To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (review)

This is a wonderful book. It is well written, beautifully designed and conceptually challenging. The pictorial motif of the streamlined body of swimmer Annette Kellermann, which introduces every chapter, becomes a mesmerising image of the modern colonial woman (athletic, adventurous and self-possessed), whose historical significance Woollacott so deftly charts. Already winning races before she left Australia in 1905, Kellermann would become world famous for her exhibition swimming and diving, which combined physical prowess with theatrical performance. ‘Colonial connections between Australia and the European metropole’, Woollacott explains, ‘facilitated women’s sexual and bodily expression and were a vector for the flow of modernism around the world’. (p.182)

In its several intertwined arguments concerning the ways in which white colonial women’s travel between Australia and London (and back) were one such ‘vector’ shaping global modernity, the book exemplifies the rich potential of the new post-colonial history for generating fresh insight into the formation of national and international subjectivities . To Try Her Fortune in London places Australian history in its imperial context and, in charting the flows of modernity, Woollacott liberates Australian history from its claustrophobic containment in the masculinist nation-state. Historically, it seems, Australian women also sought such liberation and their ‘desire’ focussed on London.

Between 1870 and 1940, thousands of Australians, the majority of them women, boarded modern steamships (and later planes) for the round-the-world trip to the imperial metropolis. They went as tourists, but also to forge careers as opera singers, artists, teachers, journalists and actresses, and to secure jobs as waitresses, landladies, typists and nurses. On the way, at stops in Columbo, Bombay and Port Said, they experienced first-hand the reach of British imperialism and became conscious (sometimes for the first time and sometimes uncomfortably) of their privilege as white women.

Once in London, they were confronted with the ambiguities of their status as insiders/outsiders. Emboldened by the relative freedom and anonymity of the metropolis, white colonial women strolled the streets and explored the city, becoming Anglo flaneuses, women spectators of the modern urban scene. In the words of Australian journalist, Alice Rosman, they learned to know ‘the gay old heartless prodigal city better than most of her daughters know in a lifetime’(p.62). As residents, Australian women were excited by the larger opportunities and sustained by colonial networks. Some visitors remained for a lifetime; others spent just a few years in England, while many travelled backwards and forwards, torn between the desire for London and yearning for Australia. Sometimes thinking of themselves as Britishers or even as English, Australian colonials took for granted their multiple identities, until imperial condescension or insults became insufferable and they were moved to insist on their national identity as Australian.

One of Woollacott’s concerns is to interrogate the ‘hierarchies of colonialism’ by theorising the in-between condition of white colonialness — or the situation of the white colonial as subaltern. Australian girls often shocked the English with their boldness and cheekiness — but it is only subordinates who give cheek. The fact that the English treated Australians as their inferiors angered them. Confronted with the condescension and snubs of the British, ‘they deployed their claims to whiteness to counteract their subordinate status as colonials’. ( p.218) But the colonials were also colonizers, beneficiaries of Aboriginal dispossession and soon to acquire their own Pacific empire. Australians constructed their national identity as both modern and white in, and against, the relations of imperialism. One wonders, though, whether women negotiated their subordination as colonials differently than did men. It is difficult to assess claims as to the gendered nature of nationalist responses without any evidence of how men reacted.

Nations and nationalisms have often been understood as masculinist projects, not least in Australia, but Woollacott reminds us of women’s own investments in the nation and their identification with it. Yet, there was also alienation and indeed the main point of her story would seem to be that many Australian women felt they...