Marian Quartly has taught and researched Australian history at Monash University for longer than she cares to remember. Her publications include the co-authored Creating a Nation, a feminist history of Australia. She is currently writing about gendered citizenship (male and female), about museums and virtual communities, and about the history of adoption in Australia. Her interest in visual representations of gendered citizens in this case of workers and capitalists arises out of the need to relate to a visually oriented generation of students.

Judith Smart, adjunct professor at RMIT University, is deputy chair of the History Council of Victoria. She coedits the Victorian Historical Journal with Richard Broome, co-authored with Marian Quartly Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women of Australia 1896–2006, and coedited with Shurlee Swain The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.