‘Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the World’: Population policies and gender in twentieth-century Australia

Abstract

This paper considers several policy responses to declining birth rates in Australia over the twentieth century, revealing key continuities in the ‘administration of population’. Early in the century pronatalist policies to enhance fertility predominated. In spite of evidence in the 1890s, 1920s and 1940s that economics shaped family sizes and that women’s lives included paid work, little acknowledgment of this occurred outside wartime. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration largely replaced pronatalism as a desired means of building population numbers. Century’s end brought new concerns about fertility decline, an ageing population, immigration and increased asylum seeking. These concerns revitalized the call for a population policy and raised unresolved questions for women.