"Down in the gully & just outside the garden walk": white women and the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women on a colonial Australian frontier

At the close of the nineteenth century, the accusation that three young white women had colluded in their uncle’s sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women in the northwest of Western Australia caused consternation for the authorities. Unlike the accusation of ‘immorality’ levelled at station-owner Walter Nairn, the charge of complicity against his three nieces is a rarity in the Australian colonial archive. The ensuing investigation in 1898 revolved around whether the white women’s alleged role was common talk in the local community and whether the Aboriginal women who lived and worked in the Nairn household slept in the bedrooms of the white women. It culminated in the unlikely finding that the white women in question were oblivious to what was going on ‘down in the gully & just outside the garden walk’. Tracing the story of this investigation provides an insight into the different expectations for women and men, both Indigenous and white, the gendered anxieties that attended the employment of Aboriginal women as domestic servants in white homes and the complex and negotiated relationships that existed on the sexual and domestic frontiers of Australian colonialism.