Tag Archives: My Brilliant Career (1979)

Pulp Friday: Journey Among Women

“Savagery and passion amongst the wild women convicts of early Australia.”

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is Journey Among Women by Diana Fuller, published by Sun Books in 1977.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about out of print classic Australian books. Journey Among Women has long been unavailable and details about its author are also thin on the ground.

That the book lives on at all in our cultural memory is only due to the cult following of the movie version, released in 1977, scripted by Fuller and directed by Tom Cowan. Unlike the book, the film is available, although it’s not easy to get.

Set among the brutal colonial beginnings of Australia, the story centres on the daughter of a judge who runs away with a group of hard core female convicts. They establish a women’s only society in the remote bush, successfully defending themselves from the wild men who dwell there and the colonial police and soldiers trying to capture them.

Journey Among Women is apparently based on a true story, the escape of a group of female convicts from a NSW Paramatta stockade in our early colonial days. Shot on a small budget, the movie was by all accounts incredibly controversial due to its graphic violence, overt lesbianism and explicit nudity.… Read more