Minding Her Own Business populates the streets of colonial Sydney with women in small business earning their living in a variety of enterprises – from millinery and dressmaking to ironmongery and bookselling; from running hotels and boarding-houses to butchering and taxidermy; from school teaching to ginger-beer manufacture. These women have been hidden in the historical record but were visible to their contemporaries. There are few memorials to colonial businesswomen, but if you know where to look, you can find many traces of their presence as you wander the streets of Sydney. This book brings the stories of these entrepreneurial women to life, with fascinating details of their successes and failures, their determination and wilfulness, their achievements, their tragedies and the occasional juicy scandal. Until now we have imagined colonial women indoors as wives, and mothers, domestic servants or prostitutes. This book sets them firmly out in the open.

Catherine Bishop is a historian with a PhD in Australian history. Born in New Zealand, she lived in the UK before moving to Sydney nearly twenty years ago. Catherine has worked as a math teacher, bookseller, school assistant and is now a historian at Australian Catholic University and the University of Sydney.