History, as difficult as it can be, offers two of the most powerful gifts most precious to the human condition — imagination and empathy. Recently, I presented the ANU Allan Martin Lecture (available to stream in full here), which detailed my work journaling Australia’s history of colonial careworkers, following a neglected route that connects our history of colonisation to the history of the British Empire.
This is a story that unfolds along the global circuits of empire, through the lives of women who worked as travelling ayahs and amahs — South Asian and Chinese women who travelled as domestic servants and nursemaids for British families across the empire, including here in Australia.
Ayahs & amahs: a hidden history
Ayah, a word of Portuguese origin, came to refer to the indispensable women who served British women and looked after British children living in India. Often, they were the only female servants in a society where men traditionally dominated domestic service, and their employment as ladies’ maids and nursemaids emerged in direct response to the demand of European women. (The Chinese amahs of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia would become more visible from the late nineteenth century.)
Many of these intrepid women travelled across the British Empire with colonial families. In the United Kingdom, their presence is acknowledged — there’s even a blue heritage plaque to commemorate them in the heart of London. But in Australia, this history is unknown.
So, with the guidance of former teachers at the University of Sydney — Dr Soumyen Mukherjee and Jim Masselos FAHA, both of whom we have lost recently — I began searching for their stories. This work led to a new project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britian 1780 – 1945, funded by the Australian Research Council, which I’m leading with Claire Lowrie and Swapna Banerjee.
They weren’t arriving in great numbers – not like the hundreds of women who were yearly travelling back and forth between Britain and India after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 – but certainly, ayahs were coming into the country, and they were coming especially in the early colonial period, when there was significant maritime trade traffic between India and Australia.
Some came with families, or as indentured servants. Others came on schemes to bring servants for hire. Sometimes they were professional travelling ayahs, who advertised their seafaring services in the colonial press.
These women, and their stories, have been overlooked and forgotten from our history, and finding them is challenging — but their stories are worth telling, and I share some of them in my talk.
Thomassee & Pearbux
In 1818, a retinue of household servants arrived in the colony of NSW from Calcutta. They had travelled with their mistress, Sophia Browne, the wife of an Anglo-Indian merchant. Among them was Sophia’s maidservant, Thomassee (or Tamasee).
In 1819, Thomassee, and nine other domestic workers, sued the Browne family for mistreatment. In her testimony, Thomassee described being denied wages and food, while also suffering regular beatings. She told the judge she had been with the Browne family “since infancy” and wanted her wages. Thomassee’s testimony of the abuse she received leaves us with one of the earliest voices of a travelling ayah in Australian history.
The domestic workers won their case and returned to India.
But there was another Indian woman employed by the Browne family who was not part of the successful nine litigants. She was a Muslim woman named Pearbux – and Pearbux will leave us with Australia’s earliest letter on record from an ayah.
In early 1821, Pearbux writes a letter to her former employer in Calcutta, George Chisholm, a prominent hotelier. She asks him to write on her behalf to the Governor of New South Wales, to get her returned to her “own native Country”.
“[T]his is the worst place that ever could be expected,” Pearbux declares with passion. “I am traited no better than a slave.”
Chisholm sends her letter back to the Governor in Sydney, enclosed with a note of his own — apologising for not knowing who he is — and asking his Excellency to “bestow a moment’s attention” on this “poor woman”.
This intervention works. In February 1822, Pearbux is discharged from Browne’s service and provided passage back to India.
We have evidence Chisholm was advised of her embarkation from Sydney, and we know that the ship made it back to Calcutta. She was, I hope, restored to a better condition of life, but we don’t know.
Working with scraps and slivers
Pearbux’s letter is a tantalising archival sliver, but it offers more questions than answers.
In this letter, we hear the ayah’s voice but who is Pearbux? What is she doing in Sydney? And what lies behind her protest?
Pearbux’s letter is indicative of the kinds of scraps and remnants of evidence the historian of marginalised people is obliged to work with.
We find such fragments in the seams of stories of colonial power-brokers like George Chisholm and the colonial Governors – men who were able to exert much more power over the ways in which their own legacies would be written and remembered. This challenge, of working with such elusive and disempowered historical figures, is a familiar one to historians.
Yet even as these offer only glimpses, they prompt much bigger questions for us all: questions about whose histories get preserved, whose histories are heard, and how empathy and imagination might re-orient our understanding of the past and its meanings for the present. Sometimes, the most important stories are built upon the smallest traces.
