Dealing With Difference: Evidence of European Women in Early Contact History

Abstract

As historians attempt to reconstruct details of early contactbetween Europeans and Aborigines, evidence contained in thewriting of European women appears to have been largely overlooked. In Australian colonial times women's writing was usually relegated to the private sphere and not seen as an important part of thecolonial enterprise. There was, and perhaps still is, suspicion about the subjective, and possibly trivial, nature of women's writing. In any case, in spite of over thirty years of research and, more recently, some improvement in the use of women's evidence, there is a surprising lack of reference to primary female sources in texts that deal with contact history.In this article I look briefly at the writings of a selection of womenwho lived in what is now northern New South Wales and Queensland.This includes the edited letters of Jane Bardsley, which give anexcellent account of a woman's life on a remote station in the Gulfregion of far northern Queensland in the early decades of the twentieth century. I examine earlier information from the Hughenden region compiled between 1868-1870, found in Lucy Gray's originalhandwritten manuscript, now in the John Oxley Library, as well as thework of the prominent Aboriginal rights campaigner Mary Bennett,who spent part of her childhood in northern Queensland.