Book Review

Labour historians will welcome Jan Gothard's new book, Blue China . It documents, in fascinating detail, the experiences of working-class women who reached Australia as assisted migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some 20 years ago now, A.J. Hammerton's pathbreaking study, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830-1914, first traced the interface of women's urgent needs for remunerative employment, Britain's promotion of its national and imperial interests and female reformers' interventions on behalf of their sex. Hammerton was one of the earliest historians to show that despite easy assumptions about the scarcity of sources for women's history, a wealth of rich detail awaited the resourceful scholar of the area. Gothard faced an equally challenging task in her search given the poorer and less well educated group on which she focused. Blue China demonstrates how well she has accomplished her undertaking, as her sensitively and evocatively developed narrative unfolds.	1
Women, a Canadian emigration official suggested in the 1880s, were like blue china: 'very valuable when sound, but very worthless when damaged or broken'. Gothard captures the official anxieties about migrant women's conduct that drove governments and migration agents, some middle-class women included, to assume, unabashed, the right to dominate and control the lives of any migrant woman as they could of recipients of charity. They sought to channel the women's behaviour and destinations along paths designed by their elders and betters to maximise their eventual usefulness to the middle class. But through well-judged use of her sources Gothard is able to juxtapose against their policies the women's own intentions. Her narrative explores the tension between choice, agency and submission in these women's lives.	2
Numbers of historians have documented the enormous demand in the Australian colonies for domestic servants. This was caused by a severe imbalance of the sexes in the settler population and the high marriage rates for white women that prevailed. It was a shortage that was exacerbated by the waged alternatives to domestic service that became available as the century progressed. Only a privileged few could hope to employ a governess for their young, but many white women yearned for the assistance of a servant who could clean, cook and care for young children at the same time. There is an intersection here between race and gender politics. In colonies such as India and South Africa, indigenous people were pressed into service to meet white peoples domestic needs. Australian colonists (particularly in urban areas) had fewer indigenous people to push into such service. Colonial governments had no other choice than to pay out good money to attract young women to the colonies for such work, but pay they did, and their advertisements had effect: despite the wrench from home and kin, some 90,000 women who were unlikely to have otherwise reached Australia migrated under the scheme to start lives in this distant working environment. In an endeavour to which Paula Hamilton in particular has significantly contributed, Gothard attempted to break down historical stereotypes about these domestic workers who have often been readily characterised in simplistic and ultimately demeaning ways.	3
In recent decades, illuminating studies of convict women have shown the value of the style of critical analysis and revisionist interpretation that Gothard employs. In the absence of any substantial archive of personal papers, she shows considerable resourcefulness in her use of letters, diaries and memoirs. These are set beside drier official records: the relevant government publications, reports of select committee inquiries and colonial debates. Gothard shows how participants in assisted migration nurtured diverse motives for their decision to migrate, sustained a variety of expectations of the rewards that would ensue and responded individually to outcomes. A complex picture emerges: women did not rush to join the scheme in the hopes of a marriage partner (though this was not an uncommon result) but actively sought the steady reasonably paid work that they were promised. The cheapness of the passage was all-important and often they chose Australia because they wished to join a family member or friend who was already in the colony.	4
A striking theme of Gothard's study is the stringency of the regime of control to which the women migrants were subjected once they accepted financial assistance from the colonial state, a control that was tempered more by their carers inefficiency and the women's own strategies of evasion than the authorities goals. Admittedly it was only for a brief period of the women's lives, but even so it was astonishing how much these women's civil rights were compromised. This control included surveillance of their sexual conduct from the minute they reached the depot and continued for the length of the passage and on arrival in the colony, as officials and their employees strove to keep the women from the presence of supposedly predatory men. Even a wish to attend an evening church service was suspect! Moreover, despite the women's clearly expressed wishes to go to a particular colony, the colonial authorities could ride roughshod over their protests and divide sisters who migrated together or prevent reunions in the colonies as they willed. Officials, in addition, showed no compunction about hiding from the women the higher wages they might have commanded on the free market, in the interests of providing middle-class households with the cheapest possible labour. It was difficult to trace many of the women past their first assignments to observe their fate after this inauspicious start, but considerable hardship in all probability awaited them in the kitchens of the colonies.	5
In Blue China Jan Gothard has made an important contribution to our knowledge. She shows how British and colonial authorities matched Britain's wish to export some of its excess population with the economic and household needs of its southern colonies. In doing so, she illuminates the lives of a significant group of nineteenth-century British migrant workers, breaking down accepted understandings to set in place a more nuanced history. We are indebted to Gothard for her scholarship and her eminently readable narrative. This book deserves to take its place in the forefront of studies of women in colonial labour history.	6
University of Melbourne PATRICIA GRIMSHAW

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