After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.

It seems apt that NLA Publishing, which ‘creates books that tell stories by and about Australians’ and books that explore the Library’s extensive collections, has published Clarke’s latest one. The NLA holds seventy-six boxes of her own papers, along with those of her late husband, the author and former prisoner of war Hugh V. Clarke. The Library also has oral history interviews with Clarke, including one conducted by Ann Moyal, another admirable independent scholar.

As Clarke notes, her book Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia (1988) was a forerunner to her latest. Unlike that book, which featured short biographies and a large cast, Bold Types has individual chapters on ten women who ‘blazed a trail’ as journalists, foreign correspondents, and editors between the 1860s and the 1960s. The final chapter is about three women selected to tour operational war bases in eastern Australia in 1943.

Bold Types bookends Kylie Andrews’s Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945–1975 (Anthem), about four ABC broadcasters. Both of these 2022 titles show the value of group biography and of exploring the collective experience of women as gendered subjects. Bold Types is about the range of gains women journalists (mainly print) made over a century and the setbacks they encountered in an overwhelmingly male profession.