Kathryn Favelle: ... Services and your host for today's celebration of ‘She Shapes History’, the book by Sita Sergeant. Now, the Library sits and She Shapes History walks on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. I pay my respects to the traditional owners and custodians of the lands, and through them, I pay my respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.  

Now, as we start, I'm gonna ask you to turn your mobile phones to silent while I tell you a little story. I want to take you back to Wednesday, the 7th of April, 2021. The pandemic is in full swing, although some restrictions have eased in the ACT. It's World Health Day, and in the US, can you believe it, it's National Walking Day. But on this day, our Ask a Librarian service received the following message: "To the team at the National Library, we're reaching out to you about partnering with the NLA as we're currently in the process of establishing a women-led tourism business called She Shapes History. Our first walking tour, She Shaped a Nation, highlights the subtle and innovative methods women have used to shape history, acknowledges the individuals, communities, and institutions that supported women to do so, and recognises their enduring legacy on Australian culture and society. We're hoping to kick off our tours in the Parliamentary Triangle during June and would love for the tour to include a visit to the National Library."  

Please join me in welcoming one of the authors of that message, the founder of She Shapes History, and now the author of ‘She Shapes History’ the book, Sita Sergeant.

Sita Sargeant: Oh my God. Which side am I sitting on? Oh my God . What the hell? Oh my God.

Kathryn Favelle: What a rockstar welcome that is. Oh, welcome, Sita, and congratulations on the success of She Shapes History, both the book and the tours. But my first question is to ask, what on earth possessed you to set up a tourism business in the middle of a pandemic?

Sita Sargeant: Oh my gosh. My heart is still racing for all of that clapping that I can't even remember sending that email. And now, look, finally here.  

Kathryn Favelle: Almost to the day. Almost to the day.

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, so I ended up back in Canberra after a few years of not living here and I started diving into Australian history for the first time in my life. And I just had this moment where I was like, "Gosh, this is so much more interesting than anyone told me. Why didn't tell me, like, why didn't people just say that Australian history was interesting? I probably would've studied this at university." And then I started asking that question that I have a feeling a lot of people here have asked at some point or another, which is, "Where are the women? Where are the women in the story of Australia? Why aren't women ever being positioned as main characters?" And I then spent a good chunk of time just complaining to my family who was unfortunately trapped with me for months. And then it got to the point where I was like, "You know what? Like, I'll do something about this." I am a very extroverted problem solver. So I was like, "You know what? I'll fix this."  

So I ended up kind of catching up with a friend who was having a very similar sort of process and we decided on a whim to just start running a weekly walking tour. And neither of us had any experience in tourism or really in Australian history, but we're just very, I would say, audacious and confident people who were like, "You know what? No one else is doing it." And like I don't think either of us thought that anyone would probably come to be honest, maybe like one or two people and it would be very nerdy and intimate dates where I had all of the power. So the best kind of date. But it just completely kind of blew up and, you know, like four years on, well, yeah, four years on, gosh, we're in 2025, and now we're here with a actual book.

Kathryn Favelle: When did you know that this crazy idea was gonna work? Was there a point where you went, "Yeah, I'm onto something," or?

Sita Sargeant: I think that the thing that made me go, "I really think that there's something here that could be big," was actually when Megan, the publisher who's sitting front row, sent me an email. And I actually initially thought that Megan's email was a scam. So I wanna start by saying that Hardie Grant Explore is a real publishing house. You'll start seeing them places. They're the little dog. I am not someone who's in the world of publishing and Hardie Grant Explore sounds a bit fake. And Megan's email sounded really fake. She was essentially like, you know, "We've seen your tours online and think this would make a great book. Are you interested in having a chat?" And no one emails you saying, "Would you like to write a book?" Like, that's an unreal thing to happen. And she didn't include any references or sources or going, "These are the books that we've done in the past." So it took me a little bit before I actually Googled Hardie Grant Explore and then I had this moment where I was like, "Holy shit. This is an actual publishing house." And ended up very soon after that kind of responding back and then Hardie Grant and Megan responded very quickly and ended up having a chat. And I think that kind of that was one of the moments where I was like, "Okay, there's something bigger here."  

And then during, end of 2023, I ended up kind of quitting my very well-paid full-time job and taking off and using my advance money to buy a Subaru Forester and rooftop tent. And then I thought. Which I have heard that no other authors have done in Hardie Grant Explore, and I understand why. That was a choice. And so I then ended up spending kind of six months just very chaotically driving around Australia and I think it was while I was driving around and just seeing and digging up all of these really, really incredible and unexpected and very Australian stories of women who have shaped history and not seeing them being recognised and respected in anywhere that wasn't Cooper Pedy and I was like, "Someone needs to do something."  

And I think that was the thing that made me go, "Okay, this isn't just a Canberra thing. I wanna make it big, like, this is gonna be something huge." And then I really think that it's been the reception to this book that I've gone, "Okay, there's obviously an appetite here. People are interested in this." So I feel like I'm still having those moments where I'm like, "Oh my God, I think this could be something."

Kathyrn Favelle: I thought it was really interesting that in that email, that Ask a Librarian inquiry that you sent us, you actually had a little tagline about telling diverse stories to reshape our futures and imagining a diverse future. Is that the underlying driver? Like, are the tours and the book the Trojan horse for changing Australia?

Sita Sargeant: Oh, of course. Like, I feel like if that's not obvious, goodness gracious. Yeah, I think that tourism is really underrated as a method for creating change. I really think it is, and because at the end of the day, it is Tourism Australia, it is Visit Canberra, it's people like me who are saying, "This is who Australia is." Like, we are the ones who are defining what Australia looks like on the national stage, on the international stage. And I think that if you wanna have a different story of Australia, like you need to be doing that in part through tourism. You need to be making it kind of accessible and engaging to a really, really wide audience and just pitching a different story. So I think that kind of like tourism has been a bit of a Trojan horse for just sharing a different story about what it means to be an Australian.  

And I think that if we kind of you know go back and we say “the Australia that you think existed is not actually true, like, that's not a full version of our history”, you can start to reimagine what tomorrow would look like and what it means to be an Australian today.  

Like, I always say that one of the most profoundly unexpected things that came out of the pandemic and that has come out of running these tours is I feel so much prouder of being an Australian and I feel really distinctly Australian as well. I did not feel that way before. I feel like there's so many kind of young people and people in their 20s particularly who have a bit of like a cultural cringe when it comes to saying they're Australian. And I definitely felt that way. But diving into these stories, these histories, and just seeing all the different kinds of women who have shaped Australia and in the really different and diverse ways has made me feel a lot more, I think, proud of being an Australian. Like, obviously there are a lot of shit things about being an Australian but I think that there's a lot of like really good things as well that I'm very proud of.

Kathyrn Favelle: Who was the first woman that excited your imagination for these tours? Was there one woman that really stood out and you went, "I've gotta tell her story?"

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, and it's still a story that I tell all the time. So there's probably, I'd say, a lot of people in this audience who have heard this story before, but it is the story of Fanny Finch and she is the very first known woman in Australia to have voted. So she voted in 1856, and for those of you who are women's history nerds, which is hopefully a few of you, that was about half a century before women kind of gained the right to vote at the federal level. And she is the most unlikely person to be this candidate for the first woman to vote in Australia. She is a woman of colour. She's of African British heritage. She is a single mom of four, and one of her kids actually has a disability. And then on top of that, she's living in regional Victoria. She's in Castlemaine.  

And when I kind of found this out, I was like, "How on earth did this woman become the very first woman to vote in Australia?" Like, that is not the picture of Australian suffrage that you see, which is a well-educated, kind of, you know, quite beautiful white woman. I think about photos of like Vida Goldstein. I was like, "This is not fitting the picture." And the whole reason why Fanny Finch was able to vote was because she had left a really abusive husband across the border from South Australia to regional Victoria. She had started a business in order to support her family and her kids and she'd become kind of like just this beloved character and figure around town.  

And then there was this really dodgy guy, though, as there sometimes is in the story of Australia, and he kept working with the police to get Fanny's pub shut down because it was so successful and it was taking away customers from his pub and he's like, "This isn't okay." And after one really aggressive police raid where afterwards they said that they had a mistaken her for someone else, and this is a remarkable statement to be making in Colonial Australia about a black woman running a pub, that she ends up taking matters into her own hands. And she actually writes to the local paper, which is how we have her words, which is really rare now. Like, I am not gonna make people put a hand up for how many of you write to the local paper, but I doubt it's to that many. And she ends up writing and these are her words, "I am a woman of the few words and plain spoken, but I have worked hard," and she talks about how she worked hard not for herself but for her kids and she deserves better than this.  

And then she finds out that this guy's running for the local council and this is the first time Castlemaine is about to have an election and she finds out this really terrible person is running and she's like, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Like, "This is not okay." So she then looks at the law and the law says if you are a person who pays your rates or bears a miner's licence, you can vote. So through this loophole in the law that assumed that women would never, like, single women would never run their own business and therefore their names would be on the rates, Fanny Finch was able to write herself into history as the very first woman in this country to vote. And-

Audience member: Woo!

Sita Sargeant: Yeah! And I remember just reading that story for the first time and I just thought, "Why wasn't I told this in school? Why wasn't this a story that I had heard?" You know, as someone who is a woman of colour and someone who was never, like, I am never gonna run for parliament, good lord, but I am someone, but I am someone who would start a business, would be a key member of the community, and would call injustice out. And I am someone who would try and vote someone out for being dodgy. Like, what is more Australian than a woman who runs a pub not wanting a guy to get elected? I'm like, "Why isn't that the story of Australia we're telling?"

Kathryn Favelle: And I have to admit, I knew nothing about Fanny Finch until I read "She Shapes History." So more people will know about it and I'm waiting for the TV series. I think there's a great story to be told. Once you decided that this book idea was a real thing, how did you think you were going to write it? Is writing a book like writing a walking tour or?

Sita Sargeant: Oh God.

Kathryn Favelle: What was the plan, Sita? Did you have a plan?

Sita Sargeant: No, and this is my first mistake. This was a journey and a half. This is what happens when tour guides with no experience writing books writes books, and not travel writers. So I was just like, "Right, I'm gonna go and try and dig up as many stories as I can. I'm just gonna go travelling and find them." And I didn't really plan my route in advance. So I was like, "I'll just go where the stories take me." Terrible, terrible choice.

Kathryn Favelle: I imagine Hardie Grant were terrified at that point.

Sita Sargeant: Hardie Grant, by the way, didn't check in until the end and they were like, "Where's the book?" And I sent an email being like, "Can I have more time?" And they were like, "No." A dream to work with.  

And so my journey involved me going from Canberra up the east coast and I went up to Cairns and then I got to Cairns and I was like, "Gosh, I have to be in Tasmania for Christmas 'cause I'm meeting some people there." So then I had to come back down the way that I came to Tasmania. I caught the Spirit of Tasmania to Tasmania. So I feel like I've experienced some of what the convict women experienced coming over. I did that twice.  

And then ended up kind of doing Victoria and over to South Australia and then I was in South Australia and I was expecting South Australia to just be filled with women who had shaped history. I feel like South Australia really pushes themselves as being number one in the country for women's history. And I would say that they are in some instances, but I was going to some towns and I was like, "Where are the women?" Like, "I don't have enough time to be digging through the archives trying to find them." So then I got to the point where I was like, "Oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna have enough for South Australia. All these South Australian women are just gonna yell at me for not including enough South Australian women." So then I was like, "You know what? People would been telling me there's a lot in Coober Pedy and Coober Pedy was not on my original list," and I ended up then having to just duck up to Coober Pedy, which I'm so glad that I did because Coober Pedy is the only place in Australia I would give an A-plus for recognising and respecting women's historical contributions.

Kathryn Favelle: Hm.

Sita Sargeant: I know. You would never expect it.

Kathryn Favelle: Unexpected.

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, this book should have been sponsored by the town of Coober Pedy. This is the best visit Coober Pedy travel guide book I think they're ever gonna get. Genuinely.

Kathryn Favelle: Walking tours in Coober Pedy maybe.

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, it could happen. I don't know how many people we'd get, I'll be honest with you. But it was because Coober Pedy was the only place that I went where you'd go to the museums, you'd go to the tourism bureau, and women's stories would just be included as part of the broader town narrative. Like, you wouldn't have to go looking for women's stories. They just told you the story of the first female miner. They told you the story of the wives who kind of moved there and how terrible it was, and how the men made no money, so the women had to basically build the town from the ground up. They told you all of these stories.  

And I was just so curious about why this has happened and I found out it was because it was the women who actually set up Coober Pedy's tourism industry. And because of that, and because of that, they made sure that women's stories and contributions were being told in a really full way. So you end up seeing this really full story of Coober Pedy that you don't really see elsewhere, which is remarkable to me that Coober Pedy, the place where everyone lives underground and where you literally feel like you're entering into the apocalypse, is number one in the country for recognising women's historical contributions.  

Yeah, so then I was, Coober Pedy, then I was like, "Oh, I may as well just duck up to Alice while I'm here." So then Alice Springs, and then I realised I had to come back down. So I came back down through Coober Pedy again and then I went across the Nullarbor and then I was in the southwest of Western Australia and then I started getting stressed 'cause I'm like, "Oh my God, I need to get back to Canberra." And I was trying to make it work and I was like, "Maybe I'll duck around and do a full lap," and then I looked at how much petrol had been costing and I was like, "I can't afford that." So then I had to cross the Nullarbor for a second time and come back home. So I would not recommend that route to anyone. That was a terrible route. Just don't do that and you'll have a great time travelling Australia.

Kathryn Favelle: How was it sleeping in the back of your-

Sita Sargeant: In my rooftop tent?

Kathyrn Favelle: Yeah, your Forester.

Sita Sargeant: It was great. I don't know if I'll use it again. So if anyone wants to buy a rooftop tent, I'll give you a really good price. Just let me know afterwards. It's where history was shaped.

Kathryn Favelle: I think the price has just doubled now with that.

Sita Sargeant: I really enjoyed it. It was much more comfortable than I expected. It meant that I didn't have to pay for camping very often 'cause you could just go into a weird bush area and camp for free, which I don't know was legal all the time . But, yeah, I felt very safe. I didn't meet any other young Australians travelling the country. I met a lot of grey nomads, had some great conversations. Grey nomads also, they have amazing fridges in their caravans and showers. I got a surprising amount of free steak dinners at campgrounds from grey nomads. So I will be very grateful for that always.

Kathryn Favelle: Did you tell them what you were doing and-

Sita Sargeant: Yeah.

Kathryn Favelle: Was that the icebreaker?

Sita Sargeant: I think the icebreaker, I don't even know what the icebreaker was. I had a lot of different icebreakers. Maybe be like, "Watch out in case I get murdered." But people, the thing that I loved is that whenever I would tell someone what I was doing, they would instantly suggest women from their town who deserved to be remembered or written about. They'd be like, "Oh, I know this great woman," and they'd be pitching women to you. And I love that. Like, I absolutely love that no matter where you go or no matter what conversation you have with someone, you could be the middle of like Kalgoorlie in a pub and you ask someone and you're like, "Are there any women that you know who have shaped history?" People will be able to name names. And I think that we kind of forget that sometimes that when you just ask someone point blank, "Do you know any women who have shaped history," people will be able to name a name. And I think it really made me, again, feel really proud to be an Australian that there were so many women I was hearing about, that I did not write about because I could not verify any sources a lot of the time, that had shaped his history in their local communities.

Kathryn Favelle: So how did you go about that selection process? 'Cause you've included 250 women and I think you've been to nearly 30 places and recounted those stories in the book and on the maps in the book, which are gorgeous. How did you work out who to include? How did you fill in the gaps in their stories? How did you go from a name in the pub to someone who you wanted to feature?

Sita Sargeant: Oh gosh, it was an interesting journey again. So I went to, I had less than a week in each place so it was very fast and dirty research and I was really just kind of like standing on the shoulders of all of these incredible local historians and people who have written the PhDs and people who have done all of this heavy lifting. And diving in and going, "Okay, who are the women who are representative of this town who if I kind of include them it'll tell a good story of this place?" So it was just looking for women who were kind of interesting, a bit diverse. Like, someone who, yeah, I think just women who were interesting.

But if I, 'cause I don't have that many women in the end. It was looking for women who, yeah, by picking them, it was telling a full story of a place. And I really want people to be able to kind of read this and read a chapter, particularly for the ones where I did like a full walking tour route, that you would come away feeling like, "Oh, I know the story of Melbourne. I know the story of Hobart." You might not know heaps and heaps about it but you're like, "I have a good feel for what happened here and some of the key moments." It's kinda like the story of Australia but told through the perspective of women. That's kind of what I was aiming for. But I had a lot more women that, I'm not gonna name names or point, but there's two people in the front who cut them.

Kathryn Favelle: Maybe they're just planning part two, the second volume.

Sita Sargeant: So the original manuscript that I submitted had almost 500 stories and women and then Megan, I sent her this, and it was not a good manuscript, I really wanna say, 'cause what I did is I spent those six amazing months just driving around Australia, having chats, eating steaks, not getting murdered, and I didn't do any writing during this period. I just lived my best life. And then I got back and I emailed Megan and I was like, "How fixed is the deadline?" She was like, "Pretty fixed." So then I was like, "Oh my god, I need to write a book in, like, two months."  

And I wrote a really not good manuscript in two months that was just huge. And then I handed this in kind of like, "Enjoy." And it was like a rough draught. And then Megan I think looked at it and was like, "Good lord. I maybe should have given you a word count." 'Cause then it was a process of her cutting women, me cutting women, Rosanna cutting women, and just trimming it down and I think refining it and looking at each story and going, "You know, what is the key thing that we want to share here? What is the most kind of, you know, yeah, what is the key moment in their lives or that would fit in and tell this broader story that I was trying to tell?" Because these are like, I think it's less than a hundred words for each woman that I've shared. It's not that much time to be able to tell a story. So it was just really getting to kind of the meat of it. But, yeah, it was a very, it was a journey picking them. A lot of women did not make the cut but I think the ones that did are a real mix and representation of the diversity of what it means to be an Australian.

Kathryn Favelle: Being a library nerd, there's a bit of love for libraries in the book, but I'm wondering how useful, given the speed that you had to work and the scale on which you're working, how useful were libraries and archives for that research?

Sita Sargeant: Libraries and archives were great. Libraries in particular and local museums and councils, because I was basically just working off what other people had done. Like, this is not original research. Like, this is not me, don't imagine me sitting in the archives, you know, with a magnifying glass trying to find missing women. It was finding women whose stories had been told but hadn't kind of necessarily been told in just a hyper accessible and engaging way to make people go like, "Oh, I wanna find out more about this woman." So it was looking at books that had already been written.  

The one resource that I think is so underrated and not every town does, but the towns that did, thank the Lord, is thematic histories of a town and of a place. They are so useful. Like, I feel like I'm probably one of the few people who's really dug into them, but they were so good to just get a feel for a broad history of a place and then to be able to start finding women and having chats with librarians, or I sent a lot of manic emails to local librarians around the place being like, "I've got this woman. Do you know where to, like, I need a location for her," or "I need this," or "Do you have any more information on her?" So librarians were really, really useful for sharing information. A great free resource as well. Like, you know, people who will just work for you for free. That's fantastic. That's what we all want. That's probably not how you wanna be put.

Kathryn Favelle: That's the plug. That's the plug. We'll work for free and do your research.

Sita Sargeant: The subtitle for the National Library. I don't know why you're not leading with that more. The National Library of Australia.

Kathryn Favelle: We're free.

Sita Sargeant: We're free.

Kathryn Favelle: That leads me nicely, not into things being free, but into the way you use social media because I think that's been a powerful engine for you. And it's probably how many of us first encountered She Shapes History’. But you did an amazing April Fool's Day prank.

Sita Sargeant: Oh God.

Kathryn Favelle: I don't know if you all saw it, but would you like to tell us about that one? It almost had me fooled, Sita. I nearly-

Sita Sargeant: So many people got so angry at me about it. For those of you who haven't seen the post, I went to Bunnings. I bought three traffic cones. They're $25 each for anyone who wants to recreate this at home. And I got some caution tape and I also typed up a letter from the government saying, "Statue removal," and a notice kind of saying that the statues of all women in the National Triangle are being removed 'cause there's been discussions about the fact that there's just too many women and we don't know if it's fully representative of Australian history and while they're doing an inquiry into that, you know, they're just gonna remove the statues of women.  

And I put this up and then I did my caution tape around both Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons and Susan Ryan and then I took photos and then I posted about it being like, "Can you believe this is happening?" And then my last slide, by the way, said it was an April Fool's joke, which I wasn't actually gonna kind put in but shout-out to one of my guides, Eliza, for saying, "You will give people a heart attack if you don't." Like, "I think this is necessary."  

So I did a post on that and it was essentially just to draw attention to the fact that we cannot take the fact that women's historical contributions are being recognised for granted. And there's also always so much more work to be done, not just in terms of statue equality and place naming, but also just in terms of actually knowing and sharing more women's stories and being able to kind of, you know, comfortably name 10 women from Australian history who have shaped his history and share their stories. I think there are barely any Australians who would be able to do that.

Kathryn Favelle: And I think that was, the power of that social media prank was that it was believable. In fact, I think you say in the book that only 4% of statues in Australia are of women, which just that stat blew my mind. But the idea that we might just remove all of the three statues that we've got because someone had complained sat within the realm of possibility.

Sita Sargeant: I think that's a worrying indictment of the Australian government right now everyone thought that was real.

Kathryn Favelle: And of Australia, you know? And our keyboard warriors. But you've also had some other interesting impacts and I was thinking about the post that you put up about Fremantle and the naming of Fremantle and what that led to, 'cause what you're doing on social media is really having some real-world impacts.

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, yeah. So I ended up making a post last year and, again, if I'd known that people would actually engage with the post, I would've maybe cleaned my camera before I did it 'cause it's very blurry. And it was me just saying like, "Did you know that Fremantle is named after this really terrible person?"  

It's named after a guy named Charles Fremantle, who was sent to found the Swan River colony, so the colony of Western Australia, as part of a kind of coverup because he had raped his 16-year-old servant in front of two other servants. And at the time, the penalty for rape was the death penalty. So he was at risk of being kind of killed. And so his dad, who was you know very well-connected, ended up pulling lots of strings and made it so that Charles could come over as to kind of get him away and keep him safe to found the colony of Western Australia. And he complained about it the entire time. He's like, "This is terrible. Why are they doing this to me?" Like, "How dare they?" He hated it while he was here.  

And he got a place named after him. And I just thought, you know, we are kind of slowly but surely having this conversation about who gets to be remembered in Australian history and I think that as part of that, we should be having a conversation about who have we remembered, what stories have we remembered, and what stories have we said, "This is representative of who we are. This is who's name we want to keep alive." I made that post, and then Hannah, the mayor of Fremantle saw it. I think a lot of people sent it to her and then-

Kathryn Favelle: Oops.

Sita Sargeant: And then she saw it and she sent me a DM saying, you know, "I'm gonna be in Canberra kind of on this day. Like, I would love to actually just have a chat with you." And she brought her gorgeous 12-year-old daughter and I ended up spending three hours with them just walking around and chatting. And she said that she had then just shown that video to pretty much all of the other people on the Fremantle Council being like, "Did you know this?" And then she explained to me, she's like, "We would actually love to have like a bigger conversation about renaming Fremantle and about whether we should call it like Walyalup," which is the First Nations name for it.  

And then she goes into, she's like, "But it's very contentious at the moment because the First Nations community, the Walyalup is like a much larger area, so it's whether or not it would actually work." And she just explained that nuance to me about why it wouldn't be an instant change, but she's like, "This is something that we are talking about and that we will have a bigger conversation about."  

So I think that, yeah, and I don't think that that post was like, there was like 20,000 views, so it wasn't crazy shared, but I think that it just resonated with people and it gets in front of the right person. Yeah, so complaining online, it works.

Kathryn Favelle: But I think it also demonstrates the power of the Trojan horse, that you tell the story and it ripples out and things start to change and ‘She Shapes History’ the book is full, full of those stories that will start to maybe change the way we think about our places and our people.  

We're gonna give you a chance to ask some questions in a minute, but I'm going to put to Sita and then to all of you who do ask a question, the question that Vasiliki put to me on a She Shapes History tour last Sunday. I was a spy. I was doing my research.  

And Vasiliki asked us all at the start of the tour to tell us about a woman who inspires you. Now, I'm going to rule out mothers, daughters, sisters, wives. We'll take that as given that we're all inspirational. But Sita, who is the woman that maybe most inspires you at the moment? 'Cause it will change.

Sita Sargeant: Alive or dead?

Kathryn Favelle: You can choose. Or you can have two. You're the author. You can have two women if you like.

Sita Sargeant: Okay, I do wanna really quickly shout out my mom. I know that you explicitly said no, but I think that there are so many women who kind of really support other women to shape history and I think that my mom is like the biggest example of that. Oh my gosh. Like, she watched my dog while I was travelling. She fed and housed me for two months while I was working on the book and walked and watered me. She helps out with behind the scenes stuff with ‘She Shapes History’. She's been project managing my move to Melbourne. She just like, I am so grateful for her every day and I wanted to just shout her out because I really don't think that I would be able to shape history without her. I also call her like twice a day, which is too much. Yeah.

Kathryn Favelle: Right, Sita's mom we're allowing.

Sita Sargeant: And the other two people that I'm gonna shout out because I'm trying to advocate for them to get a book is Hannah and Vanessa, who started Cafe, yeah, yeah, who started Cafe Stepping Stone in Canberra, which is a work integration social enterprise that trains up and employs migrant and refugee women, and they won the Australian of the Year Local Heroes for 2025 and are genuine local heroes. I'm also borrowing their car at the moment 'cause mine is broken. So genuine local heroes and I think they would make a great cookbook, Megan and Amanda. And if you think so too, Megan and Amanda are sitting up in front.

Kathryn Favelle: That was not what I was expecting but that was brilliant.

Sita Sargeant: Always hustling. I am a business owner and entrepreneur at heart.

Kathryn Favelle: And demonstrating that women are shaping history as we speak. Yeah, thank you. Now, if you would like to ask Sita a question and you've got someone you would like to talk about briefly as someone who inspires you, Jane and Kelly have got microphones. We're streaming to the conference room upstairs and we're streaming all over the country, so you do need a microphone to come to you, but maybe we could pop some lights up. Thanks, Adam. And pop your hands up. And the girls have reminded me, the She Shapes History team are just making a quiet exit to plan the next exciting phase of the morning for you.

Sita Sargeant: Yep, they're wearing their She Shapes History shirts and they'll be waiting for you at different locations around the National Triangle and you'll get a map telling you where they are, and if you get all your six locations punched, you'll get a treat. Oh, even better. Even better. And I'm hoping we're gonna sell, do you sell She Shapes History T-shirts?

Sita Sargeant: Nope.

Kathryn Favelle: I think we might need to go there. We've got one up the back.

Staff member: I've got one in the middle.

Kathryn Favelle: One in the middle. There we go. And we've got Alex down the front.

Audience member 1: I wanted to ask, with all the people that you spoke to across the country, did you find that there was an existing community of practise for women's history in Australia or is that something that would now be able to connect and develop after this book?

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, that's such a good question. I think that there are so, so many women who are working in this space and kind of doing research on the women's history space and trying to kind of make it, just share these stories more. I think it could be more connected. Like, I definitely think it could be more connected.  

And I really view what we're doing as more on that kind of public history side of things. Like, I really emphasise that we are not researchers, we are not historians in that sense. Like, we are tour guides. We're about kind of making it accessible and kind of engaging, and I think that there could be a bit more in that sort of space. So I'm kind of hoping that it does create more of that and just gets more people interested in the field of Australian women's history and maybe going like, "Oh, maybe I'll study this at uni," or "Maybe I'll do a research project on this." So I'm kind of hoping that it just makes people go, "Oh, there's more here than I expected."

Audience member 1: Thank you.

Kathryn Favelle: Thank you. Alex.

Audience member 2: Hi, Sita. My question is, what do you think is the greatest barrier preventing women's stories being told in school? 'Cause I definitely agree with you as someone who was passionate about history through primary school, high school, and then into university. It still disappoints me to this day that I didn't learn all of the things until I started doing it myself.

Sita Sargeant: Yeah, and I've spoken to quite a lot of teachers about this. I think that there's a lack of easily accessible learning resources to be super frank. I think that teachers are so overworked and they work so hard to make sure they are telling really full stories through history, but they're also having to do a lot of admin and deal with the bureaucracy.  

And I think that that's why it's really important for kind of people like me to help make those stories a bit more accessible and just make it easier for teachers to be able to bring it into the classroom. So I'm really hoping that having a book like this makes it a bit easier for kind of teachers to incorporate women's history. So I think it's having the learning resources and making it possible. So I would never put that on teachers. I really think that that's a failure of kind of everyone else by making it not accessible.

Kathryn Favelle: My colleagues are going to hate me because I think you could put that on the National Library because our Digital Classroom needs to have perhaps a She Shapes History module.

Sita Sargeant: A collaboration.

Kathryn Favelle: And on Monday morning, I'll be apologising to the education team 'cause they don't have that in their work plan yet. We've got a question down here. Jane, can you whip the microphone over, are you closest? And I haven't heard about any women that inspire you yet, so I'm putting it on you.

Audience member 3: Oh, dear. What's next for She Shapes History the tour company? And are you going to go overseas? What are you going to do?

Sita Sargeant: What a very big sort of a question.

Kathryn Favelle: That's a very big question.

Sita Sargeant: So we are scaling. So the goal, like, doing the researches and travelling around just really highlighted for me just how much of a absence there was for I just think really, like, the sort of historical experiences that do engage a wide audience and share these sorts of stories. And it made me go, "Okay, I want, like, She Shapes History could be everywhere." So I wanna scale She Shapes History up.  

We're gonna be launching tours in Sydney end of May and then in Melbourne end of June and then hopefully elsewhere in Australia over the coming couple of years. And then I would love to grow overseas too. I think that this is the sort of thing that could so easily be everywhere. She Shapes History is, like, it's universally true no matter where you go.

Kathryn Favelle: A global brand.

Sita Sargeant: A global brand, yeah.

Kathryn Favelle: Global brand. Now, Kelly's got a question online.

Kelly: Hi, Sita.

Kathryn Favelle: And then we've got, Jane, have you've got an online question too? You've got one here. Okay.

Kelly: Okay, Sita, I have a question from Campbell Rhodes, who's watching online. Campbell wants to know, "Other than Fanny Finch from 'She Shapes History,' who deserves to have a book of her own or a TV series?"

Sita Sargeant: Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. Okay, a woman I love and I think this would be such a great TV show, so her name is Alma Quon and she was Australia's very first, she started Australia's very first all-female, multi-racial, multi-instrumental swing band.

Kathryn Favelle: Ooh.

Sita Sargeant: I know. And this was in the kind of, I think 1940s, I wanna say. It was World War II period. Yeah, 1940s. And she just loved music and had seen the success of kind of swing bands overseas and how they brought community together and she went, "You know what? I wanna do this in Melbourne." So she got her friends together, she roped in her sister, and it was called Alma Quon and the Joy Belles. And I love the audacity to name like a 10-person band after yourself. And she kept playing for the next 60 years.

Kathryn Favelle: 60 years, wow.

Sita Sargeant: Like, she never made any money off this. Like, barely enough to cover the sheet music. But she just loved performing and loved the music. And I was talking to the editor of a paper in Melbourne and she was saying that she remembers going to kind of, like, primary school dances and Alma Quon and the Joy Belles performing 'cause they were just such a staple of Melbourne. And I feel like that's such a Melbourne story of musicians who just do something 'cause they love it and keep doing it and it just adds to the fabric and soundtrack to the city. And I'm like, "I want more stories like that." And I just, what an icon.

Kathryn Favelle: And will she feature in the Melbourne tour do you think?

Sita Sargeant: Oh, of course. Yes.

Kathryn Favelle: So we've already got a sneak peek at what's happening in Melbourne. Question over here.

Audience member 4: Hello, I am a teacher and I'm curious about when, hopefully not if, when you're going to turn these women's stories into little books for kids in the frame of Little People, Big Dreams series or to write them as a first-person story of grown-up women changing the world for our early readers in small chapter books? Because that's what we don't see. We have a lot of stories about people growing up and insinuating about what they will do and become, but what our students need, boys and girls need to see really strong females living their best lives in the midst of change and doing it with an Australian focus. So I hope that's coming.

Kathryn Favelle: No pressure, Hardie Grant. No pressure at all.

Sita Sargeant: Maybe by Christmas. We were talking last night about turning this into a children's version, so getting an illustrator and making it just hyper accessible to younger people. But Amanda and Megan , get the other things off the work plan.

Kathryn Favelle: Okey-doke, Kelly's got someone in the back corner.

Audience member 5: Good morning. Sita, I think I would have to say that, you know, we're talking about women who inspire us. I've been following you on socials, but actually hearing you speak this morning has left me even more inspired by what you do. You're an incredible speaker. I think everyone in this room has had the best time listening to you share the story of this book. My question is, aside obviously from every single person who is attending school at the moment who should be reading your book, who's the one person you hope gets a copy of this book and enjoys it?

Sita Sargeant: Oh my gosh. What a question. I feel like that person got a copy yesterday because-

Kathryn Favelle: Yes.

Sita Sargeant: For those of you who are wondering, "Why all the claps?" I had the Governor General of Australia reach out because, yeah, I know. And I just wanna preface by saying I know it sounds very fake what I'm about to say 'cause it feels really surreal and not quite real, but the Governor General has a secret Instagram account and she-

Kahtyrn Favelle: Not anymore.

Sita Sargeant: We're all gonna go looking for it after this. And she came across my kind of book announcement posts on social media and she saw this and she was like, "Oh my gosh, you know, this is so amazing." And she wanted to come and she did like a deep dive into our social media as well as into our website and what we were doing and then she went, "Oh, I really, like, I want to come to this book launch." And then she thought the election was gonna be this weekend so she couldn't make it work and instead, as an apology, so the email I got from her team started with, "We're so sorry the Governor General couldn't make it to your book launch." And I'm like, "I didn't know that was on the table."  

She invited me to her house, which is Government House, to talk about kind of the book. And I really didn't know what to expect. I thought I would be doing a little pitch of myself. And then I get there and then she sits me down and she's like, "I've got so many ideas." And I was like, "What is happening?" I was like, "Genuinely." And she starts talking about how she's so, so excited to be able to kind of start incorporating more Australian women's history and stories into her speeches. She's like, "We're gonna bulk order a bunch of copies and just start gifting it to people." She's sending it to the governor of each state, which is insane. And she's like, "This is the story of Australia that I wanna start promoting more of and I'm so excited that you've helped kinda make that possible. I see this is the start of a very long relationship." And I'm like, "Stop it. Stop it." Like, "This is not okay."  

And then at the, and I at the start had given her, like, a tote bag and a shirt and a book and then before I left, she's like, "Just wait." And then she ducked in the toilet and changed into the shirt and I got a photo with her in the shirt and she was like, "This will look great with blazers." And I'm like, "You need to stop it." Like, "I'm actually struggling."  

And I just think having the Governor General of Australia saying that she had been wanting to incorporate more Australian women's stories into her speeches and start sharing them more but hadn't been able to do it and to say like, "This book will help me do that," like, fuck me. Like, that's hard to beat.

Kathryn Favelle: That's very hard to beat. And I think we've got maybe the last question.

Audience member 6: Hi, I'm a senior researcher at the Parliamentary Library, so I'm also inspired to make sure I'm doing more of this in my work. But just as a testament to how compelling stories are as a way to research history, I am dying to know whether Fanny Finch's vote got rid of the bad dude.

Sita Sargeant: I am so sorry to tell you it did not work. And when they found out that a woman had voted, they immediately went through all the ballots and then they ripped hers out and then they closed the loophole in the law. But it's not that guy's name that we're remembering. It's Fanny Finch's, so.

Kathryn Favelle: Thank you for your great questions. If you are thinking about ways that you can do more, there's a feast of things that you can do today. Sita, of course, will be signing books in the foyer. So you can buy a book and take it away and read it and plan your own walking tours. You can pick up a map. We have maps of walking tours in the Parliamentary Triangle and the She Shapes History team are standing out there at key spots ready to tell you stories. So you can go for a walk today in the beautiful sunshine.  

But you can also do more. As Sita says at the end of the book, think about the women that you know, the women in your family, the women in your towns that you would like to know more about. Use your local library. I have to plug the National Library's collection and Trove as a great way to start finding out those stories and start telling people about the women that you know. But for now, the first thing we have to do is thank Sita for She Shapes History and the book. Congratulations.

Sita Sargeant: Oh my gosh. Wow. Oh gosh. Okay, I feel like that's enough clapping. You can stop.

Kathryn Favelle: Now, I know you all want to talk to her, but let's give her a couple of minutes to get up to the foyer and then you can have a chat and talk about women that inspire you. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.

Sita Sargeant: No, thank you. Oh my goodness.