Catherine Helen Spence

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Lore & Background

Catherine Helen Spence was born on 31 October 1825 in Scotland near Melrose. Her father David Spence was a lawyer, while her mother Helen (née Brodie) was descended from a family of tenant farmers. In 1839 her father lost a substantial sum of money after investing in a speculative wheat venture, forcing the family to leave Scotland and move to South Australia. Catherine arrived in the three-year-old colony at age 14 in November 1839. The family spent seven months camping in a tent near Brownhill Creek, keeping a small herd of cows and selling their milk. They moved to Adelaide around mid-1840. Spence later stated these were among the most miserable years of her life, saying she 'suffered from the want of some intellectual activity and from the sense of frustrated ambition and religious despair'. She witnessed one of the earliest uses of proportional representation in the 1840 Adelaide municipal election, where her father, as town clerk, oversaw the election. At 17 she found employment as a governess for the children of the postmaster Henry Watts, Surveyor-General Edward Charles Frome, and the governor's Private Secretary Alfred Mundy. According to her autobiography, she received two marriage proposals but chose to remain unmarried. In May 1846 she opened her own short-lived school. She began contributing anonymous writings to the South Australian in the 1840s. In 1850, after her school closed, she worked as a live-in governess, then resigned to attempt making her living as a writer.

Reader's Guide

Catherine Helen Spence began writing anonymously for newspapers in the 1840s, contributing a regular column to The Argus until 1858. By 1876 she wrote under her own name, and in July 1878 became a paid staff member for the literary pages of the South Australian Register. Her journalism was published in England's Cornhill Magazine and Fortnightly Review. She wrote on domestic topics and social/political debates, advocating for causes including poverty relief, electoral reform, the 'single tax' theories of Henry George, rational dress, and improvements to women's education and employment. Her first novel Clara Morison was published in 1854, followed by Tender and True (1856), Mr Hogarth's Will (1865), and later works including Gathered In (serialised 1881–82, published 1977), Handfasted (published 1984), and A Week in the Future (1889). She made little money from her novels. In 1856 she became a Unitarian and joined the Adelaide Unitarian Christian Church. From 1878 she became a regular preacher, also preaching in Melbourne, Sydney, and the United States. In 1865–66 she spent a year in Britain, meeting feminists and social reformers. In 1872 she co-founded the 'Boarding-Out Society' with Emily Clark, which lobbied for and oversaw South Australia's first foster care system. She served as the society's treasurer and intermittently as secretary until 1886. In 1897 she became Australia's first female political candidate, running in the Australasian Federal Convention election. She served on South Australia's State Children's Council and Destitute Board. She wrote multiple non-fiction works, including political pamphlets, an unfinished autobiography, and Australia's first civics textbook. She has been described as one of the pioneers of Australian feminist and realist fiction.

Did You Know?

• Spence witnessed one of the earliest uses of proportional representation in the 1840 Adelaide municipal election, where her father served as town clerk.
• She received two marriage proposals but chose to remain unmarried, citing her Calvinist beliefs as a reason for refusing the first.
• Her novel Handfasted was completed but not published until 1984, more than a century after its completion.
• She co-founded the 'Boarding-Out Society' in 1872, which created South Australia's first foster care system, and served as its treasurer until 1886.
• Spence wrote Australia's first civics textbook.