The State had a very clear definition of what well-behaved meant. And it kept meticulous records of everyone who didn't meet it, which included quite a few women.

Women were criminalised for vagrancy, for sex work, for public drunkenness, for having children outside marriage, for wearing the wrong clothes, for living as men, for killing the husbands who were abusing them. They were transported and listed by name, age and sentence. They were indentured as children. They were photographed on admission to prison, written up in police gazettes, and sold to the public as scandals in the morning paper.

The National Library holds those records. First Fleet convict lists. Police gazettes. Prison photographs. Indenture papers. Welfare and charity files. Oral histories. Newspapers that named and shamed.

Read the way they were meant to be read, these documents are evidence of women behaving badly. Read against the grain, they are some of the only proof we have that these women existed at all.

Join Sita, Leigh, Zoe and Esme as they work through the collection: the women the law went looking for, the women the papers turned into cautionary tales, and the women whose absence from the record is itself the story.

About She Shapes History at the National Library of Australia

Where are the women in the story of Australia?

The answer might surprise you. The National Library of Australia holds one of the richest collections of women's history in this country: diaries, court records, photographs, oral histories, union files, objects, and more. Many Australians have no idea what's there. And much of what's in it has never been seen by the general public.

Over four years and twelve talks, She Shapes History founder and CEO Sita Sargeant is partnering with the Library to change that. Along with the events, we'll develop a digital hub with research guides and reading lists so by the end of the series you won't just know more about Australian history. You'll know how to find it yourself.

Join us for the entire journey, or come along to any one (or more!) of the events to hear from incredible speakers shaping history in their fields.

About Sita Sargeant

Sita Sargeant is a social entrepreneur, author, and one of Australia's leading voices in women's history. In 2021, she founded She Shapes History, a company making women's history accessible and engaging through walking tours, digital content, and partnerships with historic sites and cultural institutions. She Shapes History currently operates in four cities: Canberra, Sydney, Wollongong and Melbourne with plans to be in eight by the end of 2027. She published a book by the same name in 2025 sharing the stories of over 250 women who helped shape 31 towns and cities across Australia. In 2026, she was named the ACT Young Australian of the Year.

About the speakers

Zoe Smith is an award-winning historian whose research sits at the intersections of gender, cultural, social, literary and feminist legal history. Her work excavates the long history of domestic violence in Australia, centring the experiences of victim-survivors and the feminist writers who spoke up alongside them, and drawing attention to the historical lineages of abuse we now name as coercive control, financial abuse, and reproductive coercion. She was the 2024 National Library of Australia Seymour Scholar, a fellowship she spent in the Library's rich archive of feminist writing about domestic violence at the time of Australia's national foundation.

Associate Professor Leigh Straw is an internationally recognised historian, educator and award-winning author who teaches Australian history, crime history and modern American history. Her interest in women and crime began in 2010, when she found stories she knew nothing about buried in the Police Gazettes. She has since written true crime biographies of organised crime figures Kate Leigh and Dulcie Markham, a biography of Australia's first female detective Lillian Armfield, and books on the women of Perth's Roe Street brothels and the sensational ballroom murder case of 1925. She appears regularly on BBC History Extra, ABC Radio National and Conversations.

Dr Esmé Louise James is an author and sex historian, best known as the creator of Kinky History, which has grown from a viral series with over three million followers into a globally bestselling book, a chart-topping podcast and a live show. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2024, tracing an aesthetic of the erotic across eighteenth-century literature. Her debut novel, Becoming Venus, is out with Simon & Schuster this September. Set in Melbourne and loosely inspired by the eighteenth-century erotic classic Fanny Hill, it follows one woman's journey of sexual self-discovery.