time

Few young men spend some relaxing time near the river.

As the war progressed and came closer to Australia’s shores, this need for more “manpower” grew even more pressing. Eventually it was conceded that women’s services would be required, though one question was still perplexing some: what exactly could women do? One woman who took up the challenge of a “man’s job” was Mary Emma Martin (nee Jackson). Before the war, Emma’s husband Bob was an ice vendor, delivering blocks of ice to Brisbane’s inner-northern suburbs, in the days before refrigerators when everyone relied on an icebox in their home to keep foodstuffs from perishing. Ice delivery was such an essential service that at first ice vendors were excused from military service; it was still quite a novel idea to think a woman could handle the job. However, when Bob Martin and other men enlisted for service, Emma took on the role, along with an estimated 50 other women ice vendors in Brisbane alone . Amid wartime crisis, these women literally kept cool and carried on! Source: www.anzacsquare.qld.gov.au/stories/australian-women-work-...

The first missionaries at Mapoon used food as an assimilation strategy. Through the distribution of rations, the establishment of gardens maintained by Aboriginal people, and the introduction of set meal times, they radically altered the traditional Aboriginal diet and way of life. Food was the fuel that made the Mapoon mission run. It provided work for the Aboriginal ‘inmates’ and the missionaries sold surplus crops, cattle and seafoods to raise funds for the mission. One of the other ways the Presbyterian Church supported the Mapoon mission was through the sale of its ever-popular Women’s Missionary Union cookery book. Christianising and ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people involved curtailing their mobility, revolutionising their diet and teaching them European ways to produce, prepare, distribute and consume food. Source: Alison Wishart ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’—food as an assimilation strategy: re-writing the menu at Mapoon mission National Museum of Australia www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue9/Wishart.pdf