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Convict Maids, the Forced Migration of Women to Australia. By Deborah Oxley. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xi, 339 pp. $25.00.
Traditionally, historians poorly served the story of Australia's convict women. These forced immigrants of the late 18th and early l9th centuries, the overflow of Britain's goals, left for Australia with moralizing slurs ringing in their ears, echoed into 20th century historiography by academics bearing as many stereotypes and prejudices to their research as analytical tools. That the convict women of Australia were all prostitutes and economically unproductive to the fledgling colony has been wisdom, repeated, if not warmly received, as recently as Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore (1987). Hughes observed that when the colonial authorities referred to convict women, "the word 'prostitute' was less a job description than a general term of abuse." Deborah Oxley contends in her introduction to Convict Maids that Hughes' work, the most influential account of the convict era yet published in the international marketplace, repeats the interpretative and factual flaws of orthodox historiography in the field -developed in the 1950s by Manning Clark, Lloyd Robson and A.G.L. Shaw. Oxley says (5) a "resilient theme" emerged from their research: all convicts came from a professional criminal class, intolerant of legitimate employment; the "`dregs of society; the women were prostitutes or at least morally `abandoned.'"
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