AustLit

Carmichael left Ballarat for Orbost with her parents at the age of nine. In the 1880s she was schooled in Melbourne then became a certified nurse at the Children's Hospital there. After finishing her training she married Francis Mullis. They moved to Adelaide then London, where hardship impacted Carmichael's health, eventually leading to her death. Her sons, brought back to Melbourne by friends, adopted their mother's maiden name.

Carmichael was the first Victorian-born woman poet. Her poem 'Sweet Summer's Dead' was set to music by J. A. Steele and published by Allan's in 1934.

Ada Cambridge was born at St Germans, Norfolk, England, in 1844. She was educated by a series of governesses and also read widely. In 1865 she published two small works: Hymns on the Litany and Two Surplices. A Tale. She married the young curate George Cross in 1870, and that same year the couple arrived in Victoria. Between 1870 and 1909, George Cross conducted pastoral work at Wangaratta, Yackandandah, Ballan, Coleraine, Bendigo, Beechworth and Williamstown. In 1873 Cambridge began writing to supplement her husband's meagre income. Many of her works (she published twenty-one novels) were serialised in periodicals like the Australasian and a number were also published in book form. Novels such as A Marked Man (1890) and The Three Miss Kings (1891) brought her wide recognition in Australia and England with their tales of the Anglo-Australian aristocracy. She also published three volumes of poetry: The Manor House and other Poems (1875), Unspoken Thoughts (1887) and The Hand in the Dark (1913). After George Cross resigned from Williamstown in 1909 they returned to England. But after her husband died in 1917, Cambridge returned to Victoria. She died at Elsternwick in 1926.

Ada Cambridge's reputation suffered after her death because critics, looking for evidence of 1890s nationalism, found nothing of interest in her works. However, feminist studies in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated the radical explorations of Victorian society in Cambridge's poetry and fiction, particularly in her studies of marital love. In response to these findings, new editions of her poetry and fiction have appeared, making her work more accessible to general readers.

First Australian-born woman novelist. Also a noted naturalist and natural history artist.

Mary Gaunt was born and grew up in Chiltern, Victoria. She was one of the first two women admitted to the University of Melbourne, but did not complete her degree.

From the late 1880s on she had short stories and articles published in such journals as Argus, the Sydney Mail and the Australasian, which earned her enough money to pay the passage of her first trip to Europe in 1890. In 1894 she married a widower, Dr Hubert Miller, and settled in Warrnambool. Her husband's death in 1900 left her penniless, and to maintain her independence she decided to move to London in 1901 and seek her fortune as a writer. She never returned to Australia. She travelled widely in Europe, Africa, China and Jamaica, where several of her works are set, and finally settled in Italy.

Gaunt wrote numerous travel books and works of fiction. Many of her novels deal with feminist themes. Of over twenty published works, six novels and a book of short stories concern Australia, most notably her novels Kirkham's Find (1897) and Deadman's (1898). (Source: Oxford Companion to Australian Literature)

An accomplished author, artist, botanist and naturalist despite her lack of formal education, Louisa Anne Meredith was the first woman to write a description of life in Tasmania. Her first book of self-illustrated poetry, titled Poems, was published in London when she was in her early twenties. Her next volume, The Romance of Nature, or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated, was likewise published by Charles Tilt in London and appeared in 1839. In the same year, Meredith married her cousin Charles Meredith and moved first to New South Wales and then to Oyster Bay, Tasmania where she continued to write and paint. Notes and Sketches of New South Wales was published in 1844 and My Home in Tasmania in 1852.

Meredith was an active participant in the production of plays, concerts and poetry readings in Hobart. As an ardent conservationist Meredith lobbied to have an act of parliament passed to protect Tasmania's wildlife and also helped found the Tasmanian branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Her love of flora and fauna was clearly illustrated in her many and varied works. Meredith's remarkable collection of writing and painting provide a clear picture of the life of white Australian settlers spanning 50 years of the pioneer era of Tasmania.

In 1884, four years after the death of her husband, Meredith was awarded £100 per year by the British Government in recognition of her work in literature, art and science.

(Adapted from website Significant Tasmanian Women Sighted 17/1/2013 [Originally sighted (2006) at http://www.women.tas.gov.au/significantwomen/search/louisameredith.html]

Born in Victoria, Alice Henry was a journalist on the Argus, the Daily Herald, the Triad and the Australasian in the 1890's. In 1905 she went to England and the United States to lecture on women's suffrage and became secretary of the Chicago branch of the National Women's Trade Union League and the editor of Life and Labour, working closely with Miles Franklin. She returned to Australia in 1933 where she settled permanently.