Sheridan reconsiders the often-neglected women's fiction and journalism from the 1880s to the 1930s and shows that Australian women writers have been excluded from history unless, like Miles Franklin, they engaged with the nationalistic concerns of their male counterparts. She reassesses the romantic fiction and radical journalism of these lesser-known women alongside famous names like Franklin, Gilmore and Prichard, arguing that they write along the faultlines in the dominant discourse of sex, race and nation.