The Mirror’s writing women

If ever a magazine was a victim of its success, it was the Australian Woman’s Mirror. Having started out as the Bulletin’s little sister, it was so popular by 1960 that Frank Packer bought it in order to kill it and clear the market for his Australian Women’s Weekly. He acquired the struggling Bulletin as part of the package.¹ When the Mirror appears as a footnote to the legend of its older brother, we get no sense of what the magazine achieved or how important it was to readers and contributors.

And if ever an Australian writer has been undeservedly forgotten (although she’s not the only one) it is Zora Cross. Her poetry collection Songs of Love and Life was a publishing sensation for Angus & Robertson in 1917 and she published verse in major journals and newspapers for the rest of her life. In the 1920s she produced popular novels set in her birth state of Queensland, a much anthologised elegy to her younger brother, who died in the First World War, and a great deal of journalism, much of it focused on promoting other women writers. In the late 1920s and early 1930s she interviewed Australian women writers for the Australian Woman’s Mirror. These articles are often the only remaining glimpse of authors whose work was eagerly consumed by the magazine’s many thousands of readers.