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Newsletter 31: News from National Committees

AUSTRALIA

NEW PRIZE
Jane Long (UWA) is the winner of the Inaugural Mary Bennet Prize awarded by the Australian Network for Research in Women's History for her article 'The Colour of Disorder: Women's Employment and "Protective" Intervention in the Lead Industry in Victorian England', in Women's History Review, (vol.7, no.4, 1998).

OTHER NEWS
Ann Curthoys (ANU), Barbara Caine (Monash) and Mary Spongberg (MacQuarie) received Large Australian Research Council funding to put together a Companion to Women's Historical Writing -the start of project has been delayed due to birth of Mary's daughter, Tallulah Mabel.

Dr Hsu-Ming Teo who won the Vogel Prize for a first novel last year has also taken up a Post-Doctoral position at Macquarie University working on the history of women's romance writing.

Margaret Allen (Adelaide) recently hosted a visit from Professor Veena Poonacha Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University, Mumbai. Professor Poonacha spoke on her research on three generations of women in an Indian family and on women's organisations involved in combatting domestic violence.

Barbara James (Northern Territory) has been doing some research into women's domestic arts for a Centenary of Federation publication looking at a 1901 name-cloth collected and embroidered by a now anonymous woman at Port Darwin at the turn of the century.

Pauline Ross at the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame in Alice Springs is expanding her exhibition, "Women of the Heart," currently on display at their museum and headquarters at the Old Courthouse, looking at some of the multicultural and social history of the region through the contribution of women from Central Australia.

NEW PUBLICATIONS
Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga: Gendering European History 1780-1920 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000).

Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women's Rights 1919-1939 (Melbourne University Press 2000). Her book considers a set of white women's campaigns challenging race policy based on biological assimilation, promoting in its place a national and international women's version of a just Aboriginal future within White Australia. It was launched by Ann Curthoys at the conference described below. Fiona is an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research.
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Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800-2000 (Fremantle, W.A. : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). This book on removal of indigenous children from their families was launched by Jackie Huggins at Queensland University of Technology in November.
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Dennis Deslippe: "Rights, Not Roses": Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80 (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000).
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Dr Pamela Sharpe, a historian of women's enterprise in early modern England, was appointed a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow on an ARC grant. Her edited collection, entitled Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, will be published soon by Routledge
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.Jan Gothard (Murdoch University) Blue China: Single Female Immigration to Colonial Australia. MUP forthcoming.
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Issue 21 of the Studies in Western Australian History, a journal published by the Centre for Western Australian History, is edited by Cheryl Lange, from UWA's Anthropology Department, and titled Being Australian Women: Belonging, Citizenship and Identity. This timely collection is yet another in a string of publications that developed in the UWA's History Department and the research carried out with the assistance of the ARC grant for projects on women and citizenship. The project involved staff and postgraduate students from across WA universities; this collection offers perspectives on gender and migration from Polish, Dutch, Vietnamese, and Iranian women, to name but a few, as well as theoretical explorations into the nature of Australian multiculturalism.
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Patricia Crawford and Phillipa Maddern (UWA) eds Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories, forthcoming MUP. The book argues, and rightly so, that modern Australian discourses on citizenship have a long history located in texts as diverse as medieval European thought and early modern English notions of citizenship rights and interests. The book has valuable contributions from Philippa Maddern, Patricia Crawford, Cheryl Lange (on women's negotiations of migration from Vietnam, former Yugoslavia and Italy), Jane Long (on British nineteenth-century views of women as citizens), Rita Farrell (on Indigenous people and citizenship), and Joan Eveline (on ethnicised/racialised discourse of modern Australian multiculturalism). What makes this publication particularly interesting is the integration of all those different elements that shape women as citizens, including the under-researched area of English language as a marker of citizenship.

CONFERENCES
"New Comparisons/International Worlds: A comparative feminist history conference" was held at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the Australian National University on 21 and 22 October 2000. The conference was organised by Fiona Paisley, of the CCR, and Alison Kibler, in History RSSS. Participants compared national histories of gender and women and also explored the transnational links and exchanges in women's history. One prominent theme of the conference, extending from Dolores Janiewski's keynote address, was comparative colonialism and empire, including discussions of white women as agents and critics of imperialism, the gendered frontiers of colonial contact and the power relations within international feminist networks. There were comparisons of the intersections of gender and race in many settler colonial societies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States. Several important questions arose in relation to this work: Janiewski and Pat Grimshaw noted that US women's historians have not paid sufficient attention to US imperialism, thus making it difficult to craft comparisons along these lines using secondary literature. In addition, Aileen Moreton-Robinson and others called for further reflection on the uses of "whiteness," seeking more rigorous theorisation of whiteness as a position of power and raising serious concerns about the absence of Aboriginal women's voices and experiences in this research.

Philippa Mein Smith discussed a spectrum of eugenics discourses and strategies in Australia and New Zealand in the early twentieth century, explaining points of contrast related, in particular, to New Zealand's closer attachment to Great Britain. In her keynote address, Pat Grimshaw used a comparative framework to demonstrate the distinctive relationship between missionaries and the state in Victoria. She uncovered Koori women's resistance to their considerable authority, as revealed in moving letters they wrote to various officials.

Over the course of the conference, participants also engaged in debates over terminology: scholars sought alternatives to "comparative" alone because it tends to imply only the juxtaposition of discrete national units, and criticised "global" for its suggestion of homogenisation around the world. Ian Tyrrell reiterated his earlier calls for comparative and "transnational" research to capture the comparison of geographical spaces as well as the exchange of people, ideas, and materials across national boundaries. In addition, scholars debated the choice of comparative units: Should substantially similar cases be compared, to isolate particular variables? And, how could interracial marriages in Australia and the United States be compared most effectively, considering the different racial
hierarchies in each country? Overall, the conference raised new questions about comparative and transnational research, and set an agenda for future research, particularly the need to develop the building blocks of race, gender and class histories necessary for comparative cases as well as transnational frameworks of analysis.
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For December, Liz Conor (La Trobe), Joy Damousi (Melbourne) and Ruth Ford (Flinders) have organised a conference "Flapper Trappers and Modish Maids - Women and Modernity" at University of Melbourne. Among 40 plus speakers will be keynote speakers Professor Marilyn Lake, Jodi Brooks and Jill Julius Matthews. See www.flinders.edu.au/wmst/modernity.html.
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Margaret Allen (Adelaide) convened a conference "Gender in the Contact Zone" for the Network for Research in Women's History in July. Most papers focussed upon relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Some papers will appear in a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies in Vol. 16 (no.34) May 2001 and others in an online journal 'outskirts' address:
http://mmc.arts.uwa.edu.au/chloe/outskirts/index.html.

-compiled by Margaret Allen