This art icle was downloaded by: [ Griffit h Universit y] On: 15 Sept em ber 2013, At : 23: 15 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Australian Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rj au20 The family in Australia Lisa Feat herst one & Yorick Smaal Published online: 20 Aug 2013. To cite this article: Lisa Feat herst one & Yorick Smaal (2013) The f amily in Aust ralia, Journal of Aust ralian St udies, 37: 3, 279-284, DOI: 10. 1080/ 14443058. 2013. 815574 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 14443058. 2013. 815574 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Journal of Australian Studies, 2013 Vol. 37, No. 3, 279
284, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2013.815574 INTRODUCTION The family in Australia Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 Lisa Featherstone and Yorick Smaal As Australia enters the first decades of the twenty-first century, ideas about the family, its role, and how we define it remain firmly on the public agenda. If in the 1950s, the nation had an unquestioned idea about what a family looked liked and what being part of a family meant, the same can no longer be said for contemporary Australia. The older idealisation of the nuclear family no longer holds true for the experience of most Australians today, and families now come in myriad forms. They are not, however, uncontested. In politics, law, media, and, of course, in the home itself, the precise meaning of our most intimate relationships*our kinship*is defined and redefined according to a range of political and personal intersections. Missing from these public discussions, however, is an appreciation of the historicised nature of the family. Like other phenomena, the family is socially and culturally contingent, subject to a range of factors in time and place. As historians, our awareness of this is heightened. Nonetheless, the ‘‘family’’ is a space rarely specifically interrogated in Australian history. Over the past forty years, there has been crucial historical scholarship on domesticity and home, and on women and children’s history in both public and private spheres. Yet the concept of the ‘‘family’’ itself has not necessarily been at the centre of these works. While families were understood to be historical constructs rather than natural or transhistorical, the scholarly focus was more clearly on gender and class negotiations within the home, and the concept of ‘‘the family’’ itself was rarely deconstructed in detail. Interest in the history of the family began more broadly in the 1960s, with increasing attempts to chart the formations and structures of many layers of society, including private life.1 Stimulated by Philippe Ariès, who viewed the ‘‘the idea of the family’’ as ‘‘one of the great forces of our time’’, others began to examine the role of the family in wider social, political, and economic frameworks.2 By the 1970s, historians, such as Lawrence Stone, Jean Louis Flandrin, and Edward Shorter, began to look more intently at the home, the family, domesticity, and familial relations.3 Some of this work was primarily demographic, tracing the establishment of the nuclear family through population trends.4 Drawing on sociology, psychology, and anthropology, others attempted an analysis of the cultural and philosophical meanings of childhood and the family.5 Into the next decades, feminism had profound impacts on studies of the family, leading to detailed investigations into the life of women as girls, wives, lovers, and mothers.6 Many of these ideas were taken up by Australian historians, especially in the 1980s, when aspects of family life and structure were considered in a range of historical and sociological studies.7 In the 1990s, historians Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly drew attention to the multiple # 2013 International Australian Studies Association Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 280 L. Featherstone and Y. Smaal ways women as mothers were marginalised in Australian society, despite the contributions they made to family, work, politics, and the nation itself.8 Childhood was also explored by Jan Kociumbas in a study that historicised child life in the home, the street, the classroom, and the workforce.9 More recently, scholars, including Shurlee Swain, have made substantial inroads into how we might understand concepts of the family, poverty, class, and the impact of the ‘‘broken’’ family.10 Work by Barbara Baird and Rebecca Jennings had also begun to establish the historical place of non-normative families, while both Baird and Catherine Kevin have deconstructed the place of the reproducing female body in the nation state.11 The role of fathers, however, is still nascent in the historiography: if labour history has examined men as wage earners and breadwinners, we have not yet fully seen an examination of their role within a wider concept of the family. Race, too, had profound effects on the ways family was imagined, constructed, and experienced. Historians considering Indigenous Australia have powerfully articulated how the wider processes of colonialism and postcolonialism impact on the individual and on the family itself. The stories of the families of First Peoples, drawn in historical scholarship and the Bringing Them Home Report, is a stinging reminder of the power of the state to intervene in familial and community life.12 Despite these important interventions in writing the past, Australia has never produced a classic or iconic study of the history of the family. We hope that Tanya Evan’s monograph (to be published in 2014) will fill this gap.13 Similarly, in this volume, we aim to explore family life but also to bring the idea of the family into question. We interrogate the concept of the family, covering multiple aspects of family life from the intimate to the public: marriage and divorce, reproduction and birth control, pleasure and desire, domestic and sexual violence, sexual identity, and, of course, the power of the state to define and regulate these issues. This collection investigates the family in Australia from the eighteenth century to our most recent past. Consideration of legal, medical, and cultural frameworks enable contributors to explore the multiple ways concepts of family were, and are, constructed over time. This collection embraces ideas of kinship in its broadest sense, tackling nuclear, Indigenous, and rainbow constructions of families. It thinks, too, about the way sex and sexuality plays out within the institution of the family. It also considers the darker side of family life, with studies on violence and sexual abuse within the family. This volume pays particular attention to race, class, and gender divisions, rethinking the ways that certain forms of family were idealised and publicly lauded and others marginalised and silenced. The collection begins with Tanya Evans and Patricia Curthoys’s assessment of the practice and politics of family history, told through their collaborative involvement in projects marking the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia’s oldest charity. Established in 1813, The Benevolent Society provided for the colony’s neediest*often lone and unmarried mothers, who struggled to raise their children in the absence of a male breadwinner. The authors argue persuasively for an approach that combines both genealogy and academic analysis, to bring layers of depth to the production and representation of public history. As they suggest, the search for personal identity in the practice of family history not only creates ‘‘sturdy foundations for present circumstances and lives’’, but offers a detailed and emotional engagement with the past*one that is often beyond the limits of scholarly research but that nevertheless enriches our contested historical knowledge. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 Journal of Australian Studies 281 If, as Evans and Curthoys’s analysis of The Benevolent Society shows, poverty was one way the family was shaped, race was an equally important framework for thinking about colonial families. Historians have widely acknowledged the role of the state in removing Indigenous children from their families and communities. Building on this work, Shirleene Robinson reveals how the private homes of European colonists were similarly complicit in ‘‘civilising’’ and ‘‘reforming’’ Aboriginal children. Robinson illustrates how the white colonial family operated as part of imperialism’s racialised ‘‘moralising’’ process, removing Aboriginal children from their own family groups in unofficial (albeit state sanctioned) ways. The evidence reveals varied motivations behind the private procurement of Aboriginal children. Alongside the orphaned and ‘‘rescued’’, others were acquired as a source of unpaid labour, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century. Robinson’s work makes a significant contribution to the ways we might rethink Indigenous child removal and the role of the ‘‘family’’ within it. Robinson’s article shows one form of violence inflicted upon the Indigenous family. The work of both Yorick Smaal and Amanda Kaladelfos deals with differing forms of violence experienced within predominantly white families. Smaal examines incest in colonial Queensland between 1870 and 1900, assessing whether the prosecution of intrafamilial sexual violence was affected by the creation of a separate criminal offence of ‘‘incest’’. Despite the special provisions to deal with sexual violence in the family, Smaal finds that new policy measures brought very little change to how incest was treated inside and outside the courts. Part of its failure can be understood through family dynamics and the community expectations of female behaviour. The hold that domineering fathers maintained on the family made it difficult for girls and mothers to bring cases to notice; the lack of neighbourly scrutiny indicates that outsiders expected mothers to address their husband’s behaviour, and courtroom testimony shows that a girl’s character continued to matter whether she was assaulted by her father or a non-related male. Continuing the theme of family violence, Amanda Kaladelfos offers the first Australian study of paternal filicide. Her work on fathers who murdered their children skilfully unpacks the differences between men and women who killed their children from the 1850s to the 1950s. Kaladelfos argues that in the courtroom, men rationalised their own violent behaviour in particular ways. They regularly lamented their own paternal failings as breadwinner, claiming the necessity of ‘‘protecting’’ their families from their shame, or they discussed their perceived betrayal at the hands of their wife. But, as Kaladelfos suggests, onlookers struggled to comprehend the acts of murder, regularly constructing the men as previously ‘‘good’’ fathers and family men. This ensured their attacks were understood as acts of insanity rather than of domestic violence. This article brings to light new ideas about masculinity within the family and how it was understood in the darkest of moments. If the work of Robinson, Smaal, and Kaladelfos considers the potential for violent ruptures of the family, articles by Featherstone and Riggs and Willing examine the changing shapes of the Australian family itself. Beginning in the midtwentieth century, Featherstone examines the status of marriage in the postwar years, when divorce rates had shown a sharp peak. In an examination of the anxieties around divorce, Featherstone analyses the multiple ways that a happy marital sexuality was constructed as central to a contented marriage and the ways that an unhappy sexual life was imagined to contribute to marital breakdown. Featherstone Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 282 L. Featherstone and Y. Smaal ultimately argues, however, that the overwhelming emphasis on sexual contentment was an ‘‘easy answer’’, detracting from the otherwise complex array of domestic and social pressures that tested postwar relations. So too Damien Riggs and Indigo Willing explore the changing face of the Australian family through an important case study on lesbian mothers in the contemporary setting and their continued marginalisation in the primary school system. Reading twenty-three interviews of women from South Australia for the ‘‘little bits’’ of prejudice, Riggs and Willing illustrate how lesbian-mother families continue to face different forms of inequality from teachers and parents, including the requirement to ‘‘educate the educator’’ about their family status and the sexualisation of female-only relationships. Riggs and Willing argue that for schools to be safe places, educators must fully recognise the changing dynamic of the Australian family in its diverse forms. Oral narratives also inform Robert Mason’s analysis of male migrants’ emotions in contemporary Australia. Race continues to shape the family in multicultural Australia, and migrants bring with them their cultural memories and experiences of kinship elsewhere. Mason deftly draws on theories of transnationalism and migration to examine the childhood memories and remembered families of Goan men in Australia, showing how the family is central to their personal and professional lives. In doing so, Mason argues convincingly that family is constituted across time and space and articulated through a variety of practices and relationships. Given that family life is central to experiences of migration, Mason reveals how an emotive sense of belonging and intimate relationships are used by Goan men to negotiate racial and gendered hierarchies in their new homes. The collection concludes with Simon Bronitt and Wendy Kukulies-Smith’s evaluation of the family and criminal law. While the family has most often been the concern of the civil law, Bronitt and Kukulies-Smith demonstrate that criminal law has engaged with the family in complex and contradictory ways. The authors close reading of doctrine, case law, and practice around domestic violence, marital rape, and domestic homicide, challenges the idea that the family was an entity immune from the state and legal intrusion. Historically, men did not have the power to use violence absolutely, nor were women universally denied access to justice. But the role of husband and wife and father and mother also affected the sentencing of family crimes, mitigating or aggravating punishment in particular circumstances. While Bronitt and Kukulies-Smith acknowledge that the feminist law agenda of the 1970s and 1980s has done much to render family crime visible, they remind us that the inadequacies of criminal law’s treatment of family crime is yet to be fully remedied. As these articles show, ideas about what constitutes family raise crucial historical and cultural questions warranting particular scrutiny. The family is a proxy for a wide range of social, cultural, and historical issues that play out in the public and private domain. Through these articles, we hope to illuminate some of the key conceptualisations of ‘‘the family’’ in Australian history and in the present. Notes 1. Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance (London: Palgrave, 2002), 148. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 Journal of Australian Studies 283 2. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962), 10. 3. Jean Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500
1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); Lawrence Stone, ‘‘The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage,’’ in The Family in History, ed. Charles E Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 13
57; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 4. See, for example, the essays in Peter Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Australian examples include J. C. Caldwell and L. T. Rutzicka, Australian Fertility Transition; Destabilizing a Quasi-stable Situation (Canberra: Department of Demography ANU, 1977); Pat Quiggan, No Rising Generation: Women’s Fertility in Late Nineteenth Century Australia (Canberra: Department of Demography Research School of Social Sciences ANU, 1988). 5. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage; Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family; Flandrin, Families in Former Times; Emmanual Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 6. See, for example, Carol Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood. Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992); Jane Lewis, ed., Labour and Love. Women’s Experience of Home and Family 1850
1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 73
98; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil Motherhood in Outcast London 1870
1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); G. Bock and P. Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880
1950s (London: Routledge, 1991); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Leonore Davidoff et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830
1960 (London: Longman, 1999); Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations 1780
1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. Kerreen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernising the Australian Home, 1880
1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); Bob Bessant, ed., Mother, State and her Little Ones. Children and Youth in Australia 1860s
1930s (Melbourne: Centre for Youth and Community Studies, 1987); Kerreen Reiger, Family Economy (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1991); Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991); Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-century Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984); Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia, 1788
1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984); Bettina Cass, ‘‘Redistribution to Children and to Mothers: A History of Child Endowment and Family allowances,’’ in Women, Social Welfare and the State in Australia, ed. Cora V. Baldock and Bettina Cass (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 54
84; Desley Deacon, ‘‘Taylorism in the Home: The Medical Profession, the Infant Welfare Movement and the Deskilling of Women,’’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 21.2 (1985): 161
73; Patricia Grimshaw and Graham Willett, ‘‘Women’s History and Family History: An Exploration of Colonial Family Structure,’’ in Australian Women. Feminist Perspectives, ed. Norma Grieve and Patricia Grimshaw (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981); Betsy Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood. A Study of Sydney Suburban Mothers (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984). 8. Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation 1788
1990 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994); Marilyn Lake, ‘‘Childbearers as Rightsbearers: Feminist Discourse on the Rights of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Mothers in Australia, 1920
50,’’ Women’s History Review 8.2 (1999): 347
64; Marilyn Lake, ‘‘Marriage as Bondage: The Anomaly of the Citizen Wife,’’ Australian Historical Studies 112 (1999): 116
29; Patricia Grimshaw, ‘‘Whose Problem? Experts and the Working Mother in 1960s Melbourne,’’ in Go! Melbourne in the Sixties, ed. Tanja Luckins and Seamus O’Hanlon (Melbourne: Melbourne Publishing Group, 2005), 131
48. See also Alison Holland, ‘‘Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves? Exploring White Women’s 284 9. 10. Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 23:15 15 September 2013 11. 12. 13. L. Featherstone and Y. Smaal Intervention in the Politics of Race, 1920s
1940s,’’ Australian Historical Studies 117 (2001): 292
310. Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood. A History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997). Shurlee Swain with Renate Howe, Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Shurlee Swain, Born in Hope: A History of the Early Years of the Family Court of Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2012); Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute. Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002); Gail Reekie, Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Barbara Baird, ‘‘An Australian History of Lesbian Mothers: Two Points of Emergence,’’ Women’s History Review 21.5 (2012): 849
65; Barbara Baird, ‘‘The Howard Queers: Recent Politics of Homosexuality in Australia,’’ in Acts of Love and Lust, ed. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings, and Robert Reynolds (Newcastle Upon Tyne: CSP, forthcoming); Rebecca Jennings, ‘‘Lesbian Mothers and Child Custody: Australian Debates in the 1970s,’’ Gender and History 24.2 (2012): 502
17; Catherine Kevin, ‘‘Subjects for Citizenship: Pregnancy and the Australian Nation, 1945
2000,’’ Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 12.1
2 (2006): 131
42; Catherine Kevin, ‘‘Maternity and Freedom: Australian Feminist Encounters with the Reproductive Body,’’ Australian Feminist Studies 20.46 (2005): 3
15; Barbara Baird, ‘‘Maternity, Whiteness and National Identity: The Case of Abortion,’’ Australian Feminist Studies 21.50 (2006): 197
221. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997); Peter Read, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883
1969 (Sydney: New South Wales Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, 1982); Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1999); Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800
2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). Tanya Evans, Family Life in Colonial Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, forthcoming).