SOURCE: Pearce, Sharyn. “The Beginnings: Women and Journalism in the 1880s.” In Shameless Scribblers: Australian Women's Journalism 1880-1995, pp. 1-13. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Pearce describes the suppressed but significant role of female journalists in late nineteenth-century Australia.

In Henry Handel Richardson's short story, “The Bathe”, a little Australian girl is about to enter the water:

stripped of her clothing, the child showed the lovely shape of a six-year-old. Just past the dimpled roundnesses of babyhood, the little body stood slim and straight, legs and knees closely met, the skin white as the sand into which the small feet dug, pink toe faultlessly matched to toe. She was going to bathe. …

“Naked to the sun and air”, the child skips and frolics “with the delight of the very young, to whom clothes are still an encumbrance”. Her happy abandonment arouses the envy of...