La Trobe backing to give rebel women their TV Eureka moment

La Trobe University is putting $200,000 into a TV series based on Clare Wright’s book about women of the Eureka Stockade.

Clare Wright: ‘The idea of taking something from the humanities to market is, I think, really innovative and brave’. Picture: James Croucher

La Trobe University historian and author Clare Wright hopes the university’s courage and faith in the marketability of her story about the women of the Eureka Stockade will inspire other universities to fund humanities projects.

Academics have become accus­tomed, she says, to univer­sities providing seed funding for the development of biotech projects and the like, but history and literature seem to have been left behind.

“The idea of taking something from the humanities to market is, I think, really innovative and brave,” Wright says, “and I think it sets a terrific example, hopefully for other universities to follow.”

The La Trobe Strategic Innovation Fund will today announce that it plans to invest $200,000 to finance the development of the ­series outline and pilot script for a television series based on Wright’s book about the women of the ­Eureka rebellion, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, which she ­describes as a “big, sprawling, narrative nonfiction book” and a ­“rollicking story”.

The pilot will be used to pitch a high-quality, eight-part TV drama series to potential investors.

Wright, a research scholar and associate professor at La Trobe, won the Stella Prize in 2014, scooping up $50,000 in prizemoney for Forgotten Rebels. The fundamentals of the book came from her postdoctoral research, which was funded by an Australian Research Council grant.

She had a hunch that there was more to the Eureka story than generations of Australian children had been taught at school, and she wanted to look deeper into the role of women in the rebellion.

“Not only were women at the Eureka Stockade, there was a woman who was killed in that battle, and they were involved in every level of it,” Wright says, adding that the women of Eureka were fundamental to the movement, fighting, politically agitating, fundraising and providing intellectual leadership.

“It was basically a community grassroots movement and women were an integral part of that community,” she says.

“They weren’t just sweeping out the tent, they were hosting political meetings in the businesses they were running, they were writing inflammatory letters to the newspapers.

“In fact, a woman was editing the Ballarat newspaper when her husband, the editor, Henry See­kamp, was arrested for sedition after Eureka.

“When he was in jail, his wife, Clara Seekamp, started editing the newspaper and, as far as I can tell, she was Australia’s first female newspaper editor.”

Forgotten Rebels, she says, is a bit of a “historical #MeToo” book. Women were there in the thick of the rebellion, their contributions were crucial and for many decades they were ignored.

Broadcast company Ruby Entertainment bought the screen rights to Wright’s book in 2015 and invited her to be part of the ­creative team developing it into a TV series.

Now Hollywood script­writer and producer Anne Kenney, who wrote the scripts for the Outlander series — about a time-traveller in Scotland — has signed on to write the script for the pilot. “She’s a wonderful writer,” Wright says. “I sent her a copy of the book; she said she loved it and she wanted to be involved if it looked like it was going to move forward.”

Now there is progress and Wright looks forward to working with Kenney on the pilot. “It’s a dream come true for me, I’m a big Outlander fan,” she says.

She revised The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka to create a young adult version of the book, titled We are the Rebels and published in 2015. It has now been set as a school text, a development she terms “very gratifying”.

“I have three kids, they’ve all studied Eureka, and the curriculum had not changed much since I was a schoolchild in the 1970s,” she says.

Wright is not resting on her ­impressive laurels. Today is the deadline for her latest book, titled You Daughters of Freedom, about the first suffragettes in Australia.

Scheduled to be launched in October, the book, she says, is a beast at 525 pages, but it will shed a lot of light on the fight for the women’s vote.

“We don’t have to spread them across T-shirts if we don’t want to use them as the pin-up girls of today’s activism,” she says, “but I think it’s still important to understand what they did.”