ABSTRACT
Anne Summers argued in Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) that women were regarded as objects for the use of men in the early Australian penal colonies. Although this has been challenged by later feminist historians who focus on women's agency, it is the case that many women were subjected to sexual violence in those years. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the forces of order were working to reduce such offences by prosecuting and punishing perpetrators. This chapter compares and contrasts two such cases, the notorious Mount Rennie gang rape in Sydney in 1886 and the rape of an Aboriginal woman by two settler colonist men in rural Victoria in 1888. It examines the identities of both the victims and the offenders, the cases made for the defence and the prosecution, and the punishments, showing that even when the justice system was working to protect women from sexual violence, they were also on trial.
