Of all those in the deeply stratified world of colonial New South Wales, Aboriginal women might be considered the least likely to leave traces in the historical record. Yet more is known about two women, Charlotte Ashby (c. 1823-1913) and Margaret White (c. 1827-1894), than about many of their contemporaries in the NSW Central Coast of that period.

This paper ‘zooms in’ on a regional history, using fragments of information gleaned from newspapers and police records to build up intimate biographies of Charlotte and Margaret. They grew up separately, and their lives are preserved in the documentary record for very different reasons – one because of her frequent appearances in court, the other because of her ‘irreproachable morals’ and a popular celebration of her dubious status as ‘the last of her tribe’. Given that that our sources of information are so markedly different, the paper will ask questions such as: Can two such individual biographies throw any light on the common experiences of poverty and marginalization that Aboriginal women experienced in the colonial period? Can relatively well documented lives such as theirs be extrapolated to inform a history of all Aboriginal people in their region at this time?