Kay Saunders - The Big Book of Scandalous Australian Women: Stories of Women who Broke the Rules

Our history is replete with rebels, rousers, eccentrics and plain bad girls: women some even deadly who have not received the sort of attention they rightly deserve. The two books in this compendium go some way towards addressing that.

Notorious Australian Women (first published in 2011) charts the lives of some 20 mavericks who defied the rigid cultural prescriptions of what it meant to be a woman in Australia. The scope of this book is wide, not just geographically and temporally but in the diversity of the womens cultural and class origins. Some of the women were born to privilege in Australia, others came from humble circumstances and from far-off European countries: Prussian-born brothel keeper Caroline Hodgson is profiled alongside cosmetic queen Helena Rubinstein, who rose up from plain beginnings in Poland; Sydney-born Annette Kellermanns parents were French and German classical musicians; Mary Cockerill was a teenaged Pallawah woman from the Hobart area who became a bushranger in 1815; and Walyer was a frontier freedom fighter in the northern area of Van Diemens Land.

No matter where they came from and what their destiny held, each woman looked societys values squarely in the eye and went upon her own path regardless. Some flourished in their fame or infamy while others met inglorious and tragic ends. Their verve, courage and decisiveness deserve our applause and our admiration.

Deadly Australian Women (2013) showed that women could kill sometimes within social contexts, but sometimes because they were by nature killers. There are women such as Donna Fitchett, who coldly murdered her two boys in 2005 in a bizarre revenge attack against her husband, and teenager Helen Moore who, in Sydney in the 1960s, set about killing and disabling children she was entrusted to babysit. A smaller but intriguing category of female serial killers includes Caroline Grills, a maternal Sydney housewife who found excitement in the early post-war years killing family members with the tasteless and odourless rat poison thallium.

The prevalence of infanticide and the abandonment of unwanted newborn babies throughout Australian history still have the power to shock. Many convicted murderers were imprisoned largely because of the roles they played in matters of reproduction and birth control in a time when women had limited choices. Abortionists such as Madame Harpur, an educated woman plying her trade in late-colonial Adelaide, made a fortune supplying terminations to often poor and desperate pregnant women. Sarah Makin and Alice Mitchell ran businesses providing care and shelter for ex-nuptial babies only to realise there was more money to be made in killing them.

Unhappily married women, with no option of an easy divorce, came up with deadly solutions to the problem of escaping unwanted or violent partners. Some husbands were dispatched for the insurance money, while others were eliminated through vengeful pacts with the new man on the scene.

The Big Book of Scandalous Australian Women takes readers into the hidden corners of our history, revealing women of audacity, courage and commitment alongside those who went beyond mere scandal into the realms of deadly action.

KAY SAUNDERS

Brisbane, January 2014