The sanitary settler state: Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Sanitary Citizenship in the Settler Colonial City: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia’, in Maxine Newlands, Claire Hansen (eds), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The sanitary settler state: Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Sanitary Citizenship in the Settler Colonial City: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia’, in Maxine Newlands, Claire Hansen (eds), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2024

22Aug24

Abstract: This chapter argues for the closer integration of historical analyses of hydrosocial relations into the blue humanities by attending to the expressions and consequences of sanitary citizenship in urban settler Australia. Focusing on interwar Perth, Darwin, and Melbourne, this chapter reveals the ways that freshwater has been historically implicated in the social and moral fabric of settler Australian cities. In these growing cities, the availability of clean freshwater supplies was a means for authorities to govern both urban spaces as well as the raced, classed, and gendered bodies that resided in them. Practices of sanitary surveillance allowed for the exclusion and inclusion of particular bodies, according to their perceived ability and willingness to conform to the expectations of the sanitary state. As the examples in this chapter suggest, this regime provided for the rise of a discriminatory sanitary order that especially marginalised non-white bodies in order to physically and morally protect the settler colonial city.

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