Women In Australian History

When Frances Taylor began a monthly journal, Woman’s World, in December 1921 in Melbourne, which she edited, produced and managed herself, sceptics forecast ‘a speedy death’. Two years was regarded as the most a periodical not backed by an established publisher or media interests could expect to survive. Against the odds, Woman’s World flourished and within four years had 12,000 readers. Several factors contributed to its success, particularly the unique way in which Taylor combined traditional women’s magazine topics of homemaking, mothercraft and fashion with promotion of female independence at a time when a new world of freedom was opening for women. She promoted her vision of independence through articles on women in new fields – for example, building weekenders, travelling to exotic destinations and taking up motoring – and by publicising women in unusual occupations. To this she added her pioneering exploitation of radio broadcasts to publicise her publication and attract readers.

In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brisbane, writing as a profession became increasingly open to women. This phenomenon developed partly in response to a rapidly expanding urban female audience, but in turn it helped to form the tastes, reading habits and social attitudes of new generations of female readers. The prolific and popular poet, Emily Coungeau exemplifies a new, self-consciously cosmopolitan type of woman writer who emerged in Brisbane in the early twentieth century. The English born Coungeau’s life story is of interest on several different levels. Her remaking of herself in Queensland from lady’s companion and parlour maid into successful businesswoman, poet, and patron of the arts demonstrates the transformative possibilities for women of migration to the colonies. Her involvement in commerce and culture over many decades also sheds light on Brisbane life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, Coungeau is of interest because her articulation of an urban, cosmopolitan, female aesthetic in her writing relies heavily on notions of race and culture that are discredited today.

Belinda McKay, Finding Voice: Emily Coungeau and ‘Australia's National Hymn of Progress’, Queensland Review 13.2 (July 2006), 13-33.

It takes a great deal of bravery to be a nurse, even more so to be a war nurse, and the demands on medical personnel are even greater when subject to enemy bombing. When German aircraft struck on the evening of 22 July 1917 it would only have been natural for Sister Derrer and her three companions to seek shelter and wait until danger was over to resume their work. They did not. Instead, they ran to the damaged tents to move their patients to safety. When unable to move some of them, they placed tables and other objects to help protect them. For such bravery, over and beyond the normal call of duty, they were awarded the Military Medal for their “coolness and devotion to duty”. They were the first Australian nurses to be awarded this decoration, which since June 1916 could be granted to women “showing bravery and devotion under fire”, and which only eight women would receive during the whole war.

This thesis analyses a selection of Australian women writers who responded to, and reinscribed, the fictional and cultural trajectories available to the ‘girl’ in the aftermath of Australian Federation in 1901. These women reveal varying degrees of prolificacy and notoriety: they were often renowned during the time at which they were writing, and yet they were still writing within—and against—a masculine, and masculinist Australian tradition. And while some of these women have at certain stages been acknowledged, most of these writers are now nearly forgotten and have been largely overlooked with regard to their feminist aspirations and radical literary outputs. Each of the women that are the focus of this thesis are part of this disharmony in Australian literature and will be analysed through a queer lens and in a rubric pertaining uniquely to feminist scholarship. These writers, all Australian ‘girls’ themselves, use their literary and artistic platforms to interrogate the dismal fates assigned to ‘The Australian Girl’; sharing themes of romance, mobility, and duality. In their lives and literary works these women writers challenged heteronormative assumptions and hegemonic marital heterosexuality in the hope of mobilising the category of the ‘spinster’, and the many classifications of the single, and often child-less, Australian woman. This thesis traces the Australian Girl’s dark path toward maturation, to contend that no fate is more abject than that of fulfilling the promise placed upon her by an emerging nation.