AustLit

This Hecate Exhibition is concerned with the history, influence and experience of the interdisciplinary journal Hecate. Founded in 1975 with Emeritus Professor Carole Ferrier as editor, it had support from The University of Queensland (UQ), Hecate was one of the first international second-wave feminist journals. Hecate is published by Hecate Press and produced from within the School of Communication and Arts at UQ.

The Literature Board and Arts Queensland, over the past four decades, provided extensive support for Hecate. To date, there are 76 published volumes of Hecate. Click here to view the full collection. 

Ferrier was always an advocate for female liberation within Australia's socio-political sphere. After obtaining a BA Honours from London and then a PhD from Auckland, New Zealand, Ferrier moved to Brisbane in 1973 to teach in the Department of English, now the School of Communication and Arts, at UQ.

Ferrier also became editor of the Australian Women's Book Review in 1999. She is on the editorial board of eight other national and international journals.

Ferrier's work in the academic world is extensive and eclectic. She has written over a hundred articles and book chapters, presented papers at seventy conferences in Australia and overseas, and has regularly organised conferences at UQ.  She has also published a number of books, including Gender, Politics, and Fiction (1992), Radical Brisbane (2004), Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (1986) and a biography, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (1999). A complete biography can be found here (use a hyperlink to the end of the project). Hecate's inception pioneered the advancement of feminist, socialist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic critique and scholarship. Since 1975, Ferrier continued to establish women's writing as an authoritative component of academic curriculum; personally, she would edit thousands of pieces of critical and creative writing and write many pieces of her own. Over her long-spanning career, Hecate became just one aspect of Ferrier's feminist activism.  

Ferrier's academic output is concerned with Women's and Gender Studies, and Critical and Cultural Studies, with a special interest in Black women authors; Australian women writers and Migrant writers; feminist and Marxist theory; and the theorising of ethnicity and race in regards to culture. Across her 50-year career, Ferrier has continued to strive for the liberation of women and other minority groups in the academy, in the writing and arts world, and beyond.

Through the development of a new alternative canon of literary and artistic value, Ferrier aimed to rediscover silenced and unrecognised figures of the past. Ferrier’s advocacy brought more awareness to the voices and cultural history of women and marginalised groups in literature. Likewise, the wide circulation of Hecate showcased Australian writing to the world.

To view Ferrier's publication list, please click here.