Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
5 - The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
Summary
[T]he Australian girl appears to best advantage in her particular environment – most so the Girl of the Bush. Here, she seems a natural product of the peculiar features which make Australia unlike all other countries. It is the Bush Girl who represents emphatically the Australian type, and in her bush home she is more or less the same always, whether that be a rough station out West, or the luxurious homestead of a rich Victorian squatter.
Rosa Campbell Praed published ‘A Daughter of Greater Britain: The Australian Girl’ in the English periodical Girl's Realm in 1899. Although Praed asserts that Australian girls are similar to English girls, she points out that bush girls are unique in their refinement despite the uncivilized nature of their environment: ‘She may be poorly educated, she may run almost wild, hobnob with blacks, ride after cattle, and scrub, cook and clean … but withal, the squatter's daughter is almost always a natural little gentlewoman’. Praed's perspective is similar to the admiring depictions of Australian girls in British girls’ fiction of the period, which frequently exult in their physical strength, bravery, horse-riding skills and heroism while dispelling ideas of colonial savagery. Yet such imagined freedoms and heroics inspired by colonial life, enacted effortlessly and without conflict with feminine domestic expectations, were distinct from the lived experience of Australian girls at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand , pp. 75 - 90Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014