Early Australian history is usually told as a male-dominated story, and it is remarkable how often this is a story of male failure – Burke and Wills et al. The women who do appear are usually painted in lurid colours as prostitutes and slatterns, or as the odd lonely, isolated “lady”, having a thoroughly miserable time of it.

Yet I’ve just read a collection of (mostly) success stories in which women undertake amazing feats and complete them with aplomb.

Just imagine the journey of Annie Caldwell, an Irishwoman who arrived in Adelaide as a free settler with her husband Matthew in 1841 with almost nothing. They both laboured to earn enough to take a lease on a small farm at Gumeracha, near Adelaide, but the land was poor and the rainfall scant. Matthew died in 1856, leaving Annie pregnant with their eighth child.

She decided to move to NSW in 1864, selling “everything except five horses, some cattle, Lassie the dog and a tilted wagon – similar to covered wagons in America”.

They took eight weeks to cover the 900km trek to Albury and they took up land near Holbrook (one of my old stamping grounds, where to my knowledge there is no memorial to her – although there should be!), where they selected a block in her oldest son’s name.

One of the children said: “How hard we all did work! Mother seemed able to turn her hand to any sort of man’s work after her ten years as sole manageress.” The farm did well and Annie died aged 69, surrounded by her family. (p. 15-17)

This book is A Wealth of Women: Australian Women’s Lives from 1788 to the Present, by Alison Alexander, which takes a fascinating, anecdotal approach to the topic, drawing heavily on the “History Search” by the Office of the Status of Women of 2000, which collected oral histories and much of the work of family historians.

The latter, it seems to me, is a much underutilised resource. No doubt it has its technical limits – but many family stories – particularly women’s stories – are now being recorded that should not be lost again.

The success that many female convicts made of life in Australia is an element that comes out again and again. Little has been written on this until recently, since this was until the 1980s regarded as a “stain” rather than the badge of honour that it is today. There’s for example Mary Smallshaw, a Welsh silk throwster transported for theft in 1818. She married first the clerk of the Tasmanian magistrate’s court, then, after bearing him a daughter, the magistrate himself, and her descendants were “respectable society”. (p. 6)

Although there were ladies made thoroughly miserable by the conditions. I particularly liked the one horrified at having to drink out of handless cups, and by the lack of visiting cards — if you visited someone who was out a piece of chalk was left near the door so you could record your presence on it!

And others were trapped with feckless males. The tale of Matilda Wallace, whose husband moved them from Mt Gambier (South Australia) to Mount Murchison, where he tried in a desultory why to open a shop, to Queensland, then spent the next decade roaming those areas, seldom more than six months in one spot. Two babies died young, and when her fifth was due she went to “civilisation” in Menindee – still the back of beyond.

It is story that reminds me of the mammoth tome I have just finished, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by (Henry Handel) Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson.

Back in Australia after 10 years away, I’m struck by how there seem to be no new male television news personalities. One of the first things I saw was George Negus presenting SBS’s Dateline, then there’s Andrew Denton doing celebrity interviews. There are so many tributes (or not) to the arts of the plastic surgeon and the wigmaker.

Of course all the women have changed – anyone visibly over 40 and on TV being strictly forbidden.

I posted last week on my current reading on Australian politics, Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard.

Overall I thought it a powerful, and scary, analysis, if suffering from some of the inevitable faults of an academic book completed very soon after the events that it describes.

She brings from other fields some interesting analytical tools, including the sociology of religion thesis that as a society becomes more secular, non-religious people are happy to think that religion is a useful implement for controlling others weaker than themselves (p.188).

Sometimes she seems to be arguing that “a religious fundamentalist tail is wagging a secular rightwing dog” (p. 73), and other times that a conservative social policy is an essential requirement for free market economics (when her analysis approaches that of Thomas Frank’s of America), and I don’t think that is ever resolved, but then there is probably an element of leadership on both sides.

She is also very clear on the right-wing view of “equality”, “as reinvented by the neo-conservative think tanks of the closing decades of the 20th century … wants everyone treated identically, regardless of where they start. Any extra help to some groups, however disadvantaged, amounts to ‘special privileges’, which breeds ‘resentment’ among those who do not qualify.” (p. 111)

She is echoing American commentators on the way that the American Right (with Australia’s close behind) uses extreme language to address its extremist constituency, then half-hearted apologies and back-downs later (as per Bush’s “crusade” against Islam) to satisfy the mainstream.

Her final chapter — understandably sketchy since these extremists are unlikely to fully reveal their apparent approach — is truly frightening. She quotes an Australian Republican Movement delegate to the constitutional convention, Karin Sowada, as saying: “Keeping God in out Constitution is ultimately an expression of the fact that those who govern us are accountable for their actions to someone other than themselves.” (p. 301) The delegate then noted there was “no particular support” for democracy in the Bible.

Overall, this book left me wondering if Australia (and America) are not fast approaching what might be described as “the Algeria problem” – having a significant (if not yet dominant) group of religious extremists who while using the instruments of democracy refuse to accept any obligation to maintain them.

More reviews: here and here, and a transcript of a Radio National programme on it.

* The woman who planned to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania for ransom, Ann Carson, sounds fascinating, but apparently her ghost writer, Mary Carr, is even more worthy of note.

* On the joys of dealing with a legend, Saul Bellow’s editor.

* A search tool for Project Gutenberg texts. I haven’t fully checked it out yet, but it looks potentially brilliant.

* London’s abandoned Tube stations. Why? Why not?

* Almost a reason to visit New York: Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era.