Awakening highlights the lives of four largely unknown colonial Victorian women who achieved greatness within the arts during the first part of the 20th century.

This trim, cogently written and detail-filled book – and its four concise biographies – admirably achieves its purpose.

Anyone with an interest in art and even general history will accept that the story of Australian accomplishment since Federation is anything but simple. The triumphs have been endowed with a rich variety of characters. Arguably, none are more fascinating than the four women discussed in this work: artist Dora Ohlfsen, patron Louise Hanson Dyer, publicist Clarice Zander and educator Mary Cecil Allen. All were born in Australia between 1869 and 1893 and each achieved world-wide prominence.

Dora Ohlfsen, Ceres 1910, bronze relief, collection of the Art Gallery of NSW.

In 1916, Ballarat-born Ohlfsen created the Anzac medal to mark the slaughter at Gallipoli, and perhaps her greatest work was a war memorial commissioned by Benito Mussolini. However, her first love was music and after studies in Germany she performed for the Kaiser. Then she moved to St Petersburg and leant sculpture before completing her studies in Italy, where she remained for much of her life. She visited Australia several times but was frustrated by the lack of opportunities in her homeland, where sculpture was still seen as a male art form.

Ohlfsen and her lover Helen Kugelgen, a Russian countess, were found dead in a gas-filled studio in Rome in 1948.

Awakening: Four Lives in Art, by Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller, Wakefield Press, $39.99

Dyer was a talented pianist and studied in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh before marrying Scottish businessman James Dyer in Melbourne. He was one of Victoria’s richest men and, with his money, the pair opened a branch of the British Musical Society. During this period, Louise Dyer acted as a musicologist, which helped her in publishing, recording and researching music.

But she felt there were limits to what she could achieve in Melbourne, so in 1925 the Dyers sailed for Paris, where Louise founded music publishing company Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre.  For her services to music, the French government appointed her with a Légion d’Honneur.

Allen was born and brought up on the campus of the University of Melbourne and became an artist, writer and a lecturer on art. She was lionised in the United States, where in 1930 she arranged the first New York exhibition by Australian artists.

Zander, also born in Victoria, became the first press officer for the Royal Academy in England and organised the Exhibition of British Contemporary Art, which she accompanied to Australia in 1933.

The four mini-biographies make fascinating individual stories. Together, they are even more absorbing, persuasive and enlightening.

It is fortunate that these four almost forgotten women have found such chroniclers as Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller.  Their re-emergence as women of substance, significance and assertion can only be aided by this commendable book.