The consideration of some of the ways political voice operated in settler women's poetry, especially that published in newspapers and journals, has implications for how colonial poetry and its relationships to poetry in the twentieth century and beyond are read. In concluding this book with a chapter on the poetry of Louisa Lawson, I mean to situate the links her poetry has to the ongoing legacies of earlier Romantic and Victorian women's traditions as well as to poets who would follow. This book considers a sample of nineteenth-century white settler women poets in Australia and ways their poetry, far from being isolated and apolitical, demonstrates close relationships to rights movements outside of Australia and the connections between imperial feminism and colonialism. Their close continuations and engagements with British and European poetic traditions and discourses differ greatly in that these women were published in the contexts of colonialism, horrific genocidal intent, massacre, enslavement, human rights abuses and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Settler women's poetic expressions of political voice must be understood in connection to the extreme injustices of invasion and colonialism.

The examination of political voice in these women's poetry makes clear that the relationships of rigid colonialist ideas of binary gender to the developments of colonial poetry and emergent nationalism, and to how these have subsequently been represented and understood, is more significant than has been recognized. The themes of the women poets discussed reflect political concerns and positions in relation to gender, including engagements with classical mythology, religious and theological debates, floral symbolism and spiritualism. These themes situate these five poets within the imperial feminist and transnational contexts of anglophone women's poetry in the nineteenth century. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson notes, these contexts were influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, who ‘showed that the Enlightenment's ideal of a universal human nature meant in practice two codes: one code constituted the feminine and the other the masculine’. Yet, such analyses ‘by making invisible race and class in their representation of gender oppression, were by omission centring the life experiences of middle-class white women […] The articulation of gender as the primary form of identity and oppression became the basis of white feminist epistemology and political action.’