She 'makes history' both by simply living her life, and by (re)making history by writing it. Joan makes history Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. Joan is an Everywoman character who in various guises lives through all the iconic moments of Australias past. Funny and sometimes piercingly poignant, Grenville offers an unblinking and unsentimental view of life's underside her book is an often poetic treasure. Joan Makes History is a satirical re-writing of Australias history, foregrounding the women rather than the men. Women were part of all the big moments of history but reading history books, you wouldn’t think so. Joan is a wife and mother of no great distinction, but in the life of her imagination she is in the front line of events, effortlessly subverting the solemnity of momentous occasions and cheerfully altering the course of history. It was also Kate Grenville’s debut novel. Kate Grenville's wonderfully irreverent novel rewrites 200-odd years of Australia's past. Chapters from Joan's own life are interspersed with imagined moments in Australian history in which Joan plays a role: as Captain Cook's proud wife in the discovery of the continent, as a female convict first to set foot in Botany Bay, as an Aboriginal woman, as dozens of unsung, hardworking and invisible women who toiled skeptically alongside the men who starred in, and wrote, the history books. Joan Makes History was first published in 1988 and was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority to celebrate 200 years of history. Male readers need not cringe, however: Joan (who appeared briefly in Lillian's Story ) may be thoroughly unconventional, yearning for a more striking role in life, but her sympathies embrace all of humankind, and the portrait of her good but unimaginative husband Duncan is profoundly moving and perceptive. The brilliant Australian author of the award-winning Lillian's Story achieves something utterly original and moving in this fanciful feminist epic.

Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville