History Essay Topic: What does the A Place for the Friendless Female exhbition suggest of the quality of womens' citizenship in colonial Australia?

History Essay Topic: What does the A Place for the Friendless Female exhbition suggest of the quality of womens' citizenship in colonial Australia?

The theme of A Place for the Friendless Female exhibition restraint is manifested both physically and metaphorically from many sources, and is central to understanding the course of events that take place throughout the story. The Australian women and their society with the restraints of her society on the intellectual, spiritual and emotional lives of young women, from early on in their lives to when they reach adulthood, and the effects that these restraints have in shaping their character. The rigid and confining Victorian hierarchies of social class and gender serves to challenge the freedom and personal growth of young women, and restrict their abilities to realize their dreams and aspirations for themselves.1 It is precisely these attributes that allow her to prevail in the end by overcoming the obstacles in her path that prevent her from realizing her dreams, and as a result making her one of the best-loved female protagonists and one of the most powerful symbols of Victorian feminine empowerment in English Literature. The passion that is contained within her drives her to react to the events around with a spontaneity that suggests that she is deeply aware of the injustices committed against her. However, the passion within her is viewed by those around her as a dangerous force, and it s only when this passion is tamed at the end of the story can she embrace society's conceptions of what it means to be a "true woman'. One of the best-known images of the Chinese in colonial Australia was created by Livingstone Hopkins (Hop), the Bulletin's chief cartoonist from 1883 to 1913, and it captured White Australia's image of the life of the Chinese man in the colonies. The drawing, from 1886, shows a lone Chinese hawker walking through the Rocks in Sydney. Dressed in typical Australian workingman's clothes, balancing baskets laden with goods on a pole over his shoulder, he was representative of the 'typical' Chinese man in Australia. We cannot see his face, but we know he is Chinese from his baskets and his isolation--he is alone, plying his trade without companion or friend.

The Chinese population in colonial Australia was primarily male. Few Chinese women accompanied their men to the 'New Gold Mountain' in their pursuit of gold and work, and typically it was thought that Chinese men lived an isolated and lonely life, like Hop's hawker in the Rocks, or that they 'stuck together' and had only limited interaction with White colonists. If we look deeper, however, we see that Chinese men were interacting and mixing with the wider population in their work and social lives. Hop's lonely hawker went into the White community every day, selling his wares door-to-door, meeting and communicating with his White customers, many of ...