Biographies

Queensland’s history is different in many respects from the older states, and similar only to Western Australia in features such as its vastness, its relative emptiness and its history as the last of the ‘frontier’ states. It is easy to caricature Queensland as historically and naturally conservative, even reactionary, by comparison to its more cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant counterparts in the south-eastern corner of Australia. This is the state in which, if Henry Reynolds’s estimates are accepted (as they still generally are, despite the notorious efforts of Keith Windschuttle), half of the 20,000 Aborigines killed in violent conflicts with European settlers in Australia met their deaths. This is the state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all the corruption that went with his government. And this is the state that was home to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and that gave it twenty-three per cent of the vote and ten seats in the 1998 state election.

If it is inadvisable to judge a book by its cover, perhaps it is equally unreliable to judge one by its title. But The Complete Book of Great Australian Women set my teeth on edge before I’d turned the first page. What qualifies a woman for greatness? Great deeds? Great courage? Great neighbours? And wasn’t the point of feminist history not only to open up the list of historical actors but also to challenge the very principles of historical gatekeeping: professional merit, political influence, public stature? The subtitle certainly doesn’t contribute to more inclusive notions of historical agency and achievement. Like a human hydroelectric scheme, de Vries’s women struggle to overcome the many ‘natural’ barriers to female success, and, like the nation itself, emerge triumphant.