HST110 Essay

The online exhibition 'A Place for the Friendless Female ' bestows items discovered at the Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney a location that was a previous repository for supported female settlers to Sydney1. The depot housed “isolated” solitary female migrants in Sydney, sheltering them till they might be employed out as household labor or requested by other family affiliates. According to the exhibition, during 1847 to 1886, the depot accommodated a plentiful amount of working-class woman colonists from Ireland, Scotland, and England2. Finances extended from the selling of settler estate to free settlers were used to support the way of young woman migrants from England, who would then be contracted to labor as household domestics to reimburse their migratory passage tariff3. The exhibit effectively expresses portion of the story of an significant section of the female populace of colonist Australia: it bestows proof of the physical artifacts that were in the possession of free immigrant females in the transitory interim of their conversion from their live in England to lives in New South Wales. The exhibit grants mostly a portrayal of relics, which their importance is not assigned in a broader chronological background. Additionally, the exhibit doesn’t inform much about the substance of the lives that these females managed after they had departed the depot. It is to be discussed that the exhibit is coherent among and maintains the interpretation that females in the settlement were cast as a excess workforce: their arrival was envisioned to stipulate household labour for bourgeois families and maybe due to their fertile age, a means of enforcing procreation to develop the settlement. Provided the substantial gender discrepancy in New South Wales, these young, marriageable females were of worth due to their momentary shortage, introduced to provision the requirements of the novel colonist immigrant society4.

Nevertheless, their position in colonist live could not be

Bibliography: 'A Place for the Friendless Female ', NSW Migration Heritage Centre, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/friendlessfemale/flash.html. Damousi, Joy. Depraved and Disorderly. Female convicts, sexuality and gender and colonial Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge, 1997. Davies, Peter. "Destitute Women and Smoking at the Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, Australia." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15(1) (2011): pp. 82-101. Grimshaw, Patricia. "Making Male and Female Worlds." In Creating a Nation, edited by Grimshaw, Patricia, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly, Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, 1994, pp. 79-105. McConville, Chris, "Peopling the Place Again." In A Most Valuable Acquisition, A People 's History of Australia since 1788, edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee,  Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1988, pp. 73-86. Rushen, Elizabeth. " 'Not the very lowest and poorest classes ': Irish female assisted immigration to Australia in the 1830s." Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 9, (2009): pp. 52-72. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God 's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Anne Summers. Melbourne: Penguin, 1994.