- Title
- 'Plenty European ladies told me you should give me fair place same as everybody': gender, race and Aboriginal domestic service
- Creator
- Haskins, Victoria
- Relation
- Women's Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present p. 153-167
- Relation
- http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415535762
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- In May 1919, Yuanho Quan Sing, a Chinese-Australian woman living in the northwestern township of Derby in Western Australia, wrote to A. 0. Neville, the Western Australian Chief Protector of Aborigines. Angered by his repeated refusals to allow her a licence to employ an Aboriginal woman to help her with her household washing, Quan Sing demanded that Neville immediately send her such a pennit, declaring her intention to employ Aborigines regardless. Every hotel and wine shop, as well as 'other Chinese premises and gardener', she asserted, had been employing Aborigines for both 'inside' and 'outside' work. 'Now I will also [ ... ] employ Aborigines as same as everybody in the town. [ ... ] I trust that you will not objection [sic]. Now I beg to ask you to protect me same as everybody.' Signing herself 'Miss Y. Quan Sing', she added the defiant postscript: 'P.S. Plenty European ladies told me that you should give me fair place same as everybody.' In 1919, after almost two decades of the White Australia immigration policy that restricted the entry of non-whites into the country, there were relatively few Chinese people in Australia, fewer of them were women, and even fewer of those employed Aboriginal servants. As Quan Sing alluded, some Chinese people certainly did employ Aboriginal labour, but she may have been the only Chinese woman to agitate publicly for the legal right to do so. The marginality of her story, however, does not detract from its importance. Her efforts to visibly employ Aboriginal servants highlight the critical significance of Indigenous domestic labour to the colonising project, as well as the authorities' preoccupation with maintaining a hierarchical social order. Her story demonstrates, also, how a non-white woman could use this gendered arena to challenge the racialised categories of rule.
- Subject
- White Australia immigration policy; labour; Aboriginal Australians; colonisation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1041977
- Identifier
- uon:13978
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780415535755
- Language
- eng
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