TWENTIETH CENTURY ARMIDALE is a cathedral and college town. It must be harder there than in a heterogeneous city for an academic to ignore the deeper ruminations of people who are met constantly at the dinner table, in the supermarket, walking the dog, mowing the front lawn.
One of the more sustained conversations in Armidale has been about the nineteenth century. The voices have included Russel Ward, R. S. Neale, Miriam Dixson, Alan Atkinson, Shirley Fitzgerald, to mention those whose words have carried furthest to listeners outside the town. John Ferry, part of this conversation, acknowledges where appropriate the company he has kept. Ferry's colonial Armidale is not the cathedral and college town in embryo. That would be to write parochial history, about foundation stones and a succession of influential men. Taking his lead from Atkinson's Camden, he has undertaken a detailed anatomy of a distinctive place, filled with stories of people in relationships, an anatomy that is meant nevertheless to describe and explain Australia at large in the later nineteenth century.
Russel Ward's bushman, transformed by bush mateship (John Howard should note), was not the typical New Englander. As the very name of the region suggested, most people were immigrants, whose behavior changed in Australia but had been learned elsewhere and was regularly checked against imperial standards (John Howard might assent). More importantly, many of them were women, while those men who were social beings and who passed characteristics on to succeeding generations were nearly all partnered by women.
Ferry takes gender very seriously. It is something possessed by men as well as by women. Despite Dixson's Real Matilda, gender was not automatically defined adversarially, but it was always unequal and hard-won. At the beginning women were few in New England and the bushman's ideal of physical prowess and hardness predominated. Once most men lived in or longed for families, 'respectability' became the mark of manliness. Respectability stretched from chivalry and sacrifice at one end to the kind of oppression that forced Armidale's daughters to marry at an average age of twenty-one years, denying young women and men the pleasure of experimental and freely chosen liaisons.
R. S. Neale provides, with Australian modification, the five-class structure within which gender and other aspects of personality were embedded. The ruling class lived elsewhere. Control of labour, investments and the means of production defined the middle class. An anxious 'middling' class enjoyed at least one but not all three forms of control. The working class exercised none of these forms of control, but could be distinguished from the indigent poor of the underclass.
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Barrie Dyster is co-author of Australia and the Global Economy: Retrospec and Prospect, to be published in November.