Founded in Brisbane in 1975, Hecate emerged as an explicitly feminist journal willing to move between political history, literary criticism, social research, poetry and visual work.

This early issue captures the journal while Australian feminism was still building its own archives: recovering women excluded from official histories, examining the joint machinery of patriarchy and capitalism, and treating colonialism, labour and race as structural rather than decorative questions. 

The issue opens with a substantial study of Aboriginal women workers in the Northern Territory between 1911 and 1939, followed by an investigation into the death of an immigrant woman in colonial Western Australia. Elsewhere it examines the difficult political life of Adela Pankhurst Walsh, whose movement from militant suffragism and socialism toward conservative and anti-communist politics resists the neat heroic biographies movements often prefer. The volume also includes poetry, criticism, work on women in art, and a bibliography devoted to women and labour. 

The prose retains the pressure of retrieval: testimony, government reports, neglected political lives and fragmentary records are treated not as dead evidence but as sites where power has hidden its casualties. A strong piece of Australian feminist print history, especially for readers interested in colonial archives, women’s labour, Indigenous history and the ideological complications that respectable retrospective narratives tend to sand flat.

Vol. IV, No. 2, July 1978. Original illustrated wrappers. Moderate edge and corner wear with small chips and surface marks; internally clean and firmly bound.