EVENT REMINDER:
History on Wednesday | August 27
Part of the Powerful Stories Network:
Burning the House Down: Arson and Aboriginal Resistance in Settler Colonial Australia
Professor Victoria Haskins | University of Newcastle
12.10pm - 1.30pm | Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09) and Zoom
In 1916 a young Aboriginal domestic servant in suburban Brisbane was charged with arson, after allegedly trying to burn down her employer’s home in a murder-suicide attempt. A decade earlier, another young Aboriginal woman working in domestic service in Brisbane was reported for setting fire to her mistress’s bedroom curtains, apparently in retaliation for beatings she’d endured. And nearly a century before that, on the Hawkesbury River frontier, an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family was accused of burning settlers’ homes in collusion with local Aboriginal groups.
These scattered but striking incidents, spanning the long nineteenth century, mark flashpoints in a continuous history of coerced Aboriginal domestic service. This paper reads them as gendered acts of subaltern resistance: responses to violence within the settler household and to the wider structures of colonial domination. In revisiting arson as a political weapon, I ask how such incendiary refusals can unsettle conventional narratives of frontier resistance, and what they reveal about the intimate sites of Indigenous agency within the home.
About the speaker:
Victoria Haskins is Professor of Australian History at the University of Newcastle. She is a historian of gender and colonisation, whose work explores cross-cultural relationships, with a particular focus on domesticity and the home. Her books include Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel, 2019), Living with Locals: Early Europeans’ Experiences of Indigenous Life (with John Maynard, 2016), Colonization and Domestic Service (with Claire Lowrie, 2014), Matrons and Maids (2012), Uncommon Ground (with Anna Cole and Fiona Paisley, 2005), and One Bright Spot (2005).
