To return to the abstract index press the back button on your browser
Aunty Bertha: Aboriginal Woman as Farmer's Wife 1902 – 1922
Vicki Grieves
Wollotuka School of Aboriginal Studies
In the social construction of race, gender and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage……the phenomenon of interracial marriage involves the making and remaking of notions of race, gender and culture in individual lives, as well as at the level of social and political policy. (Pascoe 1981:5)
Colonial histories of Australia have left a legacy of widespread acceptance of race relations characterised by a huge “separateness”, a gaping chasm, between Indigenous populations and the newcomers to their lands. This applies especially to perceptions of relationships between European colonising groups and the colonised Indigenous peoples and also has ramifications for relations with African and other minorities who accompanied the Europeans as slaves or indentured labourers. The fact of many and various intimate and married relationships between these groups seems to defy the rhetoric of racism and separateness: how can racist views of separateness predominate in social milieus where intimate, sexual and married relations between racial groups were frequently commonplace? Recent scholarship is questioning perceptions that relationships such as these reflected the gendered conquest of Indigenous lands, that is, that people were not necessarily coerced or forced into sexual unions because of unequal colonial power relations: there is an emerging perception of strong Indigenous agency in such unions.
The incomplete power of the colonial enterprise is thrown into relief by scholarship that unfolds the realities of domestic and sexual lives and arrangements on which individual men and women lived out their lives. Recent scholarship has rightfully dealt with the myth of homogeneous colonising populations with a common, shared purpose, and highlighted the internal tensions of colonial enterprises (Young 2001). The heterogeneity of colonial cultures and the tensions that existed within them produce a diversity of marital arrangements that inform us of the nature of that society.
This paper examines the realities of colonial constructions of race and gender by exploring the marriage of my great-aunt Bertha of Wootten in the mid north coast of NSW. Bertha b. 1884 was the youngest daughter of William McClymont (b. 1826 d. 1886) and Annie Butler (b. c1850 d. 1922) who married Isaac Morgan French, the son of her older sister's husband Henry French. She was raised by her mother who was forced to live on an Aboriginal reserve for the first time in her life after the death of her non-Aboriginal husband. After a period of time in domestic service, Bertha, like six of her seven sisters, married a non-Aboriginal man who was clearing and farming land.
Her married life is documented within the contexts of marriage in Australia in this period, of mixed race marriages with Worimi and within the social, political and cultural milieu of mid north coast colonial society of the time. What emerges is a picture of a woman living precariously in complex and dynamic times, finding her way within developing constructions of race and gender.
Bio:
Vicki Grieves, currently a lecturer in the Wollotuka School of Aboriginal Studies, is Worimi-Kattang from the vicinity of the Great Lakes and Manning River in the midnorth coast region of NSW. She has a BA (Hons 1) with a double major in history from the University of NSW, and Grad Dip Ed from the University of Sydney.
Vicki has twenty years experience as an educator, administrator and manager with the context of Indigenous affairs in universities, the Commonwealth Public Service and Aboriginal community controlled organisations.
As a Doctor of Philosophy student at the Macquarie University, she is documenting her mother's families' history, "The Changing McClymont Family Fortunes: A History of Race Relations on the Mid North Coast of NSW 1834 - 1934". Her research interests include Indigenous philosophy; constructions of race and indigenous identity in history and in contemporary society; Aboriginal history in colonial Australia particularly the impacts of Aboriginal out-marriage; Aboriginal genealogical research and the impacts of public policy on Indigenous communities and individuals
<Vicki.Grieves@newcastle.edu.au>