Historicising domestic violence in the family: Pearlie McNeill and Jimmy Barnes remember their mothers

Pearlie McNeill’s One of the Family (1989) and Jimmy Barnes’s Working Class Boy (2016) are autobiographical texts that recount childhoods in which violence perpetrated by the authors’ fathers is a defining experience and the authors’ mothers are the primary victims. This chapter examines these accounts as historical and gendered representations and seeks to establish their possibilities for understanding mothering practices in the context of domestic violence and for writing a history of that violence. It reflects on these examples in relation to what has been established by historians about twentieth-century understandings of domestic violence and illuminates the ways in which each text has been made possible and legible through political discourses prevalent at the time of writing.