Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Introduction
In November 1839 a passenger ship, Palmyra, sailed slowly up a creek until it
reached a jumble of temporary buildings that constituted a port. Surrounded
by dismaying mangrove swamps, the passengers disembarked and organised themselves
and their possessions into port carts. Their drive, along a dusty road through
sparse, sunburnt grass, in a wind blowing directly from the north as though from
a furnace, eventually jolted them across a meagre river into a settlement of broad,
straight streets, lined with tents, interspersed with houses of brick, wood, earth or
stone. This was Adelaide – the centre of a three-year-old British colony established
on the coastal plain of Gulf St Vincent in South Australia. Among the passengers
scrambling out of the port carts was a red-headed young woman, undoubtedly
sunburnt, and appalled by her surroundings. ‘When we sat down on a log in Light
square, waiting till my father brought the key of the wooden house in Gilles street,
in spite of the dignity of my 14 years just attained, I had a good cry’. 1 This was
Catherine Helen Spence.
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, in October 1905, in a church schoolroom
in Adelaide, a public gathering celebrated Catherine Spence’s 80 th birthday. At
that party, South Australia’s chief justice proclaimed her:
the most distinguished woman they had had in Australia … There was
no one in the whole Commonwealth, whose career covered so wide a
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