Seeing the anthology as a particularly useful tool to address some issues about gender, writing and empirical critique, Whitlock returns to her eighties anthology 'to re-engage with my former self at work as an editor, critic and anthologiser', using data which 'has the potential to bring a different approach to bear on Australian women's writing in what...I confidently described as "a phase in the national literary history when women writers and readers entered the mainstream".' (274)