Recent feminist theorising and cultural analysis has been said to involve a return to history, as Rita Felski argued in her attention to the gender of modernity. What kinds of history might this be? What temporal structures are inhabitable in this ‘return’? Felski’s question posits that challenges to ‘epochal unity’ and ‘unilinear narrative’ are the largest ones with which feminist history should have to deal:1 but there are multiple feminist historiographies which have reformulated the historical project via precisely these challenges, and indeed may be seen to enact them. In Australian contexts, where history has been a dominant mode in women’s studies and where, as Meaghan Morris has argued, ‘history is the name of the space where we define what matters’, Felski’s question is perhaps about a moment incited by history rather than nostalgic for it.2 This is not only a question about what difference feminism makes but about how it has used that difference in re-visioning a national past. If history as an activity no longer presumes a model of surveillance, the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ model identified in colonial writing by Mary Louise Pratt,3 what kind of gendered feminist lens can be set up through which to view the injustices of the past? What is entailed in that looking backward, or in that wish to look?

In the introduction to her book on ‘being thought of as a white woman’, Vron Ware declared that this inquiry had ‘forced [her] to become a historian’.4 She examines how the different meanings of ‘white woman’ as a category were produced and thus searches for its ‘significant moments’ as an historical task. This reluctantly historical book begins by discussing an image of a mother and child, from a British Conservative party election advertisement that is not designated British and in which the mother’s whiteness is not racially signified. Vare recognises this white mother as an exclusive vision of the nuclear family, unifying white tradition, race and nation and establishing them as subject to dominant white masculinity. 5 Feminist history and anti-racist history come together in her analysis and their separate, significant challenges to unilinear history might also be supposed to come together in the continually broadening body of work in feminist anti- or (post)colonial history in Australia. The figure of the mother in this body of work is a complex one, however. Unlike the British Conservative party, feminist inquiry privileges maternity as a location of gendered oppression and sexual difference. As a narrative figure in historical writing, maternity can bridge separated historical experience of different women. It brings the experiences of indigenous or colonised women and European or colonising women into relation. Jane Gallop’s tracing of maternalist metaphors in feminist literary criticism at the end of the 1980s pointed to the way ‘making history like mother’ instituted parameters of identity for the category of woman that not all women have access to nor desire, however.6 A similar approach can perhaps be taken to Australian forms of feminist history that employ the maternal as a central model of historical identity. Identifying the operation of generative tropes of maternity (and/or its failure and/or rejection) in white Australian feminism, as structures of temporality — as gendered biohistories, at once tropic and material, metanarratives organising the instance — doing this kind of identification can highlight feminist historiography in a way that focuses on epistemology, and thus historical authority.

So, against teleology but not outside history, I want to place three progressively generated historical narratives of maternity in synchronic contrast. The three narratives are ostensibly, or to some degree, about the same moment or event. They are all generated as the birthing experiences of an Eora woman of the Port Jackson area. The first narrative was generated by observing British women, then recorded by the First Fleet chronicler and Judge-Advocate, David Collins in an appendix to his published journals.7 The narrative was remade and retold by the novelist Eleanor Dark in the first volume of her immensely successful historical trilogy, The Timeless Land in 1941. 8 It has been retold again in the opening chapter of the 1994 generalist white feminist history Creating a Nation.9 The last two narratives figure, in differing ways, as mnemonics for the restitutive memory of white anti-colonial, nationalist history, written by white women. Purposely, however, they are women’s history. The opening chapter of Creating a Nation is couched in its new form, ‘new feminist history’, as Marilyn Lake declared in debates around its publication in 1995. In an article in The Weekend Australian, titled ‘Birth of History’, Lake declared that Creating a Nation ‘subverted the distinction between women’s history and national history’.10 Tracing this feminist remodelling of the ‘birth’ of a nation, of ‘that critical juncture’, as an ongoing myth of origin, positions these narratives as more than mnemonic; as, indeed, allegorical. They are systematic metaphors which organise and enact epistemologies and delineate certain forms of collective identity. Women’s history and (post)colonial national history come together with a view of an Eora woman giving birth as their point of convergence. This maternal figure has been handed down through Australian history, via white European narratives, as a real trace of indigenous women’s experience. Its variations may demonstrate, nevertheless, what kind of work white maternalism does in that history, and give an indication of the difference a feminist epistemology makes there.

Three History Texts and a Critique of Maternalism

Published in 1994 and lauded by a wide range of feminist and other readers, Creating A Nation was characterised by one of its authors, Marilyn Lake, as a ‘mother’s book’.11 It begins its first chapter, titled ‘Birthplaces’, by recounting the labour and birthing of a woman of the Wangal clan and Eora people, called Warreweer, as the authors record it.12 Their account states that ‘Warreweer had befriended some of the British women and she agreed to their presence at the birth. Their observations, mediated through Lieutenant David Collins’ journal, led to the first written record of an Aboriginal woman giving birth’.13 The birthing practices of the Eora women are recounted in explanatory language, contrasted with and detailed against the actions of the not merely observing, but intervening British women, and the account is then explicitly offered as a revealing precursor of future relations between the two sets of women. Placed and framed as they are, the birthing moments of Warraweer thus function as directedly political textual stratagems, imbued with meaning distinct as a moment of exchange between British and Aboriginal culture. The writers offer the conduct and experiences of the Eora women, as they have been recounted and mediated by white women observers, as a kind of alternative construction of a white Australian originary moment, mediated and read through Aboriginal mores. The account has been moved from the margins of imperial history, from Collins’ appendices, to become the opening moments of a ‘general’ Australian history. Its placement, and indeed the text which it synchronically begins, assertively literalises the birthing metaphor with which white Australian history has organised a retrospective ‘creation’ of nationhood, and the account is privileged as its simultaneous, reconciliatory, origin and critique.

The appendices to Collins’ journal are mere margins to his otherwise proudly masculine, imperial quest narrative, about the journey of the fleet and the administration of the colony. In these appendices, he collects what he calls ‘particulars’ and ‘remarks on the disposition, customs, manners etc of the Native Inhabitants’. Collins retells the British observation of Warreweer thus:

‘War-re-weer, Bennilong’s sister, being taken in labour in the town, an opportunity offered of observing them [these people] in that critical juncture, of which some of our women, who were favourites with the girl, were desired to avail themselves; from them we learned that …’.14

Creating A Nation recontextualises these details, the explicitly recounted birthing practices, by placing them at the beginning of the complexly conflictual nation-making that it retells. It reconfigures the events as originary and more than singular but also, at once, individual and subjectivist. Importantly, it reconfigures the relation between British women observers and the birthing women, absenting the sign of the British women’s desire to observe; the opportunistic, imperial power of their wish to look.

In 1993, reviewing another feminist history, Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Amanda Wilson noticed the absence of race from the collection’s idea of history and called for its inclusion, not just in the margins, but as a critical practice that could thoroughly ‘rupture the dominant discourse’.15 Reviewing Creating a Nation, Lyndall Ryan characterised it as significantly ‘new’, a departure from its counterparts, which represents women as agents and carefully avoids constructing them as a ‘homogenous class under patriarchy’.16 The question of how, or indeed whether, the inclusion of the individual and collective histories of particular, identified indigenous women has acted to ‘rupture’ the dominant discourse in Creating a Nation, however, is not immediately answerable. That is particularly true if we allow that the dominant historiographical discourse is nationalist. Ryan declared that ‘the separation of Aboriginal women’s stories from white women’s narratives not only denies an understanding of how Aboriginal and other women interacted, but it also precludes any discussion of how and why white Australian women saturated themselves in racist discourse in the twentieth century’. She goes on: ‘These absences expose the problems with the nationalist discourse’. 17

Creating a Nation privileges maternity as an experience and practice that is imbued with historical and political meaning, and this stance is thus explicitly in contest with the mythic ‘natural’ associations of maternity as biological authority, which would otherwise place it outside history. Nevertheless, the privileging of maternity as a trope of historical agency institutes a shared mode of meaning making between black and white women, at once shadowing maternity’s myth as a humanist location of universality and backgrounding the precise power relations at work in contest between colonised women and colonising women. This historiographical separation yet epistemological collocation is a complex strategy, determinedly anti-racist in its use of temporal contiguity to demonstrate the coevalness, via Johannes Fabian, of ‘othered’ women with their western observers.18

As a strategy, nevertheless, it perhaps downplays the distinct and even crucial role of maternity as a mechanism of colonial relations that shores up, literalises or inscribes racial hierarchies. Jane Haggis has recently and compellingly demonstrated the work of the concept of maternal ‘native agency’, as a mode by which compliant citizenship was enforced in the constructs of protestant missionaries on the Indian subcontinent.19 Elizabeth Povinelli has also described the way in which indigenous ‘Australian’ sexuality and familial practices, as they were ‘observed’ and constructed by imperial chroniclers such as Collins — as irregular, irrational and requiring intervention — came to signify the legitimacy of terra nullius. The process of instituting what she terms ‘the content of Aboriginal emptiness’ within imperial narratives, the ability to find some form of ‘social vacuity’,20 was reliant on evacuating reason and convention from the make-up of Aboriginal sexual and emotional interaction. She argues:

Drawing on eighteenth century notions of savage sexuality and passion and of social progressivity and sovereignty, the emerging Australian [sic] government could present itself not as appropriating an ordered land but as ordering an as-yet-unordered, unappropriated land, a social terra nullius.21

The observing moment recorded by Collins is a prominent and carefully coded part of this process. Not the signified corporeality of birthing as an othered identity practice but the rehearsed act of observation and observing; its repetition, its modes replay the imperial process. Its role, thus, is a determining part of its produced meaning, which Creating a Nation must both echo and attempt to delegitimate.

There is a third narrative of this same event: which becomes, as my view moves ‘around it’ now, unequally refracted across the colonial ‘divide’. Stuart McIntyre has suggested that it was the decades of the twentieth century preceding 1939 that witnessed the birth of the writing of white Australian history. It is thus no coincidence that is in the premier historical novels of the 1940s, Dark’s canonical Timeless Land trilogy, that a writing of the maternity of Waraweer (and of Barangaroo, Bennelong’s wife, as she is designated) is inscribed as history, and as a narrative of consciousness, by a middle class white woman. The international acclaim with which The Timeless Land was met in 1941 privileged subjectivity as the narrative’s originality; identifying humanist, Aboriginal interiority as its anticolonial newness, its primitivist modernism.22 This is, notably, subjectivity across difference, but also as embodied, gendered memory. Along with Dark’s explicit indebtedness to ‘dying race’ and so-called ‘practical’ anthropology, including A P Elkin and Daisy Bates in her list of acknowledgements, we can discern a polemic of maternalist feminism at work in the trilogy. This is most notable in her representation of Aboriginal women as an explicit ideation, as Benedict Anderson would recognise it, of ‘prehistory’ as race and nation.

Brenton Doecke’s recent laudatory re-evaluation of The Timeless Land uses a formalist analysis to argue that it is a heterogeneous text with much political force as a radical critique of Australian society at a crucial point in its nation-making process. He argues that much of this force is locatable in the ‘clash of perspectives and ironic juxtapositions’ and that the workings of ‘critical perspective’ inform Dark’s representation of Aboriginal subjectivity such that its ‘idealisation’ is crucially multiple and politically directed.23 Penny Van Toorn, in a similar focus on multiple points of view, argues that as a character, Bennelong’s Aboriginal viewpoint ‘serves as a device for estranging the posited Anglo-Australian reader from British ceremonial and ritual practices’.24 Van Toorn notes that in Dark’s representation ‘Aboriginal society is healthily ‘natural’ and ‘classless’ in comparison to British society and she argues for appropriative Aboriginalist nationalism at work in Dark’s novelistic as well as historical task.25 Unlike Doeke’s analysis, Van Toorn’s is prepared to notice the way in which the construction of race is necessarily inflected within certain gendered modes, as well as classed ones, in The Timeless Land. One effect of Dark’s romantic anti-racist humanism, including women without noting social difference, is a glossing over of forms of gendered social organisation in many Aboriginal communities. Neither Van Toorn nor Doeke consider Dark’s representation of Aboriginal women in detail, however. Their formalist analyses are also not concerned to identify the anthropological sources of her Aboriginalism,26 nor what can be pointed to as the maternalist feminism at work in these representations.

Waraweer’s birthing moment doesn’t actually happen in The Timeless Land. It is textually pre-empted and its appendixed details dislocated into someone else’s illness narrative, the story of Barangaroo’s ‘inevitable’ and mythic death which signifies racial defeat. Barangaroo’s pregnancy and maternity (also recounted in the opening chapters of Creating a Nation), instead, are explicitly foregrounded as a sex and race specific epistemology, an atavistic, corporeal knowledge of doom:

She said nothing, knowing that the terrors of a woman are to be nursed in her own heart. For it is the function of man to be fearless, and what man could face a woman’s knowledge and remain undaunted? So she kept quite still, her face impassive and her dark eyes melancholy, feeling the life of her race stir within her body, and knowing its movements for the throes not of birth, but of death.27

Historically, white feminist acknowledgement of black motherhood can be seen, on occasion, as a moment at which black women’s perennial sufferance under the racist, classed, Christian and welfarist stigma of ‘bad mothers’ is contested. But this inclusive subjectivising, as Dark activates it here, perhaps cannot help but be silencing (‘she said nothing’) and, moreover, as I have suggested, active in the imperial model of taxonomic surveillance. Susan Sheridan identifies, in the maternalism in white Australian feminist cultural texts from earlier this century, an ambivalence that recognises gendered likeness and simultaneously insists on difference, on the absolute difference of the ‘othered’ dying race, arguing that both of these are invoked in the one gesture.28 This is the potent duality enabled by Barangaroo’s animation of her pregnancy here. But in Women and the Bush Kay Schaffer read Dark’s maternalism as assertively appropriative and foremostly concerned with white legitimation,29 as do Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream. They note its ability to enact the Aboriginalist relegation of land ownership to ahistorical mysticism, in the form of a feminised ‘life-force’.30 Birthing ‘death’ not life, the fictional figure of Barangaroo retains maternity as the feature of a gendered response to colonial destruction. Oppositely, perhaps, to Creating a Nation, birthing here cannot function as the inauguration of intercultural relations, of a modern nation, but of the retrospective and thus prescribed doom of a conquered race. Feminist identification in both cases seems to obscure the meaning of Aboriginal women receiving and birthing their own children as Aboriginal and for themselves.

The forceful arguments of indigenous women in Australia, as well as the recently more expansive histories produced by both white and indigenous researchers, have exposed the differing ways in which white constructions of indigenous and colonised maternity have worked to enforce colonial rule.31 Margaret Jolly’s interventionary essay on these concerns in feminist work, ‘Colonizing women: the maternal body and empire’, from 1993, presented the details of an explicit critique of maternalism in (post)colonial analysis.32 The growing body of work on the role and construction of white women as such in colonial relations has acknowledged that maternalism can operate as a feminised figuration of paternalist domination. This has been only a partial concern for this work nevertheless. Ware’s Beyond the Pale invokes the iconic role of ‘the mothers of empire’ in colonial contexts but doesn’t pursue an analysis of that role,33 as I suggested above. She cites only Anna Davin’s 1978 article ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, from a UK debate.34 Jolly’s essay came from Australian and Pacific contexts and is outside Ware’s purview. Ann Laura Stoler’s re-reading of Foucault on sexuality and colonialism notes Jolly’s critique as a marginal aside in a slightly less marginal footnote list of gender analyses.35 Australian feminist histories, such as those of Lake, Fiona Paisley and Francesca Bartlett, that trace connections between white feminist activism and Aboriginal and indigenous issues and activity, have maternalism offered to them as an explanation by the arguments of those past women.36 As a model for feminist identity in anti-colonial analysis, however, it can do with greater consideration.

White maternalism has occurred even through feminist use of motherhood in internationalist rhetoric against war, for example, and clearly in its foregrounding as a benevolent form of domination assumed by white women over black women and men. Jackie Huggins named appropriative contemporary white feminist practices maternalism in her essay addressed to white women in 1992. 37 Recent work by Victoria Haskins on the New South Wales indenture system of Aboriginal domestic service in the 1930s and 1940s exposes the relation established between young Aboriginal women and their upper class white women employers as explicitly maternalist, and discursively justified as such by the whites.38 Eleanor Dark’s Aboriginalist maternalism is seamlessly locatable within the parameters of the Sydney, ‘feminist’, anthropologist discursive formation that Haskins elucidates, and also in its economic base: in the domestic labour of Aboriginal and white working class women that afforded upper and middle class women like Dark the time in which to write.39 Heather Goodall and Jackie Huggins have argued that government indentured Aboriginal labour systems in this period baldly functioned ‘to fill a gap in the domestic labour force as white servants became increasingly harder to find’.40 Marilyn Lake identifies feminist maternalist protectionism as a precursor to labour movement involvement in the struggle for Aboriginal citizenship.41 An opposite causal logic, and a more materialist rather than discursive analysis, may argue that it was the untenability of maternalism in the face of Aboriginal women’s calls for equality with their employers that exposed the exploitative relations at the heart of welfarist ‘protection’.

‘Maternity is maternity whatever the race’ declared Vida Goldstein in The Woman’s Voice in 1912, a discursive moment cited by Creating a Nation as sharp feminist criticism of the White Australia Policy, which was of course behind exclusions of ‘Asiatics’ and ‘Aboriginal natives of Australia, Papua or the Islands of the Pacific’ from eligibility for the new maternity allowance.42 The question that remains at the heart of the reverberating work of maternalism in feminism is, I think, exactly how it is that we know what maternity may be. Sabina Lovibond has identified the function of maternalism in feminism as ‘a celebration of the life lived by the twentieth century western, bourgeois married woman’ only. 43 When maternity is put to work as a mode of knowing, especially a mode of knowing in history, what it is that it knows is what is in question, and the conditions within which that knowledge was and is produced. How can maternity be maternity whatever the race?

That Critical Juncture

The narrative collocation of maternity and history, as I’ve sketched it here, is more than a parallelling; the collocation can be seen to be a literalisation, each of the other. More than mnemonics, as metaphors they become each others’ teleology. The risk seems to be, as always, perhaps, a multilayered ‘naturalisation of colonialism as history’, as Gyan Prakash warns,44 in which colonialism itself, as nation-making, becomes all of history, and this time through the potent naturalism of progenerative metaphors, of the mythically natural maternal reified as a gendered nation. This risk is not only the misrecognition of enlightenment models for history as the truth about the past. Critiques provided by black and indigenous Australian commentators like Mudrooroo and indigenous and colonised historians elsewhere parallel Dipesh Chakraberty’s call for the revision of the discipline of history from non-western epistemologies.45 Feminist history, in its desire to shift and rethink patriarchal teleologies — masculinist narratives — has long been in the position to think about this challenge, remembering that what is identified as race is sometimes about different knowledge systems and histories.

Perhaps the collocation is another instance of the way in which white women speak with forked tongues. Making history ‘like mother’ does two things, which are themselves contradictory: inscribes maternity as both at once outside history and as history itself: and secondly, writes this maternity as and not as violence; its location and its opposite, that pronatalist ethic of care. Spivak has recently re-asked a question about matrilineal lines of slave ownership in the Americas, asking how these can become ‘History’ (capital H) in any way that is not an elision of violence. Via the scorching critiques offered of white nationhood from the participant histories of the stolen generations, white historians can no longer treat indigenous Australian family and community histories as ‘additional’, nor sideline the model of resistive, survivor maternity within which Rita Huggins spoke when she noted that all her children were born free, meaning not on the missions, not in service. Geneaology as history is not available in similar ways to black and white communities, nor has black maternity been lived or experienced in ways easily reconcilable to white feminist anti-oedipal constructions of it as anti-patriarchal. Brigitta Olubas and Lisa Greenwell discuss the work of white maternalism in Carmel Bird’s collection of survivor accounts from ‘The Stolen Generations’, explicitly identifying ‘the failures of maternity as a narrative device linking Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal stories and lives’.46

It is a challenge for this ‘new feminist history’, as Lake characterises it, then, to remain aware of differing maternities, as Margaret Jolly has thought of them, differing because of their relation to teleologies of power (imperialist capitalism), which produce differing epistemologies.47 Anti-racist feminist history needs to continue to rethink these epistemologies as structuring knowledges rather than alternative ones, since they are as much about white history as black, and not alternative but definitive. A disparity remains between the postcolonial turn towards integrated dualist models that investigate shared meanings, and an indigenous Australian insistence that binary colonial models are still powerful and that the vantage point of interpretative history making is still not given over, nor shared. The degree to which maternity can be both the object of knowledge and a way of knowing in these contexts is a difficult question.

Notes

1 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1995, p 208.
2 Meaghan Morris, ‘Question for Carolyn Steedman, “Culture, cultural studies and historians”’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York and London, Routledge, 1992, p 62.
3 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York and London, Routledge, 1992, passim.
4 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, London and New York, Verso, 1992, p xii.
5 ibid., pp xi-xii.
6 Jane Gallop, ‘History is like mother’, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, New York and London, Routledge, 1992, p 215.
7 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales with Remarks on the Disposition, Customs, Manners, etc, of the Native Inhabitants of that Country [first published 1798], Brian Fletcher (ed), Sydney, Wellington, London, Reed and Royal Australian Historical Society, 1975, pp 464-9.
8 Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, London and Sydney, Collins, 1941.
9 Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marion Quartly, Creating a Nation: 1788- 1990, Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1994.
10 Marilyn Lake, ‘Birth of history’, The Weekend Australian, 18-19 March 1995, p 26.
11 Marilyn Lake at a feminist history conference at RMIT in Melbourne, July 1995.
12 Collins’ account uses the spelling War-re-weer. Warreweer is the version used by Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land and some other subsequent references.
13 Grimshaw, et. al., op. cit., p 7.
14 Collins, op. cit., p 464, my emphasis.
15 Amanda Wilson, ‘Dead men running: A review of Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1980s [sic]’, Australian Women’s Book Review, vol 5, no 3, 1993, p 6.
16 Lyndall Ryan, review of Creating a Nation: 1788-1990, Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 21, 1995, p 230.
17 Ryan, op. cit., p 232.
18 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983.
19 Jane Haggis, ‘“Good wives and mothers” or “dedicated workers”? Contradictions of domesticity in the “mission of sisterhood”, Travancore, south India’, in Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly (eds), Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp 81-113.
20 Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Sex acts and sovereignty: race and sexuality in the construction of the Australian nation’, in Roger N Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (eds), The Gender Sexuality Reader, New York and London, Routledge, 1997, p 515.
21 Povinelli, op. cit., p 519.
22 The Timeless Land was widely lauded and best selling, received internationally as a ‘novel of towering stature’ as Katherine Woods declared in the New York Times. Woods’ comments were reprinted on the back cover for the Collins London Australian edition of 1941: ‘The stuff of epic drama here, is not merely the movement of event and outward struggle, stirring as that may be. It is especially — behind all circumstance — the drama in the minds and hearts of men of different races, cultures, classes; their purposes and efforts and despairs, their adjustments, above all their unescapable, insoluble conflicts’.
23 Brenton Doeke, ‘Challenging history making: realism, revolution and utopia’, Australian Literary Studies vol 17, no 1, 1995, p 54.
24 Penny Van Toorn, ‘Mastering ceremonies: the politics of ritual and ceremony in Eleanor Dark, Rudy Wiebe and Mudrooroo’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, vol 12, 1994, p 77.
25 ibid.
26 On ‘Aboriginalism’, see Ian McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: white Aboriginies and Australian nationalism’, Australian Humanities Review, May 1998, (http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-May-1998/ mclean.html).
27 Dark, op. cit., p 60.
28 Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s-1930s, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995, p 125.
29 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p 108.
30 Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1991, p 30.
31 See the work of Jackie Huggins, for example and specific articles of Huggins’ with Heather Goodall, or of Roberta Sykes, histories such as Raymond Evans’ and Victoria Haskins’.
32 Margaret Jolly, ‘Colonizing women: The Maternal body and empire’, in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1993, pp 103-127.
33 Ware, op.cit., p 162.
34 Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, vol 5, Spring, 1978, pp 9-65.
35 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1997, p 99.
36 Marilyn Lake, ‘Feminism and the gendered politics of anti-racism, Australia 1927-1957: From maternal protectionism to leftist assimilationism’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 110, 1998, pp 91-108; Fiona Paisley, ‘Race and rememberance: contesting Aboriginal child removal in the inter-war years’, Australian Humanities Review, November 1997, (http:www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/ archive/Issue-November-1997/paisley.html); Francesa Bartlett, ‘Clean white girls: assimilation and women’s work’, Hecate vol 25, no 1, 1999, pp 10-38.
37 Jackie Huggins, ‘Wedmedi — if only you knew’, Sistergirl, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998, p 32.
38 Victoria Haskins, ‘“Lovable natives” and “tribal sisters”: feminism, maternalism and the campaign for Aboriginal citizenship in New South Wales in the late 1930s’, Hecate, vol 24, no 2, 1998, pp 8-21.
39 See details in the recent biography of Dark: Barbara Brooks with Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life, Sydney, Pan Macmillan, 1998, pp 150-56.
40 Heather Goodall and Jackie Huggins, ‘Aboriginal women are everywhere: contemporary struggles’, in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Sydney, Harcourt, 1992, p 407.
41 Lake, ‘Feminism and the gendered politics of anti-racism’, passim.
42 Grimshaw, et. al., op. cit., p 206.
43 Sabina Lovibond, ‘Maternalist ethics: a feminist assessment’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol 93, no 4, 1994, p 789.
44 Gyan Prakash, ‘Introduction: after colonialism’, in Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995, p 6.
45 ‘Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the one we call “Indian”, “Chinese”, “Kenyan” and so on’, he argues. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts’, Representations, vol 37, 1992, reprinted in Padmini Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London, Arnold, 1996, pp 223-47.
46 Brigitta Olubas and Lisa Greenwell, ‘Re-membering and taking up an ethics of listening: a response to loss and the maternal in “the stolen children”’, Australian Humanities Review, July 1999, (http:www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-July-1999/olubas.html).
47 Margaret Jolly, ‘Colonial and postcolonial plots in histories of maternities and modernities’, introduction to Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly (eds), Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp 1-25.

Originally published in Richard Nile and Nicole Moore (ed), Vision Splendid: Journal of Australian Studies no 66, St Lucia, UQP, 2000.