‘To make the emigrant a better colonist’: transforming women in the Female Immigration Depot, Hyde Park Barracks

Abstract

ABSTRACT The immigrant’s journey is a paradigmatic example of the ‘betwixt and between’, both physically and socially ambiguous, suspended momentarily outside of normal society. For archaeologists studying nineteenth-century immigration around the British Empire, ‘institutions of immigration’ (emigrant and immigrant depots, quarantine stations, processing centres, etc.) provide access to this transitional state. Using the example of the Hyde Park Barracks Female Immigration Depot (1848–1887) in Sydney, Australia, the author demonstrates how these the institutional sites encountered throughout the immigrant’s journey were integral to the process of turning immigrants into settlers through the creation of new forms of daily practice.