A Prison Without Bars: Female Narratives in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

This chapter explores the complex implications of the concept of island and culture in the anthropological, semiotic, and literary spheres. It starts from a theoretical introduction which is necessary to justify the methodology chosen for the analysis of certain recurring themes in the epistolary, diaries and memoir literature written by women in the colonial era. In the second part of the essay the author analyses women's writings dealing with their arrival, their lives, and the cultural decoding of the new Australian reality after their arrival from England to the penal colony. Their relationships with Australia were not exclusively based on a simple ‘physical’ conquest, but were formed through an attempt to gradually incorporate the unfamiliar, to steadily draw closer that which was different, thus, rendering it familiar and therefore innocuous, even at the cost of changing their own identities. This relationship presents itself, therefore, as a kind of bilateral exchange: the woman took something from Australia and, vice versa, she gave something of herself to this new land. Their testimonies, therefore, shed a different light on a history that is often understood and interpreted in entirely male terms. of the island of Australia during the late nineteenth century.