‘The Anti Laundress’: Languages of Service in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia 1830–1860

Three languages of service in the Hunter Valley show the emotional impact of new labour systems on valuing and self-valuing in work. The newspaper advertisements present a self-image of the servant as a negotiator for wages and conditions, and servants read these advertisements and formed attitudes from them. Their language suggests they were significant players in the modernising of work. Wealthy employers sought the cheapest labour possible, and the new lower middle-class townsman added notions of respectability that servants adopted themselves. In conflict with this, the letters of a squatter family represent the servant as an object of humour, as sly, untrustworthy, and dangerously sexualised. This abject status derived from notions of servants as less than human, as stock, from slavery. In response, servants replied that they knew their work and emphasised a labour market perspective.