AUSTRALIAN women have been working as journalists and editors since the 1880s, though in the early years, they often had to use men’s names to have their work published.

Many famous female Australian writers, like Ruth Park and Ethel Turner, started off their careers writing and editing pages, columns or publications for women. Mary Gilmore, whose face is on the ten-dollar note, used her regular newspaper column to talk about socialism and feminism, and Louisa Lawson (the mother of poet Henry Lawson) wrote about how women should be allowed to vote. Caroline Chisholm and Vida Goldstein were also newspaper writers as well as social activists who wanted more rights and opportunities for women.

While Stella Davis is a made-up character, Lina’s story is set in a time when female journalists were just starting to join newspapers as proper reporters like Stella. A young woman called Betty Osborn covered the 1956 Melbourne Olympics for the Argus when she was only 21 years old. In 1954, Margaret Jones started working at the Herald, where she eventually became a Washington correspondent – the paper’s first female overseas reporter. (Before then, it was thought that covering international events was too dangerous a job for women.) And Catherine Martin started as a specialist medical reporter at the West Australian in 1957.

Nowadays women report on everything from cricket and football to overseas wars and in 2006, for the first time ever, there were more women than men working as journalists in Australia.