Mission and marriage in early Colonial contexts -- Mothers and daughters in Victoria -- Wives, widows and sisters in far North Queensland -- Single white women and faith missions -- Beyond protection in Southeastern Australia -- Teachers and nurses in the north.

In White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw provide the first detailed study of the central part that white women played in missions to Aboriginal people in Australia. As Aboriginal people experienced violent dispossession through settler invasion, white mission women were positioned as ‘mothers’ who could protect, nurture and ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people. In this position, missionary women found themselves continuously navigating the often-contradictory demands of their own intentions, of Aboriginal expectations and of settler government policies. Through detailed studies that draw on rich archival sources, this book provides a new perspective on the history of missions in Australia and also offers new frameworks for understanding the exercise of power by missionary women in colonial contexts.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous communities in the United States and Australia suffered a common experience at the hands of state authorities: the removal of their children to institutions in the name of assimilating American Indians and protecting Aboriginal people. Although officially characterized as benevolent, these government policies often inflicted great trauma on indigenous families and ultimately served the settler nations? larger goals of consolidating control over indigenous peoples and their lands. White Mother to a Dark Racetakes the study of indigenous education and acculturation in new directions in its examination of the key roles white women played in these policies of indigenous child-removal. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers justified the removal of indigenous children in particularly gendered ways by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of indigenous mothers, the alleged barbarity of indigenous men, and the lack of a patriarchal nuclear family. Often they deemed white women the most appropriate agents to carry out these child-removal policies. Inspired by the maternalist movement of the era, many white women were eager to serve as surrogate mothers to indigenous children and maneuvered to influence public policy affecting indigenous people. Although some white women developed caring relationships with indigenous children and others became critical of government policies, many became hopelessly ensnared in this insidious colonial policy.

This book contains the annotated diary of Adolf and Mary (Polly) Hartmann, missionaries of the Moravian Church who worked at the Ebenezer mission station on Wotjobaluk country, in the north-west of the Colony of Victoria, Australia. The diary begins in 1863, as the Hartmanns are preparing to travel from Europe to take up their post, and ends in 1873, by which time they are working in Canada as missionaries to the Lenni Lenape people. Recording the Hartmann’s eight years at the Ebenezer mission, the diary presents richly detailed insights into the daily interactions between Aboriginal people and their colonisers. The inhabitants of the mission are overwhelmingly described in the diary as agents in their lives, moving in and out of the missionaries’ sphere of influence, yet restricted at times by the boundaries of the mission. The diary reveals moments of laughter, shared grief, community, advocacy and reciprocal learning, alongside the mundane everyday chores of mission life. Through the personal writings of a missionary couple, this diary brings to light the regular, routine and extraordinary events on a mission station in Australia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—a period just prior to British high imperialism, and a period before increasingly restrictive legislation was enforced on Indigenous people in the Colony of Victoria.

‘Commonwealth, curry and cricket’ has become the belaboured phrase by which Australia seeks to emphasise its shared colonial heritage with India and improve bilateral relations in the process. Yet it is misleading because the legacy of empire differs in profound ways in both countries. British India, White Australia explores connections between Australia and India through the lens of the British Empire by tracing the lives of people of Indian descent in Australia, from Australian Federation to Indian independence. The White Australia Policy was firmly in place while both countries were part of the British Empire. Australia was nominally self-governing but still attached very strongly to Britain; India was driven by the desire for independence. The racist immigration policies of dominions like Australia, and Britain’s inability to reform them, further animated nationalist sentiments in India. In this original, landmark work Kama Maclean calls for more meaningful dialogue about and acknowledgment of the constraints placed upon Indians in Australia and those attempting to immigrate. Indians are now the fastest-growing group of migrants in Australia, yet their presence has a long history, as told in this book. ‘An inspiring and necessary revelation offering new definitions of what it means to be Australian — and humane — in our post-colonial, globalised world.’ – Sunil Badami ‘At last a history of the triangular relations between the United Kingdom, India and Australia. As this brilliant book shows, only by escaping empire can Australians and Indians forge independent relations based on reciprocity and mutual respect.’ — Professor Marilyn Lake ‘Original and pioneering, this connected history looks at Indian—Australian relations through Empire, race, and postcolonial belonging...told with deep scholarship, irony and style.’ — Professor Dilip Menon ‘Australians know little about their shared history with India. In this groundbreaking book, Kama Maclean, Australia’s leading scholar of South Asia, fills the gap.’ — Professor Lyndall Ryan

Pacifying Missions interrogates the variegated and contested ways that missionaries imagined, articulated, and enacted peace, considering its complex entanglements with violence in the British Empire. The volume brings together world leading historical scholarship on issues of increasing contemporary valence.

Provides a completely updated survey of the major issues in gender history from geographical, chronological, and topical perspectives This new edition examines the history of women over thousands of years, studies their interaction with men in a gendered world, and looks at the role of gender in shaping human behavior. It includes thematic essays that offer a broad foundation for key issues such as family, labor, sexuality, race, and material culture, followed by chronological and regional essays stretching from the earliest human societies to the contemporary period. The book offers readers a diverse selection of viewpoints from an authoritative team of international authors and reflects questions that have been explored in different cultural and historiographic traditions. Filled with contributions from both scholars and teachers, A Companion to Global Gender History, Second Edition makes difficult concepts understandable to all levels of students. It presents evidence for complex assertions regarding gender identity, and grapples with evolving notions of gender construction. In addition, each chapter includes suggestions for further reading in order to provide readers with the necessary tools to explore the topic further. Features newly updated and brand-new chapters filled with both thematic and chronological-geographic essays Discusses recent trends in gender history, including material culture, sexuality, transnational developments, science, and intersectionality Presents a diversity of viewpoints, with chapters by scholars from across the world A Companion to Global Gender History is an excellent book for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in gender studies and history programs. It will also appeal to more advanced scholars seeking an introduction to the field.

Reading the Bible in Australia invites reflection about how the Bible matters to Australia. Contributors probe intersections between vital debates about Australian identity (who we have been, are, and aspire to become) and the Bible, bringing a range of perspectives to critical themes--indigeneity, colonization, and migration; landscape, biodiversity, and climate; gender and marginality; economics, ideology, and rhetoric. Each chapter explores the past and present influence of a biblical text or theme. Some offer fresh contextually and ethically informed readings. All interrogate the wider outcomes of reading the Bible in different ways. Given the tragic consequences of how it has been used historically, and sometimes still is, some Australians would exclude the Bible and its interpreters from public debate. Yet, as Meredith Lake's The Bible in Australia demonstrates, "a degree of biblical literacy--along with critical skill in evaluating how the Bible has been taken up and interpreted in our history--can only help Australians grapple well with the choices Australia faces." Love it or hate it, there is no getting around the reality that the Bible, and how it is read, still matters.

The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both. Australian Book Review Books of the Year 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Best Reads of the Year for 2023 Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant temporal and colonial approaches of museum studies to document and theorise Gunai Kurnai self-presentation and community engagement in the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place. Researched and co-authored by the Cultural Manager of the Keeping Place, Gunai Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man Robert Hudson, and white Historian Shannon Woodcock, the book traces the temporal, social, and cultural considerations of the Elders who curated the permanent exhibition in the early 1990s. Discussing community management of a collection growing through the ongoing repatriation of tools, art, and Ancestor remains, the text also explores how Robert Hudson engages with visitors to the Keeping Place and local colonial history museums, and theorises the power of Gunai Kurnai work with individuals and institutions in the small museum context. Finally, Hudson and Woodcock demonstrate that the Keeping Place articulates sophisticated Gunai Kurnai-grounded methodologies of museum practice in relation to international critical Indigenous studies scholarship. Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation provides a vital case study of an Indigenous museum space written from an inside perspective. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, Indigenous peoples, decolonisation, race, anthropology, culture, and history.