Australia’s First Sporting Heroine — The Marvellous Mrs Douglas: Part One

Melbourne’s Margaret Douglas was an endurance pedestrian every bit as remarkable as her Sydney contemporary The Flying Pieman. After stumbling upon a passing reference to her in an 1878 newspaper, I took a deep dive to shine a light on her completely forgotten achievements and examine how she was deliberately excluded from many newspapers of the time and then from a seminal history book that provided a chronology of pedestrianism. In part one we look at the colourful history of women who walked long distances in England and America, the abundance of coverage given to a man who walked 1000 miles in 1000 hours in Melbourne in 1858 and how Victoria's newspapers treated Margaret’s attempts to conquer the same challenge in the city six months later.

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