Books by Patricia Clarke
Bold Types: How Australia's First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail
Bold Types: How Australia's First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail, 2022
Women journalists were a challenge to society. They defied gender barriers by working in a stubbo... more Women journalists were a challenge to society. They defied gender barriers by working in a stubbornly male profession. When obstacles were put in their way, they developed new ways of reporting, new styles of writing. They made men in power - military leaders, politicians, media magnates, their own husbands - uncomfortable. And, importantly, they let a new audience of women readers know that the news was for them too.
In Bold Types, Dr Patricia Clarke OAM FAHA, profiles Australia's first women journalists. Together, their stories cover the range of gains made by women from 1860 to the end of the Second World War, and the setbacks they encountered. The earlier trailblazers wrote with quill pens, venturing into muddy battlefields, slums and prisons in their stiff ankle-length dresses. The women who followed in the twentieth century were no less intrepid. Many chafed at their confinement to the women's pages, some for their entire working lives. All were operating in social and legal systems loaded against them.
Great Expectations: Emigrant Governesses in Colonial Australia
Great Expectations: Emigrant Governesses in Colonial Australia, Sep 2020
Great Expectations is the story of a group of intrepid ladies who forged a different path - as go... more Great Expectations is the story of a group of intrepid ladies who forged a different path - as governesses to wild colonial boys and girls on the other side of the world. It also tells a broader story, of emigration, education, class prejudice and the development of Australian society.
Eilean Giblin: A feminist between the wars
Eilean Giblin: A feminist between the wars, Jul 2013
Eilean Giblin arrived in Australia from England in 1919 with a shipload of war brides, almost cer... more Eilean Giblin arrived in Australia from England in 1919 with a shipload of war brides, almost certainly the only woman not wearing a wedding ring; she believed both husband and wife should have rings or neither. She brought with her a commitment to women's rights and social justice developed through the suffrage movement and left-wing social and political circles. During the next three decades, in three Australian cities, she worked to advance her feminist and humanitarian ideals.
In Hobart in the 1920s she campaigned for 'equal citizenship'; she was the first woman appointed to a Tasmanian hospital board; and she represented Tasmania at the 1923 International Woman Suffrage Congress in Rome. In Melbourne in the 1930s she led a committee that achieved the long sought goal of a non-denominational university women's college. And in Canberra during World War II she was one of a small minority of Australians who championed the cause of the enemy aliens, many of them Jewish, deported from Britain on the ship 'Dunera', and she set off on a lone 500 kilometre journey to investigate their internment camp conditions.
Patricia Clarke draws on original records and evidence, such as Giblin's diary kept during World War II - a unique social record and a powerful witness to the immense suffering and futility of war - to portray the courageous public and private life of this unconventional feminist.
With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright (ed. with Meredith McKinney)
With Love & Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, 2006
Judith Wright was one of Australia's most accomplished poets. She was also a passionate environme... more Judith Wright was one of Australia's most accomplished poets. She was also a passionate environmentalist, and activist for Aboriginal rights and a fine and prolific letter writer throughout her long life. Her first surviving letter, written at the age of 10, is vibrant with an early pleasure in language and the intense responsiveness to the natural world that was so central to her sense of being.
The wide range of letters presented in 'With Love and Fury' reminds us of Judith Wright's deep engagement with life, her love of the world (and of friends) and the fine fury that lead her to battle so courageously on the world's behalf - all different facets of the single passion that shaped both her life and her poetry. These letters are sometimes charming, often evocative and continually thought-provoking. Brought together in this volume for the first time, they provide an important memorial to the life of a great Australian.
The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters of Judith Wright and Jack McKinney (ed. with Meredith McKinney)
The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters of Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, 2004
'The Equal Heart and Mind' is an intimate portrait of poet Judith Wright and philosopher Jack McK... more 'The Equal Heart and Mind' is an intimate portrait of poet Judith Wright and philosopher Jack McKinney. Set in Brisbane and at Mt Tamborine, where they lived for almost twenty years, these letters vividly recreate their intertwined lives and also paint an unforgettable picture of postwar Brisbane with its lively cabals of writers, artists and intellectuals.
For decades, Judith Wright kept secret this cache of letters, giving them late in life to her daughter Meredith McKinney. Meredith and Patricia Clarke have edited the letters, interspersing them with poems, a selection of family album photographs and facsimiles of some of the handwritten and typescript letters. Meredith also contributes a special memoir of her parents, and the book concludes with Judith's moving account of Jack's death in 1966.
These letters, poems and commentaries - along with the illustrations - together make an exquisite addition to the field of Australian literary biography.
Steps to Federation: Lectures Marking the Centenary of Federation (ed.)
Steps to Federation: Lectures Marking the Centenary of Federation, 2001
This outstanding collection began in 1989 when the Canberra and District Historical Society initi... more This outstanding collection began in 1989 when the Canberra and District Historical Society initiated a series of lectures by distinguished Australians on the major events leading to the federation of the Australian colonies as the Commonwealth of Australia.
The first lecture in 1989 commemorated the centenary of Sir Henry Parkes' speech at Tenterfield. The series continued through the 1990s, commemorating the various conventions and referendums. It culminated in July 2000 with the commemoration of the centenary of the passing of the Constitution Bill by the British Houses of Parliament.
Lectures include two former governors-general and lawyers, Sir Zelman Cowan and Sir Ninian Stephen; a former state premier, John Bannon; historians, Professor A. G. L. Shaw, Professor Stuart Macintyre, Dr Helen Irving and Dr Kay Saunders; and political scientist, Professor John Warhurst.
Half a Lifetime, by Judith Wright, ed. Patricia Clarke
Half a Lifetime, 1999
In this luminous memoir, Judith Wright takes the reader on an intimate journey into the first hal... more In this luminous memoir, Judith Wright takes the reader on an intimate journey into the first half of her life. She tells how her stern forebears became prominent pastoralists in northern New South Wales, and describes with stunning clarity the landscapes she grew up in.
She remembers her first encounters with words and the emergence of her consciousness of self: 'This is where, as well as I can remember, "I" began.' She movingly describes her mother's death. And she recounts her resolution to escape from this world she loved in order to be free.
During the thirties Wright studied at Sydney University and travelled in Europe. In Brisbane during the war she met Jack McKinney, a philosopher who became her lover, the father of her daughter Meredith, and her intellectual companion in her commitment to the environment, the rights of Aboriginal people, and the possibility of leading a just and responsible life.
'Half a Lifetime' includes a number of Wright's best-loved poems and many never before published photographs. Sensuous, honest and intelligent, this is an unforgettable autobiography.
Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist
Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist, 1999
Rosa Praed (1851-1935) was a prolific author and 'a most unusual woman'. Born into frontier Queen... more Rosa Praed (1851-1935) was a prolific author and 'a most unusual woman'. Born into frontier Queensland at a time when settlers lived in isolation, afraid of Aboriginal attacks, she was to spend her adult life in the literary, artistic and political circles of London. As a young woman, moving in the squattocracy circles of Brisbane, and later in London, as a member of Oscar Wilde's bohemia, Rosa kept notes of the characters and conversations around her. Her forty-five books show evidence of her keen and intelligent observation.
While Rosa's most successful works were set in Australia, her literary subjects were varied, and reflect many aspects of her life - her interest in women's rights; her own unhappy marriage; and, of course, her search for spiritual meaning. On this search she gathered up Aboriginal dreaming, Catholicism, astrology, spiritual mediums, the supernatural and reincarnation - and finally discovered her twin soul.
Rosa's story is a rich and dramatic one, full of psychological interest. In 'Rosa! Rosa!', Patricia Clarke shows how she managed her amazing output in the midst of family problems, marital woes, illness more frequent with the years, and a constant changing of 'homes'.
With this brilliant analysis of Praed's life, Patricia Clarke offers a new and original evaluation of her place in the history of Australian women.
Tasma's Diaries: the diaries of Jessie Couvreur with another by her young sister Edith Huybers
Tasma's diaries: the diaries of Jessie Couvreur with another by her young sister Edith Huybers, 1995
The Tasma Diaries consist of three diaries, two by Jessie Couvreur the novelist who wrote under t... more The Tasma Diaries consist of three diaries, two by Jessie Couvreur the novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Tasma, and a third diary by Jessie's young sister Edith Huybers. The first diary is called 'The Windward Diary' as their mother took Jessie and the other children to Europe on the ship 'Windward', for their cultural education. The sometimes exciting voyage around Cape Horn in that small sailing ship is described, often day by day. Edith's diary recounts some of the family activity in Brussels and Paris and the cultural events that occupied much of their time. Jessie's final diary gives and account of her life in Brussels after her second marriage to Auguste Couvreur. This is a period of her greatest creative activity and included novels such as 'Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill'. Her other writings and her lectures on Australia are also recorded in this diary together with Jessie's social life and her travels including a fascinating visit to Greece.
Tasma: Jessie Couvreur
Jessie Couvreur was born Jessie Huybers in England in 1848 and was brought to Tasmania when the family emigrated in the early 1850s. All her childhood was spent in Hobart and she moved to Victoria when she married at the age of eighteen. Her writing career soon followed with small pieces in the Victorian newspapers and periodicals. Her mother took her to Europe leaving the husband behind. Her writing career and a second marriage to place in Europe.
Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur
Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur, 1994
In the second half of the nineteenth century Tasma - the Australian writer, lecturer and foreign ... more In the second half of the nineteenth century Tasma - the Australian writer, lecturer and foreign correspondent - was a famous woman. When her first novel 'Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill' was published in London in 1889 it was the 'book of the season' and was reprinted many times. She was 'surpassed by few British novelists', the 'London Times' said.
Tasma's work as a lecturer and a foreign correspondent for the 'London Times' challenged the perception of nineteenth century women being solely domestic creatures. In her personal life, Tasma also defied all the stereotypes by separating from and, in 1883, divorcing her first husband, Victorian farmer Charles Fraser. Then, for six years before her second marriage to the Belgian statesman and journalist Auguste Couvreur, she lived an independent life in Paris earning her own living and becoming involved in the radical issues of the day.
Tasma lived the life of a 'New Woman', the independent woman then beginning to appear both in real life and fiction, one who refused to conform to a traditional female role and who questioned conventional ideas on marriage.
Yet, like other nineteenth century Australian women writers, Tasma has been relegated to an obscure place in literary history. Her great achievements, particularly her inspired portrayal of life among the nouveau riche in post-Gold Rush Melbourne in her novel 'Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill', have been noted only briefly.
In this, the first biography of this remarkable woman, Patricia Clarke tells Tasma's story against an international background beginning with her early life in Hobart and ending with her death in Brussels. Using much new material discovered in London, Brussels, and Paris as well as in Hobart and Melbourne, Tasma's life and her writing are revealed in this fascinating book.
Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries 1788-1840 (with Dale Spender)
Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries 1788-1840, 1992
Women did not always travel willingly to colonial Australia and whether they wanted to or not, th... more Women did not always travel willingly to colonial Australia and whether they wanted to or not, they had to work. Isolated from family and friends, confronted with difficulties and dangers, life for them was often hard and painful. But there were always letters and journals to turn to.
Despite the many demands they had to meet, women made the time to write lengthy letters to those ‘back home’. They wrote to keep in touch, to place orders for goods they required, and to report on their new lives in a new land. Many of their narratives were adventure stories in which they were the stars.
But they also wrote for themselves. They reflected on their roles and the new identities they forged in their new environment. Even hard work could have its compensations. Many colonial women found a form of liberation in having their work needed and valued.
'Life Lines' reveals the comforts and the companionship that diaries and letters provided, as well as detailing some of the pressures and pains of the early years of white migration, and some of the joys of women’s lives. Here, in women’s own words, the nature and extent of their contribution to white Australian history unfolds.
Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson: novelist, journalist, naturalist.
Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson: novelist, journalist, naturalist., 1990
This is the first biography of Louisa Atkinson who, during her short life in the mid nineteenth c... more This is the first biography of Louisa Atkinson who, during her short life in the mid nineteenth century, became the first Australian-born woman novelist, a noted naturalist and one of the country’s earliest women journalists.
Louisa Atkinson was born at Olbury in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Although born into a land-owning family with talented parents (both authors), her childhood after her father’s death was spent in a disturbed household dominated by a violent alcoholic stepfather. During her lifetime she witnessed the end of the convict era and the start of the mass arrival of free settlers, the enormous social changes of the gold rushes and the effects of the free selection land acts.
The novels written by Louisa Atkinson are among the earliest works to draw upon the lives of ordinary men and women who were turning a frontier into a settled society. When she moved to Kurrajong Heights she was inspired by the plants, animals and birds and the beauty of the Blue Mountains to begin a long-running series of nature columns called ‘A Voice from the Country’ for the Sydney Morning Herald. She became a renowned writer on natural science, the forerunner of today’s writers on the environment. Her botanical finds were praised by Baron von Mueller and other botanists and several plants were named in her honour.
Louisa Atkinson’s appealing character and her achievements in writing and in science in an age when the usual role of women was entirely domestic, are depicted against a rich social mosaic of nineteenth-century Australia. Her life was peopled by fascinating and intriguing characters including powerful landowners, geologists, botanists and explorers, one of whom became her husband in a marriage that was tragically curtailed.
'Pioneer Writer' will appeal to historians and readers interested in the characters who pioneered Australia and the complex social fabric they created.
Patricia Clarke is a journalist who has written numerous books which explore the often hidden role of women in Australia in the last century. Her other works include 'The Governesses', 'A Colonial Woman' and 'Pen Portraits'.
Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia
Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia, 1988
'Pen Portraits' tells the story of the achievements of Australia's earliest women writers.
Despi... more 'Pen Portraits' tells the story of the achievements of Australia's earliest women writers.
Despite being confined to a life within the home in a frontier society, some talented (and very determined) women in colonial Australia carved out careers as writers. Among them were writers of popular serials, whose latest instalments were as eagerly awaited as the latest episode is in today's TV 'soapies'; writers of newspaper features and columns; even a foreign correspondent.
But it was not until the 1880s that a very few won full-time positions as journalists. For some this was the exciting storming of an all-male preserve, for most it meant the society pages - the 'deadly dreary ruck of long dress reports'.
Nevertheless, there was a handful of women who ran the new women's magazines, and in these magazines women writers carried on the fight for the vote, for the right to an education, for freedom to work and freedom from unhappy marriages.
'Pen Portraits' presents these women's worlds, their brave choices and their remarkable lives. Lavishly illustrated, 'Pen Portraits' pays belated tribute to their contribution to colonial life and letters.
Patricia Clarke, a journalist for many years and the author of 'The Governesses' and 'A Colonial Woman', has uncovered the stories of almost a hundred women, from the first woman to publish in Australia to those whose work gained international acclaim; from the writers of moral tales to those whose 'daring' copy brought a raffish touch to the newspapers of the day; from crusading reformers to society ladies who wrote the social notes.
A Colonial Woman: The life and times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857
A Colonial Woman: The life and times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857, 1986
Mary Braidwood Mowle arrived in Sydney in 1836 at the age of nine aboard a convict ship on which ... more Mary Braidwood Mowle arrived in Sydney in 1836 at the age of nine aboard a convict ship on which her father Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson was Surgeon Superintendent. She grew up as a privileged child on an estate granted to her father at Braidwood in south-eastern New South Wales where he was known as the 'laird'.
Her fortunes changed. Orphaned and penniless at 16, she married at 17 and went to live in a bark hut in the Australian Alps. Later she moved to a farm on the Limestone Plains (on the site of Parliament House, Canberra). Here and later at Eden where her husband became Collector of Customs she recorded in her diary the life of a woman in those difficult days, when childbirth was so often life-threatening, childhood illness and death common, and the Australian colonies were wracked by drought and depression and then the upheaval of the discovery of gold.
Mary Mowle's accounts offer a rich, captivating insight into life in mid-nineteenth century Australia. Through her diaries and Patricia Clarke's painstaking research the people of the infant colony come to life.
From the pages of 'A Colonial Woman' emerges an authentic picture, seldom glimpsed before, of how families and particularly women and children lived in early Australia.
'A Colonial Woman' is a goldmine for local historians and those researching family history in early and mid-nineteenth century Australia.
In addition to well-known landowning families such as the Murrays of Yarralumla, the Campbells of Duntroon, the Ryries and Gordons of Braidwood, the Kings and Powells of Bungendore, the Walkers, Mannings and Archers of Twofold Bay, many others - convicts and their descendants, free settlers and government officials - appear in its pages.
At Twofold Bay there are the sailors, whalers and traders as well as squatting families and settlers from Bombala, Cooma and all over the southern Monaro and northern Victoria who passed through the port of Eden. They all come under the eye of Mary Braidwood Mowle in her diary.
All these references are supplemented and explained in the author's notes and they can be easily reached through a comprehensive index.
The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882
The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882, 1985
In the second part of the nineteenth century, a number of women, sponsored by the Female Middle C... more In the second part of the nineteenth century, a number of women, sponsored by the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, left Britain to seek a better life in the colonies. Unmarried and unemployed, they were among the many educated genteel women who, in an overcrowded market in Victorian England, were endeavouring to find work as governesses, then one of the few occupations open to them.
In order to travel to those countries they had been led to believe could provide their ‘El Dorado’, the governesses borrowed money for their fares from the Society. In letters back to the Society when repaying their loans, these women reported on life as they saw it in the colonies during the years 1862-82.
On arrival, and already burdened by debt, the governesses found the demand for their skills had been vastly overrated. They tell of the desolation of being without work in a strange country; of the satisfaction in finding a secure job; of the problems of paying back a loan from a meagre salary; of their adjustments to strange and often hostile environments; and of their loneliness on entering unfamiliar households. Most importantly, they give fresh and disarming views on colonials and colonial society, touching on the lives of some of the pioneer families in such places as the Hunter Valley, the Wimmera and the Riverina.
Although the book mainly is concerned with the governesses who came to Australia, there are chapters on those who went to New Zealand and South Africa, and also a few who went further afield, to the United States, India and, most unlikely of all, one who went to Russia, where she found herself almost penniless in Czarist St Petersburg.
By far the most fascinating aspect of the book is the research undertaken to discover what happened to the governesses after their letters to the Society ceased. The smallest clues have been followed in an effort to track their movements and their fate. Many disappeared without trace; some entered the teaching profession, often conducting their own schools; others married and settled into colonial life. A few died young, while some returned home, unable to adapt to a new strange life. But all had the courage to venture far – and their letters tell their story.
Articles by Patricia Clarke
Australian Journal of Biography and History, 2024
This article details the history of Iris Dexter’s quest for a divorce to its ironic conclusion in... more This article details the history of Iris Dexter’s quest for a divorce to its ironic conclusion in 1950. Her story is told in the context of changing interpretations of the law on constructive desertion. The focus of the article is the life of Iris Dexter and the devastating effect of her abusive marriage and subsequent failure to get a divorce under the divorce law and its interpretation in New South Wales in the 1930s. It draws attention to a case with similarities to Iris’s that began in Victoria 20 years later and culminated in an appeal to the British House of Lords where there was a very different outcome.
Queensland History Journal, May 2023
The Queensland Government welcomed Flora Shaw, a journalist on assignment from The Times of Londo... more The Queensland Government welcomed Flora Shaw, a journalist on assignment from The Times of London, when she arrived in Brisbane on the first leg of her tour of the Australian colonies in 1892. The Premier, Sir Samuel Griffith, believed what she wrote had the potential to increase British migration and investment, both vital to the economy during the 1890s depression.
Canberra Historical Journal, Mar 2022
A few days before the Duke of York opened the Provisional Parliament House in Canberra on 9 May 1... more A few days before the Duke of York opened the Provisional Parliament House in Canberra on 9 May 1927, a Victorian journalist, Frances Taylor, set out from Melbourne in her Austin A7 car, a make popularly known as the 'Baby Austin', to write about the historic event for the monthly periodical, Woman's World.
The French Australian Review, Dec 2021
When Prussian forces besieged Paris in 1870 and a revolutionary Commune ruled the city the follow... more When Prussian forces besieged Paris in 1870 and a revolutionary Commune ruled the city the following year, two women journalists with long associations with the Australian press were on the spot to report these momentous events. Anna Blackwell's dispatch as she fled Paris in August 1870 was the most dramatic of the many hundreds that she sent during just over thirty years representing the Sydney Morning Herald in France. The following year Frances Cashel Hoey wrote an eye-witness account of life in Paris during the rule of the short-lived Marxist Commune of Paris that made the city the centre of world interest.
ISAA Review, Aug 2021
This is a story of the impact of the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany on the life of ... more This is a story of the impact of the persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany on the life of a remarkable woman journalist, and of how this played out in a private tragedy that occurred in the rugged south-west of Tasmania.
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Books by Patricia Clarke
In Bold Types, Dr Patricia Clarke OAM FAHA, profiles Australia's first women journalists. Together, their stories cover the range of gains made by women from 1860 to the end of the Second World War, and the setbacks they encountered. The earlier trailblazers wrote with quill pens, venturing into muddy battlefields, slums and prisons in their stiff ankle-length dresses. The women who followed in the twentieth century were no less intrepid. Many chafed at their confinement to the women's pages, some for their entire working lives. All were operating in social and legal systems loaded against them.
In Hobart in the 1920s she campaigned for 'equal citizenship'; she was the first woman appointed to a Tasmanian hospital board; and she represented Tasmania at the 1923 International Woman Suffrage Congress in Rome. In Melbourne in the 1930s she led a committee that achieved the long sought goal of a non-denominational university women's college. And in Canberra during World War II she was one of a small minority of Australians who championed the cause of the enemy aliens, many of them Jewish, deported from Britain on the ship 'Dunera', and she set off on a lone 500 kilometre journey to investigate their internment camp conditions.
Patricia Clarke draws on original records and evidence, such as Giblin's diary kept during World War II - a unique social record and a powerful witness to the immense suffering and futility of war - to portray the courageous public and private life of this unconventional feminist.
The wide range of letters presented in 'With Love and Fury' reminds us of Judith Wright's deep engagement with life, her love of the world (and of friends) and the fine fury that lead her to battle so courageously on the world's behalf - all different facets of the single passion that shaped both her life and her poetry. These letters are sometimes charming, often evocative and continually thought-provoking. Brought together in this volume for the first time, they provide an important memorial to the life of a great Australian.
For decades, Judith Wright kept secret this cache of letters, giving them late in life to her daughter Meredith McKinney. Meredith and Patricia Clarke have edited the letters, interspersing them with poems, a selection of family album photographs and facsimiles of some of the handwritten and typescript letters. Meredith also contributes a special memoir of her parents, and the book concludes with Judith's moving account of Jack's death in 1966.
These letters, poems and commentaries - along with the illustrations - together make an exquisite addition to the field of Australian literary biography.
The first lecture in 1989 commemorated the centenary of Sir Henry Parkes' speech at Tenterfield. The series continued through the 1990s, commemorating the various conventions and referendums. It culminated in July 2000 with the commemoration of the centenary of the passing of the Constitution Bill by the British Houses of Parliament.
Lectures include two former governors-general and lawyers, Sir Zelman Cowan and Sir Ninian Stephen; a former state premier, John Bannon; historians, Professor A. G. L. Shaw, Professor Stuart Macintyre, Dr Helen Irving and Dr Kay Saunders; and political scientist, Professor John Warhurst.
She remembers her first encounters with words and the emergence of her consciousness of self: 'This is where, as well as I can remember, "I" began.' She movingly describes her mother's death. And she recounts her resolution to escape from this world she loved in order to be free.
During the thirties Wright studied at Sydney University and travelled in Europe. In Brisbane during the war she met Jack McKinney, a philosopher who became her lover, the father of her daughter Meredith, and her intellectual companion in her commitment to the environment, the rights of Aboriginal people, and the possibility of leading a just and responsible life.
'Half a Lifetime' includes a number of Wright's best-loved poems and many never before published photographs. Sensuous, honest and intelligent, this is an unforgettable autobiography.
While Rosa's most successful works were set in Australia, her literary subjects were varied, and reflect many aspects of her life - her interest in women's rights; her own unhappy marriage; and, of course, her search for spiritual meaning. On this search she gathered up Aboriginal dreaming, Catholicism, astrology, spiritual mediums, the supernatural and reincarnation - and finally discovered her twin soul.
Rosa's story is a rich and dramatic one, full of psychological interest. In 'Rosa! Rosa!', Patricia Clarke shows how she managed her amazing output in the midst of family problems, marital woes, illness more frequent with the years, and a constant changing of 'homes'.
With this brilliant analysis of Praed's life, Patricia Clarke offers a new and original evaluation of her place in the history of Australian women.
Tasma: Jessie Couvreur
Jessie Couvreur was born Jessie Huybers in England in 1848 and was brought to Tasmania when the family emigrated in the early 1850s. All her childhood was spent in Hobart and she moved to Victoria when she married at the age of eighteen. Her writing career soon followed with small pieces in the Victorian newspapers and periodicals. Her mother took her to Europe leaving the husband behind. Her writing career and a second marriage to place in Europe.
Tasma's work as a lecturer and a foreign correspondent for the 'London Times' challenged the perception of nineteenth century women being solely domestic creatures. In her personal life, Tasma also defied all the stereotypes by separating from and, in 1883, divorcing her first husband, Victorian farmer Charles Fraser. Then, for six years before her second marriage to the Belgian statesman and journalist Auguste Couvreur, she lived an independent life in Paris earning her own living and becoming involved in the radical issues of the day.
Tasma lived the life of a 'New Woman', the independent woman then beginning to appear both in real life and fiction, one who refused to conform to a traditional female role and who questioned conventional ideas on marriage.
Yet, like other nineteenth century Australian women writers, Tasma has been relegated to an obscure place in literary history. Her great achievements, particularly her inspired portrayal of life among the nouveau riche in post-Gold Rush Melbourne in her novel 'Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill', have been noted only briefly.
In this, the first biography of this remarkable woman, Patricia Clarke tells Tasma's story against an international background beginning with her early life in Hobart and ending with her death in Brussels. Using much new material discovered in London, Brussels, and Paris as well as in Hobart and Melbourne, Tasma's life and her writing are revealed in this fascinating book.
Despite the many demands they had to meet, women made the time to write lengthy letters to those ‘back home’. They wrote to keep in touch, to place orders for goods they required, and to report on their new lives in a new land. Many of their narratives were adventure stories in which they were the stars.
But they also wrote for themselves. They reflected on their roles and the new identities they forged in their new environment. Even hard work could have its compensations. Many colonial women found a form of liberation in having their work needed and valued.
'Life Lines' reveals the comforts and the companionship that diaries and letters provided, as well as detailing some of the pressures and pains of the early years of white migration, and some of the joys of women’s lives. Here, in women’s own words, the nature and extent of their contribution to white Australian history unfolds.
Louisa Atkinson was born at Olbury in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Although born into a land-owning family with talented parents (both authors), her childhood after her father’s death was spent in a disturbed household dominated by a violent alcoholic stepfather. During her lifetime she witnessed the end of the convict era and the start of the mass arrival of free settlers, the enormous social changes of the gold rushes and the effects of the free selection land acts.
The novels written by Louisa Atkinson are among the earliest works to draw upon the lives of ordinary men and women who were turning a frontier into a settled society. When she moved to Kurrajong Heights she was inspired by the plants, animals and birds and the beauty of the Blue Mountains to begin a long-running series of nature columns called ‘A Voice from the Country’ for the Sydney Morning Herald. She became a renowned writer on natural science, the forerunner of today’s writers on the environment. Her botanical finds were praised by Baron von Mueller and other botanists and several plants were named in her honour.
Louisa Atkinson’s appealing character and her achievements in writing and in science in an age when the usual role of women was entirely domestic, are depicted against a rich social mosaic of nineteenth-century Australia. Her life was peopled by fascinating and intriguing characters including powerful landowners, geologists, botanists and explorers, one of whom became her husband in a marriage that was tragically curtailed.
'Pioneer Writer' will appeal to historians and readers interested in the characters who pioneered Australia and the complex social fabric they created.
Patricia Clarke is a journalist who has written numerous books which explore the often hidden role of women in Australia in the last century. Her other works include 'The Governesses', 'A Colonial Woman' and 'Pen Portraits'.
Despite being confined to a life within the home in a frontier society, some talented (and very determined) women in colonial Australia carved out careers as writers. Among them were writers of popular serials, whose latest instalments were as eagerly awaited as the latest episode is in today's TV 'soapies'; writers of newspaper features and columns; even a foreign correspondent.
But it was not until the 1880s that a very few won full-time positions as journalists. For some this was the exciting storming of an all-male preserve, for most it meant the society pages - the 'deadly dreary ruck of long dress reports'.
Nevertheless, there was a handful of women who ran the new women's magazines, and in these magazines women writers carried on the fight for the vote, for the right to an education, for freedom to work and freedom from unhappy marriages.
'Pen Portraits' presents these women's worlds, their brave choices and their remarkable lives. Lavishly illustrated, 'Pen Portraits' pays belated tribute to their contribution to colonial life and letters.
Patricia Clarke, a journalist for many years and the author of 'The Governesses' and 'A Colonial Woman', has uncovered the stories of almost a hundred women, from the first woman to publish in Australia to those whose work gained international acclaim; from the writers of moral tales to those whose 'daring' copy brought a raffish touch to the newspapers of the day; from crusading reformers to society ladies who wrote the social notes.
Her fortunes changed. Orphaned and penniless at 16, she married at 17 and went to live in a bark hut in the Australian Alps. Later she moved to a farm on the Limestone Plains (on the site of Parliament House, Canberra). Here and later at Eden where her husband became Collector of Customs she recorded in her diary the life of a woman in those difficult days, when childbirth was so often life-threatening, childhood illness and death common, and the Australian colonies were wracked by drought and depression and then the upheaval of the discovery of gold.
Mary Mowle's accounts offer a rich, captivating insight into life in mid-nineteenth century Australia. Through her diaries and Patricia Clarke's painstaking research the people of the infant colony come to life.
From the pages of 'A Colonial Woman' emerges an authentic picture, seldom glimpsed before, of how families and particularly women and children lived in early Australia.
'A Colonial Woman' is a goldmine for local historians and those researching family history in early and mid-nineteenth century Australia.
In addition to well-known landowning families such as the Murrays of Yarralumla, the Campbells of Duntroon, the Ryries and Gordons of Braidwood, the Kings and Powells of Bungendore, the Walkers, Mannings and Archers of Twofold Bay, many others - convicts and their descendants, free settlers and government officials - appear in its pages.
At Twofold Bay there are the sailors, whalers and traders as well as squatting families and settlers from Bombala, Cooma and all over the southern Monaro and northern Victoria who passed through the port of Eden. They all come under the eye of Mary Braidwood Mowle in her diary.
All these references are supplemented and explained in the author's notes and they can be easily reached through a comprehensive index.
In order to travel to those countries they had been led to believe could provide their ‘El Dorado’, the governesses borrowed money for their fares from the Society. In letters back to the Society when repaying their loans, these women reported on life as they saw it in the colonies during the years 1862-82.
On arrival, and already burdened by debt, the governesses found the demand for their skills had been vastly overrated. They tell of the desolation of being without work in a strange country; of the satisfaction in finding a secure job; of the problems of paying back a loan from a meagre salary; of their adjustments to strange and often hostile environments; and of their loneliness on entering unfamiliar households. Most importantly, they give fresh and disarming views on colonials and colonial society, touching on the lives of some of the pioneer families in such places as the Hunter Valley, the Wimmera and the Riverina.
Although the book mainly is concerned with the governesses who came to Australia, there are chapters on those who went to New Zealand and South Africa, and also a few who went further afield, to the United States, India and, most unlikely of all, one who went to Russia, where she found herself almost penniless in Czarist St Petersburg.
By far the most fascinating aspect of the book is the research undertaken to discover what happened to the governesses after their letters to the Society ceased. The smallest clues have been followed in an effort to track their movements and their fate. Many disappeared without trace; some entered the teaching profession, often conducting their own schools; others married and settled into colonial life. A few died young, while some returned home, unable to adapt to a new strange life. But all had the courage to venture far – and their letters tell their story.
Articles by Patricia Clarke