Settler domestication: Marlena Tronicke, ‘Unsettling Domesticity: Homemaking Practices and Empire Building’, in Marlena Tronicke, Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres, Palgrave, 2025, pp. 75–113 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler domestication: Marlena Tronicke, ‘Unsettling Domesticity: Homemaking Practices and Empire Building’, in Marlena Tronicke, Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres, Palgrave, 2025, pp. 75–113

11May25

Excerpt: The two novels discussed in this chapter reimagine British settlement in what is now Australia. Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) revisits the convict colony of New South Wales at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By contrast, Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek (2015), which has so far eluded neo-Victorian scholarship, is set in mid-nineteenth-century South Australia. Rather than using these locations as mere backdrop, both novels examine how they are gradually colonised by British settlers. Whilst following oppositional trajectories—Grenville’s novel essentially presenting a narrative of upward mobility and Treloar’s one of failure and social decline—they each depict a form of imperial domesticity and its enactment via homemaking practices. The reader encounters extensive descriptions of how cabins are built and furnished, how land is fenced in and cultivated, and how domestic chores structure the comparatively secluded and monotonous day-to-day lives of colonial women.

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