Gender and Urban Experience in Nineteenth-Century Australasian Towns

Australasian cities were like Australasian women: integral to the development and character of society, yet strangely invisible in emerging national cultures. Towns and cities grew and populations clustered disproportionately in them, while national identity in Australia and New Zealand was persistently imagined as rural. Women were part of the fabric of community life, but their value was systematically disavowed in national mythology. Urban history is a gendered history. Gender was formed, experienced and invested with meaning in the physical and imaginative spaces of Australasian colonial cities.