The symposium “Gender and Settler Colonialism” was held last friday at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, North Melbourne. To get an idea of the areas covered, have a look at the program.

Keynote: Angela Wanhalla, ‘Intimate Moments, Racial Pasts, Colonial Histories’
Chair: Kat Ellinghaus

‘Intimacy, Space and Types/Representations of Indigenous Women’
Chair: Lynette Russell

Penelope Edmonds, ‘Settlement and Gendered Territorialism: First Nations Women and Mixed Relations in Victoria, British Columbia, 1850s-1880s’

Jane Lydon, ‘Photographing “native slums”: Assimilation, Domesticity, and Aboriginal Camps’

Liz Conor, ‘The “Lubra” Type: Colonial Mobility and Typology’

Roundtable: Thinking through Methodologies
Chair: Lachlan Paterson

Jane Carey, ‘Reproducing Empire, Nation, Race: Transnationalism vs the New Imperial History’

Victoria Haskins, ‘Transnationalism in the Archives: Comparing state intervention in Indigenous domestic service, Australia and the US’

Shurlee Swain, ‘Child Rescue and Settler Colonialism: Gendering the Discourse’

Ben Silverstein, ‘Gendering Native Divisions of Labour: Efficiency, Exploitation and (Dis)Order’

Ann McGrath, ‘Writing Gender, Courtship and the Transnational across the Middle Ground’

Discussion Panel
Chair: Jane Carey
Panelists: Ann Curthoys, Patricia Grimshaw, Angela Wanhalla, Angela Woollacott.

Booklaunch
Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities, UBC Press.

Overall, the symposium was a great success, and featured some great scholarship accompanied with lively discussion. The speakers I found especially provocative were Penny Edmonds, whose investigation into the urban pockets of settler regimes was thorough and timely; Liz Conor, whose meticulous exploration of racial stereotypes yielded fascinating histories of expanding words; and Ben Silverstein, whose deconstruction of the gendered division of labour as it appeared in settler discourse in northerly Australia, South Africa and Kenya, was really something. Congratulations to Jane Carey for organising the event, and let’s hope there’s room for more of this 2010.