Tells, for the first time, the stories of Australian girls in the Antipodes: how they learnt, worked, played and connected.
Despite their significant contributions to our nation’s past, settler and Aboriginal girls have been overlooked in Australian history. Australian Girls reinterprets our national story through the lens of these girls’ experiences. It reveals how the lives of girls in the nineteenth century intertwined with broader currents, including colonial invasion and settlement, labour and education, and family and community.
Drawing on materials and artworks uncovered in local and national archives and made by girls themselves – including diary entries, needlework, traditional fibrecraft and exercise books – the book explores the girls’ removal or migration, homemaking, intimate sisterly ties in the school classroom, and a swelling of activism against colonial oppression. The untold stories of Aboriginal girls, including Djaara girl Ellen, reveal how ideas of race were used to discriminate and subjugate, but could not destroy enduring connections to culture and Country.
Australian girls were not peripheral to the national story, as is commonly assumed. The girls in these pages were much more than servants, sisters and settlers’ daughters. 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.
