What can the stories of South Asian ayahs – nursemaids and domestic servants – tell us about the significance of race and women’s domestic labour in Australia’s settler colonial history – and why do these stories remain so elusive? In this talk, Victoria Haskins reflects on the obscure lives of South Asian domestic workers who, traversing the transcolonial webs of empire, found themselves working in the Australian colonies. Drawing on decades of research in histories of race and women’s relationships in domestic service, she considers how we might connect the dots across archives, regions, and historiographies to bring visibility and meaning to these marginalised women’s presence in the past.

At stake are larger questions that have long preoccupied feminist and postcolonial historians. What counts as labour? How is agency expressed under conditions of deep inequality and oppression? And how can we respond to the methodological challenges of recovering and writing transcolonial and cross-cultural histories of the subaltern? In exploring these questions, Professor Haskins highlights the generative tensions between domesticity, mobility, race, and care, and what it means to pursue a feminist history that is at once intimate, transnational, and politically urgent.

Victoria Haskins, FAHA FRSN is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. She traces the entangled histories of gender, race and colonisation in Australia, the US, and Asia. Her books including Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie, and Frances Steel, 2019); Living with the Locals (with John Maynard, 2016); Colonization and Domestic Service (with Claire Lowrie, 2014); Matrons and Maids (2012); Uncommon Ground (with Anna Cole and Fiona Paisley, 2005); and One Bright Spot (2005).