What are the major themes of women’s writing in Australia? Discuss with examples

Images such as this should be set against the sentimental versions of pioneer
womanhood that reinforced the narrow male tradition.

Similarly, Mary Murnane’s Uphill All the Way (1980) documents the hardships suffered by women in domestic life, childbearing and sweated labour, the vicious double standards of colonial society and most disturbing of all, prostitution of convict and Aboriginal women and the removal of children conceived by them. Feminist histories such as Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) and Miriam Dixon’s The Real Matilda (1976) challenge the idealized images of women. Dixon sees the distinguishing feature of Australian society to be its contempt for women and traces this to “our formative decades” with their violence and brutality towards women and widespread prostitution of women (Walker, 168).