A Moving Female Frontier: Aboriginal Exemption and Domestic Service in Queensland, 1897–1914

Abstract

Inspired by new histories of Indigenous mobility that emphasise how movement was an important feature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience, this article examines how mobility enables us to better understand the legal status of exemption. It shows the way non-Indigenous families seized on exemption in Queensland between 1897 and 1914 as a way to maintain control over the movement of the women and girls who worked for them as domestic servants. It also examines how those women and girls negotiated, refused and embraced the policy of exemption and used it to gain freedom to move around Queensland, driven by their family connections, ambitions and cultural and community ties. These two different uses of exemption show that even though the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act made the movement of Indigenous people fraught, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continued their efforts to be mobile.