The brash colonial: Class and comportment in nineteenth-century Australia

In colonial Australia, the meanings of politeness were continually contested. The urban centres held a world of strangers of dubious origin. Social edifices erected to deal with the question of who was 'in Society' became ever more elaborate and unstable. to the elite, English manners represented a last bastion of civilisation in a wilderness of social disintegration. To self-made Australians, seeking acceptance rather than exclusion, they were absurd remnants of a class-ridden 'Old World'. Important issues of class, gender, social organisation and identity clustered around the problem of comportment and shaped a redefinition of politeness in a colonial worlds.