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'Mary Montgomerie Bennett (1881-1961) has been called many things: benefactor, biographer, indigenous culture recorder, indigenous rights activist, pamphleteer and schoolteacher. While these descriptions neatly encapsulate her core contributions, there is one descriptor missing from the list that was arguably the defining characteristic of her life and life's work. Above all else Mary Bennett was a writer. She was certainly a biographer, having written her father's biography in 1927. Pamphleteer also encapsulates the nature of her writing, which was thoroughly political, in pursuit of a cause and for the purpose of broadcasting her views. She was also an epistolographer whose extensive letters were both acts of resistance and self-definition. This article explores the significance of writing to Bennett's life and work, and shows how her pen was not just a means of publicising her views and the 'wrongs of the Aborigines' but was a weapon she wielded in her war with the Australian state in defence of the same.' (Publication abstract)

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y Lilith no. 22 2016 12016218 2016 periodical issue Abstract
'At the March 2016 ‘Intersections in History’ Conference, eminent feminist historian Professor Patricia Grimshaw recounted the origins of the Australian Women’s History Network (AWHN). The AWHN ‘helped start a conversation’ with the Australian Historical Association (AHA) ‘about [the] representation of women in Ph.D. programs and lecturing’, Grimshaw asserted; it perhaps even forced the AHA to ‘consider gender politics in academia’.1 Access to these enlightening recollections was made possible not through participants’ memory of the conference held at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Melbourne, but through the documentation of the conference on Twitter. Both Lilith: A Feminist History Journal and the AWHN are becoming more engaged with new media technologies, spaces that some argue have a democratising effect and even constitute new forms of feminist activism.2 Indeed, the AWHN will be expanding their efforts in this direction with an upcoming feminist history blog, to be edited by current Lilith Collective members Dr. Alana Piper and Dr. Ana Stevenson. The 2016 AWHN conference topic was in part inspired, or provoked, by the rise of ‘intersectionality’ in online feminist conversations and communities. Conference participants discussed an academic focus on intersections as a productive, but also a seductive, space - one that can illuminate but may also distract.' (Editorial introduction)
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2016
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pg. 37-51