Louisa Albury Lawson was one of the most prominent and influential figures of suffrage-era feminism in Australia. She is best known as the founder, editor, and writer of much of the copy for the Dawn, the earliest feminist journal published in Australia. She was also a poet, writer of short stories, inventor, farmer, postmistress, tailor, mother, and wife--a multifaceted person.

Louisa Albury was born in 1848 on Guntawang station (ranch), near Gulgong in New South Wales, the second of twelve children of Harriet Wynn, a needlewoman, and Harry Albury, a station hand, later a contractor and publican. She was educated at the Mudgee national school, a star pupil when she was not kept at home to care for her younger siblings. Life in the bush offered no encouragement to her aspirations, no nurturing of her intellectual abilities. Her mother burned her poems and refused to allow her to have...