Marie Steiner's SERVANTS DEPOTS IN COLONIAL SOUTH AUSTRALIA is a fascinating account of a little-known period in South Australian history. In 1855 the colony of South Australia experienced 'excessive female immigration', with large numbers of single females arriving from the British Isles to work as servants. When an economic downturn led to a shortage of domestic help positions, the Colonial Government was moved to establish servants' depots around South Australia to house them. The book details the day-to-day running of these depots, and reveals much about the attitudes towards women in colonial South Australia.
Its capital is named after German-born Queen Adelaide, its main street after her English husband, King William IV, so it is not surprising that little is known about South Australia's Irish background. However, the first European to discover Adelaide's River Torrens in 1836 was Cork-born and educated George Kingston, who was deputy surveyor to Colonel Light; the river was named in turn for Derryman Colonel Torrens, Chairman of the South Australian Colonisation Commission. Adelaide's first judge and first police commissioner were immigrants from Kerry and Limerick. Irish South Australia charts Irish settlement from as far north as Pekina, to the state's south-east and Mount Gambier. It follows the diverse fortunes of the Irish-born elite such as George Kingston and Charles Harvey Bagot, as well as doctors, farmers, lawyers, orphans, parliamentarians, pastoralists and publicans who made South Australia their home, with various shades of political and religious beliefs: Anglicans, Catholics, Dissenters, Federationalists, Freemasons, Home Rulers, nationalists, and Orangemen. Irish markers can be found in South Australian archaeology, architecture, geography and history. Some of these are visible in the hundreds of Irish place names that dot the South Australian landscape, such as Clare, Donnybrook, Dublin, Kilkenny, Navan, Rostrevor, Tipperary, and Tralee (as Tarlee). The book's editors are twentieth-century Irish immigrants from Dublin (Dymphna Lonergan), Portadown (Fidelma Breen), Trim (Susan Arthure), and by descent from eight Irish-born (Stephanie James).
Examines the rising numbers of free settlers from the 1820s to the 1860s, their dependence on Aboriginal, immigrant, and convict under-paid laborers, and the slow development of representative government.
Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood.
A History of South Australia investigates South Australia's history from before the arrival of the first European maritime explorers to the present day, and examines its distinctive origins as a 'free' settlement. In this compelling and nuanced history, Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster consider the imprint of people on the land - and vice versa - and offer fresh insights into relations between Indigenous people and the European colonisers. They chart South Australia's economic, political and social development, including the advance and retreat of an interventionist government, the establishment of the state's distinctive socio-political formations, and its relationship to the rest of Australia and the world. The first comprehensive, single-volume history of the state to be published in over fifty years, A History of South Australia is an essential and engaging contribution to our understanding of South Australia's past.
Caroline Kearney faced a heartbreaking dilemma. Caroline was a thirty-one-year-old mother of six when her husband died in Melbourne, Australia in 1865. Having no legal rights herself to the sheep station in Wimmera, Victoria that her late husband owned, she had great hopes that her sons would inherit it. But that was not to be. Her husband’s will, written on his deathbed, offered a reasonable annuity to support her and the children, but it came with a catch. To get that money, Caroline had to move to Ireland with her children and live in a house of her brothers-in-law’s choosing. English-born, Caroline had migrated to Australia with her family when she was only seventeen. She had never even been to Ireland. Her husband and his family – unlike her – were Catholic. This extraordinary book combines storytelling with a historian’s detective work. Pieced together from evidence in archives, newspapers, genealogical sites, legal records and old-fashioned legwork, Caroline’s Dilemma sheds new light on the workings of colonial gender relationships and family lives that spanned the nineteenth century globe. It reveals much about women’s property rights, migration, settler colonialism, the Irish diaspora, and sectarian conflict. It shows how one middle-class woman and her family fought to shape their own lives within the British Empire.
A note on language -- Introduction -- Liberating free labor : vere foster and assisted Irish emigration to the United States, 1850-1865 -- Humanitarianism's markets : brokering the domestic labor of black refugees, 1861-1872 -- Chinese servants and the American colonial imagination : domesticity and opposition to restriction, 1865-1882 -- Controlling and protecting white women : the state and sentimental forms of coercion, 1850-1917 -- Bonded Chinese servants : domestic labor and exclusion, 1882-1924 -- Race and reform : domestic service, the great migration, and European quotas, 1891-1924 -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index -- About the author
Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance throughout the British Empire. Sweeping in its geographic and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures, different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain. Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free labor" within a multiracial empire. Contributors: David M. Anderson, St. Antony's College, Oxford Michael Anderson, London School of Economics Jerry Bannister, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia M. K. Banton, National Archives of the United Kingdom, London Martin Chanock, La Trobe University, Australia Paul Craven, York University Juanita De Barros, McMaster University Christopher Frank, University of Manitoba Douglas Hay, York University Prabhu P. Mohapatra, Delhi University, India Christopher Munn, University of Hong Kong Michael Quinlan, University of New South Wales Richard Rathbone, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation, Chicago Mary Turner, London University
