Barbara Lemon: 

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name is Barbara Lemon and I am now audible, hopefully. Director of Curatorial and Collection research here. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the second event in our She Shapes History at the National Library series. The library sits on the beautiful lands of the Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples. 

 I acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and pay my respects to elders, past and present. We recognise that this continent's first historians, storytellers and knowledge keepers have been sharing and safeguarding history here for tens of thousands of years. And as curator of oral history in particular, I'm continually moved by the recordings we hold, the oral testimony, the songs, the stories told and retold over generations, not only from Indigenous Australian communities, of course, but from hundreds of diaspora communities representing cultures all over the world. 

Right now, we're working very closely with Pacific diasporas across Australia, and it's a great privilege to be custodian of this material. Thank you all for being here. It's wonderful to see such a strong turnout for what will surely be another lively, enriching and hopefully provocative conversation. No pressure, Sita. This whole four year series is built around a simple but powerful question: 

Where are the women in the story of Australia? Our partnership with Sita Sargeant and She Shapes History, brings to light some of the remarkable women whose lives, work, struggles and achievements have helped to shape our communities, our institutions and even our national identity, often in ways that have gone unrecognised. I think one of the extraordinary things about libraries and archives is that they allow us to reinterpret our own documentary heritage over and over again. Documents that were once created to judge, label or silence women can now help us to recover their experiences, their identities, their humanity. 

Today, we're turning our attention to the tried and tested proposition that well-behaved women rarely make history. Looking at women who came to the attention of the law or to the attention of the public via newspaper headlines, and the women whose stories survive in archives that were never intended to celebrate them. Leading the conversation is Sita Sargeant, founder and CEO of She Shapes History. 

Author, social entrepreneur and one of Australia's leading advocates today for making women's history more accessible and engaging, building on the efforts of so many over the years. Very unfortunately, one of our panelists has had to withdraw at the last minute. That's Dr Esme Louise James, who did have to go into hospital last night. She's still there. She's okay, but she sends her sincere apologies. 

She's very, very sorry to miss the conversation and we are equally sorry that she has to, but for very good reason and we wish her a speedy recovery. So joining Sita today is Associate Professor Leigh Straw and Zoe Smith, both of whom have worked in their chosen fields to find history's hidden women and give them back their voices. Please join me in a very warm welcome for Sita Sargeant. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Awesome. Thank you, Barbara, for a really lovely introduction. Hi everyone, I'm Sita the CEO and founder of She Shapes History. Whether it's your kind of first time being here or you've joined us before at one of these events, thank you and welcome. I would also love to start by acknowledging that we're meeting today on the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. 

One of the things that I always like to say is that it's such an immense and a great privilege to be able to talk about history and share women's stories on a land where oral storytelling has been the primary form of sharing art, history, literature and culture for tens of thousands of years. So I wanted to start by paying a really deep and sincere respect to Aboriginal elders past, present and emerging and extend that to any First Nations people who are joining us today. 

So this idea that well-behaved women rarely make history. I think that all of us have probably heard some variation of this line at some point. It's kind of daring us to, you know, live this really adventurous in trouble making life. And but when the American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich kind of penned those now really infamous words in 1976, it was never actually intended to be this dare. 

The rarely cited second half of the sentence goes “...against Antinomians...”, which is people who believe, I had to look it up too, it's people who believe that faith in God's grace frees Christians from the obligation to obey moral, religious, or social laws. “...and witches, these pious matrons had little chance at all.” So she'd kind of found that the women who followed the rules didn't get documented. 

It was the ones who broke them who actually ended up in the history books. And 50 years on, I think this is still such an accurate statement. Almost kind of every object that we're going to explore today exists because someone was watching a woman who wasn't behaving. A police officer, a court reporter, a ship surgeon, a newspaper editor (who knew her scandal would sell) these records, they were made to punish, to correct, or just to gawk. And yet they’re also how so many of these women end up surviving and entering into the historical record. And I have thought a lot about how I wanted to structure this event. I had lots of great conversations, actually. Can we get a hands up who came to the first one? 

Lots of people, which is wonderful. But lots of people were first time, which is great. I had lots of really great conversations with people afterwards about, like what they really loved about it. And one of the things that kind of people said, and that stayed with me, was that they loved really diving into the collection in a deeper way. 

So that's what we're going to be doing. The NLA has pulled together this incredible reading list, as they did last time, and we're going to kind of use that as a jumping off point to have a really interesting conversation about how women have made their way into history by breaking the rules. So we're going to do this in kind of four parts. 

We're going to look at who the state was watching, who the papers were watching, and then look at how women kind of wrote themselves into history. And then we're going to ask and turn to who's holding the pen now, and how is each of us going to be remembered in the next 100 years, in 100 years? But before we bring anyone else in, I want to start with you. 

I am going to make everyone to turn and talk on a Saturday morning. I would love if we're going to spend two minutes and then I'm going to have to do like, a loud [tap] to get your attention again. So don't go really off track. But I would love if you could turn to the person next to you and share one thing I would love. And this is my question. What does the government know about you? But you didn't really just hand over. 

This could be a parking fine. Something I have a lot of. It could be your Medicare record. It could be, you know, if you've been in court for something. But I would really love for you to have a think about when have you brushed up against the government and it's been recorded. And then to share that with someone. 

Okay. Awesome. And we're going to come back. I feel like you could have gone on for a while, but. And now I think I also got the best answer in the front row. We have the wonderful Elizabeth Reid here with us, and she answered her ASIO interviews, so, which I think is hard to beat. 

I won't make people put their hand up to say who they who has an ASIO file today, but I kind of then just want you to like, reflect for yourself. How do you think that is going to be interpreted in 100 years, like what story a people are going to tell about you based on your interactions with the government? 

 Because I know for myself that's been quite a confronting question to be sitting with because, you know, the way, like I know all the context around something. I know the context around a parking fine. I know the context around, you know, all of those things. But someone who's interacting with me for the first time in 100 years, through just the documents and the moments where I've interacted with the government, wouldn't have that. 

So how do then we as historians kind of construct that and tell those stories and do it in a way that's kind of, I think, ethical. So that's kind of the big idea that I think I want to really dive into. And I just want you to sit with as we're going and I think kind of engaging with these stories and these women with like, a lot of grace that we would want for ourselves in a hundred years when someone is looking at our ASIO file. 

So I won't be doing this alone. You won't be getting kind of me monologuing up here for two hours. And while Esmé really, sadly won't be joining us, I will be joined by two incredible researchers. Dr Zoe Smith, who is this award winning historian whose work is really focused on kind of excavating and bringing out the centuries old history of domestic violence in Australia. 

And the kind of feminist writers who were naming it more than a century before, we had the kind of today's language for it, which, I don't know, I just find a kind of such a remarkable topic. And I'm looking forward to her book when it comes out. She was also the library's 2024 Seymour Scholar. And then the other person I'll be joined by is Associate Professor Leigh straw, who is an internationally recognised historian, educator, and award winning author who first found stories that she kind of knew nothing about and in police gazettes in back in 2010, and has since written about notorious women like Kate Leigh and Dulcie Markham and not so notorious women like Lillian Armfield, Australia's first female detective. So I would love if you could join me in welcoming them to the stage. 

So I'm not going to start by asking you how the government has interacted with you over the years, but instead Laurel's line has ended up on mugs, t shirts, bumper stickers. Who is one of the most badly behaved women that you've ever met in the archive? 

Leigh Straw: 

Will you kick it off? Yeah, yeah. Do you go? No. You go.  

Sita Sargeant: 

We’re off to a great start!  

Leigh Straw: 

I'll go first. Yours is better. There's a lot of badly behaved women in the archives, and it's wonderful. But there's one story that really resonated with me because she's portrayed as a really bad woman in Western Australia in the early 20th century, and her name is Mary Ann Sweetman. 

Now, she was originally Mary Ann Haynes before she married. And if you believe what's just in the record, she was drunken on the streets. She would stop cricket games. Imagine a woman stopping a cricket game! She was, you know, she would push police officers. She was drunk in park. She was using obscene language. She was quite offensive. 

And she was very well known about the streets of Perth and Fremantle because she was very public and very out there with her drunkenness and disorderliness. But the very important thing about Mary Ann’s stories, you've got all that on record as a historian. When you pull it back and you go, who was Mary Ann Haynes? Well, at the age of 17, when she was working in her parents’ shop in Wellington Street in Perth, she heard her mother let out a huge scream from the back of the, the, the shop and and the house. 

And she when she ran to the back of the house, her father was standing there with a hammer in his hand, and her mother had died of immediately horrific injuries. She saw that at 17. And she had to then go through her father's execution and then try and bring up her two younger brothers. So the historian goes, let's start here with a young Mary Ann Haines, and then let's tell that story as we get to the early 20th century. So we’re just getting off to a happy start. 

Zoe Smith: Yes, my most badly behaved woman might actually sort of come as a surprise, and that it's Louisa Lawson who perhaps wouldn't think of in that context today. She's sort of known as sort of the mother of womanhood suffrage in Australia and a really radical feminist. But she was actually so radical at the time that she was sort of seen as subversive and nonconformist by the men and some of the women around her. 

And I think they sort of saw her as actually quite badly behaved in what she was doing to publicise women's experiences of domestic violence, talk really openly about things like euthanasia and women's lack of voting rights and property rights under coverture. I mean, in her personal life, she took the really bold step to informally separate and leave her abusive husband taking the children with her, setting up the first feminist journal within Australia. 

Within itself, I think is quite bold. And we see even some of the pushback as well, in that there was immense boycotts from the typists unions, all of these men who were really unhappy with the fact that she chose to just hire women, which like, God forbid, you try and do that in the 19th century. She also fought in court to have her inventions recognised when men tried to steal patents from her. 

And she was also even considered too outspoken by some of her fellow women. And she actually had disputes with suffragists like Rose Scott and Mary Windeyer. And she left the Womanhood Suffrage League because they said she was too outspoken or, I guess, badly behaved about things like domestic violence. And they thought that her lower class background was an issue and that they should be focusing more on middle class women's opportunities. 

And so all of these things now we're like, wow, that's really progressive and radical of her. But then she was, yeah, considered sort of nonconformist. And I'm sure many people thought, well, this is actually really poor behavior.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, it's quite interesting because like, neither of those like women, I think now we would consider badly behaved in the same way as they would have been at that time, which I think speaks to so many women who got recorded in a certain way. 

So I have been thinking a lot lately about this. I woke up at, so I got very, I get very nervous about these events. Full disclosure. And for the last three nights I've woken up at 5:30 a.m. stressed. And when I wake up, I think about this event. And one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is this idea of friction, and about how it's usually through kind of friction that people end up getting written into history. 

You know, you rub up against the system and institution a law, and it writes you down off the back of that. And it's not always because, like, you changed it or, you know, advocated in the way that Louisa Lawson would have, but because you kind of made yourself this problem that it then had to record. And the thing that I've been sitting with, like so much during prep for this event, is that being remembered is not the same as consenting to be remembered. 

And every like so many of the women were going to meet kind of, you know, was recorded by someone she never would have chosen to record her story. And like the government was and continues to be, I think, the first and busiest pen holder of Australian history and in so many ways, the written record of women in kind of Australia kind of kicks off with a list of women who were sent here for behaving badly. 

And you know what? I'll just do a show of hands. Does anyone think that, like, hands, no statements or anything! Is there something that the state has written down about you that you would rather it didn't anyone? Yeah. Okay. Lots of well-behaved people. Yeah, that's my take. 

So this is my first, not mine. This is a collaborative event. Our first object: Arthur Bowes Smyth was a surgeon on the Lady Penryhn. This was the first fleet ship that ended up carrying the largest number of women. And when the convicts own surgeon kind of fell ill, he took charge of the 101 women on board. And in his journal, he ended up setting down the names, the ages, the crimes, trades, and the years that each of the women had been sentenced to serve. And in that list, you end up meeting the women who arrived in Sydney Cove on Gadigal country in January 1788. And you meet women like Esther Abrahams, who was a 15 year old hat maker transported for theft alongside women in their 60s and 70s, women sentenced to seven years on the other side of the world, for stealing a few yards of fabric.  

And the oldest woman on the list is Dorothy Hendlin. She was 82 when they sent her to Australia. And the kind of image in that doodle is of her that you can see that the kind of ship surgeon was writing as he wrote out these names. And you go through this, you know, journal from 1788, and we saw it yesterday. 

And it's just, I think remarkable to see because it feels very human in so many ways. You know, it feels very human to be doodling an 82 year old woman that they took to Australia. And what I found interesting was that he wasn't just kind of, you know, documenting the women. He was judging them as well. You know, he writes about one woman Ann Yates, who was uniformly behaved well, yet still got sent to Norfolk Island, which was known as being, like, terrible. 

So, like, what does good behavior in that context even mean? But Leigh, I would love to start with you, because most of the women that you write about would start as a line on a list like this one. Maybe not as old as this one. But how do you get from kind of a single line to a life and like, you know what can't these records tell you no matter how hard you look?  

Leigh Straw: 

Sure. I mean, these records were not meant for our consumption. Okay. So if you've got police gazettes, fantastic records, and anyone can access them, okay. They're great resources. And not just for a little group of us folk. But you start with a line, you start with a name. There's an age, there's an offense. There might be any mention of any prior convictions, residences, you know, so their whereabouts, any aliases that they have, and they have fabulous aliases.  

And you start with a line, and you have to remind yourself as a historian, as a researcher, you are always starting with a person, okay? Because there's a very methodical, categorical way of with the police gazettes with you, you know, you've got a line and then you might have a description, you know, it's might be a description of that person or the police gazettes will hold. 

They have records of when people are released from prison. So this is a, and again the police gazettes are not for us. They're designed for the police. Right. So this is an in-house record. So you've got this record you're looking out for these people who there's a warrant that's out there for their arrest. There's the known offenders. Any details that goes with policing work they're not thinking about. Hey, Leigh Straw in the 20th and the 21st century is going to be sitting and researching this. They're thinking about this is for the job. This is for the job. This is for police officers. So I had to acknowledge that, that I'm not going in for a really nice, touchy feely experience of their record of people. And it's of its time too. 

So it has to be it's very strict. It's very methodical. So you start with that and then what you do as a historian is you are then building up around that, okay. And sometimes the beauty of it, you get an image of the people in the police gazettes as well. So you get if they’re released from prison, then they show the police image that's been taken of them. 

And those scenes get even better over time because you initially start with just the front, you know, just the head and shoulders show. And then we get into the 20th century, and then you have the full body shot on the side different, you know, if they got tattoos, if they've got markings, all this sort of stuff gets really very interesting. 

 And suddenly you see, even with that, while it's a person on display, it's more three dimensional, it's more here's a whole person rather than just head and shoulders and but yeah, you start with the one line and you build up the humanity around that story.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Are you often able to kind of find more context? It's not just kind of documented by the police for people that you go into, like where do you go looking for that?Like, what does that look like?  

Leigh Straw: 

You go beyond, you would go police gazettes, then you go to prison registers. And back in the day they had the male and the female prison registers were separate because of separate quarters, of course, and separate prisons and so on. So you go through the, the prison registers, then you'll be looking through any other kind of government agencies. 

Also, asylum records are really important to you because sometimes, particularly with women behaving badly, you find that they are also in asylum as well, in and out, or because they're trying to figure out what's going on with these women who are behaving badly. There must be something going wrong. Right. And the number of times that they referred to as hysterical, you know, and we know the reasons for that. 

And let's take more agency of that. Let's be that, you know, let's not make that a negative word. Let's take that on. Let's say, okay, that's our’s. If you can put that name on us, let's do that. You know, let's make that our thing. So yeah, you have to cross-reference. It's what you do. And you guys have be researchers as well. 

You do this, you cross-reference, you start with a record. If you ever only just use one record, that's really bad history. So you want to put a lots of different records around it, and then you get a bigger picture of that person, because you also get a bigger picture of the person that they the people that they've been meeting, whether it's your prison wardens, whether or not it's people coming in who are from, say, the Salvation Army, women who worked with us, Salvation Army would go around the prisons. They would talk to the women. They'd make their own records, too. So you get a bigger picture of the people who are around them.  

Sita Sargeant: 

And I might turn to you now, Zoe, so much of your work ends up putting victim and survivors and kind of their voices at the center. But what do you do with a record that was made by people who did not want to let women speak? 

Zoe Smith: 

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think for me, my first approach or sort of the the first question that I ask is why? What did these women do that frightened these record keepers? What made them anxious? What were they going to expose or reveal, and why was there this need or desire to silence them? And this is something that you do come across not infrequently, particularly in the legal archives, be it in criminal or in civil cases. 

And often the silencing is because really the men because it for the 19th century it is all men know that the truth is dangerous. The truth is uncomfortable. It's not a reality that they're willing to confront. And so there are sort of so many different examples of it where if we're thinking Australian colonial history, we have instances where women and some men are being silenced or ignored when they're trying to talk about frontier violence and sexual violence against Indigenous women on the frontier. 

We have instances where young female immigrant servants, particularly from minority backgrounds, are being silenced in the courts about the abuses that they're trying to tell their experiences of in their households that they're working in. And then you also have more and more related to my research is, interestingly, finding the wives of wealthy and prominent men in society. So it's the politicians, it's a lawyers, it's the doctors, and they're being silenced or being settled out of court, or there are all of these sort of different apparatuses around them that are making sure that their story doesn't come to light because their story and their experiences contradict their husband's social positions, their sort of moral standing in the society and reveal actually really uncomfortable truths that people don't want to let out. And so I think this idea of why they're being silenced is what really sort of is the kernel of those records.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. I've got like 13 slides and I feel like I need to start moving through them. So police gazettes and kind of, you know, I think stole my thunder. But that's okay. I'll forgive you. So police gazettes were not made for us. They were weekly bulletins passed between, kind of police stations. They were listing the wanted, the missing, the escaped, the stolen. So they're, like, very literally, you know, this record of who this state was watching. And the National Library doesn't hold many of them. 

So they're mostly in state archives. But this one ended up here through the papers of the writer Frank Clune. And it's a really interesting one. Because and I'll tell you the story of it, and then I'll tell you why I think it's interesting and why the National Library thinks it's interesting. So just before Christmas in 1861, it's carrying this notice from a Sydney bookseller, James Hill, who's looking for his daughter, Mary Ellen, who had been placed in the Benevolent Asylum as an eight year old in 1858. 

And that same year that she'd been kind of placed a man named John Hill had killed his wife in Sydney, and his young daughter, who was also named Mary Ellen, gave evidence as a trial and was sent to the asylum afterwards, and he was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, and it was largely because his wife was said to have been a drinker, and both men had served in the 99th Regiment, and we don't actually know if they were the same man or not, even though there are so many similarities between them. 

But it's a really interesting one because of that, and it really speaks to this thing of like when it comes to women's history, there's so much of it that raises a lot more questions than answers and relies on kind of someone just going deep and, you know, following a lead. This is a lead that anyone here can follow. 

We don't have answers to this. And gazettes are kind of like a key part of your work. Can you tell me a bit about a woman that you followed out of a gazette, and you know what you found at the other end?  

Leigh Straw: 

I followed many women, so I was like, I'm trying to think of a particular woman that I could have followed out of there and followed down. Look, there were some women that I followed out of the gazettes that I wanted to know more about, and I just couldn't. And that's something you also have to accept with the research, is that we don't have all the answers, and sometimes they do just disappear from the record. Beyond that, I've found records where pages have been torn out. 

That's always interesting because I'm always thinking, who tore the page out? And could it be a family member that wants to keep a story quiet? You know, I had one one woman who really came out of the police gazettes into other records, and I wanted something more about her was a women called Sarah Matson. And she had ended up being charged and convicted with idling, disorderly drunkenness, vagrancy, consorting with other women. Consorting with other women sounds interesting for a number of different explanations, and it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be, but she was consorting because she's consorting with known female criminals. And these are women who are criminalised in the late 19th, early 20th century for things like public drunkenness, being on the streets using foul language against police officers. And you could face up to six months hard labor in prison for using bad language or being drunk on the streets. 

And the dramatic difference between men and women. Men faced this too. But the commentary around that was really very, very different. So Sarah Matson has a whole list of different convictions. And then when I put some of that story together, I pulled the story back and realised that maybe one of those reasons that she had kind of I think she had postnatal depression, which they didn't say at the time. 

Okay. And she had also witnessed the death of twin babies. And I think that, along with life circumstances raises a lot of questions, but I can't definitively say for sure that's what happened. And so sometimes you will follow someone, but you can't for sure say, this is exactly why she went down this road, or you know the reasons for it. 

But what happened with Sarah Matson's story is one side that was in the book, and I did a few talks, is that I actually had a family member who came forward and said, we didn't know that she was actually convicted for prostitution. We didn't know that there was these other offenses. But the family member said, but that's okay, because that's part of her bigger story. 

But it explains a lot. So yeah, you start with there's a there's a story that's there, you follow it. Sometimes you get the full measure or most of the measure of person. Sometimes it just is a dead end. It stops and the historian just has to go, I can't, I can't without the evidence. I can't say anything around. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. What do you do for those kind of, like, stories in women where you find like this? Like, what if we found nothing else from this? Like, you know, how where do you where does that take you? You know, how can you approach that? How can you kind of engage with that history?  

Leigh Straw: 

You could build the historical context around them, you know, so you could you could find other women who had similar experiences, you can tell their stories and you can pop in a story like this. You can always use the element of saying it's possible. Or it may have, you know, we can use that kind of language as long as you're not definitively saying if the evidence simply isn't there. But as we know, a lot of what we know about women's stories is the stories are there, you know, and the lives have happened and, and their experiences have happened. 

But what we all too often have to do is to try and put the pieces of the puzzle together, because their stories were not regarded as important.  

Sita Sargeant: 

So this is and really interesting photo. Has anyone heard the story of Elizabeth Woolcock? No. That's okay. No. I tell like, guides not to ask that questions on tours because it kind of shames people. And then I've just asked it! 

So, she's a really interesting one. And I actually first came across her story when I was doing research for my book and going through South Australia and trying to find stories of women. And I remember because my publisher cut an outrageous amount of women from that book, she was one of them. And maybe, like, you can kind of see why. 

So on the 30th of December, 1873, Elizabeth Woolcock was hung at the Adelaide jail for poisoning her Thomas, her husband Thomas, with Mercury. She was 25 years old. And she remains the only woman to the state who was ever executed in South Australia. And this is a photograph that was taken of their family, kind of, you know, like shortly before Thomas dies. 

And in so many ways, it looks like kind of any other colonial family portrait. Like, you wouldn't be kind of expecting. This woman was the only woman who's ever been hung in South Australia. She, Elizabeth is quite a sad story in so many ways. You know, her childhood been marked by, like, abandonment and sexual violence, and her marriage was really violent and financially controlling. And she tried to leave him more than once. And at her trial, Elizabeth ends up being kind of barred from law for giving any evidence in her own defense. And her lawyer called no witnesses. And then kind of the second object that's kind of tied to her story is her confession. And it was, you know, written in her cell and it was printed in the media kind of three days after her execution. 

And she speaks about her husband's ill treatment of her and about being tempted by Satan. And I think that it's a really interesting one to kind of think of and look at them both in that context and in the context of this was a woman who was not given a fair trial in any way. And there's kind of a push in South Australia at the moment to try and kind of, almost like retry her and have her name and looked at differently. 

And I think, Zoe, that this is kind of an interesting one to think about because your research is filled with, I would say, a lot of women like Elizabeth. She's probably the extreme example. Yeah. I'm not going to say that this, like the extreme example, but like of women who's like account of their own marriage kind of exists only within someone else's kind of document. And that we see kind of through the outcome of which, how do you work with that?  

Zoe Smith: 

Yeah, I think it's a really sort of tough thing to grapple with, because a lot of my work deals with divorce archives, and it's a similar sort of situation in that you've got to take into account the fact that even if we are getting these women's stories, like, for example, Elizabeth's confession or these women's life narratives that they're basically writing in their affidavits, they've written in moments of desperation, they've written in moments of vulnerability, and they're also often shaped by the circumstances that are going on. 

So in Elizabeth's case, it is partly shaped by a desire to tell her story, but also she's engaging with sort of religious sentiments that are going on at the time. She's also thinking about, well, what's my claim, sort of posterity here for women in the divorce archive. It's also the constraints of the law and what it's actually sort of needs to be included in a divorce affidavit, but also sort of very strict legal definitions of what cruelty looked like and was imagined like. 

And so it's it's tricky to think about, okay, we may have these women's voices here, but thinking, I guess, how to read against them and read with them at the same time. I mean, my my goal is to always just try and draw out I think their agency within that. And so I think even the fact that they are willing to share this, like even the fact that Elizabeth wrote her confession, she's got really, sort of quite graphic and frank descriptions, but she's a sort of God only knows the ill treatment that I've been suffered through. 

And same in these divorce archives as well. And like, yes, they're navigating legal convention and they're being transcribed by legal clerks and lawyers. And so they are being shaped by other people's voices and perspectives. But I think thinking about how at least these women are using what is available to them to try and tell their stories in a way that does make it public as well. 

I think that's important to think about. Yeah, it's that sort of double edged sword of acknowledging the limitations that were placed upon them in telling these stories and the ways that they were maybe not able to tell the story in the way that they wanted to, but then equally acknowledging that they still did in some capacity.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, I think that's such like that's a really interesting point about agency, because it's how much agency did someone like Elizabeth actually have? You know, that was almost like a forced confession. You know, can we be reading that document with agency?  

Zoe Smith: 

Exactly. And I think that is yeah, something that, I mean, we're ultimately never going to know. Unfortunately, we can't exhume Elizabeth from the grave and interview her and ask her. But I think looking at language, I think is really crucial there. 

The different ways that they're sort of maybe phrasing things or talking about what has happened to them in their lives. And also, I think, I don't know, it's you never want the agency is such a sort of tenuous sort of issue for historians more broadly. But I think also, at least in my capacity as a as a gender and a feminist historian, I think we always want to be looking for and trying to find it when it's there, as opposed to painting women solely as victims. 

And so even whilst acknowledging the caveats that may have put limitations upon that, I think acknowledging the kernels where it could be is still really important.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. Hundred percent. Something that hit me as I was kind of going from like the past slide to this one is that this guy murdered his wife and he got three years because, you know, she was drinking. And then you've got someone who was known to be abusive. Just something we can all sit with. I don't have any further commentary on that.  

So I feel like we've done a lot of really dark stories. So this is a really, I love this. And if there's only kind of one piece from the reading list that you go off and you, like, actually read, this is a very, very fun one. 

So in 1906, Bill Edwards, who is a Brisbane barman, was arrested for burglary. And there was this kind of police constable who'd known Bill for over a year, and he was shocked to learn that Bill had actually been born Marion. And the charge kind of ends up going nowhere. And the real offense was that Bill had been, you know, spending the last, like, decade living, working, you know, and even marrying as a man. 

And what is really interesting about, this story is that so often when you find stories of, gender nonconforming people kind of in the archives, particularly around the late 1800s and early 1900s. They're pretty bleak. Like they usually kind of end up with someone, like coming out or like a forced coming out and then them ending up in asylum. 

Like, they're not like fun stories. And what is so interesting is that Bill kind of takes that, and then he, kind of like, takes over the narrative and kind of uses it to build a career for himself. And instead of lying low, he kind of builds this business out of being a man. And this by the time that kind of this interview happens, you know, he had been really well documented. 

And he also was someone who really took control of his own story. And you can see that particularly in this piece where the writer is trying to be like, really, you know, like almost like very judgmental, a bit sneering. And then she kind of gives Bill the floor and there's so many direct quotes from him, and you get this real sense of him coming out.  

And I think the part that's really kind of stayed with me is he goes on this more rant about how expensive it is to be a woman, how you don't get paid as much and the clothes cost more. So he's like, economically it just makes sense. But which I personally love. And I'm like, it's so I feel like you do get paid more in the clothes are cheaper. And I think in so many ways, Bill's kind of own version survived because he made himself the story. He made himself really interesting. And I just wanted to kind of like, can you think of, like, any other examples like that of people who really, you know, wanted to be painted and who the media or like, you know, public wanted to paint in one way and then they, like, reclaimed it themselves a bit? 

Leigh Straw: 

no I'll be honest, I had the thought I was like, maybe that's good. You know, good idea. Like clothing costs and so on.  

Sita Sargeant: 

because we were speaking about this yesterday. It's like, you know, that idea of, like, what power do each of us have in curating our own story? And I wonder, maybe Jackie Kennedy is a good example of that. 

Leigh Straw: 

Oh my gosh, you finally asked me about a female in that family! That's so exciting. Not that the men. There's nothing wrong with men. And I'm telling you, as a teenager when I opened an encyclopedia, I started with the men Yeah. Yes, I know this is wonderful story about Jackie Kennedy that when she was, not long from when she was, she was going to die, of lung cancer. 

And the great thing about Jackie is that she's. This is not saying smoking is great, but is that she was a chain smoker, and Jack was always saying, Jackie, put the cigarette away. We're getting photographs taken kind of thing. But she. That was her thing she held on to. She's like, damn, I'm going to smoke cigarettes, Jack. 

You know, let's talk about your lifestyle. But what she did towards the end of her life in her apartment in Manhattan is that she had close friends and close family members who came over, and they were going through her old letters and so on and other records, and they would look at it and they laugh or cry, whatever they would, and she'd throw it into the fire. 

Letters went into the fire, and me as a historian was like, no! Throw myself into the fire and retrieve! But she was curating her story because it's such a public story, and she was such a private person. And so that was her agency. And being able to say, I know as much as this will go into the JFK Library as possible or wherever else it might well go or go off to auction and so on. 

And so she wanted to have a bit of control of there's things that I just don't want people to have access to, and all credit to her for that. I think that's absolutely fantastic.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, I love that story. Did you have anything you wanted to add, Zoe? I've got other questions for you later on.  

Zoe Smith: 

Yeah, let's move on. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I feel like I just really wanted to share this story. Okay. Someone that you definitely recognize. Has anyone been to Tilly's? So in if you. No matter which paper you were kind of picking up in the 1920s, you would have probably seen, like, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine at some point in it being, you know, framed as Sydney’s queens of the underworld, the worst women of the city. 

Or I reckon that if you were in the suburbs and you loved kind of probably just great gossip. And Leigh you wrote the first kind of full biography of Kate Leigh And I'm really curious, kind of like, how do you get past kind of almost a tabloid version of her to find who she really was and the way that she'd been framed? 

Leigh Straw: 

Yeah, I know, I mean, look at her. She's there in the left. How gorgeous. Like she wouldn't harm a fly. She was just a well-meaning auntie and so wonderfully positioned in their story. She and Tilly, her great rival. Well, Kate Leigh obviously draws you in because there's a fascination. It's there with the 20s and 30s and and Darlinghurst being, you know, Surrey Hills was being called, you know, Chicago of the South, all the kind of sensationalism in the press at the time. 

And she's so very public as an identity because of her underworld life and because, because they're so fascinated. The media is so fascinating, because here's here’s two women, woah, that are like controlling these organised crime worlds, and they're not used to that, but they love it because it's gonna sell papers and it's sensational. And, and people are going to be out there looking Kate Leigh or Tilly Devine. 

Where are they? That's a bad idea. Don't do that. Because, you know, these are also outside of all the sensationalism and outside of what we know about them. These are actually quite ruthless, rough, violent women. And so let's not put that to the side. Let's actually bring that into the picture. This is the reality of running organised crime in the 20s and 30s. 

And so they were very, very tough women. I think it was Tilly that took a stiletto to a guy’s eye in a hairdresser's because he had wronged her. You know, that's the level of violence that you're dealing with. Kate Leigh shot a guy dead in 1930 because he was tempting to break into her house, and that she got away with self-defense in that respect. 

But I guess pulling back from all of that and the, you know, the sensationalism around this, you then want to, as a historian go, I went with where did it all start? Where's the young Kate Beahan who's growing up in Dubbo, country New South Wales? What's going on around her life?  

Let's start with that very real person who has a family story, and she's still got lots of family members who are around. And so that's very much a part of her story as well. So you go into the Parramatta Girls School because you were sent to Parramatta Girls School as a teenager. That's another story in itself. The historian goes, my gosh, what was going on then with her? What did she experience? She's then released when she's 18 and basically has to fend for herself in eastern Sydney. 

And so there's a newspaper records, but there's the other records of her life as well, police records. There's a private records. There's other private material that's there, too that brings her to life in a much bigger way, that she's more three dimensional. This is a part of her story, but there's a lot more that was going on around it as well. 

So she's a very fascinating individual that I don't think it's the job of the historian to say are they, good or bad, do you like them? Do you dislike them? I don't think that's what we do. I think what we do is we present a story as best we can, and you make your readers make up their mind. I think that's a good thing to do. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I feel like the way that, like Kate and Tilly have been remembered in the broader public consciousness is like a lot of their brutality has been stripped away. Like, I don't think that they're remembered as being as, like, rough as they were. Like, these are two women I would not want to, you know, like run into, like, I don't think I'd do well, but it's like, how did that happen? Like why? Like when do you reckon the kind of almost legacy started getting flattened?  

Leigh Straw: 

Because they were instrumental in doing that. Okay. So you see right here like we would look at that kind of story, and you'd think, oh, the press are following them. And, you know, these are, these are notorious women of the time, but they were feeding the press the stories as well. 

Okay. So when Tilly Devine gets herself a couple of really nice fluffy dogs, she goes to get her female, her favorite press photographer and gets photographs taken with the dogs, you know, and then Kate sees and goes, oh, buddy. So she's going to get three dogs and she's going to get the press photographer to take pictures of her with three dogs and take that Tilly, there you go. I've got three dogs, you got two. And there's this constant, who's got the biggest hat? Who looks the best? They use the press. That's remarkable for its time. They use the press, they use press photographers. They position themselves in various ways in these stories. And there's this beautiful dialogue in the stories as well. About the tit for tat between these, these two women. 

The interesting thing I always found about these two women is that Tilly was not as accepted as Kate, because Kate remained more a part of that working class eastern Sydney community, whereas Tilly bought a nice big house at Maroubra. Right. So the locals were kind of like, that's not really what you do. So Kate maintained more of that kind of local identity beyond what Tilly maintained. 

But if you then also later on, Kate Leigh did this, if you have your favorite press folk and you go to them on an annual basis around Christmas because you've organised a big Christmas party for the poor kids in Surrey Hills, you got all these big tables that are set out in the street. There's so many goods that are given to the kids and so on, and there's a beautiful big Christmas party. 

Get the press photographers there and get the press. They create a lovely story about Aunt Kate's Christmas party for the kids. Now some the locals will tell the wonderful stories about how kids were gifted a car tyre for Christmas and realized that some of their mates had the other parts of the car as well. They was gifted to them. 

So she launches these wonderful Christmas parties. But there's a lot of hot goods that are also given out to the to the kids as well. You know, parents are going, where did you get? Oh, Aunt, Kate gave that to me. So she marketed a very favorable image of herself through the press later on. But I also think, too, there's that level in a very serious end of where you don't always want to take kind of that idea of violent woman into the fold, you know, because that's an aberration. 

That's not what women are. And I think, no, let's let's actually have that, as you say, part of the story, the reality of how you control organised crime is incredibly violent.  

Sita Sargeant: 

I'm just so curious. Were there, like many people who were able to control their own narrative in the 1920s, as much as, like Kate and Tilly were? Because I just think that's remarkable. Like how much they were able to control the press.  

Leigh Straw: 

The other women that I looked at that were up for public drunkenness and vagrancy. And, you know, these that are regarded as lesser crimes. They had they had no agency in that they didn't know. And there's no element of where they can, properly they can't go to a press photographer, they can't do that sort of thing. 

And money, money also figures in this too, because these two women had empires that were very lucrative. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Which kind of, like brings me to the next one, which in the first kind of which is something that you've written about in the first few decades of the 20th century, women across Perth and Fremantle were like turning up in court again and again for kind of offenses against the good order. 

And interestingly, again, when I was doing a research for the book, I found so many stories like this that you just couldn't include. And you have read kind of like hundreds of these cases. And again, it was interesting how they were documented, like, compared to men. And I would like maybe if you could just speak to that of it, because I think that's an interesting point. 

Leigh Straw: Yeah, it's I mean, here you have only glass, but too much for Mary. So women can't take too much drink. Right. You know, I have a Scottish background. That did not sound good, did it at all? It's okay. It's only my fifth vodka for the morning. The language we were talking earlier. Zoe and I have talked a fair bit these last couple of days. Let me pause to thank you as well, because your work on something is incredibly important. I know I mentioned it yesterday. 

I have a granny Janet, who's up there, who, as I said, was suffering horrific domestic violence. And yesterday I just went, oh my gosh, thank God for you. And she said through me to this is the language, Zoe was talking about that before, the language is so stark. You know, a male will be charged with public drunkenness and he’ll serve time for it. 

But a woman is a disgrace, a public disgrace, and you'd have people writing into the newspapers along the lines of language that they were used, that a man in public is bad enough, but a drunken woman is even worse. And I drew a correlation when I was doing the research. There was so many newspaper articles Mary Ann Sweetman here, Mary Ann, many other Mary Anns that were around, and I was drawing this correlation from when I was looking at stories from, say, like, you know, early 20th century to 21st century and the kind of narrative that was there about drunken women and women who were drunken public and had disgrace. 

And you should be in the home. You should be looking after your children. She had children. And that kind of narrative around it that I don't think has changed that much. Okay. And it made me think. I remember there was an article from 2015 at sorry, 1915. I need to look at you. You're the fountain of knowledge.1915. And at the time, I think this was a few years back, and it was about 2015 or so. Right. And it was all these newspaper stories about the drunk women of the Melbourne Cup. Right. And taking photographs. And it went up on social media. Right. And people are clicking on it, newspapers, joints, all these drunken women. 

And it was these horrible photographs of women who, you know, the dresses are everywhere and the shoes off and there's no shoes. Oh my gosh, women with no shoes that automatically means is drunk. And I was thinking about that kind of public narrative around that. I was like, well, where are the pictures, older men? Where are the where the men and there’s some. 

But it's still that narrative of this. This is far worse. You know, women shouldn't be seen like that. They shouldn't be drinking in public and they shouldn't be drunk. And so the difference is most definitely there between women and men and that kind of narrative that it's just it's unsightly, it's unseemly. It's wrong. And I'm not saying that public drunkenness then or now is right or it should, you know, that should be happening. 

But it's the language that's used around it between men and women. So, so very different.  

Sita Sargeant: 

So interesting. Yeah. That question of when you're seeing women popped up, popping up and being described this way of asking, where are the men? Which I think we don't have to, I don't know, often. 

So we've got the Dawn and you kind of a spoke about Louisa Lawson a bit earlier, so I'm not going to give her a full recap again. But Louisa, was someone and the kind of writer that you spent your fellowship at the NLA really looking for, and I'm really curious, what were women like her able to say in print? And I think I'm also curious about what it costs them to do so?  

Zoe Smith: 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think Louisa is a fantastic example because she even remarks herself about the capacity that running her own journal gives her to print things that her contemporaries were not able to. She has total editorial control. She's not subject to the whims of male publishers or editors of other newspapers, who would perhaps put little caveats above women's articles, saying, oh, well, we don't necessarily agree with what you're saying here. 

We're just printing it. And so she gets this total editorial control, which means she can be as graphic and quite serious and critical as she likes when talking about things like marital rape, which otherwise weren't really talked about in the colonial press. And she also is very aware of that, to the point that she then uses the Dawn to platform other women who aren't offered that opportunity or who face those same restrictions. 

So she has a fantastic working relationship with Leontine Cooper, who was a Queensland based feminist slash suffragist who was really, really pivotal in getting the Queensland Women's Property Act through. She leads the Queensland women's suffrage movement as well. But she's kind of just been relegated to the footnotes of history. But Leontine Cooper also had tried to use fiction and the press as well, to write about things like domestic violence. 

And so she has sort of some articles that get published in the Boomerang and in the Brisbane Courier and stuff. But yeah, the Boomerang publishes her articles with a caveat at the top. And we're like, well, these are just the opinions of whoever we're publishing here. And then when the Boomerang changes editorship, they decide to not publish her at all. 

Louisa’s like, great, I need a Queensland correspondent and so gets Leontine on board. And they have a working relationship where Leontine publishes a Queensland Notes comment. I think over seven years or so in the Dawn. And so Louisa is very aware that it's very rare for women to have this real direct access to a public voice and for journalism in that sense as well. 

But it's interesting as well, where Leontine Cooper sits as well, because the way that she uses fiction to as well sort of reflects that other avenue that women were increasingly using at the time, and that was using fiction as well. And I mean that and I think we'll speak to this a little bit later. They were then subject to the whims of male editors and publishers as well. 

And so there were caveats and restrictions about what they could put in fiction as well. But there is something about fiction within itself that allows you to be more creative in what you're writing and talking about, and so you can get into the interiority of characters that you wouldn't then see represented in newspaper reports about other women. Or you can write about things like economic abuse and coercive control in ways that a use paper is certainly not going to. 

And so there's sort of these two very different pathways, but there are ways that women are finding ways to have their voices heard despite the constraints that are being built around them.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Which kind of perfectly brings me to my next one, which is Rosa Praed who was kind of the model of a well-behaved, you know, like colonial lady. 

She was born into a Queensland pastoral family in 1851. She married in English man and ended up being one of the most kind of successful novelists of her day. And then, you know, you end up like, really reading her romance novels. And you find, you know, like physical abuse, coercive control, you know, like implied sexual violence, like wives who don't have any legal way out. 

She's really making the case against marriage, the romance novels. And, you know, you speak to how, like, when she wrote an attempted rape scene into an early draft in 1881, her publishers kind of pushed her to cut it, and she ends up kind of doing so. And, you know, I think maybe if you kind of just want to speak to that and speak to also like what shaped what a woman could put on a page and how, you know, you can kind of still get things through and how she was using essentially like romance, which is a genre that I love. 

And it's kind of the basement of this building. They have all the Mills and Boon's published book works. So I would say the National Library loves it too. How was she using kind of the genre of romance as a form of activism?  

Zoe Smith: 

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, I can talk about her for however long you guys have, but she’s this really fascinating figure because she. Yeah, this is the period that she's writing. And so she published her first novel in 1880. And it has been identified as sort of this period where women novelists and writers are actually having quite a moment in Australia, the two most popular writers of serial fiction across all of Australian newspapers are women. 

It's Ada Cambridge and Leontine Cooper. Rosa Praed is publishing. She publishes 45 books over the course of her life. About one a year, sometimes two a year. So she's she's working hard. But this there's a real visibility of women authors in a way that there hadn't obviously they'd been their predecessors, like Catherine Helen Spence and those that had been writing sort of the [18]50s and [18]60s. 

But it's the first time that women writers in Australia are getting a national and international reputation, and they're really they're leveraging that. And that is partly their success is through using like the romance and the gothic, which they knew would appeal to audiences and would sort of give them the capacity to use sort of generic tropes and ideas to then actually kind of camouflage what they really wanted to talk about. 

And so, yeah, it's sort of surprising what I did my National Library fellowship, because also all of Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge's romance novels are also in the basement here as well. I sort of talked to people like, yeah, no, I'm looking at romance novels. Oh, but you work on domestic violence. I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point. 

And there's a fantastic scholar Shuming Tao who has actually described a lot of these books that are coming out from Australian women writers in the 1880s and 1890s is actually anti romance's like you opened them, and it may be subtitled Romance of a Station, but the content is anything but romantic. They are sort of using the sort of the cloak of romance to write about coercive control, marital rape, economic abuse, reproductive coercion, intense depictions of physical violence. 

And yes, they are having to work around their publishers. So partly one way that they do that is through using very specific language. So they never actually call marital rape, marital rape. They call it immoral violence, and they differentiate it from moral violence, which is how they sort of frame physical abuse. And then there's also, yes, through getting into sort of the interiority of characters that they were able to do through genres sort of like the domestic realist and the romance as well, but also kind of taking sort of the plot of a romance novel that you would expect a sort of woman meets a man. They get married happily ever after to sort of have the first two thirds of that, but then that last third is actually the complete opposite of what they're expecting. 

And it may be sort of reconciled in that it's sort of tied up in a neat little bow, and that sometimes the woman is able to get a divorce or the husband quite conveniently dies. And sometimes it does end up with them remarrying. And so there's sort of still that, ratification of marriage to an extent that meant that they were able to get published in the numbers that they were. 

But at the very core of these books are really quite significant critiques of the institution of marriage and patriarchy and what it means to be and live as a woman as well. In colonial society, that's very much their concern. And in speaking to a national and international readership, they're like, there's a fantastic quote about Praed and that she sort of shows the dark side of Australian society to her readers, and that was very much what she was wanting to. 

She wrote about how she was writing from her own experience. She drew on the lived experience of women around her. She had extensive correspondence with her stepmother, Nora, who basically sends her these eight page long letters. Basically everything that's going on in Brisbane society at the time, including all of the marriages that are breaking down and what's going on behind closed doors. 

And so they're really drawing on what is going on around them and also engaging in debates about divorce, extension and property law reform within the pages of these sort of romance novels, so that if you're picking it up off the shelf, you're like, oh, great. So next Rosa Praed like, fantastic, but then you're reading it and you're like, oh, this is like, I think that her readers would have come to expect that, but certainly her publishers, there was a way that they were able to sort of manipulate, literary conventions to sort of get things through in a way that you would maybe sort of not think so.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Why don't we know about her now? Why isn't she studied? Because I feel like she's a key part of from, like what you were saying. Like double major in English literature. Like, I have a major in English literature and religious studies. Prepping to be a cult leader. And. Why? Like, I, I feel like she's someone who should have been on the curriculum, like, you know, like, why has she completely, like, fallen out of fashion? Like, why don't we know about her at all? Like what happened? So I have to put that on to you.  

Zoe Smith: 

I mean, I think there's generally an exclusion of women from Australian literature, the sort of the nationalist canon more broadly, like we think of the Banjo Paterson and the Henry Lawson's and all of that trope. And sometimes the only woman that gets a look in is Barbara Baynton, who also was actually a contemporary of these women. And she's also writing about domestic violence, particularly in rural areas of Australia, and the realities of that for women at this time. But I think it does come actually back to that question of romance, because it was seen as lesser than it was kind of dismissed as sort of silly women's stories. 

And so then when we get to the first and foremost, sort of the 19 tens of the 1920s, when you've got this sort of nationalist literary canon building, the men who are mainly doing that canon building are turning to their male contemporaries. And so they're looking at the Bulletin writers and the Henry Lawson's and the Boundary Pattersons. And then also then when we're getting to sort of the 1950s and 60s and we're getting Russell Ward and everyone writing about the sort of Australian legend, the type of Australian history that they're wanting to write is not one that generally includes women's voices in the first place, and then certainly does not want to include women's voices and stories that are kind of contradicting the narratives of what Federated Australia looked like in this sort of real turn of the century period. And so I think she's sort of been a bit of a victim of that. I mean, kudos to the feminist historians and literary scholars who, from about the 1970s and 1980s, have been working to reintroduce women like Praed and Ada Cambridge and Barbara Baynton back into the fold. 

But I think there is still a lot more work to be done. And I think it also, yeah, it comes back to actually finding where these women are. Like a lot of papers are here in the National Library, but we don't know that. A lot of her novels are fully out of print now, but they're all here in the basement. And so I think it's also just like being aware of where they are and bringing them to light. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Always aware of the time. So I feel like you can't talk about this topic, sharp pivot, without talking about Lindy Chamberlain. So Lindy Chamberlain, I think a really interesting figure. I think one of the things that I've spoken with a few people about over the last few days is that she's someone who feels very modern, you know, it doesn't feel like this was happening in the 1980s. 

Like it feels like something that happened, you know, recently. And I think it's because her case was never, you know, like, just tried in the courtroom. It was, you know, tried in pubs, in lounge rooms, in papers, on talk about radio. And, you know, it was tried in such a way because she didn't grieve in the way that people thought that she should. 

You know, she was composed on camera, you know, didn't cry on cue. And like, was part of a church that many Australians were very suspicious of. And none of that was kind of evidence of anything, but it was all treated as if it was. And the National Library is really interesting for the collection that it holds around Lindy Chamberlain. 

So they have the like, you know, more than 20,000 letters that people sent her while she was in prison. You know, letters of like sympathy, abuse, prayers, marriage proposals, death threats, like 20,000, like plus of people kind of sending in their thoughts. You've got this real like, I just, I can't think that there would be that many moments where you would have a nation kind of coming out and commenting on it in such a way, like directly to the person. 

And the other thing that they have in their collection is her, strike paper strike statement in Darwin prison in 1985 that she had smuggled out, which basically kind of says that, you know, like, I didn't do this. And it ends with, you know, like I did not kill my beloved daughter and refused to be treated as a criminal any longer. 

And it's here, like in the National Library. And she's someone who has been framed and still is framed in such a way. And I just want to kind of go to you Leigh because you actually teach Lindy in one of your, courses. Yeah. So, like, I'd be really curious about, like, how do you approach her and why is she someone that you include? 

Leigh Straw: 

Yeah. Okay, so I teach an Australian crime history course, which is interesting, fascinating, troubling, triggering for some students. So I have to be very careful in teaching a course like that from the very start of it. So, you know, it has this particular content that we look at, and some students will be fine and other students part way through the course will go, I'm not okay. I'm not okay with this. I'm just going to remove. That's fine. That's okay. So it's very sensitive material that we do we do deal with. And I start the course with the Lindy Chamberlain case and Michael, of course, Michael Chamberlain too. And I'm very conscious of the fact that I've been in academia. 

I think I've been teaching at universities for 25 years. Okay. So I started when I was five and so. But I'm conscious of the fact that, look, I came to Australia in 1988 from Scotland. So I wasn't, you know, that lived experience of when, you know, the early case inquest and, and the trial and so on. But I'm conscious of the fact that some of my students this is not live history for them. This is not familiar to them. 

This is actually history for them. Whereas for many of us, you've lived through it. It's very it feels recent. Okay. So I thought, why not start with a case like this that encompasses so much of how we study crime history. So obviously as a woman interested in women in crime, that's where my interest is. What level of agency did she have? 

What level of agency does she have? And she had agency. But how much does that agency not matter because public opinion goes over that person's agency. And so we talk about the case itself. I've brought in forensics experts to talk about the case too, because they have that expertise. I don't have that. We talk about the media, trial by media, the how she was treated as a woman on trial, how Michael Chamberlain was treated as well. 

The fact that he his masculinity is another part of this story, too, which is really fascinating, the fact that the Indigenous expertise wasn't brought into the case as well as it could have been the fact that there were female trackers in particular, who were telling the police that they could track a dingo, you know, that they had that expertise. 

And when that was brought in, it was questioned. It's not real science, you know. Where's the knowledge behind that? So you're starting with the start of a course to unpack for students. Here's one case that has so many prongs into other areas of how we study the criminal past and Seventh Day Adventists. So there's a whole religious element to this case. 

Then there's also the in the telling of this story is the fight for justice. Okay. So Lindy's fight for justice that went on for years and years and where these students in a class, what do you want to do with students is not to bore them. You want to keep them awake as you do audiences, tell me if they're following, but what you want to do is you want to. 

You have that moment where. Aha moments, or you want to have a moment where that's it's the so what of history, right? That's the question I always start with. In any course I'd be like, what's the story? What of what we're doing here? It's not that. Sorry. What? No one cares. It's like, so what? Why does it matter? 

So that's the whole picture around the so what of this story? And for students to then also track her story with her children too. You know, with her children. Azaria is a big part of this story, but her other children are a part of this story, too. And they have been at different points of anniversaries and so on. 

They've talked to the media, they've been a part of documentaries and so on, and they've tried to also show their own agency around their mother's story, in their story as well. So there's just so much around this to, to be able to engage students in the story, but also to highlight the fact of how women are treated in the criminal justice system in so many different ways that are incredibly detrimental, but also the justice system itself. 

But then all the politics outside of that, then all the media sensation around it, to also remember as well, because we've got, you know, the, the late, great Sam Neil and Meryl Streep in Evil Angels, Cry in the Dark, however it was marketed around the world. Sometimes people only have that idea from a film, and it's a great film, don't get me wrong. You know, fantastic film. And I do say the late, great Sam Neil because he was fantastic. But sometimes if that's your only record of something or if it's only from some quirky joke and a Seinfeld episode. Yeah, right. You know, we've heard those kind of cultural things. And so it's to draw it back to this is real people and the historians always looking for the real people in the stories and trying to really understand them, and so allowed perhaps their voice to, to come through. But I'm not the this is just I'm part of trying to get that out then into education.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. It's a really interesting point about I think like agency as well. Back to that. I've got one final one and then I'm going to throw it to the audience for questions. So this is a really interesting one that I was kind of surprised in some ways was in the collection, but I think it's a reminder that they're always collecting, every police force in Australia now uses kind of body worn cameras, and the kind of promise is simple. 

You know, it's that idea that they're recording what really happened. And in 2024, criminologists kind of published the first study of, how women who have experienced domestic and family violence see those cameras? And the 119 victim survivors surveyed in this were less than convinced about their kind of usefulness and saying, you know, like footage can lead to the police identifying the wrong person as the primary aggressor and the perpetrator can present as calm and reasonable, you know, while it's rolling. 

And that might not be the case. And it's recording what's in front of it, and not so much the context. And what I find really interesting is that the library is collecting those stories of the extra context. And I think that that's one of the things that I feel you see kind of more and more in like the recent collection or even, you know, around Lindy Chamberlain, that they really work to collect the context and, you know, like her voice and her agency around it. 

And I think kind of maybe if either of you kind of just want to speak to that idea of like, what has changed about how we collect and what is in the archives and, you know, maybe what's still needs to change.  

Zoe Smith: 

I mean, I think one of the fantastic things about the National Library is its oral history collection. And I think also the capacity of oral history more broadly for people to tell their experience in a way that obviously, yes, they are sometimes interview questions that are guiding them, but it is it's not mediated by a court appearance or a media interview or a royal commission being sort of targeted towards very sort of specific answers and questions and focuses. 

And so I think oral history more generally is fantastic in the way that it is able to capture day to day experiences that perhaps other records don't. And that is something that the National Library has a fantastic collection of, and is continuing to invest a lot of time into. Like, I know they've got an ongoing project about collecting the really diverse experiences of people during Covid. 

And I think particularly when we're even thinking about how things like body worn camera technologies may appear in one realm to sort of tell a true story, but then there is so much of this other context around it, giving people the opportunity to share their experiences as well in that sense and offer that context, perhaps through something like an oral history, is actually a really important medium, that is only really become available in sort of the last, like 30 to 40 years. 

And so I think for me personally, I would love to see more oral histories around that, whether it is about just general everyday experiences of what it means to be a woman or a gender diverse person in 21st century Australia, with the rising rampant misogyny that we've got going on, or whether it is specifically about victim survivor experiences at the moment and how they're grappling with things like coercive control and tech facilitated abuse, or tech facilitated financial abuse through systems like Centrelink. 

And I think because of also then the fantastic part about doing these oral histories is that they’re then recorded and preserved and kept. And I mean, it's the sort of the classic if we don't know the history, we're doomed to repeat it. And lived experience is so crucial to making change that I think making sure that we continue to access, obtain and preserve those is really crucial. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. 100%, I think big shout out to the National Library of History collection. And like the work that goes into that. Yeah. Leigh, did you have anything? 

Leigh Straw: 

I’ve got two thoughts. The first one, I don't know if I have an answer to it, but I said there were thoughts. I didn't say I had solutions. The, the first main thing that I've always encountered in a regular basis is that question of trying to capture people's stories that they don't think are important. You know, the number of people that they're like, have lived a full life, like a really long, amazing life. And you think, wow, you've I always say to my students, if you've got your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and sit them down, just even if it's for yourself, record their story or whatever. 

And they always go, yeah, but they say it's not important. I'm like, just don't listen to them, just sit them down. Those kind of stories, because it's amazing what you can actually discover where people start telling their stories, think, wow, this is actually a really amazing story. And the person who made me think of that was a World War II veteran, and it was his daughter who had brought his story to me. 

I knew him, you know, my mates, World War Two veteran dad. Right. And he said, oh, my story is not very important. I don't want anyone to listen to me Leigh. And I said, no, no, I just want to just want to, you know, you to tell your story. And when he started really telling that story, Alan Diggins, I realized this is what we need to really capture. 

However, I don't know if you put a word out there. Your story is not important. Maybe it is. I don't know, maybe there's some kind of campaign because there's so many people in our community who have fantastic stories, but they don't think they're important because they think it should be somebody who's known in the press or wherever it might be. 

 The second thing is random. I had this thought, and I don't know why. I’m of the world of the floppy disk, right? My kids are like, what is that? I'm. I've got three boys. It's a it's such a it's so nice talking women's history. And I do that at home to one of my, one of my boys, my second boy. And I won't call him the middle child, but my second born. His name is Lawson. And the number of times I've had people who've said to me, oh, his name for Henry Lawson, I imagine. And he's not sorry, he's not named for Louisa either. And my response is, he's known for a dead guy on a headstone in Tasmania. And that's true. So a guy's name on a headstone in Lawson? Great name. But floppy disks. I often wonder about the knowledge, the stories that people put onto a floppy disk. Now, if you've still got a disk driver, you could do that, find it somewhere, you know?  

But I just I think about all the knowledge that might be contained or old book manuscripts that somebody was writing. They saved it, put it on a floppy disk. Now that technology isn't used anymore. As I said, I don't have answers. I just had thought about it. But I wonder about the number of floppy disks that are out there and the knowledge and the stories that are, that are there that we can't access because the technology is different now. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, I think a lot about social media and how that's getting recorded in like what's not getting recorded. And on that note, does anyone have any questions? Okay. Right up the front.  

Audience Member: 

Yeah. My question was about social media. In 100 years historians, and Sita your first questions about what the government knows that maybe don't want them to frame first place through social media and the good thing about social media in a way is that people who were historically kept from telling their truths. Now have a platform to curate their own image and how close to reality that image is. We don't know. But I wonder prompts that people are putting into ChatGPT, how will historians use all of that data in the future and how much context does it does it really provide? Do you think? 

Sita Sargeant: 

oh, that's such a good question. I want to answer it. What? What do you want to go.  

Leigh Straw: 

I want to hear you. 

Zoe Smith: 

I mean, I think it will be really interesting, I think in history more generally. And it's something that we've talked about getting access to everyday lived experience is such a fascinating thing. And so even if you're if there is a way for historians in 100 years to look at the average person's, say, what they're putting into ChatGPT over the course of the day, whether it's okay, put together my meal plan. 

Oh, how do I plan a trip to Bali? How do I like what should I use to get this stain out of my shirt? Like, I think it's going to be really interesting to get access to that, that real minutiae, that day to day sort of texture that is often quite hard for the historian to access. And so I think in a way, social media and a lot of these technologies are brilliant in the way that they really expose that, that because there wasn't that technology, say, 100 years prior, we were able to do. 

And so obviously it's terrifying as well, what is being kept and recorded about us often when we don't know about it. Like when you're getting your targeted ads and being like, oh, I mentioned to my friend that I maybe wanted to buy a new alarm clock and oh my god, now I've got seven ads for alarm clocks. But I think, yeah, the way in which historians will hopefully be able to piece together what, yeah, sort of average 21st century life might have looked like. 

And even the way in which people were using these technologies as sort of or whether they were or they weren't, and also the extent to which they were, I think that's it's going to be a really rich source for historians as long as they are then obviously approaching it with sort of the good historians brain of thinking about the context and the limitations and what sort of what sort of image is trying to be constructed here. 

But yeah, I think it's I think it's actually going to be really useful and really fascinating.  

Sita Sargeant: 

And yeah, I can't see the thing that I like that you have brought up. And then I honestly, I hadn't thought about like, ChatGPT prompts as a historical source. But I wonder if because there is just the sheer volume of it, like, when does it stop being useful for like, you know, uncovering, like and kind of constructing, I think, biographies of individuals versus, you know, just those like broader trends. 

So I kind of wonder if it's going to be harder in some ways because of just the just like the sheer amount of data that's out there for us to actually use it to construct an individual biography, or if it'll just be more to kind of get a feel for like, you know what? We as a society, we're thinking at the time because it will be harder to trace people like back through the archives, because you'll just be looking at kind of, you know, like search term spikes around a particular moment. 

You'll be looking at kind of like broad trends, you know, you'll be looking at probably like the amount of people using like they don't even use really hashtags anymore. It would be like, you know, like keywords that people use and sentiment analysis. So I kind of, I don't know. But then on the flip side, you know, like with the rise of AI, like, is it then becoming easier as well to be able to find information about individuals because of how well documented we are? So it's like are none of us safe in terms of our...? 

Leigh Straw: 

Do you know what I'm really excited about around it? And I had that thought while you made that, that was brilliant. Was I'm really excited about in the future. Like if you were to say if somebody was going to look back on, like my social media for have fun, look back on mine. But you know, the serious end of that. How wonderful that in the future we'll be looking at women who are hashtag perimenopause, hashtag hot flash, hashtag raging, you know, all these sort of things. Imagine that later on. But also for the lives of women. I feel now that we can know more about the depths of those women and what they were going through right in there. 

Or if you are only menopause, you know it's your late 30s, right? Because that's true and it happens and it's real and it's your 40s and into your 50s that now there is a medium there to have a bigger community to engage with more people. This is what I'm experiencing. This is what I'm going through. And I think that's me very subjectively, being a late 40s woman, you know, experiencing that. 

But I think that's a wonderful avenue for women's history to have more agency, to be able to talk out more about this kind of stuff. 

Sita Sargeant: 

What is the role of an institution like the National Library in collecting and preserving and documenting that? Because one of the things that I learned recently yesterday is that the recently yesterday is it the National Library, like records twice a year, every website in Australia. 

So they have all of those collections, kind of like just screenshots of them, a live moment in time. But it's, you know, like, what is the role of an institution like this in recording that and keeping that? And it's like, you know, as we get more and more data and it's all out there like we can't we've got a finite amount that we can store unless we keep building data centers in Queensland. 

You know, again, like how much can we store? Like this is what do we curate and collect? Yeah. Does anyone have any other questions?  

Audience Member: 

Yes, Sita, Leigh, Zoe, thank you for a fabulous session. I want to talk about I want to ask you about an area that still isn't talked about a lot and which you've touched on today, and that is formerly incarcerated women, women in contact with the criminal law system. It seems to me that so much like, across all the areas that you talked about, so much of what you find in the past is still in the present, but our awareness around a lot of those issues through, as you say, social commentary, social media has grown. This is one area which hasn't grown. And where I think that what you describe is still very present today without a lot of awareness. So I just wonder if you've got a comment about that particular area which underlies so much of both of your research, is how we work to change the narrative on some of these topics where the narrative might not be changing. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Either of you want to take that? I guess I think one of the things that I learned a really, really good mate of mine, he runs a social enterprise and was in prison for three years, and I feel like I've had this real awakening, as you know, a Canberra born gal raised by public servants to kind of that experience. And one of the things that he kind of said to me, like six months ago that's really stayed with me is that only 6% of all people who are incarcerated are female. 

Which I think tells you a lot about gender equity in this country and who is committing crimes. And again, how those are there was a weird tangent for that. Do you want to jump on and actually answer the question, not just my fun fact about percentages!  

Leigh Straw: 

I feel things will get more, there would be known with more research that is done by people with immediate experience. 

Really, that's what has to happen and I'm always aware of my not, I wouldn't say failings, I would just say that there's just research that I can do, but I could never fully, truly understand it. Okay, so lived experience matters so much. And I reminded of a female researcher from Western Australia who had been incarcerated and she used came out of the system. 

Now while she was in there, she became kind of like an auntie to some of the women that were in the system itself. And she came out of it invigorated to do postgraduate studies. Okay. Her name was Cheryl Patello. She unfortunately died a few years ago before her PhD was finished. And the institution where she was doing that PhD, they actually got the people who were supervising her working with her. 

They finished the PhD in her honor. She'd done the whole chunk of the research and they put it together. But she was a big reminder that a lot of what we study as historians. And she did tell me about this. She she said, you just you have to work with people with lived experience, and you also have to allow people with that experience to tell their stories. 

So what we also need to do within the broader system is to be able to enable people who have going through, have been part of the system and criminalised, and whatever form it might take for them to have the ability to be able to, to tell their stories, to share that experience and to do that. I think that's where you'll get truly more authentic voices that that will be coming through. 

So I did a few years ago some work with Mission Australia, and it was they were getting people from different experiences who had come out of prison, whatever it might well have been, and they were putting them through a program in order for them to get a certificate, to have the opportunity to go to university in order to tell their stories. 

And that was just such a wonderful initiative, and that would be so great if we could see that more and more of that place.  

Sita Sargeant: 

And I think one of the things that I kind of find really interesting about the, like, I think lived experience spce, particularly when it comes to incarcerated women like formerly incarcerated women, is that it's probably the only like in a lot of ways, it's very overrepresented by like, women, like you look at kind of women who have lived experience, who are like speaking up now. 

Like, I find it really heartening in so many ways that you have so many incredible women. Like I can think of like a handful of the top of my head who are really, like driving change. And, I think shifting their narrative a lot. So, I don't know, I think that there is some like, incredible work being done in that space that like, gives me a lot of hope for it and for things changing. Do we have any other questions? Maybe we'll go up the back. Make Kelly run. 

Audience Member: 

More about common history rather than making history as an 81 year old who's just experienced horrible seasickness on a fast efficient ship between Broome and Perth, that raises the question of the 82 year old convict woman. How does the record tell us how she fared on that six months journey, and does it tell us how she fared once she arrived here? 

Sita Sargeant:  

I think a question for the National Library, but we know that she made it so she's alive. She's not alive right now, but she she she's right here and she's here. She's here today. Prepared. Prepared. Yeah, but she made it up. But I was reading it like we don't actually know if she was 82. That's just what the surgeon wrote down there is some kind of accounts were like, she's probably closer to 60, 70, which is still a lot to I think 

put someone through that. But yeah, I think something to kind of dive deeper into, I think that we might kind of wrap up unless there's anyone who has a burning question that they want to ask. Okay. Go. Lucky last. 

Audience Member: 

Do you feel like this idea, the standards of what make a woman badly behaved have changed dramatically? Or whether they're still roughly the same? 

Zoe Smith: 

I mean, I think they've definitely changed in part in the extent that we don't. I mean, some spheres are trying to bring it back, but the sort of really sort of traditional models of gender based roles and divisions, I think, like if you're sort of looking at the badly behaved women that come up in as public drunkenness or consorting with other women or as homeless or appear in sort of the divorce archives as being villainised by their husbands, are frequently women who just resisted gender roles that were being put upon them. 

They maybe like to have a drink with their fellow housemates, or sort of boarding house companions of an evening, or they didn't quite devote as much attention as they were expected to their children, or they wanted to go like ride a bicycle and not, like sit in their husband's house and wait for him to come home and didn't have dinner on the table by 5 p.m. the moment he walked in the door. 

And so I think at least some of those prescriptions have changed, thankfully. But I think they also do just adapt in other ways. And I think the way I think, yeah. Similarly, looking at the language that is being used to villainise as women today still has a much longer legacy in the way that women have been portrayed in society and in Australian history more broadly. 

So it's it it has changed, but also not a whole lot. I don't know if that answers the question at all.  

Leigh Straw: 

I think women are still judged so much. I think they are. And I think that you experience it. You know, like if I was think of my 15 year old self, I wouldn't I wouldn't be saying this, you know, different stages of life as you go through in a new 20s and 30s and whatever. 

But I think that we are still heavily judged in terms of what are these ideals of like? It makes me think of Anne Summers and her great work from the 70s, you know, and the good and the bad women, we still have that idea of what makes a good woman. Well, that good woman is, you know, she's married and she has children, and she has a good job, and she doesn't speak up too much, and she doesn't get too angry. 

 And she's not emotional. We don't want her to be too emotional. And then the idea of, well, a bad woman is she's stepping out of kind of what we expect for her. She's a little bit too mouthy, she's a bit sad, too many opinions. And, and even that idea of like the different ways in which women live, you are judged along those ways. 

 And look, one thing. Funny thing will say, I think, and I always say this and I think we can be our own best allies. We really can. We need allies everywhere. Okay. We really do. Yeah, but I think I think what we can do is I'll add it to the final. I do say this and I say to we, you know, the Gloria Steinem passing away. You can say a lot around that in terms of being like my Mini Countryman is called Gloria for Gloria. So my students see Gloria driving around. Well, Gloria the car for Gloria Steinem. And I think that she always espoused about, you know, feminism is about the equality for all. 

You know, it's not just about women. It's about what men can also do and what, you know, what women can do. And we've got we acknowledge very diverse and inclusive identities around that as well, not just that, you know, between men and women, there's many, many wonderful identities. But we I think as women will be so much more powerful when we stop judging each other, when we stop having the comments that are made about, oh, she did this or she did that or whatever, if we came together more empowering each other, accepting the diversity of women and who we are and what we want to achieve and what we can do, we would be an absolute powerhouse. We would be running this world, as Beyoncé says, you know, and she's got the words and it's so true. You can tell that I'm in a household of lots of nerds can’t you, the dog is a female, so that's okay. But that is just such a powerful thing. And I see that so much. And I've seen it in I'm not perfect, I've done it. 

And you and you see it how we judge each other in different ways. Let's not do that. Let's just go. She's throwing it that way. That's cool. That's cool for her. You know she's doing this. That's what works. What works for women. Let's embrace what works in its various ways.  

Sita Sargeant: 

And what a wonderful note to end on. That was beautiful. Thank you so much, Leigh and Zoe, for such a fabulous conversation. They'll be sticking around afterwards if you want to come up and have a chat or if you have any questions you weren't comfortable asking in front of an audience, we will also be kind of sending out the reading list, everyone's inbox. And there's also like a like, business card that I created that you can grab on the way out that has some conversation prompts as well as a QR code linking to that. 

The next talk will be on December the 5th, and it will be diving really into kind of the history of like the domestic in so many ways. And, you know, women who, were recorded through recipes, through cooking and women who were working in the back end of kind of kitchens and, you know, like ran the restaurant, but their names weren’t on the lease are, you know, we are also going to dive into some spicy topics today, like trad wives. 

So hopefully we will see you at that one. It's available to book now. Otherwise have a fabulous rest of your Saturday. Oh no, Barbara wanted to speak!.   

Barbara Lemon: 

I can't resist. Maybe the mic's off again, but I'll talk anyway. Just have you sit there awkwardly. Well, I thank you very much on behalf of the National Library as well, Sita, Leigh and Zoe for a truly compelling conversation, as you can tell from the atmosphere in the room and just that reminder about finding history in the lives that have been perhaps misunderstood, overlooked or erased, as well as those deliberately preserved as the person with some curatorial responsibility for web archiving, including explorations of collecting social media. 

You're pressing the buttons that wake me up at three in the morning. So thank you very much. Also, with the historian hat on, something I think about a lot and just reiterating, have a look at the reading list. Big thanks from me to the curatorial and collection research team, who've done a lot of work behind those reading lists, led ably by Dr Susannah Helman. 

Do linger longer, as Sita said. And once again, sincere thanks to you Sita, Leigh and Zoe.