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For every Aboriginal child taken away by the state governments in Australia, there was at least one white family intimately involved in their life. This book is about one of these families: Ming, a Sydney wife who hired Aboriginal servants in the 20s and 30s, and became an activist against the Stolen Generations policy. Australian author

Diverse questions might be contemplated once we consider the gender implications and impacts of Aboriginal exemption policies. The article traces such questions in relation to a series of distinct episodes in the history of exemption. The first of these focuses on postwar New South Wales, where marital status was core to the application process from the point of its introduction, and the system built upon older policies of 'training' Aboriginal girls as servants. The second moment, moving back in time, discusses a petition for collective exemption for a group of women domestic workers in Broome, Western Australia, that was presented to a government enquiry in 1934. The third concerns the quest for release from government controls by several domestic workers brought to Adelaide in South Australia, from the Northern Territory, in the late 1920s. Finally, the article reflects upon the efforts of young women placed in service in early‐twentieth‐century Brisbane, Queensland, to secure exemptions, and the responses of the authorities. While exemption policies may have been designed to impose Anglo‐Australian gender norms of female dependence, Aboriginal women who worked in service consistently subverted these aims, by using the discourses of domesticity to challenge and resist the authorities' power.

AbstractThis essay introduces the Special Theme on regulation and domestic service in colonial societies. It provides a brief overview of the key themes of domestic service and regulation in the history of colonial states, and reflects upon the ways in which the colonial past is deployed in contemporary calls for the regulation of domestic work by the state, to secure the rights and protections of present-day workers as modern, free subjects. We note that, while much more work needs to done on this subject, current scholarship suggests that the status of the domestic worker and the extent of regulation in colonial contexts was historically unclear and often ambivalent. The three articles that constitute the Special Theme are then discussed in turn, to highlight the important insights, both empirical and theoretical, they offer to our deeper understanding of this complex history.

AbstractBetween 1946 and 1949, the Pilbara Walk-Off of Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northwest of Western Australia came to symbolize the demand for Aboriginal rights and independence and is now recognized as a key event in the Aboriginal land rights movement. While the Pilbara strike has received attention from many historians, the involvement of Aboriginal domestic workers in the action has not. But the strike provided an unprecedented opportunity for Aboriginal domestic workers to mobilize and organize. This article examines the historical role and impact of Aboriginal domestic workers in the Pilbara strike. Drawing upon Aboriginal oral histories and correspondence of employers at the time as well as official records, this study argues that the involvement of the domestic workers made Aboriginal domestic labor visible, and in doing so challenged the racial and gender foundations of hierarchy and power that underpinned the pastoral economy of colonization.

This groundbreaking book brings together two key themes that have not been addressed together previously in any sustained way: domestic service and colonization. Colonization offers a rich and exciting new paradigm for analyzing the phenomenon of domestic labor by non-family workers, paid and otherwise. Colonization is used here in its broadest sense, to refer to the expropriation and exploitation of land and resources by one group over another, and encompassing imperial/extraction and settler modes of colonization, internal colonization, and present-day neo-colonialism. Contributors from diverse fields and disciplines share new and stimulating insights on the various connections between domestic employment and the processes of colonization, both past and present, in a range of original essays dealing with Indonesian, Canadian Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, African, Jamaican, Indian, Chinese, Anglo-Indian, Sri Lankan, and "white" domestic servants.

Uncommon ground brings together a unique collection of essays about the complex roles played by white women in Australian Indigenous histories. It showcases some of the latest and most interesting work in Australia on gender and cross-cultural history.