"English, yet essentially un-English": Female constructions of imperial belonging in Melbourne, 1850-1870

During the 19th century, travel memoirs were used to shape ideas of ‘home’ and ‘away’. Women travel writers brought their own perspectives to understandings of British identity and imperialism, marketing their work as a distinctly ‘feminine’ approach which considered different aspects of travel from their male counterparts. Using three travel memoirs, based on their time in Melbourne and its surrounds during the 1850s, this chapter focuses on how these white and middle-class women used their experiences travelling in Melbourne to explore their own understandings of what constituted ‘Britishness’ in the Empire, and the position of women from Britain and Ireland in imperial settlement. These memoirs provide an insight into how British women travellers projected visions of British belonging onto urban spaces in the Australian colonies, specifically Melbourne, in order to expand understandings of the ambiguous place of colonial women highlighted by Anne McClintock.