Seamen, Australian Unionists and Indonesian Independence 1945-1949" in Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives, ed. Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal (London: Routledge, 2010), 158-196.

76Marilyn Lake, "Nationalist Historiography, Feminist Scholarship, and the Promise and Problems of New Transnational Histories: The Australian Case" Journal of Women's Histon/ 19, no. 1 (2007): 180-86.