Cirrus@Austlit

'When tasked with teaching a class on South Australian women's suffrage some years ago, Catherine Helen Spence was the name I associated most with the campaign. What did I know about Mary Lee? Only that she was a mother of limited means. Thankfully, I had Susan Magarey's wonderfully readable Passions of the First Wave Feminists (2001), which devotes four pages to Lee's work, but it was still difficult to get a handle on who Lee was. Magarey included Spence's observation, on the eve of the crucial vote in 1894, that Lee seemed ‘miffed that she, Spence, should be gaining so much attention in this moment, a moment for which Mary Lee has campaigned with all her considerable skills and energy’. In 1986, Helen Jones remarked in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that Lee's work had gone unrecorded until 1980. It seems in death she was overshadowed by Spence, as she had been at crucial moments in the life of the suffrage campaign.' (Introduction)

'Tom Reid was the Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Honeysuckle Creek tracking station near Canberra during a momentous time in history: when humans first set foot on another celestial body, in the Apollo 11 crewed mission to the Moon. The fiftieth anniversary of this event was celebrated worldwide in July 2019, and Andrew Tink's biography was clearly timed to meet this market. It is also a welcome addition to the very small number of books covering Australian space history, of which the most prominent are Peter Morton's meticulous history of Woomera, Fire Across the Desert (1989) and Kerrie Dougherty's Australia in Space (2017). With the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018, there is a renewed interest in Australia's largely overlooked role in global space exploration.' (Introduction)

'It is over ten years since the fires on 7 February 2009 burnt throughout Victoria and into the history books. Black Saturday occurred during one of the worst bushfire seasons in Victoria and led to the death of 173 people. Peg Fraser's Black Saturday: Not the End of the Story is an important contribution to the process of remembering and reflecting on the effects and aftermath of the fires.(Introduction)'