Becky Johnston (1858–1938): A case study of Aboriginal women's financial agency in early 20th century New South Wales

Abstract

This article introduces Becky Johnston, a mixed-descent Worimi woman on the lower Mid-North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. During the 1920s, Johnston became a businesswoman and landowner despite the economic limitations for Indigenous Australians. Beyond domestic labour settings, historians have overlooked how Aboriginal women participated in the settler-colonial economy. I argue that living within the Myall Lakes timber-getting industry, Johnston learned to capitalise on economic opportunities in her ancestral Country, demonstrating that histories of Aboriginal women's financial agency may be recovered from understudied areas of rural and regional Australia.