ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the gendered spatial expressions of identities of the Irish women who lived and worked in the Royal Mail Hotel, Glenorchy, around 1863. Feminist scholars have investigated 19th-century Australian colonial space in gendered terms by analysing how the bush was gendered masculine in art, literature and myth, while the interior, private, domesticated spaces of house, verandah and garden were gendered feminine. W. F. Massey calls for the investigation of ‘the variable construction of gender relations in different local-cultural space/places’ that point to the social construction of identity. Contemporary descriptions of Glenorchy emphasise the masculine gendered spaces and activities that predominated in the township. For J. Wallace, the only visible women in the social spaces of Glenorchy were married women of his own class. In working out the private and public expressions of servant and mistress identities, social construction of the meanings of space was crucial.
