From the centre to the city: modernity, mobility and mixed-descent Aboriginal domestic workers from central Australia

Title: From the centre to the city: modernity, mobility and mixed-descent Aboriginal domestic workers from central Australia
Creator: Haskins, Victoria
Relation: Womens History Review Vol. 18, Issue 1, p. 155-175
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020802608108
Publisher: Routledge
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2009
Description: In the early decades of the twentieth century, a number of young Aboriginal women, of mixed descent, were brought down from Alice Springs in central Australia to the city of Adelaide, to work as domestic servants. Their mobility was a product of the colonizing project, inextricable from the very modernity that was discursively denied Aboriginal people at that time. Indeed, these domestic workers were young women whose journeys crossed all kinds of boundaries and frontiers, and whose very presence in the households of the colonizers was inherently destabilizing. While their journeys from the centre to the city have been all but invisible in feminist historiography of the frontier, this article argues the historical significance of a different kind of moving female frontier—one in which Aboriginal women made mobile by colonization were themselves active historical agents.
Subject: Aboriginal women; domestic service; mobility; modernity
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/807370
Identifier: uon:7390
Identifier: ISSN:0961-2025
Language: eng
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