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The early settlement of middle‐class and gentry families on the frontier in several districts of New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia, in the 1820s and 1830s, and the role of women in this process, has generally been overlooked. Some regional and family histories touch on some of this territory, but largely leave unexplored questions of colonialism, gender, sexuality, class, race and culture. A number of aspirant gentry families took up extensive land grants and settled on them while the area was still a conflict zone between the British invaders and the Aboriginal inhabitants. Women and the family were at the heart of this enterprise, as wives and husbands set about replicating British genteel culture in the Australian wilderness. The female archive for these settlers is thin. What sources and analytical tools should we use to uncover the roles, attitudes and activities of these women in settling on the frontier in New South Wales in the 1820s and 1830s? This article draws on a variety of sour...

Mass immigration to Australia began in the late 1830s. It was a small part of the international movement of people in the nineteenth century. The majority of emigrants to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century were from Britain and Ireland. As in north America in the previous two centuries, they quickly overwhelmed the indigenous people and became the dominant population on the Australian continent. In the first half of the nineteenth century the British government and British private enterprise were instrumental in diverting some of the flow of emigrants from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies away from north America. Other factors, such as chain migration, helped once this emigration field became known. At the heart of the immigrants' quest, as it probably was for most free emigrants in the nineteenth century, was the family. I have constructed a story of the operation of two sets of extended families over several decades to provide insights into their culture and customs, to look...

In the 1830s and 1840s a racist labour immigration policy for New South Wales developed out of responses in the Colonial Office and the colony to proposals for the importation of indentured Indian labourers. Race, culture and willingness to work under conditions tantamount to slavery were thought to distinguish Asians from Britons. Temperate climates in Australia were to be British settler colonies, while tropical areas were to be plantation colonies, worked by non‐European labourers. This paper examines the construction of racist imperial immigration policies and their implications for the colonies in eastern Australia.