June is the final month for entries in The Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize 2013, administered by the University of Southern Queensland. So for our June collection spotlight, biographer Stephany Steggall explores Fryer's Bruce Dawe papers...

For this month's Collection Spotlight, guest writer, Sue Bell, shares her experiences of researching her great-grandmother's letters in the Fryer Library's collection.

Records of women's lives in the 19th century are very sparse in comparison with those of men or at least 'important' men. Women were usually invisible with few or no signs that they had lived and even wives of 'important' men were only recorded when they were attending social occasions or accompanying their husbands to events.

Amongst Fryer's manuscript collections is a folder of papers relating to the 1948 St Patrick's Day clash in Brisbane. The papers form part of the collection of Connie Healy, whose husband, Mick Healy, was secretary of the Trades & Labor Council of Queensland at the time. Mick Healy was the leader of the protest march that was met with such violence by the Queensland police.

In the seventeenth century, many members of the upper classes collected objects for 'cabinets of curiosities', amusing their guests with rare and unusual specimens of natural history. Shells were one of the most popular objects among collectors, and in the eighteenth century, as major voyages of discovery made available new and previously unrecorded species, these shells came to be studied in a more scientific way.