Catherine Helen Spence, born in Scotland in 1825, migrated with her family to the new colony of South Australia in 1839. She became a teacher and journalist, an untiring philanthropist, wrote eight novels, travelled the world twice and worked as a lobbyist for proportional representation. She was Australia's first woman candidate for political office (unsuccessful) and when she died in 1910 was described as 'the grand old woman of Australia'. Spence's life demonstrated that a nineteenth-century Australian woman could achieve a lifestyle which even in the twenty-first century can be described as satisfyingly liberated.