Michelle Staff review of Yves Rees, Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America

(NewSouth Publishing, 2024), 240 pp., PB $34.99, ISBN 9781742238135

Imagine for a moment you are a woman in 1920s Australia. If you are white, you have had the vote for some years now, though you may already feel disillusioned about its power. You might have advanced to a higher level of schooling than your mother did, potentially even to university. Of course, this is not the case for many, who suffer the burdens of poverty or the institutionalised racism of White Australia. With barriers still in your way, even if you are lucky, where else might you think to go?

Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America tells the stories of 10 Australian women who crossed the Pacific Ocean about a century ago, seeking a new and better experience in the supposed ‘woman’s paradise’ (p. 7) that was the United States of America. In so doing, they pre-empted the larger geopolitical turn their country would make during and after World War II—a shift that author Yves Rees reminds us profoundly shapes our world today.

This cast of 10 was selected from the much larger cohort of 700 women Rees identified during their research, ‘a raucous compendium’ (p. 3) full of all sorts of interesting characters. The final picks range from a lawyer and a couple of academics to a swimming teacher, nursing student and ‘health entrepreneur’. In between are the sorts of peripatetic creatives one might expect in a book about travel and expats: an artist, a pianist, a novelist and, more unusually, an interior decorator. We learn about each of them via intermittent snapshots of moments in their lives. Some stories, like those of economist Persia Campbell or lawyer May Lahey, show that Australian women made substantial professional contributions during their lifelong expatriation to America. Others are fun tales that allow the reader to learn about unexpected topics, like the advent of surfing and the swimming science of ‘natation’, both fundamental to Isabel Letham’s transnational tale. Among the quirkier characters in the book is Alice Caporn, leader of a Maryland nudist colony and self-proclaimed health guru. Rees has not simply selected women who can easily slide into established canons of significant personalities, and the project is all the stronger for it.

These were talented, creative and driven individuals who left at least some trace in the historical record, making them discoverable now. ‘If these women were so remarkable’, the author asks, ‘why don’t we already know their stories?’ (p. 9). Apart from the obvious and important answer of gender, Rees is right to point to the fact that transnational histories that do not fall squarely within the boxes of one nation’s history or another often fall through the cracks. It bears noting that Australian historians have a particularly strong tradition of looking transnationally in their research. And others, such as Ros Pesman and Angela Woollacott, have explored Australian women travellers before. But it is nevertheless true that individuals from the past who moved across the seas, and whose archives may reside elsewhere, are often forgotten by time. This book recovers their stories.

The author pairs individual biographical detail with discussion of broader phenomena to produce a thorough, multilayered analysis. One of the first figures we meet in the book is the modernist artist Mary Cecil Allen, who sailed into New York in 1927. Rees draws a line from Allen’s youth, spent in the environs of her father’s workplace, the University of Melbourne, and her eight-year stint as an art educator in the United States. At the same time, Rees explores the different art cultures that developed in these places, and how something about America allowed a thriving modernist style to flourish well ahead of the same being possible in the Antipodes. Through interior decorator Rose Cumming’s story, Rees shows the importance of sibling networks for enabling long periods of expatriation, while also zooming out to say something about the characteristics of the modern womanhood the Cumming girls were chasing.

These connected but parallel life stories create a pacy and immersive narrative. Readers can feel the sheer force of the American culture of capitalism and entrepreneurship that, while suppressing the hopes of many ordinary people for a comfortable life, enabled a special few to embark on bold endeavours. So too do we see the effects of innovations in higher education, and how America’s self-conscious differentiation from the ‘old world’ of Britain enabled new ways of thinking. As its title says, this is a book about that nebulous concept ‘modernity’ and what it looked like and meant to Australian women. Giving depth to the figure of the ‘modern woman’ is an important achievement of this project.

History through biography

Travelling to Tomorrow is a work of history, but it can also be described as a group biography. Group biography can take many different forms: the story of a family, for instance, or that of a circle of artistic colleagues and friends. The subjects do not necessarily need to have known each other; as Rees has done here, selecting a group of people whose experiences were connected thematically or temporally can offer great insight into large historical phenomena such as migration and the advent of modernity. These 10 women were like ships in the night, sailing around the same continent, but mostly unaware of what one another was doing. There is much to be learnt from studying a cohort like this; the richness is in the diversity of the group, and the deep level on which we get to know each member.

One question that might be asked is: how representative can 10 out of 700 subjects be? Rees does not pretend to capture every single experience possible. Yet these figures are all white professionals. Working-class women who might have travelled as domestic servants are absent. So too are women of colour, including Indigenous women, though it must be said that Rees’s subjects do allow for an exploration of queerness in quite an expansive sense. Were these sorts of expats exclusively middle-class, white women, or are there other experiences that, however difficult to recapture, need to be told? One person that comes to mind is the Dharug nurse and education advocate Marion Elizabeth Smith, who has only recently been added to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.¹ This First Nations woman trained and worked in Massachusetts between 1911 and 1916. In mentioning her I am not trying to point out a person that Rees could have included but did not; to do so would be both unfair and unhelpful, especially because Smith never returned to Australia. Rather, the point is to ask whether there were other similar figures and, if so, how might space be made for them in a group biography like this, even if historical evidence is scant?

This book shows that group biography is a compelling way of doing social history. Unlike political histories that focus solely on statesmen or formal foreign policy, Rees shows how everyday people make history. As they put it: ‘More than just passive recipients of American mass culture, ordinary Australians were active participants in reorienting their nation towards an emergent global superpower’ (p. 4). History does not just happen to people; it is made by them.

Biography and autobiography

There is an eleventh ‘character’ that I have not mentioned so far. The author—a historian at La Trobe University, queer activist and non-binary writer—is present throughout its pages, even shifting into the foreground in places. Their interest in the history of Australians travelling to the US is entangled with their own experiences of being an expat, first in Britain then in North America. The book opens with the 23-year-old Rees boarding a plane bound for California. There is a direct link between this episode and the book’s genesis, as Rees explains, ‘the historian in me wondered how this all began … When and why did Australians start crossing the Pacific?’ (p. xi).

The historian’s subject position is a well-established and important concept. It holds that the scholar cannot possibly approach a project from a neutral stance or with an unbiased mindset. Far from rendering evidence-based research irrelevant, this demands a greater degree of self-reflexivity. In Rees’s book, the process of grappling with the writer’s relationship to their subject is laid bare. In positioning themselves as a central part of the book, Rees has created an open and honest account of the history-writing process. This is something of which all historians might take note, as it greatly enriches the final work.

Their first book, All about Yves: Notes from a Transition, was a memoir about their experience of realising their transgender identity. I note this because their personal journey unfolded alongside this project about women going to America. ‘When I started thinking about Australian women in the United States, I did so from a position of identification’, they write. ‘They were women; I was a woman’ (p. 61). Working on the book therefore required grappling with their relationship to women’s history, as well as the sub-discipline’s core epistemologies.

One outcome of this is Rees’s theorising of what trans history is and where it sits in relation to other approaches. They advocate for not siloing women’s and trans histories. Instead, they explain trans history as ‘a way of looking, a questioning lens that encourages us to doubt our certainties about any given person’s identity’ (p. 64). This is not a complete answer, but hopefully it propels a conversation about what gender history looks like as we approach the mid-twenty-first century.

1. 1 Odette Best and Abigaill Slinger, ‘Smith, Marion Elizabeth (1891–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University, published online 2025, accessed 8 September 2025, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/smith-marion-elizabeth-33806/text42325.