John Ferry, part of this conversation, acknowledges where appropriate the company he has kept. Ferry's colonial Armidale is not the cathedral and college town in embryo. That would be to write parochial history, about foundation stones and a succession of influential men. Taking his lead from Atkinson's Camden , he has undertaken a detailed anatomy of a distinctive place, filled with stories of people in relationships, an anatomy that is meant nevertheless to describe and explain Australia at large in the later nineteenth century. More importantly, many of them were women, while those men who were social beings and who passed characteristics on to succeeding generations were nearly all partnered by women.
Ferry takes gender very seriously.
It is something possessed by men as well as by women. Despite Dixson's Real Matilda , gender was not automatically defined adversarially, but it was always unequal and hard-won. At the beginning women were few in New England and the bushman's ideal of physical prowess and hardness predominated. Once most men lived in or longed for families, 'respectability' became the mark of manliness. Respectability stretched from chivalry and sacrifice at one end to the kind of oppression that forced Armidale's daughters to marry at an average age of twenty-one years, denying young women and men the pleasure of experimental and freely chosen liaisons.