Fences, Boats and Teas: Engendering Patient Lives at Peel Island Lazaret

Within institutions, a separate social world comes into existence. Gender is a crucial shaper of relations in this new world, defining status, relationships to others and personal identity. Understanding the gendered conditions of, and responses to, institutional care is an important social contribution of historical archaeology to contemporary society. Research on the Peel Island Lazaret in Moreton Bay, Queensland, uses a model for engendering archaeology, with modifications pertinent to historical archaeology. Analysis builds on the work of others who have investigated the ways in which men and women of the confined and confining classes experienced institutions and interacted with each other. This study also extends beyond these approaches in exploring the areas of “interpersonal agency” and relationship building, and the ways in which disadvantage minimization was mediated by the structuring principle of gender.