AustLit

'Pioneer Eliza Hawkins blazed a trail across the Blue Mountains. Sydney journalist Louise Mack moved to Tuscany and enjoyed a steamy affair with Italy's leading writer. As the world's first female war correspondent she reported the German invasion of Belgium for The Daily Mail, Louise narrowly escaped being shot as a spy and returned to Sydney.

Sister Ann Donnell risked her life to save Gallipoli victims in a field hospital on the island of Lemnos.

Beautiful, wild and wealthy, Nell Tritton became the lover and second wife of Alexander Kerensky, former Prime Minister of Russia. Nell foiled attempts by Stalin to assassinate her husband and drove him to freedom when the Nazis invaded Paris.

Melbourne artist Hilda Rix Nicholas had a five day honeymoon before her husband was killed fighting the Germans in France. Hilda had two landmark exhibitions in Paris before returning to Australia, marrying again and moving to the Monaro.

Mary Gaunt explored the remote jungles of West Africa with a team of naked warriors carrying her baggage. Two years later, in 1913 she spent six months in Peking, in an era before China had proper roads, journeying by mule cart from Peking to the Gobi desert and wrote three books about her adventures.

Margaret Ogg and Vida Goldstein were jeered in the 1890s when they claimed women were clever enough to get into Parliament.

It took 50 years before Enid Lyons, widowed mother of twelve, was made Australia's first Cabinet Minister and her struggles to hold office are compared with the career of Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, and Quentin Bryce, mother of five and our first female Governor-General.' (Publisher's blurb)