Catherine Gay

Catherine Gay (PhD in History, 2024), Girls in Nineteenth-Century VictoriaSubscribe By Email, Australia: A Material History

This thesis explores the lives of Aboriginal and settler girls who lived in nineteenth-century Victoria. From the Port Phillip District’s invasion in 1835 to its federation into the Australian Commonwealth in 1901, I trace girls from infancy to their late teen years as they grew up in the colony. Despite being a major proportion of the population and participants in significant historical events and processes, girls have been overlooked in Australian historiography. I argue that, both as individuals and as a collective, Aboriginal and settler girls in Victoria contributed significantly to their families, communities, society and culture, whilst influencing, subverting and defying the expectations these structures placed upon them. I examine both what it meant to be a girl and how girls enacted their own girlhoods. I explore how race, ethnicity, class, religion, location and other intersectional factors combined with gender and age to produce myriad experiences for the young and female. This study uses girls’ material culture, what I term ‘girl-produced sources’, to uncover their overlooked stories. Each chapter demonstrates that sources like girls’ needlework, craft, writing or performance, can provide rich insights into diverse experiences and themes in girls’ lives, namely migration, work, First Nations activism, schooling, public life, sisterhood, and play.

By centring girls as historical subjects and prioritising their material culture as a primary source, this thesis offers a new perspective on Australia’s colonial history. It complicates challenges and enriches a historiography that has historically privileged the voices and experiences of adults.

This project was generously supported by a Hansen PhD Scholarship in History.

Supervisors: Prof. Andy May, Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy, and Dr Deborah Tout-Smith (Museums Victoria)