Colonising motherhood: Evangelical social reformers and Koorie women in Victoria, Australia, 1880s to the early 1900s

This article examines the separate world of evangelical social reformers of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union and mission based Indigenou s women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the colony of Victoria. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) activists, chara cterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, claimed mate rnal moral authority to promote for their sex a legitimate place in public life and full citizenship. Simultaneously, Koorie women on the scattered mi ssion stations of the colony, their lives under increasingly intrusive surv eillance, were forced on painfully unequal terms to negotiate with mission managers and colonial officials for the right even to raise their own child ren. Unable to perceive the plight of Koorie mothers, the WCTU reformers, c haracterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, aligned themselves with the so-called 'civilising' endeavours of their fellow evang elical, the missionaries, oblivious to their collusion in the colonial stat e's grievous assaults on Koorie human rights and civil liberties.