'Keeping the Home Fires Burning?: British Female Settlers’ Conceptions of Home and Belonging in Colonial India, Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia, 1826-1860'

Abstract

This thesis contributes to an emerging sub-field in the humanities which considers ideas of home and belonging in the context of migration. Specifically, it investigates how nineteenth-century ‘respectable’ British women who settled in mid-nineteenth-century Australia and India thought about home, and explores how the meaning of this word could change over time. It examines these ideas using a rich trove of written and visual sources created by British settler and sojourner women as they journeyed to, and lived within the isolated colonies of India, Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia, from the late 1820s to 1860. Each chapter examines a different meaning or dimension of home, illuminating the highly individualised ways in which home was understood by these women. This thesis hopes to make a significant original contribution to migration and imperial historiography by drawing attention to two aspects that have been overlooked in current scholarship. Firstly, the thesis identifies that home was not a stable, rigid concept shared by nineteenth-century British settler women. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates that settler women used their highly individualised ideas of home both to make sense of their own colonial experience and to assert their place within both local and imperial networks of people, places and ideas.