Originally from New Zealand, I am a historian and writer living in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.

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I research Australian, New Zealand and international history, with a particular focus on businesswomen. And in a strange departure, caused by the unexpected discovery of an archive, I am also writing about two Cold War Youth Forums. 

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Much as I enjoy getting lost in archives (real or digital) and creating words on a page, I have been known to say that the best part about writing a book is engaging with audiences about it. In non-Covid times I am a regular conference participant and particularly enjoy giving talks to local historical and family history societies and to the public more generally.

 

I received my PhD from the Australian National University in 2012 and have published a number of books as well as academic and popular articles. I have just come to the end of a postdoctoral fellowship in the Business School at Macquarie University (2019-2025) for my project 'Gendered Enterprise: A History of Australian Businesswomen Since 1880', funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. I am now an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University, 

 

I am  a Chief Investigator on another ARC project 'Shop Talk', a history of Australian department stores. For this project I am co-writing a book about female department store buyers.

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My first book, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (NewSouth 2015), won the 2016 Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

 

My second book, Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2019 New Zealand Heritage Book Award and longlisted for the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Non-Fiction Book Award.

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In 2020 I edited Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective with Jennifer Aston. This collection included research from academics around the world, writing about entrepreneurial women ranging from Mexican laundresses, Angolan merchants and Australian cookbook writers to Spanish business owners, Russian traders and (my favourite for its sheer unexpectedness) Chinese pirates. 

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My third book, Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ: Australia's 'Mission Girl' Annie Lock (Wakefield Press, 2021), cleverly released in the middle of a global pandemic, was shortlisted for the Chief Minister's Northern Territory History Book Award in 2022.

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My most recent book is The World We Want: The New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum and the Cold War Teenager (Australian scholarly Publishing 2024). 

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