Food, Feeding and Consumption (or the Cook, the Wife and the Nutritionist): The Politics of Gender and Class in a 1948 Australian Expedition.

The field diaries of John Bray, Bessie Mountford and Margaret McArthur are important first-person accounts of the social dynamics within the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. This article explores the ways in which representations of self and others in the diaries, particularly in relation to food, illuminate the gendered and class-based politics of the expedition's group from the perspectives of participants on the margins of the group's power structures. Although the focus of the expedition was on increasing knowledge about the Aboriginal cultures of Arnhem Land, it is the nuances of post-war non-Indigenous Australian class and gender relationships which are most vividly illuminated in the diaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]