Melbourne’s Margaret Douglas was an endurance pedestrian every bit as remarkable as her Sydney contemporary The Flying Pieman. After stumbling upon a passing reference to her in an 1878 newspaper, I took a deep dive to shine a light on her completely forgotten achievements and examine how she was deliberately excluded from many newspapers of the time and then from a seminal history book that provided a chronology of pedestrianism. In part one we look at the colourful history of women who walked long distances in England and America, the abundance of coverage given to a man who walked 1000 miles in 1000 hours in Melbourne in 1858 and how Victoria's newspapers treated Margaret’s attempts to conquer the same challenge in the city six months later.
","author_name":"Michael Adams"}