The goldfields of Australia and New Zealand provided a chance for people to reinvent themselves, an opportunity that many women used to escape undesirable legal and social restrictions.
In this talk, presented to the Friends of Canterbury Museum on 5 March 2019, Julia Bradshaw, Canterbury Senior Curator Human History, explores how women navigated laws and customs that didn’t suit them.
Her talk includes examples of the fluid definition of marriage some women had and the use of aliases to escape an unhelpful past.
