Exemption: A Gendered History

Diverse questions might be contemplated once we consider the gender implications and impacts of Aboriginal exemption policies. The article traces such questions in relation to a series of distinct episodes in the history of exemption. The first of these focuses on postwar New South Wales, where marital status was core to the application process from the point of its introduction, and the system built upon older policies of ‘training’ Aboriginal girls as servants. The second moment, moving back in time, discusses a petition for collective exemption for a group of women domestic workers in Broome, Western Australia, that was presented to a government enquiry in 1934. The third concerns the quest for release from government controls by several domestic workers brought to Adelaide in South Australia, from the Northern Territory, in the late 1920s. Finally, the article reflects upon the efforts of young women placed in service in early-twentieth-century Brisbane, Queensland, to secure exemptions, and the responses of the authorities. While exemption policies may have been designed to impose Anglo-Australian gender norms of female dependence, Aboriginal women who worked in service consistently subverted these aims, by using the discourses of domesticity to challenge and resist the authorities' power.