This book focuses on the works of six Australian women who were active photographers in the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It critically examines their photographic works against the tumultuous backdrop of the first women's movement, British settlers’ violent and incursive treatment of Indigenous Australians, the Great War in Europe, the last years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China, Australia's imperialist occupation of New Guinea and debates about photography's status as an art form – all of which occurred during the period in question.

The photographers who inform our study are not particularly well known today, unlike mid-twentieth-century Australian modernist photographers such as Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis, but we have selected them because we believe that their stories and works offer new insights into aspects of Australian society and culture that have received little or no treatment in histories of Australian photography. Clearly, we are not attempting to produce a comprehensive record of Australian women's photography from this period or write a history of women's photography focusing on aesthetic issues. We are rather attempting to demonstrate photography's usefulness as a source for understanding key moments in Australia's cultural history and exploring some unique ways in which women contributed to the history of photography in Australia.

The idea that photography might shed new light on major cultural forces at work in the nation's past is by no means novel. As early as the 1940s, Australia's national librarian, Harold White, described photographs as ‘another vital form of source material that illustrated the life and development of a nation and its people’. This observation guided the National Library's collecting policy from 1952 to the present. However, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the library's preference has been for ‘representational pictures’, with the result that most of the images collected by the National Library are realist and documentary in style. They also focus on activity in the public domain. Typical examples include industry-related photographs of mining, agriculture and large-scale construction projects such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Largely overlooked, according to Ennis, have been photographs that are expressive in style or record the private and intimate aspects of people's lives.