Constructing a tradition of women's labour: Representing women's work at the Brisbane Exhibition

Not all 'labour' traditions are created, perpetuated or controlled by the labour movement and its members. Across 130 years, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (NAIAQ) has established and maintained traditions relating to the display of the results of men's, women's and children's work through the annual Brisbane Exhibition. First held in 1876, this metropolitan show is one of the oldest annual events in post-contact Queensland society. Each year, it presents the outputs of the state's rural and urban industries for the education and entertainment of the thousands of visitors who enter the showgrounds. And each year, it variously reflects, endorses and promotes particular versions of Queensland society and its economy. While precisely assessing the impact of exhibition displays on their audiences is a task fraught with difficulty, it is appropriate to acknowledge the Exhibition as one of the sites which has mirrored and contributed to Queenslanders' definitions of and understandings of their society and its values. Its presentation of economic activity, then, is one of the many influences that has informed, mirrored and shaped local appreciations of who performs or should perform particular types of work and the value accorded such labour. This paper begins to unpack the presentation of work at the Exhibition through an analysis of how women's labour was displayed at the show during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from the creation in 1900 of the Women's Industries section to 1941; the following year the Exhibition was cancelled due to wartime exigencies and a comprehensive annual event was not reinstated until 1945. It adopts a broad definition of work that crosses class boundaries and includes unpaid labour and small-scale income-generation within the home, voluntary work, and participation in the formal economy. Nevertheless, this study also recognises the importance of a class-based analysis of the Exhibition, its organisers and its priorities. The display of the outputs of women's work both within and beyond the specific domain of Women's Industries suggests that the Brisbane Exhibition embraced the racial and gendered hierarchies of Queensland society, and adopted an increasingly rigid division of non-Indigenous men's versus women's spheres of activity. It located men within the public domain of the formal economy and positioned women primarily as current or future wives and mothers engaged in unpaid work within the domestic realm. The likelihood of women's participation in the formal economy being acknowledged and valued at the Exhibition was further reduced by the NAIAQ's practice of showcasing the outputs of the Queensland economy within a framework that, with occasional exceptions, effectively ignored the role of employees in the production of those outputs