Gender, Empire and Race: cross-cultural relations in colonial Australia

Researcher: Dr Jacqueline Van Gent

This project will provide a new feminist critique of historical and anthropological representations of cross-cultural gender and race relations in colonial Australia.

This project analyses the construction of gender roles and identities as a relational process, investigating the interactions between men and women with regard to race and class as they took place on Christian missions in central Australia. Applying a postcolonial feminist perspective, the project will illuminate the various strategies employed by Indigenous women and men in adapting, resisting and subverting European gender roles.

The second part of this project examines the ways in which whiteness was engendered at the mission. Utilising a wide range of historical sources, including letters and diaries written by missionary wives, I will explore how femininities and masculinities were shaped in social interactions. Building on an increasing body of feminist scholarship on missionary women, this approach raises the question how women created spaces of power and how they constructed their identities in response to the expected gender roles of women as wives and mothers.

And lastly, I am investigating a wide range of textual and material representations of gender relations produced by German missionaries at Hermannsburg mission in central Australia between 1877 and the 1940s. The rich documentary evidence includes extensive ethnographic descriptions and collections, mainly housed in German museums today. This part will focus on the gendered production of knowledge about Aboriginal women, and critically analyse how women’s material culture was collected, documented and exhibited. I will also trace how these gendered representations continued to influence the exhibition strategies of anthropological exhibitions in Germany from the early 20th to the present.


This research is currently (2005) supported by a UWA Research Grant and a Northern Territory History Grant. I will be seeking further support from the ARC next year to expand this research.

Research Outcomes

Chapters

Van Gent, J. (2005) “Changing Concepts of Embodiment and Illness among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg Mission”, in P. Brock (ed), Indigenous Peoples, Christianity and Religious Change. Leiden: Brill.

Van Gent, J. (2004) “Blickwechsel: Arrernte encounters with Lutheran missionaries in central Australia”, in: Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (eds), Luther zwischen den Kulturen, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Van Gent, J. (2001) “Bildung und Identität: Indigene Bevölkerung und Erwachsenenbildung in Australien”, in E. Tschernokoschewa und D. Kramer (eds), Der alltägliche Umgang mit der Differenz: Bildung – Medien – Politik. Münster, New York, Munich, Berlin: Waxmann.

Van Gent, J. (2001) "Carl Strehlow, Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien ", in C. F. Feest and K.-H. Kohl (eds), Hauptwerke der Ethnologie, Alfred Kröner-Verlag, Stuttgart.

Van Gent, J. (2001) "Geza Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream.” in C. F. Feest and K.-H. Kohl (eds), Hauptwerke der Ethnologie, Alfred Kröner-Verlag, Stuttgart.

Refereed Articles

Van Gent, J. (2003) “Changing Concepts of Embodiment and Illness among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg Mission”, Journal of Religious History, October 2003.

Van Gent, J. (2003) “Voraussetzungen und Folgen eines Kolonialmassakers: Margaret Wieners Studien zu Bali als Beispiel anthropologischer Geschichtsschreibung”, Historische Anthropologie, volume 11, no.1, 2003, pp. 123-128.

Van Gent, J. (2002) (with Peggy Brock), “Generational Religious Change Among the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, Central Australia”, Australian Historical Studies, no 120, October 2002, pp. 303-318.

Book review

Van Gent, J (2001) Book review of Anna Haebich, The Broken Circle, in Historische Anthropologie, 2001.

Conference papers

2005 “Indigenous and German missionary masculinities, Hermannsburg mission 1870s to 1930s”, Centre for Gender Relations, ANU, conference Moving Masculinities: Crossing Regional and Historical Borders.

Grants
2005 Northern Territory History Grant, project entitled “A social history of missionary wives at Hermannsburg Mission”

2004 University of Western Australia Research Grant, project entitled “Missionaries between cultures: Encounter history and anthropological research at Hermannsburg mission, central Australia, 1870s – 1940s”

2002 Visiting Fellowship, Max-Planck Institute of History and Institute of Historical Anthropology, University of Erfurt (Germany).