Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

In the first chapter Woollacott articulates what is in fact a self-evident point, but which I have not seen
so clearly discussed before; that is that the ship itself was a signifier of modernity with developing
attendant cultural rituals such as the dockside farewell and the on-board class distinctions; the long
voyage entailed stops at exotic places (outposts of empire) where even the lowest class of passengers in
steerage became transformed into colonial plutocrats in relation to the indigenous people they
encountered at these colourful ports of call (vendors and rickshaw drivers, for example). Woollacott
links these often temporary attitudes to a developing knowledge among travellers about an imperial
hierarchy of colour and their own whiteness and gender in that hierarchy, a knowledge, however, which
on most occasions merely served to reinforce pre-existing beliefs in racial divisions within Australian
society and the privileges of whiteness. She problematizes the issue of whiteness by drawing
particularly on the work of several American scholars who discuss the structured invisibility of
indigenous peoples and the ways in which non-Anglo-Saxons are reduced to an undifferentiated other.
Similarly the second chapter on settling into a new urban space draws on the work of historians and
cultural studies scholars on the city and urbanization in the nineteenth century; in a section on 'Colonial
Geographies: Mapping London' Woollacott notes that, for Australian women, London was a place of
particular geographic and social spaces according to their interests and work. The subsequent two
chapters record the establishment of colonial networks and organizations in London and the challenge
to a masculinist culture which these represented. The strength and sense of communal solidarity which
such organizations engendered - such as the feminist focus in the Lyceum Club and the British
Commonwealth League and their commitment to female suffrage - furthered a growing sense of a
coexisting national and imperial identity, sometimes at odds (resentment at being labelled 'colonial'),
sometimes enabling a robust criticism of the imperial centre and its masters. Being seen as physically
(and sexually) active, and embodying political freedom also (having won the federal vote in Australia
in 1902), Australian women were seen as bearers of modernity, both in London and when they returned
to Australia (particularly artists and musicians who participated in and brought back techniques and
ideas of European modernism), in much the same way as Woollacott has argued in previous work for
women munitions workers in the First World War as symbols of modernity. Nevertheless her claims for
the potency of Australian women as equally symbols of modernity appear at times to be at once selfendorsing
(different, adventurous, therefore modern) and historically disproportionate. Rather the
strength of this study lies in its use of multiple and wonderfully diverse source materials to support the
complex argument about colonialism and modernity and the role played by Australian women
travellers in these historical movements.
Dr Barbara Garlick taught for many years in the English Department at the University of
Queensland where she is now a Research Associate.
29