The Brash Colonial: Class and Comportment in Nineteenth-Century Australia

Abstract

In colonial Australia, the meanings of politeness were continually contested. The urban centres held a world of strangers of dubious origin. Social edifices erected to deal with the question of who was `in Society' became ever more elaborate and unstable. To the elite, English manners represented a last bastion of civilisation in a wilderness of social disintegration. To self-made Australians, seeking acceptance rather than exclusion, they were absurd remnants of a class-ridden `Old World'. Important issues of class, gender, social organisation and identity clustered around the problem of comportment and shaped a redefinition of politeness in a colonial world.

Elite women's schools across three Australian states in the 1930s: a prosopographical study

“…A further understanding is that elite women, here defined by their inclusion in these Who's Who volumes, played a central role in the making of the ruling classes through reproduction and production of class and gender subjectivities and enactments. Other research discussing Australian female schools, teachers, and curricula (but with very little on the identity of students) has shown how private girls' schools socialised elite women into a suite of manners, understandings, knowledges, and accomplishments (Theobald, 1991, 1996; Kyle, 1986; Chambers, 1986; Selzer, 1994), that together marked out women's place within the fuzzy boundaries of the anxious Australian ruling classes (Russell, 2002, p. 436). Their schooling paradoxically prepared them to defer to men, but demonstrated by example through independent women who taught, and through opportunities afforded by education, wealth, and position, that they were able to lead, especially in the field of volunteering, creating women's clubs, and through charitable works about which the three volumes studied here are rich in detail.…”

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality, Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves, South‐Eastern Australia

“…Crucially, the difference between missionaries' representations of domesticity and the actual experience of Aboriginal residents emerges as a source of dissonance. In general, colonial attempts to recreate the familiar social order were fraught with conflict and challenge, as migrants disputed their supposedly natural social ranking (Russell, 1994(Russell, , 2002. In particular, Aboriginal women on the Victorian reserves experienced a contradiction between colonisers' representations of the domestic sphere as a private familial haven, and the expectation that Aboriginal homes would be continuously open to inspection and surveillance.…”

‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

“…But they seek to capture, through several different lenses, what Bhabha has called the 'unhomely moment': that which 'creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow' until suddenly you find yourself 'taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of "incredulous terror"' (Bhabha 1994, p10). The 'disenchantment of the home', which Kerreen Reiger has tracked for a later period of national modernisation (Reiger, 1985), was implicit in the ideology and practice of domesticity from the commencement of the colonial enterprise, as colonists sought to shape themselves and their children as civilised and civilising subjects beneath the spectral shadow of the 'Savage' (see Hall, 2002;Russell, 2002).…”