Jan Gothard
Blue China:
Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia
MUP, $44.95hb, 298pp, 0 522 84958 X

Angela Woollacott
To Try Her Fortune in London:
Australian Women, Colonalism, and Modernity
OUP, $69.95pb, 298pp, 0 19 514719 7

TRAVEL HAS ALWAYS been central to the experience of being Australian. The roots of non-indigenous Australians lie in voyages from somewhere else to Australia. Inherent in the journeys of migrants is the desire and obligation to engage in the ritual of return, and of their descendants to visit ancestral hearths and the centres of their culture. Those who live in provinces and colonies have always been drawn to the places deemed to be the centres of their worlds. The abundance of recent work on women and travel has subverted the myths of men as the explorers and wanderers of the world and women as the stationary guardians of hearth and home; Mother Courage is as much a female archetype as Penelope.

Women's travel is central to both Jan Gothard's Blue China and Angela Woollacott's To Try Her Fortune in London: the former focusing on the migration of some 90,000 single working-class women from Britain to Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century; the latter on the travel to Britain of middle-class, and usually single, Australian women from the 1870s to the 1940s. It is indicative of the subjects' class that Gothard's women are migrants and Woollacott's are travellers, but migration and travel in both books are situated within narratives of empire and colonialism.

Gothard's study convincingly debunks old notions that the assisted female migrants of the second half of the nineteenth century migrated to Australia in search of husbands and were sought by colonial governments only to rectify a gender imbalance. The women migrated on the basis of rational economic choices for work, and were desired as servants, a commodity in shorter supply than wives. The women came as independent agents, with their own goals and agendas, but, as Gothard argues in this engaging and illuminating study, the focus of colonial governments and the middle-class female philanthropists who worked alongside them was on protection and control. The immigrant women needed to be protected from physical and moral danger; like blue china, they were 'very valuable when sound, but very worthless when damaged'. Colonial homes needed to be protected from 'contamination' and infection by 'damaged' goods, and colonial governments wanted a return on their financial investment. To secure the interests of all parties, control was exercised throughout the three phases of migration: selection; the very dangerous sexual terrain of shipboard passage; and reception in the colonies.

For many reasons, working-class women were less likely to write letters and diaries than their middle-class counterparts, and, if they did, there was a greater likelihood that they would be lost. Thus, Gothard's study is heavily dependent on other material: the official records that testify to the attitudes and intentions of the immigrant women's protectors. Nevertheless, she has, through telling glimpses of individual lives, conveyed a sense of what it was like to be, for example, a single girl from Ireland or rural England seeking a future in an only vaguely imagined or understood, far-off colony.

While Gothard's main subjects are the female migrants, another group of women features prominently in her study: the middle-class women in both Britain and Australia who played such an important role in shaping the lives of the immigrant women in all three phases of migration. Their participation in all parts of the process, from policy formation to allocation of employment, was also an active intervention in contemporary political and social issues, Britain's problem of redundant women and Australia's of too few servants.

Gothard's study also analyses the emergence of a new profession for middle-class women, that of the matron charged with responsibility for the welfare and protection of the future women servants during the voyage. It was a profession that provided much opportunity for women to travel and included some of the most travelled women in the world. Mary Pittman Monk undertook the role of chaperone on twenty-one voyages from Britain to Western Australia between 1896 and 1921. She was the subject of a verse relating to one of the voyages of 'the good ship Cornwall', quoted by Gothard:

The passengers on board the ship
Are varied in their kind
Some of them live in the saloon
The others are behind

The last are guarded jealously
Both when they sleep in bunk
And on the deck, by one they know
As matron — Miss M. Monk.

Middle-class women seeking new lives, opportunities and careers through travel to Britain are the subjects of Angela Woollacott's study, although, at times, she seems somewhat embarrassed by the narrow ethnic and class base of her subjects. On more than one occasion, Woollacott laments the absence of Aboriginal women from the ranks of the travelling Australian women.

If Jan Gothard is frustrated by the absence of diaries and letters to explore the lives of her migrants, Woollacott has sources in abundance. Her study, parts of which have already appeared as book chapters and journal articles, is particularly grounded in the wealth of journalism by, and about, travelling Australian women and their overseas lives that appeared in magazines such as Everylady's Journal, The Lone Hand, The New Idea and, above all, the British Australasian, that long-prized source for all students of Australians in Britain.

Woollacott is interested in the writings and experience of Australian women in Britain as a source to explore the intersections in the imperial metropolis of gender, race, power and modernity. Her focus is not so much on the women themselves, but on her theoretical questions, and this preoccupation, often manifested in overly long and complicated sentences, tends to divert her at times from her subject. This is particularly so in her sections on race.

More interesting than Woollacott's opening sections on whiteness, colonialism and gender is her discussion of the relationship of colonial women's travel to the metropolis and modernity, and her exploration of the women's sense of emancipation at the centre and their pursuit of new lives and careers. She maps the Australian and Empire-wide networks that were built up through private and professional connections, and clubs and associations. Through her discussion of organisations such as the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters' Committee, the British Dominions Women's Suffrage Union, the British Commonwealth League and the Lyceum Club, she has added to the growing body of knowledge on the role of Australian women in British feminist movements. Woollacott also charts the geographic concentration of the women in London and their colonisation of certain parts of the metropolis: Chelsea, St Johns Wood, Bloomsbury — forerunners, perhaps, of the Kangaroo Valleys of the 1960s.

Woollacott's study comes in the wake of a number of studies of Australians abroad which, wittingly or unwittingly, follow Donald Denoon's long-standing observation that Australian history is not about Australia but about Australians wherever they may be. Australian history also encompasses the contribution that its citizens have made to other societies and cultures, including, most notably, that of Britain. Woollacott notes the irony that that most famous of English nannies, Mary Poppins, was the creation of the Australian-born P.L. Travers, the subject of a recent biography by Valerie Lawson. The themes in To Try Her Fortune in London also belong with new theoretical approaches to discussions of national identities, discussions that emphasise that such identities are formed outside, as well as inside, national boundaries, in imagining and creating narratives about the other — nations, colonies, centres of empires.