Ann Curthoys

Do not be put off by the earnest and fusty-sounding title. The Companion to Women’s Historical Writing is not a book to acquire for the reference shelf on the off chance of needing to look up some arcane topic in the future. Quite the contrary. I have found it to be a most enjoyable bedside companion. Arranged alphabetically, with more than one hundred and fifty entries, it offers thumbnail sketches for a quick dip and more substantial essays to hold the attention in a longer engagement. The three editors, like most of the other fifty or so contributors, are distinguished writers in their own fields. Mary Spongberg, at Macquarie University, is the editor of Australian Feminist Studies; Ann Curthoys, from Sydney University, is a doyenne of Australian cultural and political history; and at Monash, Barbara Caine is a leading scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history. Drawing on their own research fields, each has provided long and lively analytical pieces, as well as writing a great many of the shorter entries. With some six hundred pages, plus another hundred when the index and bibliography are included, the Companion is a good fat book that will not sell the reader short. The new paperback edition has presumably been issued as a consequence of the success in the last five years of the expensive hardback.

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

Ann Curthoys’s Freedom Ride is a meticulously researched piece of Australian history, and so much more. It could sit comfortably on the required reading lists of subjects ranging from History, to Government, to Media. This ‘road story’ of peripatetic direct democracy, from people too young to assert the right to vote for change, is also an inspirational text that makes you question your own passivity to the wrongs in our world.