The social change sweeping Australia meant few matters were off the table.
But “meeting” the subject of her UNE PhD – trailblazing feminist, writer and political hopeful Catherine Spence – soon put Liz straight.
“We felt we were agitators in the 1970s, but we still had to handle some topics carefully,” Liz says. “Spence was a real pioneer; she was writing about abortion and contraception, venereal disease and domestic violence almost a century earlier, as Australia’s first woman journalist on a metropolitan newspaper.”
From 1878, for 15 years, Catherine courted controversy and commanded respect with her contributions to the South Australian Register. She had earlier become the first female novelist of Australian life (in 1854) and was the first woman in Australia to stand for public office, nominating for the Federal Convention in 1897.
Although this tilt at politics was unsuccessful, Catherine was not one to let small hurdles stand in her way. She was an ardent campaigner for electoral reform, education and employment for women, and led the early childhood movement in Adelaide’s underprivileged suburbs.
“Spence was a fascinating person to spend four years with,” says Liz. “She wasn’t a young person when she entered public life, so was not subject to the same discrimination she might have experienced had she been young and pretty.”
Completing a PhD as a creative practice gave Liz the opportunity to get to know Catherine intimately – and to produce a biography that is narrated by several characters close to her heroine. Challenging traditional biographic conventions, Liz’s work blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction to reimagine Catherine’s life. In doing so, she recovers the voices of other women lost to Australia’s colonial past.
“I had returned to study at UNE [Liz also has a Master of Arts] to do some history units out of curiosity and got into feminist history,” she says. “Spence kept popping up in everything I read, and I was intrigued by her.”
I Knew Miss Spence hovers at the intersection of history and creative writing. It recognises that memory is both selective and imperfect, but that historical rigour is important.
“In any archive there will be gaps and voids you have to imagine and speculate across,” says Liz. “You can’t distort the facts. You have a responsibility to readers, who will read it as something that has happened.
“However, what we regard as truth is often a matter of perspective and that’s what I tried to bring out in this creative biography, by capturing different perspectives.”
While just one of Catherine’s 60 personal diaries survives in the South Australian archives, Liz found a wealth of letters, speech notes and newspaper articles during an intensive two-month research trip. “In Adelaide, I walked in her footsteps, saw two of the houses she lived in, and every morning when I entered the State Library of South Australia I passed her life-sized portrait. I also saw the lace collars she would crochet for her friends, the floor plans of her houses, even her wine account. These texts of lived experience helped me to write a biography with emotional resonance.”
Now, Liz hopes her work will find a new audience, and Catherine broader recognition, through a commercial publishing deal. But a Master of Philosophy – “I felt I had unfinished business” – is already underway, to delve more deeply into the friendship networks and mentoring of first-wave feminists like Spence, Rose Scott and Vida Goldstein, through their extant letters.
“I’m interested in those voices that reach out across time,” Liz says. “We often dwell on things that could be improved in society, but it’s beneficial and affirming to look back on what great steps we have made.
“It was only just before I finished high school that women could keep permanent status in the public service and teaching if they got married. I saw equal pay legislation come in, maternity leave, supporting mother’s benefits, efficient contraception – that all happened in my working lifetime, so I do feel very much a part of that change. But then I step back to consider what it would have been like for Spence; what kinds of social pressures she encountered? I’ve found so much resonance between her life and mine.”
