Cirrus@Austlit

‘The Australian girl became visible as a type early on in colonial print culture, occasionally invoked in ladies’ columns and popular romances in the 1860s and 1870s. By the mid-1870s, the Australian Town and Country Journal began to invest in the type as a way of valorising the distinctive traits of colonial Australian women. In 1874 it serialised T.A. Brown’s novel Incidents and Adventures of My Run Home, in which a protagonist named ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ sings the praises of Australian girls to his English companions. Paul de Serville notes that through this character, Browne created ‘an energetic, patriotic squatter of educated literary tastes…[who] could carry the good name of Australia in the motherland with credit, Browne, of course, went on to adopt ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ as his pen name. Celebrating the virtues of the Australian girl abroad soon became part of the colonial project of nation building; and as Angela Woollacott suggests, the Australian girl was often promoted ‘at the expense of her discursive foil ‘the English girl. In September 1888, the Australian Town and Country Journal celebrated the centenary of the colonies by publishing Ethel Castilla’s now-famous short poem, ‘The Australian Girl’, an early attempt to define this type’s essential qualities and measure them against her English counterpart. This part begins with an extract from the Australian Woman’s Magazine and Domestic Journal (April 1882-September 1884), which had serialised Janet Carroll’s novel Magna : An Australian Girl in 1882 – the first novel, in fact, to bear the title of the character type. The Australian girl is a projection, an ideal. But the Australian Woman’s Magazine also reminds us that she emerges out of real conditions, which means thinking about the sorts of opportunities local colonial life can offer women in terms of education and employment. In ‘Woman’s Work’, ‘Vaga’ cautions colonial women against frivolity but keeps her counsel rather vague; here, ‘work’ has more to do with nurture and duty, especially towards the husband. As in so much commentary on the Australian girl, matrimony is her taken-for-granted destination.’ (Authors introduction)