Colonial women on intercultural frontiers: Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker

Abstract

In a way unusual for their sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three colonial women, Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker, contributed in minor but not insignificant ways to knowledge of Australian settlement. The dominant colonial discourse obscured white cruelty on the frontier and denigrated Aborigines and their culture. Praed, Bundock and Parker, squatters' daughters and pastoralists' wives, made a bid for public recognition, one as a novelist, two as ethnographer and folklorist. While undeniably aligned to the colonists' value systems, the women challenged accepted wisdom to affirm aspects of Aboriginal lives and cultures, while questioning wh..