Catherine Helen Spence

Catherine Helen Spence was born in Scotland on 31 October 1825 and died on 3 April 1910. Though she started out writing fiction, she eventually became a major public voice in the colony of South Australia through her journalism and speeches. At her death, many called her the "Grand Old Woman of Australia." She pushed for changes in voting systems, women's right to vote, help for the poor, and better schooling for girls. She also regularly preached at the Adelaide Unitarian Christian Church.

Spence was the first woman in Australia to run for political office, doing so in the 1897 election for the Australasian Federal Convention. She sat on South Australia’s State Children’s Council and Destitute Board, and helped start a society that oversaw the colony’s first foster care system. In the years before Australia became a federation, she worked hard for proportional representation and other electoral reforms. She also fought for women’s suffrage and for more educational and job opportunities for women.

Her writing included novels, nonfiction, and journalism. During her lifetime, her novels were not very popular, but later readers rediscovered them as part of a renewed interest in overlooked works by women. Scholars now consider her a pioneer of Australian feminist and realist fiction. She also produced several nonfiction works, such as political pamphlets, an unfinished autobiography, and Australia’s first civics textbook.

Spence was born near Melrose, Scotland, to David Spence, a lawyer, and Helen Brodie, whose family were tenant farmers. Both parents belonged to the Church of Scotland and held reformist views. Catherine and her seven siblings all got a good education; she and one younger sister attended a local day school. In 1839, her father lost a lot of money in a bad wheat investment, which ended her hopes of further study in Edinburgh. The failure also ruined his reputation as a lawyer, so the family decided to leave Scotland for South Australia. Catherine and four siblings sailed with their mother in July 1839.

She arrived in the three-year-old colony at age 14 in November 1839. The family spent seven months camping in a tent near Brownhill Creek, keeping a few cows and selling their milk. Around mid-1840 they moved to a house on West Terrace in Adelaide. Spence later called these the most miserable years of her life, saying she “suffered from the want of some intellectual activity and from the sense of frustrated ambition and religious despair.” They had to sell the cows, and a 32-hectare farm they bought did not succeed.

During this time, she saw one of the earliest uses of proportional representation, when a quota-based system was used in Adelaide’s 1840 municipal election thanks to Rowland Hill. Her father, as town clerk, oversaw that election. In 1842, at 17, she became a governess for the children of postmaster Henry Watts, Surveyor-General Edward Charles Frome, and the governor’s private secretary Alfred Mundy.

Her autobiography says she received two marriage proposals but stayed single. She explained that she turned down the first because of her Calvinist beliefs: she feared bringing children into a world where their eternal salvation seemed uncertain. She was 17 and had just started earning money. The man was engaged to someone else six weeks later. In May 1846, she opened her own school, but it did not last long. She also began writing anonymously for the *South Australian*. After the school closed in 1850, she worked as a live-in governess but quit within a year to try making a living as a writer.

Spence wrote anonymously for newspapers starting in the 1840s. Until 1858, she contributed a weekly column to Melbourne’s *The Argus* about events in Adelaide. By 1876 she was writing under her own name and was seen as a skilled writer and critic. In July 1878, she joined the staff of the *South Australian Register*’s literary pages, replacing John Howard Clark after his death. Historian Susan Magarey described her journalism as having a “clear, usually economical, persuasive immediacy of style.” Her work also appeared in England’s *Cornhill Magazine* and *Fortnightly Review*.

She wrote about both domestic topics and the social and political debates of the day, including land management and economic policy in South Australia. She often used her articles to promote the causes she worked for, such as poverty relief and electoral reform. She backed the “single tax” ideas of American economist Henry George, supported the rational dress movement, and called for better education and jobs for women.