News

Award-winning podcast revives women’s stories

By Lua Ikenasio

Sep 30, 2025

Echuca local Francie Finn recently claimed the University of New England’s TuneFM Program of the Year Award for her podcast, Firestarters.

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On Friday, September 12, the UNE Life Student Awards were held at the Armidale campus where Mrs Finn accepted the TuneFM Program of the Year Award.

As part of her Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, Performance and Writing, Mrs Finn created the podcast as a way of showcasing the skills she had developed during her degree.

The podcast explored the stories, novels, poetry and articles of Australian women from the first 150 years of the colonial period that were published in newspapers.

To capture the attitude towards women’s writing during the colonial period, she titled the podcast Firestarters: Rescuing Australian Women’s Newspaper Writing From The Kindling Pile.

Mrs Finn said the podcast formed organically as she searched for works by Australian women and found they were few and far between.

“I wanted to do something that was written by an Australian woman and I couldn’t find anything, it was all men,” she said.

“I was a little bit surprised, and then I came across this website called Australianwomenwriters.com, and they had started to uncover some of the women’s writing that had disappeared.

“A lot of women wrote, but we don’t know about them, and so that started to pique my interest a bit.”

Francie Finn’s Firestarters explores the stories, novels, poetry and articles of Australian women from the first 150 years of the colonial period. Photo by Lua Ikenasio

Through her research, Mrs Finn discovered that many women would write for newspapers using pseudonyms, their husband’s name or anonymously.

Despite the challenging work of uncovering the stories, Mrs Finn enjoyed discovering the range of topics they covered, which included travel logs, nature observations, domestic life, world events and politics.

She also found that despite the times, the women she researched were often influenced by socialist ideas and took an interest in talking about the plight of Aboriginal women in Australia.

Mrs Finn said the project had been rewarding, and hoped it would inspire others to carry out their own research.

“I found it a really amazingly rewarding experience, just knowing that I’ve done a little bit to help uncover some of this,” she said.

“I hope that it will inspire people to look a bit further and to think a bit further about it because it’s such a skewed version of history that we have been fed, and we need to start to talk about it and remind people that there’s more to it.”