IT'S autumn. The peak of the heat seems to have gone, the tomatoes are still ripening and it's women's history month.

As if that makes any difference to our lives!

After all, when we're on the ropes or in a pickle and wondering what step to take next, few of us will rush to a dictionary of women's history for inspiration.

We may turn to friends and even mentors and counsellors but turning out to a gallery, or opening the pages to stories of women who did 'firsts', or overcame challenges and impossibilities, is hardly our first resort for inspiration.

Yet, the need to tell and record women's histories and our own lives remains important, to give a complete picture of our society.

Florence Charles discovered how big those gaps in history are when she began to write the stories of the earliest immigrant women to settle in the Mount Shadwell District (near Mortlake) from 1839 to 1864.

Her book, co-authored with Craige Proctor, was published last year.

"It was so hard to find out anything very much about them," says Noorat-born Florence.

"We made them live through the lives of their husbands and the houses they lived in."

What she means is that there was much written about their husbands and their houses, but not about the women themselves.

Molly Clark discovered similar gaps when she visited the Longreach Hall of Fame in Queensland.

She found it dominated by men's stories and vowed to right the history books.

So she set about opening the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame in Alice Springs, which on Sunday launched a new exhibition celebrating the role of women in food production in central Australia.

Thankfully, Molly's story is included. Now 93, she ran the 3410 square kilometre Andado Station, 330km southeast of Alice Springs, after her husband's and son's deaths in the 1970s.

Then, her cattle were shot by authorities after a brucellosis scare, and despite a Supreme Court battle for restitution, she lost her income and was forced to sell.

Her hall of fame is a wonderful repository of women's stories.

There, you'll find out about Marie Single, born in 1926 and who became the first woman to hitchhike around Australia (in 1947 at the age of 21), or Catherine Gregson - born in 1914 - who became the first woman to drive by car around Australia, doing her own car maintenance along the way.

Then there's Pat O'Shane, born in 1941, who became Australia's first Aboriginal woman barrister.

The Australian Women's History Forum, which introduced women's history month from the US, is another excellent store of online stories.

Among those the forum is celebrating as part of its Women's Harvest History theme is the story of the life of Yvonne Aitken, an agricultural scientist born in 1911 in Horsham.

Yvonne became one of the first agriculture studies students at Melbourne University and a world authority on the effects of temperature and light on crops.

Another is winemaker and seller Mary Penfold, who ran Penfold Wines in South Australia in the 19th century.

The forum's focus on women in food production is a great opportunity for us all to do as Molly Clark did and right the wrongs of omissions by contributing stories of women who have done so much for farming and food production.