Women in Australia: an annotated guide to records*

Abstract

The starting point for those working on the Guide was a determination to prove that Australia was not without sources for women's history. Students contemplating theses in this area were frequently being put off because there was 'no material', and our own initial experience at archives was often to be told that there were no records about women. Such allegations were still being made (in spite of an increasing flow of books and articles about women in Australian history) when in June 1975 funds were granted by the government through the Advisory Council for International Women's Year for a research program on available sources. The project fell into two phases. For six months it operated with research workers in each state locating and documenting material held by institutions or in private hands, while an office in Canberra (within but separate from the International Women's Year Secretariat) worked as an information exchange as well as an administrative centre. During the next 18 months the number of people working on the Guide dropped to three, further research was done, and the editing and preparing for publication. The end of the Labor Government brought bureaucratic and financial changes which sometimes made publication seem unlikely, but the first volume appeared just less than two years after the granting of funds. Another part of the project, Women and Health: a bibliography and guide, compiled by Louise Petterson and substantially complete at the end of 1975, appeared at the same time. An oral history project which also developed from the original research program is still continuing. Between 1973 and 1975 some of us who later worked on the research project had been involved in trying to save the remains of the Cascades Female Factory, the female convict prison in Hobart (Tasmania). We had started to follow the history of the factory in the State Archives, and it was partly files in the Colonial Secretary's Office that made us aware of the unused sources on women, as well as showing us that archive material could be especially important. The first volume of the Guide includes a detailed description of the material on the Female Factory. There is for example the particularly valuable unpublished report and evidence of a committee inquiring into female convict discipline (1841-3), which provide information about the lives of women in the Factory, their work inside and outside the community, sexual relationships, the internal trade in tobacco and rum, and the activities of the