Zora Cross
by Jonathan Shaw. ‘Love Sonnets’, whose exuberant expressions of female desire – unprecedented in Australian literature – struck a chord with young men and women separated by World War One.
Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant (extract)
The thoughts of the peculiar people fast sinking into a heathen grave, and soon to be no more the dwellers in the land, could not fail to bring a sombre sensation of awe into each heart.
Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant (review)
by Bill Holloway. The ‘first’ Australian novel is contested, but Gertrude the Emigrant: A Tale of Colonial Life (1857) is the first novel whose author was born in Australia.
Australia’s First Women Writers
by Michelle Scott Tucker. As Aboriginal people had been doing orally and pictorially for 60,000 years, the European colonists used letters, diaries, drawings and paintings to share their stories, news, and hopes.
