* Dead Born, Joan Lock, Robert Hale, London, 2001. A Victorian detective story along the lines of Anne Perry, purchased because I met the author at the Women’s Library seminar on which I blogged a couple of months ago – she has had an interesting life, having been one of the early women in the police force, a subject on which she has written a number of books.

Central to this story is the 1878 sinking of the pleasure steamer Princess Alice, which killed more than 640, many of them women and children. (There’s a monument in Greenwich.)

The other main “historical” element is baby farms, to which unmarried women went to have their babies – many of which were killed immediately after birth, although the mothers were told they would be adopted by wealthy couples.

*The Englishwoman in America, Isabella Bird, her first book. There’s a brief biography here.

*The Tailor-King: the Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom on Munster, Anthony Arthur, Thomas Dunne, New York, 1999. Having just read Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss, I wanted to know more about the historical events here, and when I walked into the academic remainder shop this afternoon there was this, sitting waiting for me.

* Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, Flora Fraser, 2004. I only went into WH Smith for some file boxes, but this was sitting there half-price, and it was already on my Amazon list …

* Clay Tobacco Pipes, Eric G. Ayto, Shire, 2002. Absolutely fascinating – really!

Before I leave the subject of Australian writers I have to mention my all-time favourite (although we are talking entertainment rather than literature here, Kerry Greenwood, particularly for her Phryne Fisher series, set in the roaring Twenties, primarily in Australia.

The plotting’s not great, but the characters are wonderful, particularly Phyrne herself. (I’m told the frocks are rather good too, although that’s not my scene.) She lived in abject poverty in Melbourne, so she has the instincts of an alley cat for survival, but the Great War having killed off lots of eligible young males, her father is suddenly an English aristocrat, but while she enjoys the money, Phyrne’s not cut out for the county set …

In the first novel, Cocaine Blues, she gets her first serious case (after she’s busted a county cricket toff for trying to steal a diamond necklace, from an English retired colonel ….

“The last time she had been fawned over with this air of distracted delight was when one county family thought that she was going to take their appalling lounge lizard of a son off their hands, just because she had slept with him once or twice. The scene when she declined to marry him had been reminiscent of early Victorian melodrama. Phryne feared she was becoming cynical.”(p. 4)

The author suggests that choosing the Twenties was almost accidental, but it certainly allows full play for a wonderful female character – Phyrne flies planes, drives enormous powerful cars, and has her pick of the men, usually the exotic ones, and none of it seems historically anachronistic, while the Australian fawning over her title, (“the Hon.”) gives her even more licence.

Probably my favourite of the 14 on my shelf (yes a full set – they might even be worth something one day) is Murder in Montparnasse, in which we learn that Phryne was an ambulance driver during the Great War.

Oddly enough the series is published broadly now in Australia (including on audio), and at least some have been translated into German, but none has been published in Britain. Any enterprising publishers out there?

(There’s also a new series just started, and yes, I’m collecting those too, although it is not quite so much fun without the historical setting.)

My mobile phone’s never been the same since someone stood on it, oddly enough. I’ve been trying to work out how to recycle it and I just found the answer.

You just email Guide Dogs for the Blind, they send you a freepost envelope and after you’ve sent it back they get £3.50. Result!

(They also do inkjet cartridges and even humble postage stamps – although I’m not sure I’m quite that dedicated.)

I should add that while I don’t read much fiction, a browse along my bookshelf revealed a selection of non-fiction on women in Australia.

This includes:

* Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Anne Summers, first published 1975.
(THE original classic.) The title is explained by two quotes:

“No, no – surely not! My God – not more of those damned whores! Never have I known worse women.”
Lt Ralph Clark on the arrival of the Second Fleet with 200 women convicts in June 1790

“If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. … For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good, without what a gentleman in the Colony appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.”
Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, 1847

* Closely followed by The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975, Miriam Dixon, 1976. She writes about what writing history was like then:

“I call this an exploratory book, not as a device to disarm critics, but as an honest statement of intent and limitations. Virtually all serious analysis of Australian character – or identity – is by males about males. So what else could I be doing but throwing up a temporary scaffolding?” (p. 13)

* The Other Half: Women in Australian Society, Jan Mercer, ed, 1975. This is sociological, concerned mostly about the present and recent past, with a heavy base in statistics.

Interesting that there was such an explosion of material in a short period. I bought all of these paperbacks in 1985, in my second year of university, when I moved out of home, found the wonderful secondhand bookshops on Glebe Point Road in Sydney, and really started my education. (Disgraceful that my posh girls’ school hadn’t even hinted that such works existed.)

Then again, I thought at the time these were very old books, but of course it was only a decade since their publication. They confirmed for me many of the things I’d observed and thought, but had not had any impact on most areas of Australian life, including (perhaps unsurprisingly) the agriculture faculty (particularly the reproduction lecturer who interspersed slides of naked women with cow uteri to “enliven” lectures).

Purchases in the past ten years, when not living in Oz, has been much more piecemeal, but two books probably present an outline of two key areas of debate.

* The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power, by Helen Garner, 1995. She identifies herself as a feminist, but she struggles to come to terms with a celebrated case of alleged sexual harassment/assault in a college of Melbourne University in 1992 that was a cause celebre at the time.

* Bad Girls: the Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s, Catharine Lumby, 1977 written in explicit response to a question asked by Anne Summers as to why younger women are so alienated by feminists of her era. “She recalls how horrified she was to discover many younger women haven’t made the connection ‘between the great array of choices now available and the battles we fought’. (p. 154) The answer the books gives is that feminism has become an institution, with all of the inevitable power frameworks that involves, and the excluded are bound to protest. To call it a defender of “lipstick feminism” would be simplistic, although there’s an element of that; it might be fairer to say it defends feminist diversity.

(I’ve haven’t included Germaine Greer’s books because she writes about women around the world, rather than specifically in Australia.)