Catherine Helen Spence, an unparalleled advocate of women's rights in Australia and the world, is now recognized as an important predecessor to the Feminist movement. Her autobiography, composed while on her deathbed and enhanced with scholarly annotation from two Spence scholars, reveals a woman both in and ahead of her time.

Body and Mind pays tribute to one of Australia's most outstanding and influential historians, F. B. (Barry) Smith. Barry has made pioneering contributions to the political, social and cultural histories of Britain and Australia, and these essays range across the fields he made his own, especially the interconnected histories of medicine (body) and ideas (mind). The editors bring together several generations of Barry's admirers, colleagues, friends and pupils, including Joanna Bourke writing on war and industrial trauma, Peter Edwards on the Agent Orange controversy, Pat Jalland on death in the London Blitz and Phillipa Mein Smith on the idea of Australasia. Body and Mind is a salute to the inestimable work, and the life and times of F. B. Smith.

South Australia has often been represented as different: convict free, more enlightened in its attitudes toward Aboriginal people, established on rational economic principles, progressive in its social/political development. Some of this is true, some not, but mostly the story is more complex. In this book, eminent historians explore these themes.

Sexual Progressives is a major new study of the feminists and socialists who campaigned against the moral conservatism of the Victorian period. Drawing on a range of sources, from letters and diaries to radical newspapers and utopian novels, it provides the first group portrait of Scotland’s hitherto neglected sexual rebels. They include Bella and Charles Pearce, prominent Glasgow socialists and disciples of an American-based mystic who taught that religion needed ‘re-sexed’; Jane Hume Clapperton, a feminist freethinker with advanced views on birth-control and women’s right to sexual pleasure; and Patrick Geddes, founder of an avant-garde Edinburgh subculture and co-author of an influential scientific book on sex. A consideration of their lives and work forces a reappraisal of our understanding of British sexual progressivism during this period and will therefore be of interest to all historians of modern gender and sexuality.

Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. She was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women.

This is a book about readers on the move in the age of Victorian empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.

Australia's first female prime minister. The country's first female judge. The first woman to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Australia's first female chief diplomat. The nation's first female winemaker. These women were all trailblazers, but they have something else in common - every one of them was South Australian. And they are just a handful of the 100 remarkable women whose stories are told in this beautiful book, illustrated with hundreds of photographs. Written by historian Carolyn Collins and journalist Roy Eccleston, Trailblazers shines a light on the lives of these extraordinary women whose feats inspired their state, nation and, often enough, the world. Now they can inspire a whole new generation.