‘Australian Girls drew me in. This is an area I’ve spent forty years exploring in fiction – I’m profoundly glad Catherine Gay has gone into the records and artefacts to produce a work of serious nonfiction, and done so superbly.’ Jackie French
‘Australian Girls is a pioneering piece of work – altogether a wonderful topic, tackled with real imagination, human sympathy and skill. It deserves to be widely read.’ Alan Atkinson, emeritus professor of history, University of Western Australia
‘Catherine Gay casts a wide net, drawing on fragments, material objects and ephemera left behind in public and private collections to reconstruct the lives and experience of girls, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who were ever present in colonial society but are often invisible in conventional histories. Both family historians and historians of childhood will find inspiration in her approach.’ Shurlee Swain, emeritus professor of history, Australian Catholic University
Tells, for the first time, the stories of Australian girls in the Antipodes: how they learnt, worked, played and connected.
Settler and Aboriginal girls have been overlooked in our history. Yet these girls were not peripheral to the national story, as is commonly assumed. In fact, they made significant contributions to our past.
Drawing on materials and artworks uncovered in local and national archives and made by girls themselves, historian Catherine Gay reinterprets Australia’s story through the lens of these girls’ experiences. She reveals how the lives of girls in the nineteenth century intertwined with colonial invasion and settlement, labour and education, and family and community.
The girls in these pages were much more than servants, sisters, settlers’ daughters or subjugated subjects. Australian Girls illuminates the ways in which girls in the nineteenth century were drivers of their own futures, central voices who contributed to the formation of a nation.
