Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire

337 Pages·2014·5.89 MB·English

by  Nadine Attewell

BETTER BRITONS
Reproduction, National Identity,
and the Afterlife of Empire
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NADINE ATTEWELL
Better Britons
Reproduction, National Identity,
and the Afterlife of Empire
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2014
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-4702-2 (cloth)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Attewell, Nadine, author
Better Britons : reproduction, national identity, and the afterlife of empire / Nadine Attewell.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4702-2 (bound)
1. Human reproduction – Government policy – Great Britain – History – 20th century.
2. Human reproduction – Government policy – New Zealand – History – 20th century.
3. Human reproduction – Government policy – Australia – History – 20th century.
4. National characteristics, British – History – 20th century. 5. National characteristics,
New Zealand – History – 20th century. 6. National characteristics, Australian – History –
20th century. 7. Decolonization – Great Britain – Colonies – History – 20th century. I. Title.
HQ766.5.G7A88 2014 304.6094109'04 C2013-903793-4
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using
funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government
of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Part One: Beginnings
1 An Island Solution: Utopian Forms and the Routing
of National Identity 35
2 Whiteness for Beginners: An Australian Experiment 69
Part Two: Endings
3 “I kept on dreaming about the sea”: Foreclosure
and the Aborting Woman 113
4 Apprehending Loss: Maternity at the Margins 146
5 Shrunk in the (White)wash: Britain at World’s End 168
Envoi 203
Notes 215
Bibliography 267
Index 301
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Illustrations
Figure 1 Harry, Maggie, and Henry Ross. Photo by Baldwin Spencer.
Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia (A1 1930/1542).
Figure 2 Agnes Draper. Photo by Baldwin Spencer. Courtesy of
the National Archives of Australia (A1 1930/1542).
Figure 3 Norman Bray. Photo by Baldwin Spencer. National Archives
of Australia (A1 1930/1542).
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Acknowledgments
Any book that, like this one, has been a decade in the making, has accumulated
innumerable debts. From Hong Kong and Britain, the island homelands from
which my parents first ventured in the 1960s, to Richmond, British Columbia,
where I grew up, histories of migration and settlement have shaped my own.
The life of a junior scholar too can be a peripatetic one: Better Britons took me
to Australia, the United Kingdom, and Aotearoa New Zealand, but was written
in Ithaca, New York, part of the homeland of the Cayuga Nation; in St Paul,
Minnesota, on traditional Dakota territory; on Paiute and Washoe land in
Reno, Nevada; and in Hamilton, Ontario, part of the traditional territories of
the Mississauga and Six Nations. I acknowledge the hospitality of all of these
places, as well as the prior claims upon whose displacement and denial such
hospitality too often sadly depends.
Working in state and other archives can be an expensive enterprise. I re-
ceived generous funding from Cornell University, in the form of the Ta-Chung
& Ya-Chao Liu Memorial Scholarship, research grants from the Graduate
School, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and Feminist Gender and
Sexuality Studies, and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship; from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; from the University of
Nevada, Reno; and from McMaster University, in the form of an Arts Research
Board Grant. Archival research can also be a lonely and dispiriting endeavour,
from which it was always a pleasure to be recalled by family, friends, and inter-
ested colleagues: in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Te Punga whanau; in Australia,
Ann McGrath, Robin Taylor, and the Hawes family; and in the United King-
dom, Derek and Jean Attewell, and the Cheung-Pauze family. A daunting task
was further eased by the work of librarians, archivists, and technicians at
the Alexander Turnbull Library (Wellington); the Auckland City Library; the