Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

The relevance that the foregoing discussion concerning the culture of critical discourse had to my project is that while Gouldner’s original thesis is flawed, it drew attention to the significance of education in providing girls and women with a discursive field that allowed for subject positions other than those embedded in the discourse of separate spheres. Where, when, and how the participants engaged with these discursive possibilities for change is central to this book.

A sketch of the cultural, political, and administrative currents surrounding the establishment of schooling in Western Australia now follows. This will serve as a preliminary ‘landscape’ that explains the choices I made about the focus of the study and the ways in which it has been constructed.

The Swan River Colony

The Swan River Colony settlement, in the western third of the Australian continent, was established in 1829. It was essentially a settlement of minor gentry and yeoman farmers, leaving the post-Napoleonic troubles of Britain in order to transplant their way of life at the far ends of the world. Early—and misleading—reports of the agricultural potential of the land did not prepare the settlers for the hardships of famine and the rigours of establishing farms with minimal available labour. The colony was not a penal settlement, and the later transportation of convicts was a concession to the more influential landlords and Perth businessmen lobbying for cheaper and more plentiful workers.⁴⁰ Much of the community had not wanted this to happen, but the decision is an illustration of the undue political influence of a small group of families in the colony’s affairs. Transportation was to have a significant social impact. On the first of June 1850, the transport ship Scindian off-loaded the first shipment of convicts.

By the time transportation ceased in 1868, ten thousand male convicts had arrived in the colony. Even though only ‘high quality’ felons—those not convicted of violent crimes—were to be sent to the colony, subsequent research demonstrates that, over time, the convicts sent to Western Australia were ‘as “disreputable” a lot, perhaps even more so, than those sent to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land’.⁴¹ Contemporary comment on the convicts is provided in An Australian Parsonage, published in London in 1872.