In this thesis I argue that the image of a child lost in the bush became a central strand in the Australian colonial experience, creating a cultural legacy that remains to this day. I also argue that the way in which the image developed in Australia was unique among British-colonised societies. I explore the dominant themes of my thesis - the nature of childhood, the effect of environment upon colonisers, and the power of memory - primarily through stories. The bush-lost child is an image that developed mainly in the realms of ‘low’ culture, in popular journals, newspapers, stories and images including films, although it has been represented in such ‘high’ cultural forms as novels, art and opera. I have concentrated on the main forms of its representations because it is through these that the image achieves its longevity. (For complete abstract open document)

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / This study places research detailing the scientific and political underpinnings of the kind of viewing employed in the British landscape painting tradition against its deployment in the British colonies of South Africa and Australia. This research was used to examine how sensing ‘home’ and sensing a ‘different place’ occur. The ‘embedded’ experience of a specific landscape as exemplified by the established artistic traditions of Aboriginal and San cultures is set against the practice of a distanced, externalized viewing developed in relation to optical technologies and the detached vision required of the colonial traveller. This thesis explores three modes of relating to the landscape via representation and their construction of home. It looks in detail at British landscape representation, then at San and Aborigine representations of their experiences of the landscape. I then follow the person of Thomas Baines, an expedition artist, in order to briefly explore the confrontation of the British settler with an unfamiliar, foreign landscape in the colony. Concomitant to this exploration is the consideration of the possible sensual biases at play in the articulation of landscape. The experience of spatiality is predominantly defined in terms of sight. Touch bears on this experience not only in its literalisation in the arts as a response to ‘texture’ or emotive feeling, but it has effects beyond this, or in the depth of this, specifically its involvement in constructions of ‘proximity’. Being cultivated are degrees of sensitivity to what comes to happen in ‘close space’ – where the event occurs, one that is hoped by the settler to be reciprocal, although never fully so, to his perception at that moment. The articulation of sensuality involved in constructing landscape representation traditions offers crucial insights into how present orientations to landscape operate. / MT2016

The creative component of my doctoral thesis articulates narratives of female experience in Colonial Australia. The work re-contextualises and re-narrativises accounts of events which occurred in particular women�s lives, and which were reported in nineteenth century newspapers. The female characters within my novel are illiterate and from the lower classes. Unlike middle-class women who wrote letters and kept journals, women such as these did not and could not leave us their stories. The newspaper accounts in which their stories initially appeared reflected patriarchal (and) class ideologies, and represented the women as the �other�. However, it is by these same textual artefacts that we come to know of their existence. The multi-layered novel I have written juxtaposes archival pre-texts (or intertexts) against fictional re-narrativisations of the same events. One reason for the use of this style is in order to challenge the past positioning of silenced women. My female characters� first textual iterations, those documents which now form our archival records, were written from a position of hegemonic patriarchy. Their first textual iteration were the record of female existence recorded by others. The original voices of the fictionalised female characters of my novel are heard as an absence and the intertext, as well as the fiction, now stands as a trace of what once existed as women�s lived, performative experience. My contention is that by making use of concepts such as historiographic metafiction, transworld identities, and sideshadowing; along with narrative structures such as juxtaposition, collage and the use of intertext and footnotes, a richer, multidimensional and non-linear view of female colonial experience can be achieved. And it will be one which departs from that hegemonically imposed by patriarchy. It is the reader who becomes the meaning maker of �truth� within historical narration. My novel sits within the theoretical framework of postmodern literature as a variant on a new form of the genre that has been termed �historical fiction�. However, it departs from traditional historical fiction in that it foregrounds not only an imagined fictional past world created when the novel is read, but also the actual archival documents, the pieces of text from the past which in other instances and perhaps put together to form a larger whole, might be used to make traditional history. These pieces of text were the initial finds from the historical research undertaken for my novel. These fragments of text are used within the work as intertextual elements which frame, narratively interrupt, add to or act as footnotes and in turn, are themselves framed by my female characters� self narrated stories. These introduced textual elements, here foregrounded, are those things most often hidden from view within the mimetic and hermeneutic worlds of traditional historical fiction. It is also with these intertextual elements that the fictional women engage in dialogue. At the same time, my transworld characters� existence as fiction are reinforced by their existence as �objects� (of narration) within the archival texts. Both the archival texts and the fiction are now seen as having the potential to be unreliable. My thesis suggests that in seeking to gain a clearer understanding of these events and the narrative of these particular marginalised colonial women�s lives, a new way of engaging with history and writing historical fiction is called for. I have undertaken this through creative fiction which makes use of concepts such as transworld identity, as defined by Umberto Eco and also by Brian McHale, historiographic metafiction, as defined by Linda Hutcheon and the concept of sideshadowing which, as suggested by Gary Saul Morson and Michael Andr� Bernstein, opens a space for multiple historical narratives. The novel plays with the idea of both historical facts and historical fiction. By giving textual equality to the two the border between what can be considered as historical fact and historical fiction becomes blurred. This is one way in which a type of textual agency can be brought to those silenced groups from Australia�s past. By juxtaposing parts of the initial textual account of these events alongside, or footnoted below, the fiction which originated from them, I create a female narrative of �new writing� through which parts of the old texts, voiced from a male perspective, can still be read. The resulting, multi-layered narrative becomes a collage of text, voice and meaning thus enacting Mikhail Bakhtin�s idea of heteroglossia. A reading of my novel insists upon questioning the truthfulness or degree of reliability of past textual facts as accurate historic records of real women�s life events. It is this which is at the core of my novel�an historiographic metafictional challenging by the fictional voices of female transworld identities of what had been written as an historical, legitimate account of the past. This self-reflexive style of historical fiction makes for a better construct of a multi-dimensional, non-linear view of female colonial experience.

The extent of Australian Indigenous employment disadvantage has been quantitatively established by researchers since the 1970s. Indigenous Australians have higher unemployment and lower participation rates, they are occupationally concentrated in low skill, low paid jobs, and their income is significantly lower on average than that of other Australians. The explanations given for this disadvantage largely focus on skills deficit and geographical location of Indigenous people. However these explanations do not stand up to scrutiny. Indigenous employment disadvantage remains irrespective of where Indigenous Australians live or how well they are qualified. Alternative explanations are clearly needed. A clue to the direction of research is given by the same researchers who acknowledge the legacy of history in creating the situation of disadvantage faced by Indigenous Australians. However, to date the nature of this legacy has not been explored. It is this history which is the focus of this thesis. The research questions which the thesis addresses are: 1. Are there identifiable 'invariant elements' which underpin the institutional forms which have regulated the treatment of Indigenous Australians within the economy, particularly in relation to employment, from colonisation until recent times? 2. Do these invariant elements help explain the continuing employment disadvantage of Indigenous Australians? To examine the history of the treatment of Indigenous Australians in relation to employment, four concepts were developed from the regulation school of economic theory and the work of Appadurai. These concepts are econoscape, reguloscape, invariant elements and institutional forms. The notion of 'scape' allows for recognition that when Australia was colonised, there already existed a set of economic arrangements and social and legal system. The conflict between the introduced economy and legal and social systems can be conceived as a conflict between two econoscapes and reguloscapes. Analysis of the econoscape and reguloscape from international, national and Indigenous perspectives for the period from colonisation to 1850 has enabled the identification of 'invariant elements' which describe the ways of thinking about Aborigines brought to the Australian colonies and adapted to the realities of the Australian situation. The four invariant elements identified are summarised as belief in 1) Aboriginal inferiority; 2) Aboriginal laziness, incapacity and irresponsibility; 3) the need for white intervention in Aboriginal lives; and 4) disregard for Aboriginal understandings, values and choices. The fourth invariant element is conceptualised as the foundation on which basis the other three developed and were able to be perpetuated. Analysis of the laws pertaining to Aborigines promulgated between 1850 and the 1960s in four jurisdictions shows that the same invariant elements influenced the nature of the institutional forms used to limit the freedom of movement and of employment of Indigenous Australians. Although during the period from the 1850s to the 1960s there was ostensibly a change in policy from one of protection to one of assimilation of Indigenous Australians, in fact little changed in terms of perceptions of Aborigines or in the institutional forms which, by the 1920s in all jurisdictions surveyed, controlled every aspect of their lives. Confirmation of the influence of the invariant elements was sought through closer study of two particular cases from the beginning and end of the above time period. These case studies involved examination of the institutional forms within the context of the econoscape and reguloscape of different times, in the first case in Victoria in the 1860s-1880s, and in the second case in the Northern Territory in the 1960s. The analysis indicates that the invariant elements had a continuing influence on perceptions and treatment of Indigenous Australians at least to the referendum of 1967. This thesis establishes, through rigorous analysis based on a robust theoretical and methodological foundation, that identifiable ways of thinking, or invariant elements, have underpinned continuous Indigenous employment disadvantage and help explain this continuing disadvantage. The common explanations of Indigenous disadvantage are also consistent with these invariant elements. The thesis concludes by recommending further research based on the findings of this thesis be conducted to scrutinise policy and practice over the last three to four decades in relation to Indigenous employment. It also emphasises the importance of redefining the problem and finding solutions, tasks which can only be done effectively by Indigenous Australians.

Widowhood and remarriage affected a majority of people in colonial Australia, yet historians have given them scant attention. Today, widowhood primarily concerns the elderly, but in the mid-nineteenth century a considerable proportion of deaths were amongst young adults. Thus many widows and widowers had children to care for, who were also affected by the loss of a parent and the possible remarriage of their surviving parent. Extended families might be called on for support, while communities, at the local and government level, were confronted with the need to provide welfare for the widowed and orphaned, including the older widowed. This thesis considers how widowhood impacted on men and women at all levels of society in the nineteenth-century Australian colonies, especially Western Australia and Victoria, taking into account the effects of age, class and numbers of children of the widowed. When men were the chief family earners and women were dependent child bearers the effects of widowhood could be disastrous, and widows had to employ a range of strategies to support themselves and their families. Men too were affected by widowhood, for the loss of a wife’s housekeeping skills could cause serious financial consequences. One response to widowhood was remarriage, and the thesis discusses the advantages and disadvantages of remarriage for men and women. Historians have regarded remarriage as the best option for the widowed, especially for women. Research into remarriage, especially in Britain and Europe, has focussed on demography. Assuming that all widowed wished to remarry, demographers have compared remarriage rates for men and women, within the context of the relative numbers of marriageable men and women in a given community.