THE CHAPLAIN'S WIFE AND THE NATIVE GIRL

ISSN： 1465-3303

Source： Australian Feminist Studies, Vol.27, Iss.73, 2012-09, pp. : 259-268

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Abstract

The relationship between Boorong, a young Aboriginal girl, and Mary Johnson, the wife of the first colonial chaplain in New South Wales, has been typically cast as a maternalist relationship, despite the fact that historians have thoroughly deconstructed the longstanding colonialist representation of white women as kindly maternal guardians towards child-like black women. Recognising the colonialist agenda in the sources when it comes to representing white women as well as Indigenous women, we must be cognisant of the constraints and silences of women's self-representation. Undoubtedly, relationships between women in colonial contact zones were more complex, and uneasy, than the surviving records by colonial male authorities admit. In this essay, the possibilities and limitations of this earliest female relationship are considered, to illuminate the potential for reconsidering how we read the evidence for such relationships in `the contact zone' more generally.