A pioneering study was Patricia Grimshaw, Women's Suffrage in New Zealand (1972), explaining how that remote colony became the first country in the world to give women the vote. Women's history as an academic discipline emerged in the mid-1970s, typified by Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present (1976). The first studies were compensatory, filling in the vacuum where women had been left out.