Bettina Bradbury, now professor emeritus at York University (Toronto), spent her career as a historian examining the fine details of nineteenth-century lives of women, children, and families in Montreal. Her first book, the award-winning Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (1993), still stands as a model of historical methodology for reading primary sources to locate the marginal histories of women, children, and families. Having relocated to New Zealand, Bradbury is mindful of her own family's histories of migration and settlement in New Zealand and Australia. In Caroline's Dilemma: A Colonial Inheritance Saga, Bradbury once again demonstrates her skill in constructing an engaging and source-based historical narrative to assess the role of ordinary people in the work of settler colonialism in Australia and the impact of British inheritance laws on one Australian woman, her children, and her Irish in-laws in Australia and Ireland.
Caroline (née Bax) Kearney was one of the many white women who were integral to the establishment of settler colonialism in British settler colonies, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. She migrated with her parents and siblings from England to New South Wales in 1851, and two years later married Irishman Edward Kearney, who had already been in the colony for a decade. Caroline and Edward were, Bradbury argues, two of the “ordinary people [who] were critical to the making of white settler colonies” (8). Edward ran a series of sheep stations, with Caroline performing the free labor customary to station mistresses. In 1865, Edward died, leaving Caroline with five children. In his will, he decreed that Caroline would be supported from the proceeds of his estate only if she relocated to Ireland, remained unmarried, and lived in a home chosen by his kin. Caroline repeatedly fought the will in court in both Melbourne and in Ireland, but in the end she was unable to win against the weight of British common law.
The book is organized into three chronological sections. Part one examines Caroline's and Edward's personal and family histories, their marriage, and their increasingly tense conflicts over religion. Bradbury provides an insightful analysis of the family dynamics of both the Bax and Kearney families, including the influential roles that the extended kin played in the Kearney's lives. Part two explores Edward's death, his will, Caroline's legal battles to contest the will, and the Kearney kin who were named executors. This second half centers on Caroline's refusal to concede to the terms of the will, her eventual relocation to Ireland, a possible secret marriage, and Caroline's death in London in 1886. The move-by-move analysis of the legal proceedings in both countries is meticulous and sometimes a bit dull, but it highlights Bradbury's expertise in nineteenth-century legal history. In the shorter third section of the book, Bradbury considers what happened to the Kearney and Bax families after Caroline and her children's move to Ireland. Somewhat tellingly, Caroline's four sons either took to the seas as sailors or returned to Australia. Their liminal existence in Ireland as the Anglican sons of an Irish Catholic father and extended kin, as the children of a dead father and perhaps unstable mother, and as Australian-born immigrants was perhaps none too comfortable.
Bradbury's key miss is a failure to engage meaningfully with Indigenous histories and settler-Indigenous interactions. Bradbury argues in the introduction that Caroline and Edward “participated directly in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples that characterized settler colonialism in Australia as in New Zealand, the Americas, and elsewhere” (8). Australian Indigenous groups and individuals are not completely absent from the book. Bradbury recounts, for example, that the Kearneys followed a common practice in their region of leaving food for their Indigenous neighbors in a hut separate from the station to prevent the theft of sheep (78). She also explores the hybrid naming that arose out of settler colonialism, in which the place names used by settlers in the 1840s through the 1870s reflected traditional Aboriginal land use. Indigenous peoples as individuals, or even as separate nations, are for the most part absent from the book. Is this how Edward and Caroline experienced their Indigenous neighbors—as only marginal figures mostly inconsequential to their daily life? If that is the argument that Bradbury is indeed making here, or the information just was not available in the sources, a larger discussion around her sources and choices regarding Indigenous histories is necessary.
Caroline's Dilemma demonstrates the complexities of migration and family dynamics in the context of settler colonialism and does this well. In assessing the life histories of Edward, and particularly Caroline, Bradbury integrates scholarship on migration, settler colonialism, Ireland, Australia, and England, women and families, and British law to produce a careful and skilled narrative of two migrant families. Bradbury is correct that we need to explore the lives of ordinary people in transnational contexts and the roles they played in establishing settler colonialism in the British settler colonies. What I recommend reading and assigning this book for, however, is Bradbury's masterful inclusion of her historical methodology throughout the book. She details what the sources tell her and cannot tell her about the family and demonstrates how small details in the record allow her to construct her narrative. Caroline's Dilemma is a masterclass in integrating analysis, narrative, and critical methodology to produce a sprawling account of the ordinary people who were fundamental to the expansion of settler colonialism in British colonies, and the continuing connections to kin and country at home that supported the work of empire abroad.
