Eliza Reilly is an award winning writer, director, performer as well as a community radio legend over on FBi, presenting the long running Girls Gone Mild.

Eliza’s debut book Sheila’s grew out of the web series of the same name Eliza produced and starred in alongside her sister Hannah.

Sheila’s presents profiles of prominent women who have played important but often unheralded roles in shaping the world we live in.

Beginning in the 1860’s with Mary-Ann Bug; bushranger and highway woman extraordinaire, the book intersperses badass lives with historical tidbits that serve to illuminate just how awful it was to be a woman, let alone a poor woman, or a woman of colour.

The thrust of the book is that progress has not been made in a vacuum and is directly the result of people who wouldn’t sit down when they were told.

Australia has a revolutionary but not uncomplicated history of women’s rights. I mean we can just start with the whole battle for rights and the fact that it’s quite a bit shit that men have never seen fit to shuffle over and make space but have had to be cajoled and bludgeoned into doing what is just right.

I mean just take the fact of Australia’s early introduction of women’s suffrage and then the abhorrent asterix to that achievement that *first nations women were only recognised as human in 1967 and their full right to vote was only secured completely in 1984 when the government made enrolling to vote at federal elections compulsory for First Nations people.

Sheila’s speaks to the reader in their own voice and does not shy away from surprise and disgust at the facts it reveals. The book also intersperses contemporary perspectives whilst trying to avoid universalising or talking over its historical subjects.

I read Sheila’s as a fan of the web series and of Eliza’s TV work. In Sheila’s she’s created an immensely readable text that takes on established ‘history’ by writing itself into the cracks and shadows. This is a book that understands the process of erasure that has been undertaken for generations and reminds it that women aren’t going to smile and cop it anymore.

Of course the process of redressing historical blinspots, erasure and general bastardry isn;t the work of a single book. If you’re thinking of reading up on more of these issues around women’s roles that are underappreciated you can also check out

You Daughters of Freedom - Clare Wright

This is What a Feminist Looks Like - Emily MAguire

Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism - Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

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