On 2 September 1845, the convict ship Tasmania left Kingstown Harbour for Van Diemen's Land with 138 female convicts and their 35 children. On 3 December, the ship arrived into Hobart Town. While this book looks at the lives of all the women aboard, it focuses on two women in particular: Eliza Davis, who was transported from Wicklow Gaol for life for infanticide, having had her sentence commuted from death, and Margaret Butler, sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing potatoes in Carlow. Using original records, this study reveals the reality of transportation, together with the legacy left by these women in Tasmania and beyond, and shows that perhaps, for some, this Draconian punishment was, in fact, a life-saving measure.

Correspondence, travel writing, diary writing, painting, scrapbooking, curating, collecting and house interiors allowed British women scope to express their responses to imperial sites and experiences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Taking these productions as its archive, British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775-1930 includes a collection of essays from different disciplines that consider the role of British women's cultural practices and productions in conceptualising empire. While such productions have started to receive greater scholarly attention, this volume uses a more self-conscious lens of gender to question whether female cultural work demonstrates that colonial women engaged with the spaces and places of empire in distinctive ways. By working across disciplines, centuries and different colonial geographies, the volume makes an exciting and important contribution to the field by demonstrating the diverse ways in which European women shaped constructions of empire in the modern period.

Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep. *** "Impressively researched, written, organized and presented...highly recommended for community and academic library Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, and Colonial History reference collections." --Midwest Book Review, MBR Bookwatch: October 2016, Helen's Bookshelf [Subject: Cultural History, Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, Colonial Studies]

From a range of leading academics and historians, this collection of essays examines Irish emigration during the Great Famine of the 1840s. From the mechanics of how this was arranged to the fate of the men, women and children who landed on the shores of the nations of the world, this work provides a remarkable insight into one of the most traumatic and transformative periods of Ireland’s history. More importantly, this collection of essays demonstrates how the Famine Irish influenced and shaped the worlds in which they settled, while also examining some of the difficulties they faced in doing so.