| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Angela Woollacott. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. viii, 298. Cloth $49.95, paper $24.95.

Writing in 1975, Miriam Dixson argued that Australian women came close to being "the doormats of the Western world," with a "deeply crippled self image." The women who are the subject of Angela Woollacott's book could not be further from this victim stereotype. The thousands of young Australian women who made their way by steamship to London between 1870 and 1940 were audacious adventurers, buoyed by a sense of their own worth as physically strong, practical, and unconventional, captured in a turn-of-the-century poem by Ethel Castilla called "The Australian Girl": "Her frank, clear eyes bespeak a mind/Old-world traditions fail to bind/She is not shy/or bold, but simply self-possessed" (p. 157). These self-possessed individuals leap from the pages of Woollacott's book. Mostly from educated, middle-class families of British descent, they left a plethora of writings and were the subject of much contemporary journalistic interest, so we are not short of sources by and about them. Swimmers like Beatrice Kerr, whose wonderful photograph adorns the cover, clad in skimpy swimsuit with kangaroo motif, literally made a huge splash in England. Feminists like Muriel Matters were even more sensational, showering London with suffragette pamphlets distributed from a hot-air balloon, and the triumphs of singer Nellie Melba are legendary. Of course, not all were so famous or successful, but all shared a fascination with London as the center of Western culture and seat of empire: the modern metropolis writ large, a magnet for such modern women.

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