Within Butlers now famous performative model of gender, cross-dressing is accorded the power to reveal all gender as performance,

thereby disrupting the claims to authenticity of naturalised heterosexual genders (Butler 1990). Similarly, Garber argues that cross-dressing disrupts and calls into question the possibility of stable binaries, not just between male/female, homosexual/heterosexual but across culture more generally. Cross-dressing is, she argues a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself (Garber 1993, 17). In Vested Interests (1993), Marjorie Garber argues that one of the most consistent and effective functions of cross-dressing is to mark the presence of what she calls category crisis, meaning by this the failure of definitional distinction or the instability of a borderline between any set of distinct categories set in opposition to each other (such as male/female, black/white, Jew/Christian, East/West, heterosexual/homosexual). For Garber: 176 LUCY CHESSER the apparently spontaneous or unexpected or supplementary presence of a transvestite figure in a text (whether fiction or history, verbal or visual, imagistic or real) that does not seem, thematically, to be primarily concerned with gender difference or blurred gender indicates a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin. (Garber 1993, 17) This theoretical model is highly applicable to Australian history. I have found examples of cross-dressing emerging time and again in key tumultuous areas of Australian history, including in relation to convict and settler societies, the gold rushes and bushranging (Chesser 2000b). This article finishes with a discussion of references to women dressing as soldiers that appeared in the press during the First World War, a period in which acute contradictions emerged around (white) womens work and their role in the war. Most historical writing concerned with cross-dressing initially focused on sexuality and notions of sexual deviance, something that probably reflected the interests and backgrounds of early researchers who sought to explore an otherwise overlooked area. For this reason, Anne McClintocks Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) has been particularly important in expanding the scope of the discussion on cross-dressing, implicating cross-dressing, gender ambiguity and inversion within the processes of meaning-making about broader aspects of culture and society, especially in regard to imperialism, colonialism, race and national identity construction.2 McClintock focused mainly on Africa; however, an examination of Australian colonial writing reveals that cross-dressing and gender ambiguity emerged time and again in a variety of forms in colonial discussions about race and Aboriginal_European relations dating from the earliest days of the arrival of Europeans, right through until the twentieth century. One of the most persistent of these discourses centred on the practice of Aboriginal women doing stock work while dressed in male attire or of adopting male attire while living or travelling with a European man. Cross-dressing in these circumstances was profoundly controversial, intersecting with tensions and competing agendas in relation to Aboriginal women, sexuality, labour and the regulation of white mens behaviour on the frontier (Chesser 2000b, esp. chap. 4). Mixed meanings were also associated with degrees of masculinity in women, and with womens work in more masculine occupations. Masculinity could signal women displacing male workers, stealing their jobs and destroying the family. Alternatively, a kind of masculinity in women was used to symbolically illustrate affinity and commonality with men. For example, in 1903 Melbournes Truth campaigned on behalf of barmaids, attempting to resurrect the reputation of women who had been disparaged in the daily press. A letter printed in Truth

explicitly portrayed women in bars as masculinised, but clearly considered this to be a good and noble attribute of working women. The majority of barmaids, it claimed, soon get so used to the company of men, that in a very little while they get to think, speak and feel towards men as a man . . . While the other class never seem able to forget they are women or lose that ridiculous self-consciousness which is more often assumed than real (Letter to the editor 1903).