This is the story of my journey across the world collecting stories from women who love women. Originally from the UK but now based in Sydney, I am a writer who realised that if we as women who love women don’t write our own stories, then someone else is going to do it for us. We have been all but invisible throughout history for this reason –  my mission is to change this.

I hope to uncover the stories of many women that might otherwise never be told – ordinary women, wealthy women, old women, powerful women, rural women, marginalised women, young women, famous women, poor women, urban women – all united by the their love of other women.

I use the term women who love women because I recognise that it is only in the past century that the words like lesbian, and more recently pansexual or genderqueer, have been embraced by women who love women, and largely only in the Western world. I am aware that to many older women, the term lesbian has negative connotations and I have yet to discover how, if at all, women who love women identify themselves outside my relatively small and insular Westernised gay world.

I also want to include the stories of women who have loved women in the past but now love men (and vice-versa), and those who may never have acted on their love for another woman.

How we define ourselves is up to us – that we are women who love women is all that matters.

So here goes. I have no funding and no fixed plan. But I will go to the ends of the earth to document the stories of women who love women, and I won’t stop until the whole world hears them.