Colonial Construction of Masculinity - Transforming Aboriginal Austral Men Into Houseboys

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Julia Martı́nez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys” ’
Gender & History, Vol.21 No.2 August 2009, pp. 305–323.
Colonial Constructions of Masculinity:

Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men
into ‘Houseboys’
Julia Martı́nez and Claire Lowrie
In 1913, the Kahlin Compound was established in the tropical town of Darwin in
the Northern Territory of Australia. Here, Aboriginal people were brought together
to form a labour pool for the government’s domestic service agency. Chief Protector
of Aboriginals, W. G. Stretton, later reported, ‘it has been a difficult matter to induce
the different tribes to amalgamate and fraternise’.1 This forced grouping was part
of the government’s plan to sustain Darwin’s meagre white population by providing
the support of domestic help. While today, the predominant image of the domestic
worker is female, in Darwin in the 1930s, Aboriginal men made up more than half of
domestic servants.2 Their jobs usually involved the more arduous, outdoor work such
as gardening, chopping wood, shopping, sweeping and hanging out clothes. Drawing
on the language of other British tropical colonies, such as nearby Singapore, these
workers were known as ‘houseboys’.
Aboriginal Australian historian, Jackie Huggins, has noted that the experiences
of Aboriginal domestic workers are now well documented in the autobiographical
and other writing of Aboriginal women, including works by Glenyse Ward, Jennifer
Sabbioni and Marnie Kennedy.3 While this may be true of the experiences of Abo-
riginal women, almost nothing is known of the Aboriginal men who were employed
in domestic service. The process of feminisation of domestic service is perhaps one
reason why men have been neglected in the historical literature, not just in Australia,
but internationally.4
A forum on domestic service in this journal pointed to the growing scholarly in-
terest in domestic service.5 That forum was primarily focused on accounts of domestic
service in Europe; our study is concerned with the colonial domain where constructions
of gender and masculinity were framed within racialised discourses. In the context of
southern Australia, the literature on domestic service mostly deals with white ser-
vants and tends towards a class rather than ‘race’ analysis. This is illustrated by Paula
Hamilton’s discussion of the home as a political site where ‘inter-class tension’ and
gender politics played out through the domestic service relationship.6 Hamilton ex-
plores representations of white female domestics during the late nineteenth century in

C The author 2009. Journal compilation
C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.

306 Gender & History
the context of an international, bourgeois discourse of the ‘servant problem’ common

to the ‘settler’ colonies of Canada, the United States and Australia.7
Our work on Australia’s north looks instead to tropical ‘non-settler’ colonies,
such as Bengal and Malaya, where we find common threads of a colonial dis-
course on race and climate.8 Indeed, Darwin had much more in common with the
multi-ethnic tropical colonies of south-east Asia than the settler societies in south-
ern Australia.9 Geographically, Darwin, which is located just 12 degrees south of
the equator, falls well within the tropics. More than any other Australian region, the
‘Top End’ is linked in popular imagination with its near northern neighbours, the
Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), New Guinea and Singapore.10 Where the tropical
heat figured in Australian colonial discourse, it was concerned with the debilitating
effects of the heat on white colonists and the need for ‘coloured’ servants to take
over domestic labour. In contrast to Asian colonies where indigenous peoples were
culturally constructed as ‘indolent’ as a supposedly natural response to tropical con-
ditions, Aboriginal Australians were more often represented as being unaffected by
the heat and this, ironically, made their labour essential to the success of the colonial
project.
The study of Australian domestic service in a racialised context is predominantly
concerned with Aboriginal women workers. Victoria Haskins’s 2007 study of the
‘civilising’ mission of white women as employers of Aboriginal women builds on Ann
Laura Stoler’s work on the ‘domains of the intimate’ as a means for understanding the
perceptions and policies of colonial administrators. In the twentieth century, Haskins
argues, ‘bureaucratic custodianship’ saw administrative surveillance and intervention
increased with both white men and women exerting authority over Aboriginal domes-
tic workers. This ‘civilising’ discourse, which promoted the government’s policy of
assimilation, was aimed at Aboriginal women of mixed descent.11 These women, now
known as part of the ‘Stolen Generations’, were employed not only in Darwin, but
in all the southern cities, in a deliberate attempt to draw them into white society and
away from their Aboriginal families.12 The Stolen Generations refers to the children
of mixed descent forcibly removed from their families by government officials as part
of a eugenics policy that aimed to assimilate them, both culturally and ‘racially’ into
white society.
The general absence of male domestic servants in Australia has been highlighted
by the historian B. W. Higman in his study of Australian domestic service. He ad-
vanced the theory that Australia’s ‘colonial roots in north-western Europe ensured
that the model of domestic service was based around a gendered, feminine concept
of domesticity’. He noted also the influence of pioneering masculinity, emphasising
outdoor physical labour as men’s work and domestic services as women’s work.13 For
Higman, the exception was the northern ‘frontier’ region of Australia, where male
Chinese and Aboriginal servants were relatively common due the disproportionate
number of men.14 Despite the predominance of Aboriginal male servants in the north,
there has been no detailed study of this phenomenon.
A gendered study of the employment of Aboriginal men first appeared in Ann
McGrath’s Born in the Cattle, examining the working lives of Aboriginal ‘cow-
boys’. The book includes a chapter on Aboriginal women in the domestic sphere
in which McGrath mentions the employment of men in domestic roles such as ‘kitchen
boy’, ‘houseboy’, ‘garage boy’ and ‘garden boy’ on the larger cattle stations.15 On

C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
Aboriginal Australian Men as ‘Houseboys’ 307
the smaller stations, McGrath found that domestic work was viewed as ‘women’s
work’, and was meted out as a ‘humiliating punishment’ for Aboriginal men.16 In
the township of Darwin, however, where other forms of labour were less available, it
is not clear that Aboriginal men would have shared this sense of domestic work as
punishment.
Our exploration of representations of masculinity and the material effects of these
representations is fuelled by the available historical evidence. As Swapna Banerjee
points out in the context of colonial Bengal, ‘the dearth of primary sources left by
the servants themselves’ means most of our evidence comes from ‘the discourse of
their employers’.17 Acknowledging our position as non-Aboriginal women, we are
unable to offer a subaltern voice of colonial resistance. Our critique of the colonial
project relies on reading the colonial sources ‘against the grain’. We point to a range of
representations of Aboriginal men as childlike ‘houseboys’, as fearless hunters and as
responsible husbands and discuss how these images worked to support the project of
colonial dominance. In addition, by engaging with comparative studies from across the
colonial empires, we are heeding Ann Laura Stoler’s call to examine the connections
between these intimate encounters and the transnational or trans-colonial management
of empire of domestic service by ‘working “along the grain” of political rationalities
that were not confined to any one nation’.18 The prevalence of the term ‘house-
boy’ or ‘boy’ in a range of colonial settings is an apt example of this trans-colonial
culture.
The concept of servants as children perhaps has its origins in the European
metropole where the employer as a paterfamilias, with ‘fatherly care over the servants
as if they were his own children’, was an old tradition.19 In the case of the colonies,
we see this same paternalism expressed towards servants, though it is predicated on
authority born of assumed racial rather than class difference. The word ‘houseboy’
was used to describe Aboriginal male servants in Darwin, but other terms included
‘blackboy’ and, in later years, ‘native boy’. The term ‘houseboy’ is well known for
its historical use in America, referring to African men, slaves and former slaves, who
worked as domestic servants. The term was also used extensively across colonial
Africa.20 In French colonial Indochina, the term ‘boy’ by itself referred to a male
domestic servant.21
Robert Morrell, writing in the context of South Africa, argues that ‘the word
captured condescension, a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of growth and the
achievement of manhood amongst African men’.22 Morrell describes the emasculating
nature of the colonial relationship where servitude ‘was combined with the denial of
adulthood and thus became a feature of black masculinity’.23 Likewise in Australia,
Aboriginal men were denied manhood in the context of a racialised discourse, in which
their ‘racial’ capacity to attain adulthood was questioned. The denial of adulthood was
a highly political project, and a means of maintaining colonial power in the home.
European colonists, particularly in the tropics, depended on servants for colonial status
and prestige. While requiring the presence of servants, they were deeply anxious
about the interaction between ‘European and native sensibilities and desires’ in the
intimate space of the home.24 Such intimate interactions had potential consequences for
colonial authority, which rested on unchallenged and untainted European superiority.
By labelling these men ‘boys’, Europeans sought to maintain the upper hand in all
domestic interactions.25

A colonial tradition: Chinese and Aboriginal men as servants

The use of ‘coloured’ domestic labour was a feature of life in Darwin as soon as
the port was established in 1869. The British specialists who were brought in by
the British–Australian Telegraph Company in 1871 were described as typical colo-
nials, having ‘brought their servants from the East’ and employing Aboriginal men
to light their path at night.26 Chinese and Malay men were the preferred choice for
servants, as they were seen to encapsulate the image of ‘the true servant’.27 As in
nearby Singapore, paid domestic service was virtually synonymous with the Chinese
‘cookboy’ or ‘houseboy’ who was employed by both Europeans and wealthy Chi-
nese.28 Aboriginal men were incorporated into domestic service, but they generally
took on the more arduous or menial tasks. As with other tropical colonies such as Java
and India, it was argued that Darwin’s small white population required an entourage
of ‘coloured’ servants to deal with the climate and maintain their colonial prestige
in the context of a multiethnic population.29 Darwin was quite unlike the southern
colony of New South Wales where only 9 per cent of the population employed any
servants at all.30 It is for this reason that we speak of a trans-colonial culture in terms
of the colonial model operating in the ‘non-settler’ tropical colonies. With the advent
of the Australian nation in 1901, however, these cultural forms became difficult to
sustain.
With federation came an emphasis on White Australian nationalism, and this
reliance on ‘coloured’ labour was frowned upon. The Immigration Restriction Act of
1901, known as the White Australia policy, which effectively banned ‘coloured’ labour
migration, resulted in the colonial elite of Darwin being deprived of a ready supply of
Asian servants. As the old colonial borders within Australia were opened up, it became
possible for Chinese men to leave the Northern Territory and to move to Australia’s
southern states. By 1910, according to the Government Resident, Samuel Mitchell,
any Chinese left were able to demand ‘abnormally high’ wages.31 He regarded this as
a serious problem for the expanded white settlement as white women would no longer
be able to obtain Chinese servants. He wrote:
As there are almost no white domestic servants in the Territory, many house-wives cannot afford
the luxury of a help, except that of an aboriginal. This is one of the reasons why women do not like
living in the Territory. The lot of the ordinary house-wife is toilsome, and, especially in the wet
season, very trying.32
Thus, even with the White Australia policy in place, with its emphasis on white-
only labour, the new administrators in Darwin approved of Aboriginal labour. The
White Australia policy was originally conceived as an anti-immigration policy and its
application to Aboriginal Australians was always a matter for debate. Ultimately, the
decision to employ Aboriginal labour was prompted by the administrator’s belief that
white officials, in the manner of British colonial staff in other tropical outposts, should
expect ‘coloured’ servants to take care of housekeeping, cooking and gardening as
compensation for having to endure life in the tropics. The Administrator, Dr Gilruth,
bemoaned the sacrifice he had made, having to leave ‘a University chair in the important
City of Melbourne for life in a tropical village’ to justify his decision to keep ‘coloured’
servants.33 In 1915, Elsie Masson, who had been staying in Government House, wrote,
‘it is becoming less and less likely that the new arrival in the Territory will be able to
secure such a prize as a Chinese cook’.34 Aboriginal servants thus became the only

possible alternative to Chinese servants and Aboriginal labour was officially endorsed
as an exception to the white labour policy.
The Commonwealth government took steps to regulate the employment of Abo-
riginal workers, bringing ‘a rigid regulation’ to the lives of the Aboriginal population.35
The Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910, amended in the Aboriginals Ordinance
1911, outlined a system whereby the Chief Protector of Aboriginals would have control
over employment by means of licences sold to employers.36 The government appointed
the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer as Chief Protector of Aboriginals in 1912. Spencer
fully approved of the employment of Aboriginal people as servants. He wrote that the
Aboriginal people of Darwin ‘have long since become degenerate and have lost all
their old customs and beliefs . . . Many of them are employed by white residents to
whom they are useful and by whom they are well treated’.37 Spencer had already made
clear his belief that Darwin was climatically unsuited for white men to undertake hard
manual labour.38
In 1911, according to J. T. Beckett, Inspector of Aboriginals, there were 125 Abo-
riginal workers employed in Darwin. Beckett characterised the Aboriginal population
as ‘a docile submissive people, who, in spite the many aspersions cast upon them by
detractors in other States render excellent service in return for the pittance doled out
to them’.39 The workers included a small number of women who were classified as
‘half-caste’, that is, having one Aboriginal parent and one white parent, and a larger
cohort of Aboriginal men and women. As protective restrictions on the employment of
Aboriginal women were put into place, eventually Aboriginal men came to dominate
domestic service. In 1938, for example, there were eighty-seven servants, sixty-six of
whom were Aboriginal men, while fourteen were Aboriginal women and seven ‘half-
caste’ women.40 It should be noted that, unlike southern Australia, white domestic
servants were virtually unknown in Darwin. White women were employed in one of
the hotels and one Russian woman was employed in Government House, but neither
of these positions had the intimacy and paternalism associated with the employment
of personal domestic servants.
The 1918 Aboriginals Ordinance spelt out the conditions of Aboriginal employ-
ment. Employers applied to the Protector of Aboriginals who granted a one-year licence
once satisfied that the applicant was ‘a fit person’. Most householders were eligible
but section 23 stipulated that a ‘male person of any Asiatic race’ was prohibited from
holding a licence.41 This ban was introduced in 1911 on the alleged grounds that the
Chinese were giving opium to their servants and that Asian men were a corrupting
influence. Darwin’s Chinese merchants protested, writing: ‘Many of us have had the
blackboys in our employ for years and have always treated them well and the boys do
not want to leave us’, but the ban remained.42
In the town of Darwin, employers had to sign an agreement with their Aboriginal
employees. Breaches of this agreement would, it was stated, lead to a twenty-pound
fine for employers, while Aboriginal employees could lose their right to town employ-
ment.43 This agreement was, however, a mere formality, given that in most cases the
Protector chose the Aboriginal worker on behalf of the employer and rarely imposed
penalties on employers. Sick employees were returned to the clinic on the Kahlin Com-
pound and replaced. While the employment of Chinese servants had been a matter of
employers’ preference, and the employment of women of ‘mixed descent’ part of the
official policy of assimilation, Aboriginal men were pragmatically viewed as a cheap

labour supply. Official intervention was limited to ensuring a steady supply of workers
and the maintenance of discipline. Unlike the case of mixed-descent women, there
was no official programme aimed at transforming Aboriginal men into houseboys and
training was left to individual employers.
In 1917, the Administrator, Dr Gilruth, expressed his concern that ‘the great
increase in the white population of Darwin has resulted in the demand for aboriginal
assistance in households exceeding the supply, though the officers of the Department
have done everything possible to assist housewives anxious to obtain this, the only class
of domestic assistance available’.44 His representation of domestic labour as a valuable
and scarce commodity helps to explain the motivation behind the strict employment
regulations that came into force in 1918. By 1928, there were 200 Aboriginal workers
in Darwin. John Bleakley, Chief Protector of Aboriginals in Queensland, wrote in
his report on the Northern Territory that Aboriginal servants were a ‘necessary evil’
as, ‘owing to climatic and other conditions, life in Darwin for many of the white
families would be almost impossible without some cheap domestic labour’.45 By
1936, 348 identity discs had been issued to Aboriginal workers who were employed
in the Darwin town centre.46 According to Tony Austin, legislation was primarily ‘to
protect employers in a town starved of cheap, reliable domestic help, by preventing
workers from quitting at short notice’.47 One of the effects of the increasing government
intervention in the employment of Aboriginal servants was that their ability to negotiate
with their employers became increasingly limited.
The local Aboriginal population was too small to supply this demand and so,
as more Aboriginal peoples migrated to Darwin from Melville Island, Daly River
and other regions, they were encouraged to take up domestic service. At the 1937
conference in Canberra to discuss Aboriginal policy, C. L. A. Abbott, the new Admin-
istrator and former federal Minister for the Interior, gave his approval to Aboriginal
people migrating to Darwin, provided that they found ‘work as houseboys and are
good workers’.48 Even so, questions as to the desirability of Aboriginal men as do-
mestic servants continued, leading the Chief Protector of Aboriginals, Dr Cook, to
reassure the administration that: ‘There appears to be no reason why the aborigi-
nal should not be trained to be as efficient, clean and intelligent an attendant as a
Chinese or Malay’.49 Cook’s assessment was in keeping with current medical opin-
ion, which during this period had become preoccupied with measuring Aboriginal
intelligence.50
The novelist Xavier Herbert, who lived in Darwin in the 1920s, was scathing in
his criticism of the administrative staff in Darwin, who liked to imagine themselves as
British colonial masters in their employment of servants. In his novel Capricornia, he
parodied the training of Aboriginal domestic servants:
Oscar took a smelly native from the Compound and converted him into a piece of bright furni-
ture . . . and called him the Punkah Wallah. This Wallah fellow also waited at table and did odd
jobs; and his lubra worked as housemaid. The services of this pair cost the Shillingsworths five
shillings a week in cash and scraps of food, and added inestimably to the value they now set upon
themselves.51
Herbert’s use of the Anglo-Indian term ‘punkah wallah’ emphasises the extent to which
white Australians sought to maintain the traditions of British colonials. Yet Herbert’s
was a rare criticism in a town where voices were more likely to be raised in discussion
of the ‘problems’ of training and keeping Aboriginal staff.

Discipline and paternalism

In 1918, as a result of amendments to the Aboriginal Ordinance, the Kahlin Compound
became more restrictive and control of Aboriginal people’s lives increased. Compound
Superintendent MacDonald, commenting on the 235 residents of Kahlin, wrote: ‘The
discipline is good, the aboriginal is taking more kindly to it than in previous years, but
there are a number who will overstep if given the opportunity, and it is with strict and
impartial discipline only that satisfactory results can be obtained’.52
A key aspect of the discipline was the night curfew imposed in 1920 that required
Aboriginal people to return to the compound one hour after sunset.53 During the
1930s, only once a week were Aboriginal residents permitted to stay out until ‘thirty
minutes after eleven o’clock’ so that they could attend the cinema which was within
the prohibited area of Darwin.54 The prohibited area included Chinatown where, it was
argued, men might gain access to alcohol or opium, the consumption of both being
illegal for Aboriginal people. Aside from this exemption, the 1933 Ordinance stated
that any Aboriginal person found ‘at large’ in town one hour after sunset without written
permission from their employer was guilty of an offence with a penalty of one month’s
imprisonment.55 During the 1930s, under the leadership of Chief Protector Cook,
restrictions were increasingly harsh, particularly in relation to limiting Aboriginal
freedom of movement.56
Aboriginal men who evaded the night curfew can be seen as regaining some
control of their lives, even knowing that these acts of defiance could result in one
month’s imprisonment. In his study of slavery, John Smolenski notes that the act
of running away, even briefly, allowed African slaves in Virginia to ‘retake control
of the spatial boundaries of their lives’ and provided ‘a site for the production of a
masculine identity’.57 Still, such acts of defiance were not common. Aboriginal men in
Darwin required permission either from the Protector of Aboriginals, the Compound
Superintendent or their employer before they could move outside their employer’s
home. For those who could recall the time before 1911, when they came and went
as they pleased, the loss of independence must have been particularly notable. Hazel
Mackey came to Darwin in 1937 when her husband went to work for the Meteorology
Department. She recalled her surprise when, after her husband bought their Aboriginal
servant Willie Dyall a bicycle, he had asked them to write a note explaining that he
owned it, since he was concerned that people would think he had stolen it.58 His concern
is suggestive of the level of anxiety generated by the constant police surveillance of
Aboriginal movement.
Another important way in which Aboriginal men were denied basic personal
freedom and forced to rely on the charity of their employers was in the allocation
of clothing. Employers were required to provide clothing for their employees un-
der the terms of the Aboriginals Ordinance, but in practice Aboriginal workers were
usually given ‘hand-me-down’ clothes. The act of giving clothes is fraught with over-
tones of paternalism. In the case of Aboriginal domestic servants, some employers
overtly asserted their power to undermine their employee’s dignity. In his published
account of life in Darwin, C. P. Conigrave, Inspector of Fisheries from 1923 to 1927,
wrote:
If during the week you have given your black boy your discarded sun helmet, or an old pair of shoes,
trousers, singlets or some other garment, irrespective of whether they are several sizes too large for

him, it is a foregone conclusion that he will appear in them at the picture show and ‘swank’ over
other boys who have not been quite so generously treated by their employers.59
In this account, Aboriginal men who dressed themselves in western fashion in order
to cut a manly figure at the local cinema were held up as objects of ridicule for
white readers’ amusement. An alternative reading is suggested by Sophie White in
her discussion of slavery in French colonial Louisiana. She argues against interpreting
‘sartorial discourse’ in terms of slave–master power relations, preferring to focus on
the internal slave dynamics and the way fine clothing was meant to be viewed by
other slaves.60 In Darwin, Aboriginal men used the cinema as a social gathering space
in which they could establish a sense of their social standing amongst their peers.
For domestic servants, ownership of prized items of European clothing provided extra
credit in this performance.
Gendered divisions of domestic labour

In Darwin, the gendered division of labour was made explicit in the Aboriginals
Ordinance but it was a division that took into account contemporary notions of ‘racial’
hierarchy. Those male workers who were categorised as ‘half-caste’ and were over
the age of twenty-one could take on work alongside white workers and could join a
trade union, thus gaining access to white wages. ‘Half-caste’ women on the other hand
remained under the protection of the Chief Protector, being classified as ‘Aboriginal’
and were subject to a lower Aboriginal wage scale of six shillings per week. While
low, this wage was generous when compared with the two shillings per week paid to
Aboriginal men and women who were officially classified as ‘full-blood’.61
Aboriginal men and women in Darwin had no access to trade union representation.
In the Northern Territory, the main union in operation after 1927 was the North
Australia Workers’ Union (NAWU). While the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU)
rules were amended in 1927 to allow Aboriginal workers to join, the NAWU did not
allow Aboriginal membership unless the person were ‘the issue of Mixed Parentage
(European on one side) born in Australasia’.62 There was considerable antagonism
amongst NAWU members over the low wages paid to Aboriginal workers and, having
failed to persuade the government to consider equal wages, the NAWU demanded a
boycott of Aboriginal workers in 1928. The left-wing journal Workers’ Weekly criticised
NAWU union officials for their hypocrisy, labelling them ‘exploiters of native labor’
over their use of Aboriginal domestic labour.63 The communist members of the NAWU
proposed in 1930 and again in 1931, without success, that all Aboriginal workers be
admitted to the union.64 Even if this motion had been passed, it was unlikely that
the government would have conceded that Aboriginal workers should be eligible for
‘white’ wage levels.
Apart from the question of wages, the differing status between Aboriginal men
and ‘half-caste’ women in domestic service was reflected in the spatial division of
the household. Sheila Hansen, who was born in Darwin in 1923, recalled that the
female servant ‘ate with us’ when she was a child, but was sent to eat alone in
the kitchen when the children were older. In contrast, ‘the black boys always ate
down in their own shed’.65 Con Scott, who was born in Darwin in 1921, recalled
that their Aboriginal ‘help’, Tommy, had assisted his mother with the washing and

other household tasks, though he was never allowed inside the house.66 Ann McGrath
suggests that colonists believed that Aboriginal women were more ‘submissive’ and
harmless, while ‘permitting men into the house was like signing your death warrant’,
but it appears that this sentiment was more prevalent in the remote frontier region than
in Darwin.67
Aboriginal men were usually allocated outdoor tasks, including watering the
garden, raking the leaves, chopping wood and washing the car. James Watts recalled
that the women worked in the house and the ‘black boys generally did the yardwork’.68
The division of labour was clearest between ‘half-caste’ women and Aboriginal men.
Sheila Hansen explained that George, their Aboriginal servant, was responsible for
‘the hard jobs that the half-caste girl didn’t have to do’, such as scrubbing the stairs.69
McGrath has pointed out that Aboriginal men in the Northern Territory at times refused
to perform ‘certain work which did not fit into their definitions of men’s sphere’.70
‘Half-caste’ women were usually responsible for childcare, but there is evidence that
Aboriginal men were involved in childcare when it took place outside the house.
Sheila Hansen recalled that: ‘if we were going down the beach for a swim, he’d come
to watch us because we weren’t allowed to swim unless we had an adult with us’.71 In a
society in which Aboriginal men were so often represented as childlike in both official
documents and the press, this is rare evidence that white residents acknowledged them
as responsible adults.
Aboriginal men were often presented as being out of their element surrounded
by the modern technologies of the domestic sphere. Outside the home, however,
both Europeans and Chinese were quick to acknowledge that Aboriginal men had
skills for dealing with the often-hostile natural environment. Indeed, the theme of
Aboriginal man or woman as a protector was common in frontier situations. Even in
the modern industry of pearl-shell diving in Broome, to the west of Darwin, a Chinese
diver commented that they relied on Aboriginal men to save them if there was ‘any
real trouble’ in the water, and they needed someone to dive in and untangle their
airlines.72 This reputation helps to explain the value placed on Aboriginal ‘houseboys’
as supervisors of children.
The less wealthy the household, the fewer servants employed and the less obvious
the division of labour. Thus, in the home of the trade unionist J. A. McDonald, only
one servant was employed. His son Patrick McDonald recalled: ‘We did have one
black boy who used to come, and he’d chop the wood, and he’d hang the washing out
for Mum and bring it back. But never allowed in the house, or anything like that’.73
In contrast, the Club Hotel employed a number of ‘native boys’, in particular for the
job of ‘punkah boy’ that entailed working the large overhead fans.74 Their ‘native
boys’, Beryl Cashman, daughter of the hotel owner, explained, did ‘all the dirty work’
and ‘even washing, ironing and everything else’. The hotel also employed ‘white’
housemaids whose wages and conditions were set according to union regulations.75
As Administrator, C. L. A. Abbott had a large staff for Government House, whose
‘racial’ origins were considered important enough to be noted. His staff included two
maids of ‘mixed race’ descent, a gardener of similar ‘mixed’ descent and his Aboriginal
wife, Charles See Kee, from Shanghai, as his personal secretary and a young Aboriginal
man to sweep the verandah. There were also two white employees: a married couple
from Russia who worked as chauffeur and cook.76 In this case, the lowly position of
the Aboriginal man within a racialised hierarchy of servants is more apparent.

In considering the division of labour, we cannot assume that gender played a more
important role than notions of race or culture. Writing in 1927, Mrs Finniss, who spoke
with the authority of belonging to one of Darwin’s oldest colonial families, complained
that she had to work hard to supervise her Aboriginal servants and warned readers of
the local newspaper:
We don’t employ the aborigines as cooks, but, with careful training, they make good house-
servants . . . Once, just after engaging a native boy for the kitchen, I was alarmed to discover the
whole house was filled with dense smoke. I thought we were to be burnt out, but when I penetrated
to the kitchen I found that the boy had only lit a fire in the oven.77
In this case, the role of cook was not deemed appropriate to Aboriginal men, not
because of their gender, but because of the belief that ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture
was incompatible with modern cooking techniques. Cooking meat over an open fire
was a normal activity for Aboriginal men, while dealing with modern ovens was not.
The question remains as to the extent to which Aboriginal men themselves were
able to determine their particular roles and whether they had a sense of certain tasks
being inappropriate for men. In the case of colonial Natal, Jeremy Martens argues that
African men ‘actively sought positions as domestic servants’ and had done so ‘since
the earliest days of white settlement’.78 Karen Hansen similarly documented domestic
work as ‘a man’s job’ in colonial Rhodesia.79 While Robert Morrell described the work
of washermen and houseboys as ‘menial, brutal or unmanly’, it is unclear whether he
has taken western paradigms of masculinity to be the measure of a supposed ‘natural’
masculinity.80 Martens argues that it was not African men but ‘white Natalians’ who
found alarming the idea of men performing what they considered ‘women’s work’.81
In the case of Aboriginal men with little previous experience of domestic service, it is
possible that they were yet to form strong opinions as to appropriate masculine roles
in domestic work.
Transforming the ‘capricious hunter’

Underlying the employer accounts of Aboriginal men as domestic servants is the
image of these men as wild men or myalls. They were imagined as roaming fearlessly
across the untamed northern landscape, displaying their prowess in both the act of
hunting and in the performance of corroborees that recounted stories of their hunting.
Dorothy Hodgson describes British ‘fear and fascination’ with Maasai warriors whom
they saw as ‘noble savages’ and as living ‘the epitome of a wild and free lifestyle’.82
There is a similar sense in Australian early colonial accounts of Aboriginal men. In
twentieth-century Darwin, however, the ‘wildness’ of Aboriginal men was more often
portrayed as an object of fascination than of fear. With policies of assimilation in
force that sought to destroy Aboriginal culture, it was increasingly the case that white
employers spoke of bush culture in terms of romantic nostalgia, believing that they were
witnessing the last of a kind. The challenge, as outlined in an 1849 colonial commission,
was how to turn ‘the capricious hunter into the steady labourer’.83 In the ‘frontier’
regions of the Northern Territory, this process was seen to be in its final stages by
the 1930s.
Aboriginal men in the Northern Territory were renowned for their skills in cattle
mustering, hunting and fishing, and even those men working in domestic service

were not solely defined by this employment. Outside working hours, they created
alternative identities as hunters. Their exploits were eagerly reported in Darwin’s
Northern Standard newspaper, as seen in a 1936 account of the capture of a nine-foot-
long crocodile by the Aboriginal men of the compound. The report describes how the
‘fleet footed agile natives caught it by the tail and tossed it onto its back’. They then
presented the crocodile ‘trussed up like a duck ready for roasting’ to the superintendent
of the compound.84 Aboriginal men were often thus portrayed as efficient and fearless
hunters by the white Australian press. For most male Aboriginal servants, the time
spent away from domestic service each year was substantial. Their ‘ability to escape
to the bush’ allowed them to resist ‘the restraints of wage labour’ and to return to life
outside the influence of white colonial society.85 White employers in Darwin seem to
have accepted this practice, acknowledging the cultural differences that the custom of
taking leave to return to the bush implied. The Northern Standard reported in 1936:
‘Following the usual custom many of the aboriginal domestics have left Darwin on
their annual walkabout. Most of them will be absent for about two moons’.86 Elsie
Masson, in her 1915 semi-fictional account of Darwin life, described the departure of
the Aboriginal servant to ‘his country’ as a return to ‘the life of a primitive savage, to
weird corroborees by moonlight in the silent bush, to long hunts after tucker, to the
learning of strange tribal magic from white-haired warriors – back to the Stone Age
for four moons’.87 Such romantic depictions of ‘walkabout’ became a central trope
in the white Australian fascination with Aboriginal culture and, as such, ‘walkabout’
was one of the few freedoms allowed to survive in an otherwise oppressive period of
administration.
C. L. A. Abbott saw his Aboriginal ‘valet’ as capable of treading the line between
‘civilisation’ and ‘primitivism’. He outlined with pride the many and manly skills of
his Aboriginal servant:
Sam could cook a good meal and wash, iron and press clothes as well as any valet, and he could
also catch fish or throw a spear as well as the wildest native in Arnhem Land. He was the best
example of the primitive and the civilised black that I have seen. Like all other natives he used to
go ‘walkabout’, when he would go up the coast in a boat with his lubra, Silver, and hunt and fish
till the day came for him to return.88
Abbott’s ideal of Aboriginal manhood combined a paradoxical mastery of the bush as
his rightful domain with a sense of his subservient place in the civilised world as a loyal
servant. But his romantic construction seeks to justify Abbott’s view of supposedly
benevolent colonialism.
The hunter image also worked for Aboriginal men. Hazel Mackey, mentioned
above, recalled that her servant Willie Dyall told her ‘one day that while he was
crossing a creek a crocodile took his horse from underneath him’.89 In the act of telling
his employer of his exploits as a buffalo hunter, Willie gave voice to his alternative
existence, where masculinity was expressed in fearlessly facing the dangers of the bush.
Having engaged in buffalo hunting alongside a white hunter, it is unclear whether this
performance of masculinity should be viewed as Aboriginal or white European. It is
possible that both Aboriginal and white men shared this sense of the masculine bravado
associated with the act of hunting.
Being described as a hunter has not always been connected with being ‘manly’.
Discussing Indians in colonial North America, Elizabeth Vibert points out that, by the
eighteenth century, ‘the hunting way of life was clearly associated with a backward

social state’. Hunters might have a ‘manly appearance’ but they were seen as unable to
‘tolerate hard labour’.90 Similar ideas regarding hunters can be observed in Australia.
Claims of laziness and indolence were also levelled against Aboriginal men. Further-
more, it is also important to note that changes in ideas of masculinity and manliness
from the turn of the century involved a shift from a vision of masculinity as comprising
raw physical strength to ‘manliness’ that involved being ‘civilised’, ‘self-controlled’
and having the capacity to rule over others.91 In this sense, Aboriginal masculinity can
be distinguished from the hegemonic manliness of white Australian men.
Most important for the white women of Darwin was the notion that an acceptable
‘civilised’ manliness required western standards of cleanliness and clothing. Hazel
Mackey describes her first encounter with Willie Dyall and her attempts to transform
the ‘hunter’ into a ‘houseboy’. She describes how the man who brought him to her
house explained to her:
‘He’s a myall, he’s been out in the stock camps, he’s been buffalo hunting and all that sort of thing
with the white buffalo hunter.’ And I said ‘Would he be able to do housework?’ And he said: ‘Oh,
I don’t know.’ But he said: ‘They learn very quickly.’ He said: ‘I think you’d probably be able to
train him’.92
Hazel Mackey recalls the transformation process in graphic terms. There is little sense
that she was talking to a man and to a stranger; rather, she employed a tone of command
that might normally be associated with a mother speaking to her child:
But when he turned up – my goodness me was he a disreputable looking fellow – matted hair and
dirty clothes. Oh dear! . . . So I said to him: ‘You’re plenty dirty fellow’, and he said: ‘No more
missus, no more’ . . . So, I got him a bucket of water and a face washer, and I asked him if he
would take himself down to the house and wash himself all over . . . So anyhow he went and washed
himself all over. He looked better, but his clothes were still filthy, so I got my husband to buy him
some new clothes.93
This ritual of washing calls to mind Anne McClintock’s discussion of the colonial
portrayal of soap as having a transformative role in bringing civilisation to African
men.94 McClintock notes that African men had counter strategies for dealing with
this ‘domestic ritual’ of ‘discipline and dispossession’ including the appropriation of
possessions.95 Similarly in Darwin, Masson writes of the ‘white missus’ who gave her
servant George a new set of clothes, explaining, ‘I give you these because you good
boy’, only to have George, in a act of resistance, promptly take his new clothes and
return home to the bush.96
Sexuality and the Aboriginal husband

Aboriginal men as domestic servants were rarely employed in the more intimate roles
that took them inside the colonial home, but even when they were, there is little sense
of a sustained discourse of sexual threat that we find in other colonial settings. White
women in Darwin are overwhelmingly represented as figures of authority rather than
objects of desire for Aboriginal men. Whereas in the United States there was ‘the
imagined simmering sexuality of the black man’, in Australia there was ‘an attempt
to completely diffuse the sexuality of Aboriginal men and render him sexually, as
well as socially, impotent’.97 In his reflections of his period as Administrator, Abbott

recalled only one case of attempted assault of a white woman and suggested that, ‘the
Australian native is, on the whole, a likeable, gentle and kindly-natured person. He
has a great respect for white women’.98 In the 1938 case to which he referred, two
white women were blamed for the attempted assault because they ‘encouraged’ an
Aboriginal worker by treating him as a ‘pet pussy-cat’ and being scantily clad in his
presence.99 The case provoked ‘race hysteria’ and led to sensationalised claims that
assaults on white women were common but went unreported.100
The idea that white women should avoid intimate contact was a common theme
in other colonies. Responding to a Natal rape scare in 1886, an Anglo-Indian woman
complained that in India male servants were never allowed in a lady’s room and if
black men had to be employed in Natal they should be confined to the kitchen and
dining room.101 The women’s attempt to draw on the experiences of other colonies
appears to ignore the unique constructions of masculinity produced in different colonial
settings. In colonial India, ethnographers constructed Indian masculinity in terms of
the so-called ‘martial’ and ‘non-martial’ races, contrasting the virile Muslim with the
effeminate Hindu.102 In arguing for the significance of a shared colonial discourse,
Ann Stoler points out that the term ‘Black Peril’ gained currency throughout much of
the British empire. She cites the case in the Australian Territory of Papua New Guinea,
where the 1926 White Women’s Protection Ordinance introduced the death penalty for
any person convicted of rape or attempted rape of a European woman or girl.103
Colonial accounts of Aboriginal Australian men express this gendered binary
in very different terms. Though images of Aboriginal men as hunters might imply a
‘martial’ image, the hunter trope was not linked with sexuality or virility. Australian
humanitarians in the 1930s maintained that Aboriginal men treated white women with
respect, in contrast to the fear of ‘other’ men’s sexuality expressed in Africa, Papua
New Guinea and India. As Fiona Paisley has pointed out, humanitarians claimed that
‘self-control was inherent to Aboriginal masculinity and that sexual aggression was
absent from the Aboriginal man’s make-up’.104 One possible explanation for why
Aboriginal men were not viewed as sexual aggressors is that the ‘doomed race’ theory
portrayed Aboriginal people as objects of pity, struggling to survive in the modern
world.105 But, while this anthropological view had currency in government circles, it
is noticeably absent from the recollections of individual employers.
In north Australia, it was more often white men who were portrayed as sexual
predators. The Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918 made it more difficult to employ Abo-
riginal women by making it illegal for white men to consort with Aboriginal women,
to keep a woman as a mistress or to have sex with an Aboriginal woman. In order
to prevent such ‘offences’, the regulations stipulated that an unmarried man, or any
man living alone, could not ‘employ any female aboriginal without employing her
husband’.106 The emphasis on Aboriginal men as guardians was ironic, given that
Aboriginal men had no real power to protect women from a white man’s assault. In
Herbert’s novel, Capricornia, when the protagonist Mark lusts after the ‘black house
maid’ it is the cultural taboo against sexual relations with ‘black velvet’ that pre-
vents him from consummating his desire rather than the presence of her Aboriginal
husband.107
The ordinance also presumed that the Aboriginal man in question would want
to fill the role of protector and husband in the western sense. It was not unusual
for Aboriginal men living outside the authority of colonial society to offer young

women to outsiders for informal sexual relations in return for gifts of food, clothing
and tobacco. There were, however, western-style marriages among Aboriginal people
living in Darwin and more particularly among those who worked in domestic service,
a custom which can be traced back to 1912. Anthropologist Baldwin Spencer wrote in
his diary in 1912 that it was ‘rather awkward to have so many eligible ladies thrown on
your hands at one time’ and that he planned to put the ‘young and fairly good-looking,
in domestic service and provide them with suitable husbands’.108 Despite this example
of overt colonial interference in relationships between Aboriginal men and women,
there was a strong sense that if Aboriginal men were not regarded as a threat to white
women it was because their own preference was for Aboriginal women.
The image of Aboriginal men as ‘respectable’ husbands comes through clearly
in the recollections of Customs official Les Lampe who employed Nim, an ex-police
tracker, and Maudie, ‘his wife’, in the 1930s. Lampe described them as ‘delightful
people’.109 Masson’s novel also depicts the Aboriginal family man:
After this the Missis wisely decides to employ only Larakia blacks whose country is Darwin. She
engages one, and gets a family. There is Paddy, short and sturdy, with a friendly grin under the
bristling moustache, who addresses the Boss and Missis equally as ‘Sir’; there is his lubra Nellie,
and his baby, Rita, who come to ‘sit down lazy’ while Paddy works. Soon Nellie expresses a wish
to work also, and before long becomes of infinite value . . . They do not live at the house, but at the
camp of natives at Kahlin Beach a mile away. Every evening at sundown the little family passes
out of the garden. First Paddy strides ahead with the billy in one hand and a bundle of spears in the
other.110
The description of Paddy striding ahead and taking the lead clearly places him, in
Masson’s view, as the head of the family. His spears signify his identity as a hunter,
endowing him with a degree of independence unusual for a ‘houseboy’. He is thus
portrayed as being the provider for his small family. At the same time, Masson gives
this ‘friendly’ man the Irish name Paddy as if to defuse any sense of threat that his
weapons might otherwise have suggested.
And yet Aboriginal men in Australia were denied any independence.111 Beckett,
working for the Aboriginal Department in 1911, reported that Aboriginal workers were
given two shillings per week and food and clothes for their labour. He described this
wage as a ‘pittance’.112 By way of comparison, the ‘white’ waterside workers at the
time were demanding two shillings per hour. On these income levels, Aboriginal men
were far removed from the possibility of being breadwinners. A representative of the
Larrakia, the Aboriginal people local to Darwin, protested to the Northern Standard
in 1936 that he was working and drawing the regulation three shillings a week with
another two shillings going into trust. He asked: ‘How can we buy clothes for ourselves
and keep our families on 3/-?’113 The notion of the male ‘breadwinner’ was entrenched
in the Australian wage system. The Harvester Judgment, passed by the Commonwealth
government in 1907, ruled that men’s wages should be sufficient to support a wife and
three children. As Marilyn Lake argues, the Harvester Judgment ‘did not just reward
manhood’, it ‘empowered white manhood’ while ‘non-white men were considered
neither manly nor civilised and thus did not have equivalent needs’.114
In 1938, John McEwen, Minister for the Interior, introduced the new Assimilation
policy, aiming ‘to raise the status of the aboriginal’ with the goal being to confer full
citizenship rights and all the privileges of white workers. Despite the rhetoric, McEwen
still envisaged a racially determined wage structure, stating that those who were unable

to reach ‘white’ standards would be placed in employment ‘for which payment would
be made in accordance with their capacity to give service’.115 It would be several
decades before a notion of equal wages for Aboriginal workers would be accepted, and
by this time, the concept of the husband as breadwinner no longer applied.
Conclusions
The case of Aboriginal ‘houseboys’ in northern Australia demonstrates the degree
to which there was a shared culture of domestic service across the colonies, but also
reminds us that colonial culture responded to, and was shaped by, the colonised peoples.
The manner in which Aboriginal men were measured against Chinese ‘houseboys’ and
found to be wanting in ‘efficiency’ and ‘cleanliness’ suggests that colonists did indeed
bring with them expectations that colonised peoples would fit into a mould of cultural
imperialism developed in other colonial settings. Similarly, the admiration expressed
for the hunting prowess of Aboriginal men draws on a trope of hunter masculinity
that crossed colonial borders. As in other colonial settings, and particularly Africa,
where white colonists were outnumbered by a potentially threatening black majority,
Australian colonists sought to minimise their fears through a paternalistic emphasis
on supervision, discipline and training and a corresponding denial of manhood or
adulthood for Aboriginal men.
The privileges of masculinity available to male domestic servants in some other
colonial contexts were subsumed by notions of race, or more specifically ‘whiteness’.
In Australia, it was so-called ‘half-caste’ women who, as a result of their ‘white blood’
and forced assimilation into European culture, received nominally higher wages and
privileges for the domestic work they performed. ‘Half-caste’ Aboriginal men, who
took up jobs alongside white men, could access union membership and were imagined
as having the opportunity to achieve white ‘breadwinning’ manhood. Aboriginal men
who worked as servants could never achieve this, a fact they came publicly to lament.
Despite this rejection of Aboriginal men as ‘breadwinners’, their role as respon-
sible husbands was brought into play by administrators whose primary concern was
the protection of Aboriginal women from the sexual advances of white men. Unlike
Papua New Guinea and some African colonies, the concept of Aboriginal men as a
sexual threat was largely absent from most colonial accounts. Whether portrayed as
the dependable family man or the fearless hunter, the masculinity of Aboriginal men
was always constructed in the context of their own culture and their ‘own’ women.
White manhood was viewed as a discrete and all but unattainable set of characteristics
and corresponding privileges.
To the extent that there was a unique character to the Australian colonial discourse
on domestic service, it stemmed, in part, from the white Australian ambivalence over
the use of Aboriginal men as servants. In twentieth-century Australia, this colonial
relationship was regarded as anachronistic, being in conflict with the new nation that
was premised on white labour and egalitarian white citizenship. For those in Darwin
who hoped to retain their colonial status as white masters over a black population,
their attempts to emulate the domestic culture of the British in Asia and Africa was
always seen as second-best. With only Aboriginal men available, colonial discourse
emphasised the perceived inadequacies of the Aboriginal servant. But, at the same
time, in this northern frontier, there was a strong colonial imaginary of the white

adventurer in a primitive land. In the stories told of Aboriginal men entering domes-
tic service fresh from the bush, more hunter than houseboy, we see white colonists
expressing the romance of their vicarious connection to the untamed land of north
Australia.
Notes
1. W. G. Stretton, ‘Report of the Chief Protector’, in ‘Report of the Administrator of the Northern Territory
for the Year 1913’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, p. 33.
2. Estimated from a list of 87 employees in the Darwin region. ‘Statement of Amounts due to date of
four-weekly payment’, 30 June 1938, F1, 1938/17, National Archives of Australia (NAA), Darwin.
3. Jacki Huggins, ‘White Aprons, Black Hands: Aboriginal Women Domestic Servants in Queensland’, in
Kay Saunders and Ann McGrath (eds), Aboriginal Workers: Special Edition of Labour History 69 (1995),
pp. 188–95, here p. 194.
4. Raffaella Sarti, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Forum: Domestic Service since 1750’, Gender & History 18 (2006), pp.
187–98, here p. 188.
5. ‘Domestic Service since 1750’, pp. 187–245.
6. Paula Hamilton, ‘Domestic Dilemmas: Representations of Servants and Employers in the Popular Press’,
in Susan Margery, Sue Rowley and Sue Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s
(St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1993), pp. 71–90, esp. pp. 74–5.
7. Hamilton, ‘Domestic Dilemmas’, p. 75.
8. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005).
9. Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Crows Nest: Allen and
Unwin, 2003), p. vii.
10. Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1982), pp. 2, 6, 137.
11. Victoria Haskins, ‘Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism: The Call for a Woman Visitor to “Half-
Caste” Girls and Women in Domestic Service, 1925–1928’, Frontiers 28 (2007), pp. 124–64, esp. pp.
125–6.
12. Inara Walden notes the ‘gender bias’ in the removal of girls and their training as servants. Inara Walden,
‘“That Was Slavery Days”: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in New South Wales in the Twentieth Century’,
in Saunders and McGrath (eds), Aboriginal Workers, p. 196.
13. B. W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), p. 53.
14. Higman, Domestic Service, pp. 55, 61.
15. Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 33.
16. McGrath, Born in the Cattle, p. 53.
17. Swapna Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal
Narratives of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History 37 (2004), pp. 681–708, here p. 682.
18. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response’, Journal of American History
88 (2001), pp. 893–7, here p. 896.
19. Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household
(Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 37; Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old
Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 5.
20. Karen Transberg Hansen, ‘Domestic Service in Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 13 (1986),
pp. 57–81, here p. 65.
21. Frank Proschan, ‘Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys and Graceless Women’, Jour-
nal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 (2002), pp. 435–67, here p. 436.
22. Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of
Southern African Studies 24 (1998), pp. 605–30, here p. 616.
23. Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, p. 616.
24. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 6.
25. Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric of
Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900–1942’, in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domes-
ticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 131–53, here p. 141.

26. Douglas Lockwood, Australia’s Pearl Harbour: Darwin 1942 (Melbourne: Penguin, 1992),
p. 93.
27. Raffaella Sarti, ‘The True Servant: Self-Definition of Male Domestics in an Italian City’, History of the
Family 10 (2005), pp. 407–33, here p. 407.
28. Lai Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese
Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), p. 77.
29. Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far’, p. 135; Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British
Domesticity in India, 1886–1925’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999), pp.
421–40, here p. 430.
30. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia, p. 45.
31. Elsie Masson, An Untamed Territory: The Northern Territory of Australia (London: Macmillan, 1915),
p. 42.
32. ‘Report of the Administrator of the Northern Territory’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 1910,
p. 7.
33. Gilruth to W. M. Hughes, Prime Minister, regarding the report of the Royal Commissioner, Justice Ewing,
on Gilruth’s administration, 24 June 1920, A1/1, 30/6111, NAA, Canberra.
34. Masson, An Untamed Territory, p. 44.
35. Powell, Far Country, p. 161.
36. Aboriginals Ordinance, No. 16 of 1911, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette 2, Melbourne, 8 January
1912.
37. Baldwin Spencer to Atlee Hunt, 15 April 1912, Atlee Hunt Papers, MS 52/1042, National Library of
Australia, Canberra.
38. Cited in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, p. 58.
39. J. T. Beckett to Dr H. Basedow, Chief Protector and Chief Medical Inspector, 29 July 1911, A1/1
1912/10964, NAA, Canberra.
40. ‘Statement of Amounts due to date of four-weekly payment’, 30 June 1938.
41. No. 9 of 1918. An Ordinance Relating to Aboriginals, The Northern Territory of Australia, Part IV –
Employment of Aboriginals, Government Gazette, 26 October 1918.
42. Chinese storekeepers to Justice Mitchell, Government Resident, 22 March 1911, A1/1 1912/10547, NAA,
Canberra.
43. 1918 Aboriginals Ordinance.
44. ‘Annual Report of the Northern Territory’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 1917.
45. Bleakley’s policy is discussed in C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: Aboriginal Policy
and Practice (Canberra: ANU Press, 1970), pp. 255–73.
46. ‘Report of the Chief Protector to Government Resident of the Northern Territory’, Commonwealth Par-
liamentary Papers, 1936.
47. Tony Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Commonwealth and Half-Caste Youth, 1911–
1939 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993), p. 67.
48. C. L. A. Abbott, ‘Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory’, Commonwealth Parliamentary
Papers, 1937.
49. Cecil Cook, Chief Protector of Aboriginals Report, 8 July 1936, A1/1, 37/70, NAA, Canberra.
50. Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness, p. 218.
51. Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (Sydney: Pacific Books, 1937), p. 10. The term lubra refers to an Aboriginal
women and in this period usually implies ‘wife’.
52. Robert MacDonald, Superintendent of Kahlin Compound in ‘Annual Report of the Northern Territory’,
Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 1917–18, p. 45.
53. Curfew imposed by Protector Macdonald. Northern Territory Times, 14 October 1920.
54. Northern Standard, 3 January 1936.
55. ‘Regulations under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918–1933’, Section 30, Commonwealth Gazette 40, 29
June 1933, p. 941.
56. Julia Martinez, ‘Ethnic Policy and Practice in Darwin’, in Regina Ganter with Julia Martinez and Gary
Lee, Mixed Relations: Asian Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Crawley: University of Western
Australia Press, 2006), pp. 122–39, here p. 127.
57. John Smolenski, ‘Hearing Voices: Microhistory, Dialogicality and the Recovery of Popular Culture on an
Eighteenth-Century Virginia Plantation’, Slavery and Abolition 24 (2003), pp. 1–23, here p. 9.
58. Transcript of Interview with Hazel Mackey (1990), NTRS 226, Ref. TS 625, tape 2, p. 7, Northern
Territory Archives Service (NTAS), Darwin.
59. C. Price Conigrave, North Australia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 120–21.

60. Sophie White, ‘“Wearing Three or Four Handkerchiefs around his Collar, and Elsewhere about Him”:
Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in French Colonial New Orleans’, Gender & History
15 (2003), pp. 528–49, here p. 535.
61. ‘Regulations under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918–1933’, Part II, 13a., Commonwealth Gazette 40, 29
June 1933, p. 936.
62. NAWU, ‘Constitution and General Rules’, Rule 6, cited in Andrew Markus, ‘Talka Longa Mouth: Abo-
rigines and the Labour Movement 1890–1970’, in Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who Are Our
Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger with the Australian
Society for the Study of Labour History, 1978), pp. 138–57, here p. 149.
63. Workers’ Weekly, 30 May 1930, p. 2.
64. Northern Standard, 2 September 1930; Workers’ Weekly, 6 November 1931.
65. Transcript of Interview with Sheila Hansen, NTRS 226, Ref. TS 640, tape 1, p. 7, NTAS.
66. Transcript of Interview with Thomas O’Connor (Con) Scott (1990), NTRS 226, Ref. TS 616, tape 1, p.
14, NTAS.
68. Transcript of Interview with James Watts, NTRS 226, Ref. TS 605, tape 1, p. 15, NTAS.
69. Interview with Hansen, tape 1, p. 6.
71. Interview with Hansen, tape 1, p. 6.
72. Transcript of Interview with Percy Fong (1981), OH463, p. 11, Battye Library Oral History Collection,
Perth.
73. Transcript of Interview with Patrick McDonald (1990), NTRS 226, Ref. TS 655, tape 2, p. 8, NTAS.
74. Transcript of Interview with Beryl Cashman (1984), NTRS 226, Ref. TS 25, tape 1, p. 10, NTAS.
75. Interview with Cashman, p. 11.
76. Lockwood, Australia’s Pearl Harbour, p. 108.
77. ‘Lure of the South’, Northern Standard, 4 February 1927.
78. Jeremy Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of
1886’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (2002), pp. 379–400, here p. 393.
79. Karen Hansen, ‘Household Work as a Man’s Job: Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia’,
Anthropology Today 2 (1986), pp. 18–23, here p. 18.
80. Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men’, p. 623; Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in
China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 8–9.
81. Martens, ‘Settler Homes’, pp. 379, 381.
82. Dorothy Hodgson, ‘“Once Intrepid Warriors”: Modernity and the Production of Maasai Masculinities’,
Ethnology 38 (1999), pp. 121–50, here p. 125.
83. The Commission of Crown Lands, cited in Henry Reynolds, With the White People (Ringwood: Penguin,
1990), p. 90.
84. Northern Standard, 26 May 1936.
85. Reynolds, With the White People, p. 91.
86. ‘Round About’, Northern Standard, 12 May 1936.
88. C. L. A. Abbott, Australia’s Frontier Province (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950), p. 150.
89. Interview with Mackey, tape 2, p. 5.
90. Elizabeth Vibert, ‘“Real Men Hunt Buffalo”: Masculinity, Race and Class in British Fur Trader’s Narra-
tives’, Gender & History 8 (1996), pp. 4–21, here p. 5.
91. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 17–19.
94. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 143.
95. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 145.
97. Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, ‘Sex, Race and Power: Aboriginal Men and White Women in
Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005), pp. 191–216, here p. 206.
98. Abbott, Australia’s Frontier Province, pp. 139–40.
99. Cecil Cook, cited in McGrath, Born in the Cattle, p. 73.

100. Fiona Paisley, ‘Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938’, Australian Feminist Studies 16 (2001), pp. 43–60, here
p. 43.
101. Martens, ‘Settler Homes’, pp. 381, 396.
102. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial
India’, Gender & History 11 (1999), pp. 445–60, here p. 447.
103. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Stoler makes the point, however, that the ‘proliferation of
discourse about sexual assault and the measures used to prevent it had virtually no correlation with actual
incidences of rape of European women’, p. 58.
104. Paisley, ‘Race Hysteria’, p. 53.
105. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, pp. 203–4.
106. 1918 Aboriginals Ordinance.
107. Herbert, Capricornia, pp. 10, 13.
108. Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 617.
109. Transcript of Interview with Les and Kay Lampe (1984), NTRS 226, Ref. TS 699, tape 1, p. 2, NTAS.
110. Masson, Untamed Territory, pp. 47–50.
111. On earlier British conceptions of men as independent protectors of the family, and the idea, for abolitionists,
that the end of slavery would mean the start of adulthood, and that a black man would no longer be ‘a
chattel’ but a man, see Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and
History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 32.
112. Beckett to Basedow, 29 July 1911.
113. ‘The Larrakeyah Tribe, Deputation to Visit Col. Weddell’, Northern Standard, 24 March 1938.
114. Marilyn Lake, ‘Translating Needs into Rights: Race, Manhood and the Family Wage’, Tasmanian Histor-
ical Studies 9 (2004), pp. 34–42, here p. 34.
115. Northern Standard, 23 August 1938.


Colonial Construction of Masculinity - Transforming Aboriginal Austral Men Into Houseboys

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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity:

Malden, MA 02148, USA.

the context of an international, bourgeois discourse of the ‘servant problem’ common

A colonial tradition: Chinese and Aboriginal men as servants

Discipline and paternalism

Gendered divisions of domestic labour

Transforming the ‘capricious hunter’

Sexuality and the Aboriginal husband

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