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This article explores the pioneering efforts of two Australian historians, Margaret Kiddle and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, to place issues of women and gender centrally in a narrative of Australia's past. While they were not the first women to enter the history profession in Australia, both women made a significant mark on the Australian history profession in the years after World War II. Furthermore, their first books represent the earliest scholarly Australian works in which women appeared as central figures. Their achievement was initially overlooked by feminists of the 1970s, but in retrospect can be viewed as a first step in subverting the dominant masculinity of Australian national identity.

Focusing on colonial Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth
century, we read the texts of a white ethnologist, Katie Langloh Parker,
to explore the ways in which Yuwalaraay women of northern New South Wales
sustained their links to land and culture. The wife of a pastoralist who
held a government lease on a huge tract of former Aboriginal territory and
mistress of numerous Aboriginal domestic servants, Parker was complicit
in colonialism. Given her childhood experiences of Aboriginal playmates
and an intellectual curiosity about the Yuwalaraay, she was at the same
time more sympathetic than the majority of colonial commentators in her
portrayal of indigenous lives, par-ticularly of indigenous women whom
male anthropologists seldom secured as informants. The complexities of
utilizing a white woman's writings as sources for understanding Aboriginal
women are multiple: in this instance, Yuwalaraay women's experiences
of necessity reached readers through the lens of a colonial woman's
perceptions. Nevertheless, we argue that, given the paucity of other
literary sources for the period, Parker's writings warrant serious
attention, principally for the insight they offer into Yuwalaraay
women's continued care of their land and maintenance of the cultural
practices so closely related to it. Parker's accounts of the Yuwalaraay
become especially significant in light of the long overdue land rights
legislation of the 1990s, under which Aborigines have been forced to
prove continuing historical attachments to former tribal lands in order
to claim title or usage.

This comparative study focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, encompassing the imperial policies of the 1830s and the national political settlements in place by 1910.