This thesis examines the policies and programs of the Australian colonial administration in the period following the Second World War through until independence in 1975. It focuses on the way in which these affected indigenous women’s lives and shaped their relationship and engagement with the state. Drawing from the administration’s archive, but blending this with archival research from a range of contemporary sources – personal memoirs, ethnographies, newspapers, and publications and films produced by the administration- the thesis provides an overview of the Australian colonial state’s intentions and practical efforts towards what they saw as ‘raising women’s status’.

Within the thesis, closer studies (micro-histories) of two groups – the Motu-Koitabuans of Hanuabada village located in the centre of Port Moresby, and the Halia and Haku speaking peoples who live along the east coast of Buka Island, Bougainville – sit in conversation with this broader archival history. Fieldwork research and oral histories undertaken between 2006 and 2007 with Hanuabadan and Buka women allows an examination of their experiences of colonialism in the post war period with a focus on motherhood, marriage, sexuality and work.

The awkward fit between the two histories within the thesis- one emerging from the colonial archive, the other woven through village women’s testimonies of the everyday – points to the contradictions and constraints inherent in the project of the colonial state. To colonial authorities, the power to transform indigenous women’s lives and fashion modem mother-wife subjects lay with the state. By contrast, indigenous women’s personal narratives reveal their active participation in the changes taking place within the village. Through their narratives we hear a very different set of stories telling of what colonialism and becoming and being ‘modern’ has meant for women in their roles as mothers, wives, community members and subjects of the state.