Day 12: The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my literary love bought for me…
Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka!
Ten years in the research and writing, irrepressibly bold, entertaining and often irreverent in style, Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat — women who made Eureka a story for us all.
Is this your perfect Christmas gift?
The 2014 Stella Prize judges said of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka:
This study of the role of women on the Ballarat goldfields in the years leading up to the Eureka Stockade is a rare and irresistible combination of impeccable scholarship with a lively, warm, engaging narrative voice that, along with a wealth of intriguing detail about daily life on the goldfields, makes this book compulsively readable.
Clare Wright offers a genuinely new historical perspective on Eureka. Traditionally represented as a key moment in the forging of Australian masculinity, the conflict and the events that led up to it involved a number of women, both directly and indirectly. Far from the usual image of a wild shantytown with an all-male population, the book reveals a relatively ordered goldfields society where commerce, domestic life and even theatre all flourished. The book makes extensive use of contemporary newspapers and journals, whose advertising reveals a thriving female culture: dances and balls where childcare was provided, and breast pumps for nursing mothers. It also makes use of private journals and letters, which are always a productive and revealing source of information about the people who usually get written out of the official records and histories. Clare Wright does not attempt to discredit existing versions of events, but rather to enrich and deepen our knowledge of Eureka and our understanding of its place in Australian history and society.
Links and Media
- Read Clare’s article on the role of women in Australian history for The Guardian.
- Read Alison Bartlett’s review for the Guardian.
- Read Kate Williams’ review for the Independent.
- Read Yvonne Perkins’ review for ABC The Drum.
- Watch a video of Clare Wright discussing the often forgotten history of the women of Eureka and beyond at the Museum of Democracy at Eureka
Clare’s recommendations: The best books by women she read in 2014
‘2014 has been a fantastic year for female writers.
Zac and Mia (Text) is billed as a Young Adult title, but this Old Adult read AJ Betts’ debut novel in one sitting. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done that!
Meredith Burgmann’s edited collection Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files (NewSouth) is both an invigorating portrayal of an era of activism and a sober reminder that we the people must always police the limits of national authority.
Sian Prior’s memoir, Shy (Text), documents the painful self-awareness and social anxiety that accompanies chronic shyness. Though I’m quite an extrovert, I was moved by Prior’s humble anatomy of suffering.
Anna Krien has won local attention and international awards, but perhaps no freebie AFL tickets to the Grand Final, for her explosive, intrusive Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport (Black Inc.), an investigation into the presence and nature of sexual violence in football culture. It’s a book for teenage sons, as much as worried mums.
I simply loved every heartbreaking, wry, whip smart word of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Profile Books). It deserves all the great international press it’s garnered.
I’ve yet to read Carolyn Holbrook’s Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (NewSouth) and Caroline Overington’s Louisa: Last Woman Hanged (HarperCollins), but I really hope that someone stuffs them in my Christmas stocking.’
Purchase The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka through Text.
View the other books in Stella’s 12 Days of Christmas.
