Mobilizing Manhood: Gender and the Great Strike in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

The Great Strike of 1890 in Australia and New Zealand symbolized the rise of class, influenced nationalist discourse, and shaped labour politics. It also signified a crisis in gender relations. Conservatives and unionists openly contested the meaning of masculinity, mobilizing concepts of manhood in ways specific to class, community, ethnicity and age. Both groups were alarmed by the role women played in the dispute; attacks on scabs and special constables and the occupation of public, ‘male’ spaces challenged ascribed boundaries, customs and locales, and revived a rich tradition of pre-industrial protest.     

Colonies and Colonisation in Bulwer Lytton’s The Caxtons,A Strange Story and The Coming Race

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, an eminently popular novelist, published The Caxtons in 1849. Though sub-titled A Family Picture and mainly concerned with domestic life, it included a lengthy disquisition on colonisation and emigration, its value to British society and its role in extending civilisation by spreading ‘God’s law, improvement’. His colonial example was ‘Australia’. A Radical MP in the 1830s, but opposed to the encroachment of ‘democracy’ and supportive of the Corn Laws, in the early 1850s Lytton turned to the Conservative Party. In 1858–59 he served as secretary of state for the colonies. In the light of his experience, his view of Australia and of self-governing colonies was modified, as A Strange Story (1862) shows. But in 1871, in The Coming Race, an elaborate satire on democracy and egalitarianism, he made a distinct addition to the colonial theme of The Caxtons. He did not doubt that ‘improvement’ and colonisation produced evidence of ‘the triumph of civilization’, but a metaphor embedded in the later novel indicated the inevitability of displacement of aboriginal inhabitants by Anglo-Saxon settlers.