Professor Victoria Haskins

For every Aboriginal child taken away by the state governments in Australia, there was at least one white family intimately involved in their life. One Bright Spot is about one of these families - about 'Ming', a Sydney wife and mother who hired Aboriginal domestic servants in the 20s and 30s, and became an activist against the Stolen Generations policy. Her story, reconstructed by her great-granddaughter, tells of a remarkable, yet forgotten, shared history.

This chapter compares the experiences of Barbara Thompson and Eliza Fraser, two white women who lived with Indigenous people on the other side of the frontier in colonial Queensland, to foreground their relationships with Indigenous women. It considers how they negotiated Indigenous women's worlds, and how Indigenous women negotiated their intrusion. It treats their meeting and adoption into Indigenous women's networks, speculates on the ways Indigenous women positioned the intruders, and details intimate relationships between white and Indigenous women. Through work, Thompson became a part of the Kaurareg community; through refusal to work, Fraser remained alienated from the Butchulla. This understanding provides a basis for a revised historical and reconciliation practice that both recognises Indigenous women's work and seeks to reciprocate.

This essay offers a reflection on conducting historical research relating to First Nations women's lives and cross-cultural relationships in ways that are ethical and informed by feminist sensibilities. In dialogic mode, the authors work through issues and insights that have arisen in the process of researching the life story of Arrernte woman Minnie Undelya Apma, who was abducted as a child from her parents in Central Australia in 1920 by anthropologist Herbert Basedow and his wife Olive (Nell). The process of collaborative research between Kath and Victoria ignited a relationship of mutual understanding and empathy that yielded further enquiries. Fundamentally the process created a space for us to talk and think about the many ways we approach and understand the remarkable history of Minnie Apma's life, that includes how that story is told and by whom. We argue that there are meaningful ways for First Nations and Second Peoples researchers of First Nations' women's life narratives to work together, that will not only improve historical scholarship, but also help to build respectful relationships that counteract inequality and ongoing disempowerment of First Nations people in our society.

On the very first Anzac Day commemoration, a young coal miner's daughter from Kurri Kurri in regional NSW was arrested and charged for illegally wearing the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) uniform. This was the third time that Maud Butler had impersonated a soldier: on the first two occasions, she had actually managed to get aboard a troopship before being discovered by the authorities. Butler's 'nonsensical escapades' (as one reporter termed them) offer an insight into the unstable constructions of gender difference and female patriotism during wartime. This article considers the controversies that surrounded her thwarted attempts to 'pass' as a male soldier, in the wider context of patriotism, masculinity and militarism during the First World War. Dissent of anti-war women in Australia in this period challenged masculine control of public space, but it is clear that the activities of pro-war women could do the same. As the authorities' bemused interventions and the discussions that ensued highlighted, such female enthusiasm for the war effort that Butler displayed threatened existing gender norms and social order. Reframing Butler's actions to shame reluctant men into enlisting could only imperfectly resolve the challenge her transgressions posed to Australian society, at a time of profound social change and upheaval.

In 1939 an Aboriginal father approached the secretary of a Sydney-based organization agitating for Aboriginal citizenship rights, to seek her assistance in locating his daughter who had been taken from his care by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board. He was not alone, but one of a number of concerned parents who sought the return of their daughters through the Committee for Aboriginal Citizenship. The fact that Aboriginal fathers were involved in this campaign challenges the stereotype of the 'fatherless' mixed-race child that underpinned the state's presumption of a patriarchal authority over Aboriginal girls and unmarried womena stereotype that endures. The following article exposes the maladministration of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board and highlights the assumptions about race and gender that are embedded in the history of the Stolen Generations.