Susan Magarey

What charming company she is, Anna Cowen – warm, energetic, amusing, enthusiastic. And what a job that must have been: partnering Zelman Cowen when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser appointed him governor-general of Australia in 1977. John Kerr, Cowen’s predecessor, had called the very existence of the office ...

Ann Moyal was born in 1926, so now she is heading towards her ninetieth birthday. She has already launched a work of autobiography into the world, written in her mid-sixties. But her life did not, then, ‘take a quieter turn’. On the contrary, she tells us, ‘I’d continued to spend my ageing life with passion, involvement, and intensity.’

This republication of Susan Magarey’s 1985 biography of Catherine Helen Spence commemorates the anniversary of her death, aged eighty-five, in April 1910. In an enlarged and attractive new paperback format, with a revised introduction, its cover sketch of Spence, with upraised hand, in mid-speech, emphasises the key subject, both actual and metaphorical, of women’s public speaking. Remarkable as a writer and as a political and social reformer, Spence’s status as one of Australia’s earliest female public intellectuals is best represented in her more immediately transgressive role as public speaker, a graphic unbridling of the female voice.