Book Review

Between 1788 and 1868, 25,000 women convicts were transported from Britain to Australia. Depraved and Disorderly focuses on New South Wales from the 1820s to the 1840s, the peak years of the transportation system. Its main theme is the sexual disorder that such women created--not literal disorder, although sometimes that was the case, but psychological disorder in the minds of colonists and officials. There were several reasons for this. One was the sexual imbalance of the convicts sent to the colony--only one in eight was a woman. Their very scarcity created difficulties since the convict system had problems integrating them. In addition, as convicts they obviously did not conform or were not seen to conform to the ideological construct of what it meant to be a woman. As a result, officials and the respectable public did not know how to view them. They were women yet not women--they had done and were doing what women should not do. As Damousi points out, unlike Aboriginal women who the settlers could easily dismiss as "alien," convict women were the "threat from within" (4).	1
To better understand that threat, the author takes a postmodern approach. She privileges the language used by officials and others and peels back the layers of meaning inscribed in the reactions to the women and their bodies. The insights provided are both tantalizing and thought provoking; at times, however, the threads of the author's arguments become blurred leaving the reader unsure of what is being said about the past. A more linear narrative to ground the analysis and provide context would have been helpful. For example, we are not given very much information on the background of the convicts and knowledge about the early history of New South Wales is assumed.	2
The book is divided into two sections. The first and largest is "an examination of four areas in colonial society where certain relationships forged particular sexual, racial and gendered identities" (7). The first chapter examines the voyage from Britain to Australia and how the presence of convict women on board ship raised the specter of sexual disorder. Unlike other historians who ask whether the voyage to New South Wales was positive or negative, Damousi examines how the presence of women and the issue of sexuality "unsettled" the order of the ship, how it shifted the interaction of private and public. She also examines the way in which the women convicts were treated and how their surveillance was handled differently from that of the men. Chapter two follows the women once they are ashore and how their presence in the colony created unease among males in power. The third chapter details the different routes of resistance taken by these women and the fourth focuses on the response to the resistance in the form of punishment.	3
In keeping with much recent analysis of those without obvious power, the author is intent on finding agency. This she does in the ability of these women to laugh, to chant, to spread rumors. Laughter itself is not resistance; but if done in public and done against one in power it can be incredibly disarming and disabling. By looking at such "small" actions, the author raises our awareness of the subjectivity of these women who in too many historical tracts are researched and described as objects. In doing so it becomes clear that the agency of these women convicts was quite different from that of the males. So too was their punishment. Women were not allowed to be physically reprimanded through beating, and so new forms of retribution were devised. The one the author probes most creatively is head shaving, an act which she argues attacked close to the psychological center of being female. I found the author's probing of the women's resistance fascinating. My only caveat with respect to the agency/autonomy discussion is the lack of analysis of the meaning of the terms themselves, particularly within a particular historical context. Who really has autonomy and is agency always positive? Agency implies actions that are controlled but the examples the author uses do not always suggest this.	4
Section two of the book takes a much different tack than the first, for it examines how family life among convicts is deemed problematic. The familiar themes from section one are maintained--sexual unease, resistance, punishment--but their focus shifts to issues of mothering, orphans, and abandonment. Each becomes the subject of a chapter. The strength of section two is the author's perception that the convict experience was not separate from that of the rest of society. The attitudes of the wider society were felt through official policy concerning, reaction to, and treatment of the women. In turn, convict women often worked in the community, frequently being sent back to the factory and then sent out again. The result, as the author points out, was diversity of experience, not a homogeneous convict experience.	5
While Depraved and Disorderly focuses on women convicts and reactions to them, the added bonus is the insights the author provides about nonconvict society. She explores the psychological meanings of masculinity and femininity and, throughout the book, probes the images of pollution that female sexuality raised in many minds--not just pollution of the body but of family and society as well. It is Damousi's ability to make clear the broad nature of her themes that is the underlying strength of this work.	6
Wendy Mitchinson University of Waterloo

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