Böcker av Kay Saunders

NOtORIOUS AUStRALIAN WOMEN celebrates the lives of some of Australia's most fearless, brash and scandalous women. there's tilly Devine, who went from streetwalker in London to wealthy Sydney madam and standover merchant; Mary Bryant, the highway robber and First Fleeter who escaped by rowing from Port Jackson to timor with her two children; Lola Montez, the Irish-born grande horizontale, who destroyed King Ludwig I of Bavaria; Ellen tremaye and Marion Edwards, women who challenged the gender order and became men; and Helena Rubinstein, who rewrote her humble Polish background and became one of the most successful and astute businesswomen in the world. From bushrangers, courtesans and cross-dressers, to writers, designers and a radical or two, what these splendid rebels have in common is a determination to take their destinies into their own hands.

Do women kill? Yes they do, but often for very different reasons from men ... Meet the women who have murdered - they've killed children, husbands, lovers, relatives and friends. they include the desperate, the poor, the abused, the sexually betrayed, and the downright callous. In some cases they were motivated by fear of society's disapproval, in others they acted to save themselves from violence. Among their number were early backyard abortionists like Madame Olga and Madame Harper; poisoners like Caroline Grills and Yvonne Fletcher; women who committed infanticide like Keli Lane; women who formed lovers' pacts to murder their husbands; and women whose troubled lives on the margins, like transgendered Eugenia Falleni/Harry Crawford, led them almost inevitably to crime. In her first, bestselling book, Notorious Australian Women, author Kay Saunders profiled some of the country's most scandalous women. Here she turns her eye to those who have broken one of society's most cherished taboos and become both notorious and deadly.

Based on thorough documentary research in archives and newspapers, Workers in Bondage begins with the origins of servitude during the convict era in Queensland before its separation from New South Wales in 1859. The study then focuses in on Queensland's Pacific Islander labor force, examining the reconstruction of the Queensland sugar industry after the withdrawal of Islander labor and describing the realities of white labor and the early trade union struggles in the sugar industry. Underlying the text is an analysis of labor manipulation by capitalism in a new colony during a time of transition from slavery to indenture in the British Empire. This is a comprehensive and insightful academic examination of the little-known history of the enslavement of Pacific Island workers in Australian convict-era industries, as well as a wider study of race relations in a frontier society.