by Bill Holloway Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910) was a notable author, the ‘mother’ of  Australian feminism, active in the Unitarian church, and an untiring social reformer. In 1910 she began her autobiography but died before it was completed. The last chapters were constructed from Spence’s diaries by fellow activist, Jeanne Lewis, and Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography was finally published in 1937. An annotated version was published in 2005, An Autobiography begins with a chapter on Spence’s childhood in Scotland, which she left at age 13, when her lawyer father became destit ..read more

by Whispering Gums A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post’s subject is a short story published in Melbourne’s The Weekly Times on 1 March 1924, by the Victorian born writer, Alice C Tomholt. Alice C Tomholt (1887-1949) was a prolific short-story writer, and some-time poet, who was published primarily by Melbourne’s The Weekly Times from 1909 to around 1936. Prolific she might have been – indeed, I gave up listing her stories that I found via Trove – but information about her is certainly not prolific. The trusty AustLit database doe ..read more

by Bill Holloway In 1991, John Moran titled his collection of four Caroline Chisholm essays, Radical in Bonnet and Shawl, which I think gives an excellent sense of Chisholm’s activism in relation to the establishment of a family-based working class in Australia; and of her progressive views on race. When I first reviewed Mary Hoban’s Caroline Chisholm biography, Fifty-One Pieces of Wedding Cake (1973), some years ago, Prof. Marion Diamond commented: “I found the Caroline Chisholm in 51 Pieces a bit too domesticated for me! Maybe because at my girl’s school, we had 4 ‘houses’ – Chisholm, (Jane ..read more

by Bill Holloway Caroline Chisholm (1808-1877) is one of our more interesting independent women. She married, but only on the condition she remain independent, and her husband ended up working in her cause rather than she in his. By and large, Australia’s iconic Independent Women up to the 1950’s were determinedly single; women like Catherine Helen Spence or Miles Franklin who knew they could not function autonomously while also shouldering the burdens of wifedom and motherhood. Very few had the luxury, as Henry Handel Richardson famously did, of being supported within a childless marriage as ..read more

Blue Mountains poet Minnie L Brackenreg (1858-1936) came to my attention by accident when looking for works published 100 years ago. A fellow Blue Mountains resident, identified only as “Tess”, wrote to the editor of the Blue Mountains Echo in November 1924, offering a companion poem to one of Brackenreg’s which had been published in July earlier that year. I found the original, “Love’s aspirations”; it hadn’t been properly transcribed, and therefore hadn’t come up in my searches. I was keen to find out more about the author who had inspired “Tess’s” tribute. Breckenreg published three volumes ..read more

by Whispering Gums A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post’s subject is a short column published in Adelaide’s The Register on 17 August 1924, by the Victorian born novelist, musician and journalist, Kate Helen Weston. Kate Helen Weston (1863-1929) might have been born in Victoria – in Ballarat to British parents who came to Australia due to the gold rush – but she died in Adelaide. Indeed, she was described by one “L.B.” in The Australian Woman’s Mirror (of 24 February 1925) as “one of the best-known of Adelaide’s feminine inky-wayf ..read more

by Alys Hungerford (1857-1934) Alys Hungerford before 1882 Introduction Alys Hungerford has been described variously as “the blind poetess” and “blind authoress and playwright”. Two sources give us insight into her life. The first is a piece by Lesley Abrahams, published in a family genealogical pamphlet, the HAFS journal (2017); the second is a readable PhD thesis by J Hunt, Cultivating the arts (2001). According to Abrahams, Hungerford was born in July 1857 in Country Cork, Ireland, and in 1877 married Francis John Beamish, a Justice of the Peace and landowner. This marriage ended in divor ..read more

by Whispering Gums A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post’s subject is a short column published in Adelaide’s Saturday Journal on 17 August 1924, by the South Australian born, Marion Simons, under the name Stella Hope. The more we research Australia’s early women writers, the more we become aware of just how many used pseudonyms – sometimes more than one. Marion Simons was one such writer. Using pseudonyms, as we know, was not uncommon for women. Often this was to hide their gender, so they would be published and/or read, or to prot ..read more

by Michelle Scott Tucker There are a surprising number of examples of independent women from the early days of white settlement. Next month we will look at Elizabeth Macarthur, the subject of Michelle’s 2018 biography. Here, Michelle reviews the diary of Anne Drysdale and her ‘extraordinary’ partnership with Caroline Newcombe as farmers near Geelong in the 1840s.’. Are diaries literature? Having briefly gone down that particular Google rabbit hole, I can safely say – I don’t know. Plenty of others purport to know, however, if you need to fill a vacant hour or three. I think diaries are to a f ..read more

by Bill Holloway Over the course of this year I wish to show that the Independent Woman is an important archetype arising from the writing of Australia’s first generation feminists. The image we have of ourselves as Australians, well, the image promoted to this day by politicians and the media – of laconic blokes at home in the bush – first arose out of a deliberate programme by the Sydney Bulletin in the 1890s to prioritise a certain type of writing, typefied by the short stories of Henry Lawson and the ballads of Adam Lindsay Gordon and AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Lawson’s protagonists were worker ..read more