Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia

“Women are like blue china: beautiful and fragile, but worthless once damaged or broken. “ —Unidentified Canadian emigrationist, writing in the 1890s.

Between 1860 and 1900, nearly 100,000 single working-class women emigrated from Britain to the Australian colonies. They were the largest single category of immigrants to be given colonial government assistance.

The book is a study of Australian immigration policy generally. Its strength lies in the breadth of this research. While showing how individual colonies differed in their approach to female immigration, it also highlights the common factors in the female immigrants’ experiences, and stories of individual women’s experiences add further life and color to a very accessible text.