Australian Women’s History Network/Lilith Conference, 24-25 November, 2025

The two CIs, Professors Penny Edmonds and Deirdre Coleman, presented papers at the Australian Women’s History Network Conference at the University of Melbourne. The conference, entitled ‘Nurturing Feminist Histories in Precarious Times: Founding Stories, Forging Communities, Feminist Futures,’ included a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Lilith, A Feminist History Journal.

This meeting provided an excellent opportunity for Penny to introduce our new grant, reminding listeners of Tracey Banivanua Mar’s comment that few historians of the labour trade ‘have considered the experiences and treatment of [Pacific] women, or explored the gendered nature of their work. Theirs is a story that can be painstaking to access in the archives, for if Islanders were a subaltern group written out of colonial memory, Islander women were doubly so’ (Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 2007). Penny went on to discuss our methodologies for finding those women’s voices through testimony, material culture, and art, and through drawing together new Pacific archives in German and English. She concluded by outlining the grant’s various forms of creative practice as research, all of which reflect on and redress the harm of the 19th-century Pacific labour trade.

Deirdre followed Penny by outlining some of the projects she has planned for the new funding, including a study of the patriarchal ‘clan’ structure built by Robert Louis Stevenson on Vailima, his Samoan plantation. In addition to detailing the lives and labour of those living within and outside the plantation house, she is documenting the story of Lauli’i, a young Samoan woman who became an intimate member of the Stevenson household. In 1889 Lauli’i travelled with her Canadian husband to San Francisco where she published The Story of Laulii, Daughter of Samoa, a manners and customs account of the island. The Stevensons, who were critical of the book, attributed the swallowing up of Lauli’i’s “voice” to a “very stupid” American editor and a husband determined to curtail her “expressions.” Literary and syntactical analysis will be used to examine these criticisms.

Text by Deirdre Coleman