Female "vagabond" or stunt reporter? The undercover literary journalism of Australian colonial journalist Catherine Hay Thomson

The history of Australian undercover journalism is largely told through the work of male journalists who wrote for colonial newspapers. Yet, there was at least one Australian woman who practiced serious undercover investigative journalism for a mainstream newspaper in the nineteenth century, a time when journalism was mostly seen as a disreputable activity for women. Catherine Hay Thomson wrote a series of articles in 1886 for the Melbourne morning daily Argus on the conditions of women in the Melbourne Hospital and the asylums, most notably the Kew Lunatic Asylum. A year before Elizabeth Jane Cochrane famously feigned insanity to enter an asylum in New York under the pseudonym Nellie Bly, Thomson immersed herself as an attendant at Kew to report anonymously on the world of its female patients. While Bly, and many of the immersive women journalists who came after her, were disparaged as “stunt girls” and “sob sisters,” Thomson mostly escaped such derision. Besides being an exemplary example of early Australian literary journalism, her work points the way to how such journalism by women across the globe can be, and is being, reassessed as a valuable contribution to the history of the field.