DOMESTIC SERVICE IN AUSTRALIA
This ground-breaking work is the first comprehensive account of the lives of domestic servants in Australia. It shows the significance of domestic service for Australia's society and economy, from 1788 to the present day.
European Australia has often seen domestic service as a civilizing force. Servants made possible a cultured existence for the leisured employing clasees, and promoted middle-class ideals of domesticity and fertility. the house with its fixed site was the marker of civilization, a denial of 'savage' nomadism, and it provided the architectural stage for the domestic theatre of social confrontation and accommodation. Changes in house design tell this story clearly, as do the shift from live-in to live-out servants and changes in modes of dress and verbal communication.
Domestic service in Australia was more common than in England until about 1860, and more common than in the United States until 1940. Why was this so ? Again, why did domestic service begin to decline relatively early in Australia, following its colonial peak, and why was that decline so rapid? How did domestic service survive in the later twentieth century, in spite of many predictions of its demise, and why and how was it commercialized ? Why was coercion used to recruit servants - convicts, Aboriginal australians, pacific Islanders, children - and why were servants at the centre of so many immigration schemes down to the 1960s, but not beyond ?
In answering these questions, B.W. Higman explores demography, technological changes, urbanization and industrialization, wealth inequalities, the economic role of women, household structure, childcare, the dual-career family, immigration policy, community organization, and much more.
Domestic Service in Australia is based on research in the archives and libraries of all Australian states and territories. It balances individual detail and the identification of broad tendencies to provide a richly textured account of an important and neglected aspect of Australian social history.