The Afghan Children of Oodnadatta: a reflection on gender, ethnicity and education in the interwar years

• Autores: Marjorie R. Theobald
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 37, Nº. 1, 2001 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Education and ethnicity), págs. 211-230
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In 1920, two literate white mothers of children at the Oodnadatta Public School in South Australia wrote to the Director of Education in Adelaide to complain about the presence of Afghan children in the school. In their view, these children were a menace to the health of the white children; they were dirty, foul-mouthed, diseased, the products of squalid and morally corrupt homes. The Education Department sent District Inspector Martin and Medical Officer Dr Gertrude Halley to the remote desert settlement to �report as to the facts of the within letters�. Both of their reports survive in the slim file of correspondence on the Oodnadatta incident in the Archives of South Australia. These documents hold out the ambiguous promise that we as historians may capture at a moment in time the meanings of gender and ethnicity, meanings which are essentially process, historically contingent, endlessly invented and re-invented by ordinary women and men as they search for collective and individual identity. This article uses the incident of the Afghan children at the Oodnadatta school to structure a reflection on gender and ethnicity in the inter-war years.