Description
Léontine Cooper was audacious, spirited and compassionate, one of the guiding lights of the campaign for the women’s vote in Australia. For over a hundred years, her courageous writings and fiction have been hidden behind her pseudonym, Onyx.
Léontine arrived in Queensland in 1871. When her husband failed to make a living on the land, she began addressing many of the great issues of the era such as married women’s legal rights to keep their own wages, or to the custody of their children. Without any private papers or even a portrait, Deborah Jordan explores her journey of love and intellect through a selection from her work.




