The Formative Years, Individuality and Growth in the Australian Settler Subject: A Focus on the Life and colonial Texts of Lucy Gray

Abstract

The formative years of middle and upper class British women who wrote about colonial life have been, in many cases, overlooked as much as, or more than, the writers themselves and their actual participation in the colonial enterprise. This is particularly true of women who went to the colonies as adults, and who saw the colonial situation from a different perspective than those who were born there – a perspective informed by a complex mix of idealised and stylised interpretations of race, religion and science formulated in Britain. In this article, I trace the formative years of one particular middle-class woman, Lucy Gray (née Waters) (1840–1879), and explore ways in which her early life in England, Ireland and New Zealand may have impacted upon her written and pictorial representations of colonial life in Australia. Her personal growth in relation to an evolving understanding of her new environment is an important focus, as she reveals aspects of colonial life often overlooked by male counterparts.