Caring for country: Yuwalaraay women and attachments to land on an Australian colonial frontier

Abstract

Focusing on colonial Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century, we read the texts of a white ethnologist, Katie Langloh Parker, to explore the ways in which Yuwalaraay women of northern New South Wales sustained their links to land and culture. The wife of a pastoralist who held a government lease on a huge tract of former Aboriginal territory and mistress of numerous Aboriginal domestic servants, Parker was complicit in colonialism. Given her childhood experiences of Aboriginal playmates and an intellectual curiosity about the Yuwalaraay, she was at the same time more sympathetic than the majority of colonial commentators in her portrayal of indigenous lives, particularly of ..