Uncommon Ground: White women in Aboriginal history

By Anna Cole Victoria Haskins And Fiona Paisley Eds, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, 280 pages, paperback, $34.95. Reviewed by Bill Thorpe in the July 2006 issue.

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What has been missing for so long has been the essentially domestic relationships between White and Aboriginal women in Australian history. When attention is actually paid to this aspect, and the political dimensions arising from it, the oversight in historiography seems starker than ever. Indeed much of Aboriginal history fails to account for the often close and binding connections between Aboriginal and white women. A sophisticated preface raises key theoretical questions which are carried through into the chapters particularly those of the editors. If nothing else the editors and the contributors fully deserve praise for these sometimes very different and complex efforts. But each compilation attempts more than this. For a start, there is an often nuanced life at work here, sometimes by those women authors (eg. Haskings) who are in the same family as their subjects.

The twelve authors have illuminating perspectives on these individuals many of whom were hitherto obscure, and by closely looking at often day-to day events in their lives, the vexed questions about living both as an Aboriginal woman and non-Aboriginal 'protector' comes to life.

John Maynard records the efforts of Elizabeth Mackenzie Hatton as a determined Sydney Christian woman who increasingly took up the position of Aboriginal people throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Maynard observes that this placed her more and more with Aboriginal people and their concerns and less with Christianity, the Aboriginal Welfare Board and the organization, AIM. Maynard points to various quotes from Hatton that put her in a thoroughly contemporary framework from most of her generation -- not least an unflinching dedication to support Aborigines which lasted throughout her life.

Similarly Victoria Haskins evokes a compelling story of her great-grandmother, Joan Kingsley-Strack, and her long, off-and-on relationship with Mary, an Aboriginal servant. Both Strack (known to the family as 'Ming') and Mary maintained often fraught ties from the 1920s to the early 1940s. In this work, Haskins spells out more than most other contributors the tense connections between race and class, and situates this within a powerful system of colonialism. Haskins likens the relationship to systems of slavery as in the United States South, making both Strack and Mary jostle uneasily for supremacy as both women, particularly Mary, subject themselves to difficult births against the backdrop of the Depression.

Stephanie Gilbert presents a likeable portrait of that relatively well-known Aboriginal activist, Pearl Gibbs. Interestingly Gibbs made contacts with Joan Kingsley-Strack, a 'commonality between these two women from such different spheres of Australian life'. Gibb's life was remarkable; numerous speeches to the press; an unmistakable desire to continue her work with Aboriginal people; determination to make a mark which included connections with an extraordinary pantheon of people from the 1920s to the early 1980s: Bill Ferguson, Charles Perkins, Joe McGinness, Faith Bandler, Jessie Street, Charles Duiguid and Gough Whitlam. At the same time her ability to work on better lives for Aborigines 'was severely limited' because of her location as an Aboriginal woman.

Francesca Cubillo entered the art controversy in the late 1990s by interrogating the fictitious Aboriginal artist, Eddie Burrup, and her real creator, Elizabeth Durack. Unlike some, Durack attempts to ground Eddie and creates this identity as an authentic and sensitive commentator on 'Aboriginalities'. Durack began her work in the 1950s -- the first time Western Desert style painting had been produced by a non-Aboriginal. Eddie Burrup thus emerged from a rich background -- work on pastoral properties and lore unavailable to most Australians. Thus Eddie Burrup and this history were not only intimately connected but an attempt to 'recapture the mythology of her childhood'.

Two essays on Daisy Bates, one by Cynthia Coyne, the other by Jim Anderson, provide other interpretations for this relatively well-known woman who became 'the legendary Grandmother of a dying race'. Anderson is more critical than Coyne, and places Bates more squarely within the racist paradigm of the 'half caste' discourse but at the same time assumes that Daisy shifted ground on this and other issues. Coyne is influenced by the Bates/Billingee relationship -- 'a unique collaboration between the artist (Billingee) and the ethnographer' (Bates). Bates shows a profound connection with the Aborigines which suggests her views on 'race' were not as thorough-going as Anderson claims.

Karen Hughes describes Ruth Hancock, a South Australian nurse who, from 1930 to 1942, undertook to alleviate perhaps the most depressing of introduced diseases, leprosy, which had increasing hold over the Aboriginal population. She spent most of her time at Roper River. An important part of her journey depended on Aboriginal laws. As a result, a large part of her skills derived from Aboriginal knowledge as distinct from dominant Western ideas, views she held resolutely against overarching figures like Cecil Cook, Chief Medical Officer of the Northern Territory.

In one of the most theoretically sophisticated and important chapters Anna Cole presents the career of Ella Hiscock, matron of the Cootamundra Girls' Home from 1945 to 1967. Cole regards her as reflecting and enacting the shifting intersections between 'race', 'class' and 'gender'. As a white widow with restricted economic choices, she took one of the most significant positions available to a non-Aboriginal woman. For Cole, Hiscock's duties as protector and carer were irreconcilable. Her central tasks lay at the heart of the colonial regime where 'sexual control is fundamental to the way racial policies are secured'. Hiscock was part of the state apparatus of assimilation including the separation of children from their families. She set about educating young girls up to the age of 15 in cleanliness and hygiene toward an ideal of white femininity to assume apprenticeships in domestic service in white households where unfortunately they were open to sexual abuse. She subscribed to the pervasive ideology of Aboriginal women's worthlessness as mothers and the perceived predatory nature of Aboriginal male sexuality, despite her knowledge of Aboriginal communities where Aboriginal law prevailed. In hindsight she came to regard the child removal as 'a terrible thing to have done'.

Fiona Paisley writes about Constance Ternent Cooke, a reform activist and South Australian (and northern Australian) government employee whom Paisley regards as an important crossover figure who had pushed 'well beyond the limits of white women's politics on 'race' in Australia by the mid 1930s. In 1926 she went on a fact finding mission herself to Central Australia and described the scandalous conditions she found such as starvation and the 'vicious' frontier where Aboriginal women were reduced to white men's prey'. This became the centre of a paper she delivered to the 1926 annual conference in London of the British Commonwealth League. When she set about to deliver a similar paper in Honolulu in 1930, the federal government successfully censored her but she was able to use their defensive response to achieve some enforcement of existing protective legislation and improve the administration of Aboriginal policy in the face of government intractability and public inertia.

Alison Holland considers Mary Montgomery Bennett, a Western Australian mission teacher in the inter-war period and Aboriginal rights activist, friend and supporter of Cooke. Holland makes it clear that Bennett's views like those of most white feminists are not disinterested and support an ideology of white, middle class female authority. She did not succeed in her considerable efforts to improve the lives of Aboriginal women. What is significant about her is that she identified and linked the gendered and racialised outcomes of colonial rule in Australia when the colonial nature of policies were not recognised here until much later. Influenced by feminist anti-slavery discourses about polygamy and infant betrothal, she gave an unusual analysis of the devastation wrought by prostitution on the frontier. If colonisation had not occurred, Aboriginal women's lives would have gone on much as they had before. Now through loss of land and starvation, outdated customs such as polygamy had been revived and Aboriginal women 'became the traded merchandise of black and white men'. This left the former in a vulnerable state with no standing before the law and subject to child removal.

South Australian writer, Catherine Martin and her book, The Incredible Journey published in 1923 are the focus of attention for Margaret Allan. Most settler-Australians dismissed it 'for presenting a far too favourable picture of Aboriginal people'. But The Incredible Journey is a surprisingly modern approach where Aboriginal women were 'heroic and devoted' to their children, notwithstanding prevailing practices where children were taken away from their families.

Christine Vickers has explored the thoughts and actions of her great-grandmother, Jennie Smith. Smith, with her five children, essentially managed the Singleton Aboriginal Home from 1910 until its closure in 1923. Vickers, like several other contributors, ensures that the domestic elements come to the fore. At the same time, the book's emphasis on biography as its methodological centre and on the white woman limits discussion of Aboriginal people. For example in Vicker's chapter, a photo dated 1917 shows 31 Aboriginal boys and girls as inmates yet there is very little about their lives.

Uncommon Ground is a most welcome and timely addition to Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal Studies. By moving the history terrain firmly into a gendered colonial space, it may indeed be a pathway into the future than what has been an overly male-centred perspective on the past.

Citation

• Bill Thorpe. 'Review: Uncommon Ground: White women in Aboriginal history by Anna Cole Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 20 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Uncommon Ground is a unique exploration of the complex roles played by white women in Australian Indigenous histories. It showcases some of the latest and most interesting work in Australia on gender and cross-cultural history.
  
  Within a particular historical context, each chapter highlights the work of a woman involved in Aboriginal issues, and with Aboriginal people. Well-known as well as less prominent public figures, are included. There's a mixture of activists, writers and workers in missionary groups and administration as well as Pearl Gibbs, the leading Aboriginal woman activist who worked closely with contemporary white feminists.
  
  Four thematic parts include: 'The Home Front' which highlights the prominence of the 'home' as institution as well as a refuge in such cross-cultural relationships; 'Shared Struggle' which explores collaborative relationships; 'Public Lives' which addresses white women who took on public roles with regard to Aboriginal issues; and 'Knowing the Aborignes' which covers the ambiguous roles played by white women who claimed the knowledge to represent Aboriginal people and issues, and who have had various impacts upon Aboriginal histories as a result.
  
  These lively and critical biographical studies trace the motivations, actions and impact of these women. The Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors, both women and men, engage with some difficult yet fascinating questions of race, gender and identity in Aboriginal history.

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