As a child and young girl, I loved learning about history. That continued throughout adulthood. When I was at Melbourne University studying first year Arts, I enrolled in the subject Australian History. This subject had a unit of study in it: Women in Australian History. This was the first time in my learning of History that I realized that women had a different history than men.

Until that point, I had been taught about ‘great men’ making history in the public sphere of politics, the marketplace and the arts. Women had been ignored in history teaching, erased, overlooked and silenced. This unit of study, however, had changed all of that.

This unit taught me that women were significant in the building of a nation, both in the public sphere of life and the private (home and family). It showed me women were valued, present and active in building the nation of Australia. This learning was about to change my world with the realization that history had been taught through a phallocentric lens.

From this time on, I asked the question in any history -where were the women? What did they do? How did they live?

I continued to study, gaining degrees in Education- a Masters and Doctorate and a Graduate Diploma in Women’s Studies, selecting units of study and research that included the study of women and their lives as much as possible. I had felt that in much of my learning at school, there were many gaps in my knowledge about women in society because of the phallocentric knowledge that had been selected to teach.  

In the1980s, later, as a Lecturer at Swinburne College Melbourne, I created a course on Women’s Studies that was accredited there and for some time was seconded to work in the Women’s Affairs Department located in the Victorian Premier’s Office.

In the early 1990s, I was fortunate to be invited to contribute to writing a history book on girls’ education in Australia, part of a series on women in history. Other books in the series included Women and the Vote; Women and the Great War; Liberation of Women, books published in the 1990s, intended for the older school market.

It was a wonderful experience. My publisher gave me the opportunity to write book reviews on other topics and I later became a reviewer for the peer journal Gender and Education .

Since that first book, I have written another fourteen that address women and their lives because I have been interested to fill in gaps in knowledge where I saw them. I am Sasha (2018), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award was written as a promise to my grandmother who asked me to write about how she and her son, my father had survived World War Two and it highlights the strength of her character as well as other women’s, in the story. It also addresses the issue of gender identity. A short film based on this book was produced in 2022: Sasha’s Game, which screened Melbourne and Sydney, receiving many awards.

Governors’ Wives in Colonial Australia and the six book series: Australian Sportswomen (2002) are prime examples where there were those gaps at the time. At that time, there were books about male governors and sportsmen, but a paucity on women. The Armytage family of Como (2002) was a prominent pastoral family in Victoria with knowledge circulating about the men of the family and their work in the wool industry, but not much available on the women members of the family so my book filled that gap offering knowledge about their lives and roles.

In 2020, I decided to write I am Woman (2020), about aspects of my life that may have been helpful to other women and share personal stories. Reframing Beauty (2022), a book that challenges the shallow value of physical beauty, so highly regarded in our contemporary society poured out of me. It emanated from my seeing billboards that advertised cosmetic procedures to enhance a woman’s beauty in a major road near where I live and as a reaction to my initial bruised face after I had a cancer removed with the eleven stitches and the reactions of two men who then saw me in the street who I did not know.

Please see my blog on my first book on women and art, THE FEMALE GAZE which is evolving into a series, as I am loving the learning about incredibly talented creative women in the arts.