Book Review

Many years ago when it was still hard to convince my male colleagues that women’s work was a proper subject for study, I suggested that a three volume history of domestic service in Australia might be needed to convince them. Twenty-five years later here is the first volume.	1
Professor Higman first became interested in the history of domestic service in Jamaica where there were plenty of servants in comparison with the Australia he had left. He was intrigued also by the absence of male domestics in the 1970s Australian re-discovery of the history of housework, and started to search for evidence of their existence. Though he found some male domestic workers during the convict years, those men who were later classified as domestic servants in Australia worked mostly outside the house as gardeners, grooms or stable hands.	2
This volume is offered as ‘a comprehensive survey of private domestic service’ in Australian history, but it concentrates on domestic service as it has been officially measured. Higman has undertaken a thorough survey of the ways in which domestic service was recorded in State and Commonwealth censuses and thus has been able to graph the rise and fall in numbers and classifications, male and female, over 200 years. With the help of his research assistants he has also surveyed advertisements for domestic servants, both employers seeking servants, and servants looking for work, in the major metropolitan newspapers, and made a more detailed analysis of the ‘servants wanted’ columns of the Sydney Morning Herald. One hundred architects’ plans for houses which included servants’ accommodation have been dissected to try to establish how the servants were perceived.	3
All this statistical work fortunately confirms the outline sketched intuitively in the 1970s, viz. that the majority of domestic servants actually paid to live and work in Australian households were young women with no other opportunities for employment before marriage, that most of them were general servants, and that few households employed more than one girl. The number of paid and live-in domestics declined during of the middle of the twentieth century so that by the 1960s and 1970s there were very few. Since the 1970s there has been a slight rise, not only in the number of live-in domestics (mainly housekeeper-nannies) but also in the number of men employed as butlers/personal assistants. Higman concludes that the egalitarian ethos in Australia has been persistently antithetical to the idea of domestic service. Aboriginal girls, however, have been among those most consistently forced into service. But for the relatively small numbers available, there might have been a situation more closely resembling Jamaica’s.	4
Thirty pages of bibliography suggest there is more to the history of domestic service than statistics, but Higman has generally avoided the tricky territory where domestic service shades human stories. His account of the work of domestic servants in Chapter 5 is anchored on Eliza Darling’s Simple Rules for the guidance of Persons in Humble Life, published in London in 1834, and the 1931 edition of Lillian M. Pyke’s Australian Etiquette, both books of advice rather than accounts of real practice. In 1976 in The Domestic Revolution, Theresa McBride examined carefully the problems associated with the use of books of advice as historical evidence. She pointed out that these were usually written by people who had limited experience, for the edification of those who aspired in vain to move up the social scale. Many of the problems discussed by McBride are evident in this chapter, and are quite serious in relation to the use of Lillian Pyke’s Australian Etiquette as a source. The first edition of Australian Etiquette was published in 1916 according to an annotation in the Mitchell Library copy, but more likely 1919 judging by internal evidence. Pyke had adapted it quickly from an existing English advice book giving it an Australian touch by writing a short introduction and adding occasional sentences to begin or end chapters. She needed money. Between 1912 when her husband died leaving her with three young children, and 1927 when she died at 46, probably from overwork, she produced two or three books a year, mostly for children and adolescents, though as Erica Maxwell she wrote romances for adults. Her children’s books were very popular as gifts and prizes, so her name would have helped to sell Australian Etiquette, but its chapter on servants was probably considered a joke, if it was read at all. The first edition was already old-fashioned, but it was re-issued in 1931 and 1945 without alteration, probably because it earned royalties for Pyke’s family. In a new edition in 1960, finally, the chapter on servants was deleted. There are several other Australian etiquette books from this period. None of them includes advice on servants. That too could be considered evidence about domestic service in Australia.	5
University of New South Wales BEVERLEY KINGSTON

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