Patricia Grimshaw

Over generations, Australian women have envisaged a world of freedom. This new collection of documents - letters, diary extracts, poems, public speeches - charts the visions that inspired women and the obstacles that confronted them. Dealing with a period from colonisation to early Federation in 1901, Freedom Bound I shows how intertwined were women's public and personal lives, and how bound by custom, ties, affection and duties. The different meanings of freedom have been shaped by the nature of women's oppression, their quests given focus by their different points of departure. Convict women protested - often violently - at the indignities they endured; Aboriginal women protested at the cruelty of the frontier and the paternalism of the mission; and white middle-class women demanded the freedom to participate in the public world. Together with its companion volume, Freedom Bound II, which deals with the twentieth century, this volume documents the dreams that inspired women, the pleasures and pain that informed their politics and the desires that enthralled them, even as they bade them to be free. It is an essential resource for students and teachers of Australian women's history.

In White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw provide the first detailed study of the central part that white women played in missions to Aboriginal people in Australia. As Aboriginal people experienced violent dispossession through settler invasion, white mission women were positioned as 'mothers' who could protect, nurture and 'civilise' Aboriginal people. In this position, missionary women found themselves continuously navigating the often-contradictory demands of their own intentions, of Aboriginal expectations and of settler government policies. Through detailed studies that draw on rich archival sources, this book provides a new perspective on the history of missions in Australia and also offers new frameworks for understanding the exercise of power by missionary women in colonial contexts.

This book brings together fresh insights into the relationships between missions and indigenous peoples, and the outcomes of mission activities in the processes of imperial conquest and colonisation. Bringing together the work of leading international scholars of mission and empire, the focus is on missions across the British Empire (including India, Africa, Asia, the Pacific), within transnational and comparative perspectives. Themes throughout the contributions include collusion or opposition to colonial authorities, intercultural exchanges, the work of indigenous and local Christians in new churches, native evangelism and education, clashes between variant views of domesticity and parenting roles, and the place of gender in these transformations. Missionaries could be both implicated in the plot of colonial control, in ways seemingly contrary to Christian norms, or else play active roles as proponents of the social, economic and political rights of their native brethren. Indigenous Christians themselves often had a liminal status, negotiating as they did the needs and desires of the colonial state as well as those of their own peoples. In some mission zones where white missionaries were seen to be constrained by their particular views of race and respectability, black evangelical preachers had far greater success as agents of Christianity. This book contains contributions by historians from Australasia and North America who observe the fine grain of everyday life on mission stations, and present broader insights on questions of race, culture and religion. The volume makes a timely intervention into continuing debates about the relationship between mission and empire.

Over generations, Australian women have envisaged a world of freedom. This new collection of documents - letters, diary extracts, poems, public speeches - charts the visions that inspired women and the obstacles that confronted them. Dealing with a period from colonisation to early Federation in 1901, Freedom Bound I shows how intertwined were women's public and personal lives, and how bound by custom, ties, affection and duties. The different meanings of freedom have been shaped by the nature of women's oppression, their quests given focus by their different points of departure. Convict women protested - often violently - at the indignities they endured; Aboriginal women protested at the cruelty of the frontier and the paternalism of the mission; and white middle-class women demanded the freedom to participate in the public world. Together with its companion volume, Freedom Bound II, which deals with the twentieth century, this volume documents the dreams that inspired women, the pleasures and pain that informed their politics and the desires that enthralled them, even as they bade them to be free. It is an essential resource for students and teachers of Australian women's history.