Australian Girls

Tells, for the first time, the stories of Australian girls in the Antipodes: how they learnt, worked, played and connected.

Settler and Aboriginal girls have been overlooked in our history. Yet these girls were not peripheral to the national story, as is commonly assumed. In fact, they made significant contributions to our past.

Drawing on materials and artworks uncovered in local and national archives and made by girls themselves, historian Catherine Gay reinterprets Australia’s story through the lens of these girls’ experiences. She reveals how the lives of girls in the nineteenth century intertwined with colonial invasion and settlement, labour and education, and family and community.

The girls in these pages were much more than servants, sisters, settlers’ daughters or subjugated subjects. Australian Girls illuminates the ways in which girls in the nineteenth century were drivers of their own futures, central voices who contributed to the formation of a nation.