Australia’s crusaders for women’s voting rights and the radical feminists of the 1970s changed lives across the country and around the globe. But what about the generation in between?

Throughout the twentieth century, a group of trailblazing women writers challenged the nation’s status quo. Miles Franklin’s forceful voice invigorated the emerging women’s movement, Mary Gilmore was a groundbreaking feminist journalist, and novelists Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark explored the colonial displacement of Australia’s Indigenous people. Kylie Tennant spoke up for battlers during the Depression. Dymphna Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Dorothy Hewett, all members of Australia’s Communist Party, advocated for social reform. Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South jolted the NSW government into developing slum clearance programs. And the work of First Nations poet and activist Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal) was crucial in achieving constitutional reform for Indigenous peoples.

Acclaimed biographer Jacqueline Kent traces these women’s stories, shaped by the seismic social and political events of their time, and illuminates their immense courage and principled determination to change the world.