Brilliant Careers recovers the women who shaped Australian cinema from its earliest years, both in front of the camera and behind it.

Andrée Wright moves through actors, directors, producers and other industry figures whose labour was routinely treated as peripheral even when they were central to the medium’s development. Among them are Lottie Lyell, Louise Lovely, Helen Twelvetrees and the women working through the uneven growth of the local studio system.

Published alongside Wright and Stewart Young’s documentary Don’t Call Me Girlie, the book is both a feminist intervention and a richly illustrated piece of Australian film history. Its particular value lies in how it connects glamour to industrial reality: women negotiating contracts, financing productions, crossing between Australia and Hollywood, and repeatedly finding that visibility did not mean authority. An important early attempt to rebuild a film history from the careers conventionally edited out of it.

First edition, Pan Books Australia, 1986. Large-format illustrated paperback. Light shelfwear and minor edge rubbing; internally clean and bright.