In June 1902 the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act through the Commonwealth Parliament meant that Australia’s white women became the first in the world to win both the right to vote and to sit in parliament. Drawing on original empirical research, this article demonstrates that at the turn of the twentieth century, Australia was internationally recognized as a world leader in democratic practice. This little known claim to geo-political fame holds significance for both transnational histories of women’s suffrage and for Australian narratives of nationhood, neither of which tend to identify Australian women as critical to the history of modern democracy. Further, re-investigating the origins of women’s suffrage helps recall the potency of radical idealism in an era that now privileges militarism—in Australia, embodied most clearly in the ANZAC legend—over maternalism as the primary source of nation building.

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women played a key role in the control and management of the Australian hotel industry. Their importance as publicans has often been overlooked by historians of drinking culture and the liquor trade, due to the representation of the pub as a male domain to which women were either socially peripheral or actively opposed. Rather, the complex spatial arrangements of the public house, where domestic and commercial activities were deeply interconnected, allowed many women the opportunity to earn a respectable and prominent living as hotelkeepers.

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The historiography of the Sabbath reflects closely the concerns of its Sabbatarian subjects: the rise or fall in public piety and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of evangelical moral reform and social control. In this article we step away from the question of how religious or secular goldfields society was, and instead, observe how Sunday functioned on the goldfields. In doing so we eschew a dominant narrative of religious history — secularisation — and deploy a postsecular analysis. Such an analysis reveals a remarkable degree of social cohesion: a diverse, but common, practice of rest on the Sabbath. It was only because of the universal honouring of the goldfields’ Sabbath that government troops were able to so quickly and decisively end the Eureka Stockade on Sunday, 3 December 1854.