Australian History

Convict Women by Kay Daniels

by Joy Damousi •

October 1998, no. 205

Allen & Unwin, $24.95 pb, 276 pp

Australian History

Convict Women by Kay Daniels

by Joy Damousi •

October 1998, no. 205

In a recent history of punishment in Australia, Mark Finnane observes that there is a ‘seemingly inexhaustible vein of convict history’. This has been especially true most recently of the history of convict women and the increasing number of accounts which are now being published in this field is to be welcomed. These studies offer a corrective to histories which have relegated convict women to a footnote, and, perhaps more significantly, some historians have attempted to reconceptualise and recast our understandings of colonialism, gender, power, and sexuality during the nineteenth century.

Joy Damousi

Professor Joy Damousi is Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is the author of numerous books, including Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (Cambridge, 2001); Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (UNSW Press, 2005; winner of the Ernest Scott Prize) and Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 (Cambridge 2010). She is a former president of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Historical Association.