Colonial women on intercultural frontiers: Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker∗

∗ We acknowledge the generosity of the following colleagues who read and commented on this paper: Patrick Wolfe, Christina Twomey, Bob Reynolds, Kate Darian‐Smith, Joy Damousi, Shurlee Swain, Niccola Henningham and Stuart Macintyre.

Abstract

In a way unusual for their sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three colonial women, Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker, contributed in minor but not insignificant ways to knowledge of Australian settlement. The dominant colonial discourse obscured white cruelty on the frontier and denigrated Aborigines and their culture. Praed, Bundock and Parker, squatters’ daughters and pastoralists’ wives, made a bid for public recognition, one as a novelist, two as ethnographer and folklorist. While undeniably aligned to the colonists’ value systems, the women challenged accepted wisdom to affirm aspects of Aboriginal lives and cultures, while questioning white behaviour and practices.

Notes

∗ We acknowledge the generosity of the following colleagues who read and commented on this paper: Patrick Wolfe, Christina Twomey, Bob Reynolds, Kate Darian‐Smith, Joy Damousi, Shurlee Swain, Niccola Henningham and Stuart Macintyre.