Marking a marginal past: Schooling and dispossession in the Franklin Harbour district

In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and economically. However, women’s and Aboriginal histories are marginalised in the district’s social memory. Women teachers barely register and the fraught relationships between the Barngarla people and white settlers are subordinated to a white masculinist narrative of progress. This article has been peer-reviewed.