Female Perspectives: A Study of the Colonial Texts of Adelaide Bowler and Lucy Gray

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the unpublished written and pictorial texts of two middle-class colonial women, Adelaide Suttor (née Bowler) (1837-1920) from Bathurst, New South Wales, and Lucy Gray(née Waters) (1840-1879), originally from Ireland and England, but writing from Hughenden in north Queensland between 1868 and 1875. Taking an interdisciplinary approach the texts of these two women are examined and ways suggested by which women's life writing, and their paintings and drawings, might be more productively utilized in our quest for a greater understanding of the colonial situation. By focussing on only two women, influences such as their formative years, Victorian ideologies and individual circumstance can be examined more closely, as can the effects of expected audience and possible meanings inherent in deletions, irregularities, and silences within the texts. First, various characteristics that appear to be genre-specific are explored. The findings are then used as a foundation for further investigations which take place across genres. While certain differences in the language, structure and content of life-writing generated by the men and women under examination are sometimes revealed, the thesis is more concerned with how, by using women's texts as primary source material, historians might introduce extra 'colour and texture' to historical discourse, which generally prioritises source material produced by men.