Books by Susanna De Vries

Trailblazers - Susanna deVries

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TRAILBLAZERS
Caroline Chisholm to Quentin Bryce

The lives of extraordinary Australian women, who have been pioneers and inspiring role models of their time.

Caroline Chisholm changed the history of female migration to Australia and ensured better conditions for families on migrant ships.

Pioneer Eliza Hawkins blazed a trail across the Blue Mountains.

Sydney journalist Louise Mack was the world's first female war correspondent

Sister Ann Donnell risked her life to save Gallipoli victims in a field hospital on the island of Lemnos.

Melbourne artist Hilda Rix Nicholas had two landmark exhibitions in Paris.

Mary Gaunt explored West Africa, and China before it had proper roads, journeying by mule cart from Peking to the Gobi desert and wrote three books about her adventures.

Margaret Ogg and Vida Goldstein were jeered in the 1890s when they claimed women were clever enough to get into Parliament.

It took 50 years before Enid Lyons, widowed mother of twelve, was made Australia's first Cabinet Minister and her struggles to hold office are compared with the career of Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister, and Quentin Bryce, mother of five and our first female Governor-General.

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FEMALES ON THE FATAL SHORE
Fettered and Free

This is the story of the lives of 14 significant women who sailed to the Australian colonies in its founding years.

The first to arrive was Esther Abrahams, a 16-year-old Jewish girl transported for shoplifting two cards of lace. Esther and other female convicts landed on ‘the fatal shore’ in a storm and she and many other female convicts were set upon by sex-starved men who had been awaiting their arrival for two weeks.

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A collector's edition
with two extra plates.

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ETHEL CARRICK FOX
Travels and Triumphs of a Post-Impressionist

In 1996 Ethel Carrick Fox became Australia's highest-priced woman artist when her painting of a French flower market sold at auction for $105,500. She had been ignored for decades - some of her unsigned works had been attributed to her more famous husband, Emanuel Phillips Fox, by unscrupulous art dealers who also accused her of forging her husband's name on her works in order to sell them at a higher price.
 

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HEROIC AUSTRALIAN WOMEN IN WAR
Astonishing tales of bravery from Gallipoli to Kokoda

Nancy Wake remarked: 'The exploits of Australia's women at war have been sadly neglected for years.’ Yet women have suffered, strengthened and defied fear in extraordinary acts of bravery.
 

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BLUE RIBBONS, BITTER BREAD
The life of Joice NanKivell Loch - Australia’s most heroic woman

JOICE LOCH was an extraordinary Australian. She had the inspired courage that saved many hundreds of Jews and Poles in World War II, the compassion that made her a self-trained doctor to tens of thousands of refugees, the incredible grit that took her close to death in several theatres of war, and the dedication to truth and justice that shone forth in her own books and a lifetime of astonishing heroism.
 

 

Susanna de Vries is an international author and former lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. She writes full time and lectures in public libraries and to branches of ADFAS, the Australian Fine and Decorative Art Society.

Of Anglo-Irish extraction Susanna’s biological father was a distinguished author. Adopted at birth and raised by loving adoptive parents, during World War 2, their London home was bombed and Susanna spent years living with relatives or in hotels. Reading everything she could find became her refuge and comfort.

She attended boarding school at Ascot and then went to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris and won a scholarship to study Art History in Madrid. She speaks fluent Spanish and French and has lived and worked in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Florence, Barcelona and Sydney but now lives in Brisbane and has nine grandchildren.

Susanna’s fourteen books have won her literary awards in Ireland and Britain, an Order of Australia for services to literature and a Winston Churchill Fellowship. She has twice been short-listed for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction awards. Great Australian Women and Blue Ribbons, Bitter Bread: the life of Joice Loch Australia’s Most Decorated Woman have become Australian classics.

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