Colonising motherhood: Evangelical social reformers and Koorie women in Victoria, Australia, 1880s to the early 1900s

Abstract

This article examines the separate worlds of evangelical social reformers of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union and mission-based Indigenous women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the colony of Victoria. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) activists, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, claimed maternal moral authority to promote for their sex a legitimate place in public life and full citizenship. Simultaneously Koorie women on the scattered mission stations of the colony, their lives under increasingly intrusive surveillance, were forced on painfully unequal terms to negotiate with mission managers and colonial officials for the right even to raise their own children. Unable to perceive the plight of Koorie mothers, the WCTU reformers, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, aligned themselves with the so-called 'civilising' endeavours of their fellow evangelicals, the missionaries, oblivious to their collusion in the colonial state's grievous assaults on Koorie human rights and civil liberties.