Contributors

Margaret Allen is professor emerita in gender studies at the University of Adelaide. She is interested in transnational, postcolonial and feminist histories and whiteness. For 20 years she has been researching India–Australia relationships with a particular emphasis upon Indians living in Australia and their negotiation of the restrictive White Australia policy in the period c. 1880–1940. She has published widely in this field. She is a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender.

Kate Bagnall is a social historian whose research focuses on the intersections of migration, family and the law in the British settler colonial world. Kate is best known for her work in Chinese Australian history, particularly the history of women, children and families in Australia’s early Chinese communities, and her recent publications include the groundbreaking edited collection, Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia (Hong Kong University Press, 2021), co-edited with Julia Martínez. Before becoming a senior lecturer in humanities (history) at University of Tasmania in 2019, Kate was an ARC DECRA research fellow at the University of Wollongong (2016–19).

Emma Bellino is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong examining marriage, women’s nationality and Australia’s Asian communities in the early twentieth century. Her research interests include women’s histories, marital and reproductive histories, and the historical connections between law, society and lived experiences.

Sophie Couchman is a professional historian and curator who works closely with communities to tell their stories. She has researched and published in the field of Chinese Australian history for many years and has been involved in the development of a wide variety of historical projects including exhibitions, walking tours, oral histories and online resources.

Jane McCabe is the author of Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Kalimpong Kids: The New Zealand Story, in Pictures (Otago University Press, 2020). She completed her PhD at the University of Otago in 2014, where she taught history for the next six years. Jane’s research has critically examined the relationship between colonial bureaucracies and family history-making. Her doctorate explored the intergenerational legacies of a Presbyterian migration scheme that permanently relocated mixed-race children of tea planters from north-east India to New Zealand. From 2017 to 2020 she conducted a cross-cultural study of rural land ownership and inheritance, funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fast-Start Grant.

Peter Prince has been writing about legal identity and belonging in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia for the last two decades. He has published articles, papers and blogs on the implications of this history for the right to belong in modern Australia. His work has been cited by the High Court of Australia in critical ‘aliens’ cases including Singh (2004), Love & Thoms (2020) and Chetcuti (2021). His PhD thesis, ‘Aliens in Their Own Land. “Alien” and the Rule of Law in Colonial and Post-Federation Australia’, is available online.¹ He is an affiliate of the University of Sydney Law School.

Kim Rubenstein is Australia’s leading expert on citizenship, both in relation to legal status and to participation in government and society. This has led to her scholarship on gender and public law, including her legal work and oral histories of women lawyers’ contributions in the public sphere. Currently a professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, Kim was director of the Centre for International and Public Law at The Australian National University from 2006 to 2015 and inaugural convener of the Gender Institute from 2011 to 2012. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.