7. On Their Own in a ‘Man’s World’: Widows in Business in Colonial Australia and New Zealand

For example, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Association, see Miles Fairburn, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand,https://​teara.​govt.​nz/​en/​biographies/​1w4/​wakedfield-edward-gibbon

Charles Terry, New Zealand Its Advantages and Prospects as a British Colony (London: T. and W. Boone, 1842), p. 259, Early New Zealand Books (ENZB), www.​enzb.​auckland.​ac.​nz

Laurel Urlich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650–1750, (New York: Knopf, 1982); on widows elsewhere, see Béatrice Craig Female Enterprise Behind the Discursive Veil in Nineteenth-Century Northern France (London: Palgrave, 2017); Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, Widows in European Economy and Society 1600–1920 (London: Boydell, 2017).

Catherine Bishop, ‘When Your Money Is Not Your Own: Coverture and Married Women in Business in Colonial New South Wales’, Law and History Review 33, no. 1 (2015): pp. 181–200.

See Craig, (chap 5, France), Nagata (chap 11, Japan) and Hernández-Nicolás and Martínez-Rodríguez (chap 14, Spain), this volume.

See, for example, Catherine Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015); Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow, Rivers and Resilience, Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009); Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017).

Catherine Bishop, Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New Zealand (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019), p. 206; similar situations can also be found in North America: see Lewis, Unexceptional Women.

For example, one imagines Charles Dickens’ Mrs Gummidge, ‘a lone lorn creetur’, in David Copperfield, as elderly, although she is in fact never given an age. Karen Chase, ‘Betwixt and Between: Mrs. Gummidge’s “Homely Rapture”’, Victorian Review 39, no. 2 (2013): pp. 68–71.

Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive, www.​hccda.​anu.​edu

Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive, www.​hccda.​anu.​edu

New Zealand Census 1871–1916, http://​archive.​stats.​govt.​nz/​browse_​for_​stats/​snapshots-of-nz/​digitised-collections/​census-collection.​aspx

Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia, 1788–1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984); Susan Hart, ‘Widowhood and Remarriage in Colonial Australia’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2009).

Lynne Bowd, ‘On Her Own: Women as Heads of Family Groups in the 1828 Census’, Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 107 (1996): pp. 303–22, p. 316; Erik Olssen, ‘Families and the Gendering of European New Zealand in the Colonial Period, 1840–80’, in Caroline Daley and Deborah Montgomerie (eds), The Gendered Kiwi (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999): pp. 37–62, p. 53.

Martha Adams, ‘Journal, transcription’, 1850–52, pp. 162–24, MS 0006, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (ATL). Raewyn Dalziel’s recent research suggests she may not have been divorced and was perhaps in fact a bigamist. (Dalziel, talk, Blenheim, 13 October 2019).

Isabella Cary, 2 October 1867, Female Middle Class Emigration Society Letterbooks, 1862–1882, Fawcett Library Collections M2291–2314, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW); Bishop, Women Mean Business, pp. 71–75.

Glenda Strachan and Lindy Henderson, ‘Surviving Widowhood: Life Alone in Rural Australia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Continuity and Change 23, no. 3 (2008): pp. 487–508; Alain Bideau, ‘A Demographic and Social Analysis of Widowhood and Remarriage: The Example of the Castellany of Thoissey-En-Dombes, 1670–1840’, Journal of Family History 5, no. 1 (1980): pp. 28–43; Bettina Bradbury, ‘Surviving as a Widow in 19th-Century Montreal’, Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine 17, no. 3 (1989): pp. 48–60; Katie Pickles, ‘Locating Widows in Mid-Nineteenth Century Pictou County, Nova Scotia’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (2004): pp. 70–86. See also, for British Columbia, Melanie Buddle, Chap. 13 in this volume.

Nancy E. Wright and A.R. Buck, ‘The Transformation of Colonial Property: A Study of the Law of Dower in New South Wales, 1836 to 1863’, University of Tasmania Law Review 23, no. 1 (2004): pp. 97–127; Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Land, Death and Dower in the Settler Empire: The Lost Cause of “the Widow’s Third” in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 41, no. 3 (2010): pp. 493–518; Bettina Bradbury, Caroline’s Dilemma: A Colonial Inheritance Saga (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2019).

Ann Ritchie Probate 1865, 13,660, 1-6275 State Records of New South Wales, Sydney (SRNSW).

Correspondence, ‘Burdekin Family Papers’, MLMSS 147, State Library of New South Wales SLNSW.

‘Letter from John Bossley to Mary Ann Burdekin 7 August 1843’, Burdekin Family Papers, MLMSS 147 90/1, SLNSW.

The Australian 31 March 1830, p. 2; Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser 19 October 1831, p. 4.

For similar conclusions elsewhere, see Béatrice Craig, Female Enterprise Behind the Discursive Veil in Northern France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Jennifer AstonFemale Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Nelson Examiner (NEx) 9 December 1854 p. 3, 28 August 1868, p. 1; Colonist 26 June 1891, p. 3.

SMH 8 February 1864 p. 8; John Sands, Sands’ Sydney Directory (Sydney: John Sands, 1858–1900) (Sands Directory), 1869 https://​www.​cityofsydney.​nsw.​gov.​au/​learn/​search-our-collections/​sands-directory; William Adnum Probate 1861 1-5244 SRNSW.

Sydney Herald (SH) 27 February 1841, p. 3, ‘Report of the Finance Committee: Accounts Recommended for Payment...’, Committee Reports, 1844, 21/002/358–359, City of Sydney Archives, SMH 18 November 1845, p. 3.

Dennis Bryans, ‘The Beginnings of Type Founding in Sydney: Alexander Thompson’s Type, His Foundry and His Exports to Inter-Colonial Printers’ Journal of Design History 9, no. 2 (1996): pp. 75–86, p. 77; Empire 21 August 1867, p. 4.

SMH 25 June 1862, p. 8; Sands Directory, 1863, 1868; Belinda Cohen, ‘Matheson Family History’, http://​belindacohen.​tripod.​com/​mathesonfamilyhi​story/​, Belinda Cohen, ‘Thomas Playfair in Australia’, http://​belindacohen.​tripod.​com/​playfairfamilyhi​story/​id7.​html; Ross Duncan, ‘Playfair, John Thomas (1832–1893)’, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://​adb.​anu.​edu.​au/​biography/​playfair-john-thomas-4405/​text7185

Sydney Herald 21 April 1842 p. 2; SMH 11 January 1843 p. 1, 24 June 1844, p. 3.

Francis Low, The City of Sydney Directory for 1844–5 (Sydney: Francis Low, 1844); SMH 20 March 1846, p. 2; New South Wales Births, Deaths and Marriages Index, https://​familyhistory.​bdm.​nsw.​gov.​au

SMH 29 July 1854, p. 5, 10 October 1854, p. 5, 19 September 1876, p. 10, 6 June 1879, p. 9; Waugh and Cox’s Directory of Sydney and Its Suburbs, 1855 (Sydney, Waugh & Cox, 1855), Sands Directory 1858.

Ibid., pp. 101–02.

Eastern Province Herald, Cape Town 22 March 1837; SMH 19 May 1853 p. 2; Bishop, ‘Women on the Move: Gender, Money-Making and Mobility in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australasia’, History Australia 11, no. 2 (2014): pp. 38–59, p. 49.

Familysearch.​com; Sydney Chronicle 13 March 1847, p. 1; SMH 19 January 1870, p. 8.

J.M. Freeland, The Australian Pub (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966); Diane Kirkby, Tanya Luckins and Chris McConville, The Australian Pub (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010); Alan Atkinson, ‘Women Publicans’, Push From the Bush 8 (1980): pp. 88–106; Clare Wright, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans (Melbourne: MUP, 2003), Sandra Quick, ‘“The Colonial Helpmeet Takes a Dram”: Women Participants in the Central Otago Goldfields Liquor Industry, 1861–1901’ (MA thesis, University of Otago, 1998); Sandra Quick, ‘“A Magnificent Stamp of a Woman”: Female sly grog sellers and hotelkeepers on the Central Otago goldfields 1861–1901’, in Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser (eds), Rushing for Gold: Life and Commerce on the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia (Dunedin: Otago University Press 2016), pp. 151–64; Julie Bradshaw, ‘Forgetting Their Place: Women of Abandoned Character on the Otago Goldfields’, in Carpenter and Fraser (eds), Rushing for Gold, pp. 165–75; Susan Upton, Wanted: A Beautiful Barmaid: Women Behind the Bar in New Zealand, 1830–1976 (Wellington: VUP, 2013), Bishop, Women Mean Business.

Press 1 February 1862, p. 6, 10 August 1882, p. 2; LT 22 October 1862, p. 1, Richard L N Greenaway, Unsung Heroines (Christchurch: Canterbury Public Library, 1994), http://​christchurchcity​libraries.​com/​Heritage/​Publications/​UnsungHeroines/​IsabellaWilliams​/​

NEx 19 January 1850, p. 183, 9 December 1854, p. 3; Ann Bickford took over husband William’s chemist business in Adelaide after his death in September 1850. South Australian Register 12 September 1850, p. 2, 23 November 1853, p. 1.

‘Mrs John Pilkington’s Story’, in Edith Mary Story (ed.), ‘Our Fathers Told Us’ c. 1920 qMS 1898–1899, ATL.

‘Harriet Spier, Grocer Insolvency’, 22 September 1864, NRS 13654, 06818, ‘John Hill Spier, Painter Insolvency’, 9 February 1858, NRS 13654, 04026, Supreme Court Insolvency Files (SCIF), SRNSW.