The library, these days resembling a church mouse,* does not have enough shekels of its own to digitise all of its fine collection of materials relating to the story of women's suffrage. Those materials include the the personal papers of feminist and social activist Bessie Rischbieth (1874-1967).

The library's priceless suffrage stuff includes as well as papers some objects, including, pictured, a medal that the UK suffragists of the Women's Social and Political Union awarded to sisters who were arrested and imprisoned and often cruelly force fed (tubes forced down gullets).

Our picture is of the medal given "For Valour" to hunger striker Letitia Withall. It is part of the Bessie Rischbieth collection. Your columnist has seen and held this medal and can testify to what a grand and touching artefact it is. If only it could speak! Its ribbon (note the famous suffragette colours) is eerily new-looking as if it was pinned on the proud and deserving Letitia just yesterday. True feminists, like this columnist and surely the Prime Minister too, think it a feisty thing that the suffragettes insisted their sisters were showing at least as much valour in fighting for the vote as medal-winning men show in blokey war fighting. There are Suffragettes' harrowing descriptions of their force feedings online at The History Learning Site.

A legend in Letitia's medal's silk and velvet case says the medal was given her "In Recognition Of A Gallant Action Whereby Through Endurance To The Last Extremity Of Hunger And Hardship A Great principle Of Political Justice Was Vindicated."

Back to the "obnoxious" suffragettes and to crowd funding in a moment but first, because we know the image is crying out for attention and explanation, to the troubled-looking tattooed lady on today's page.

Britain's valiant suffragettes were thought obnoxious by their conservative, patriarchal opponents but of course, for true feminists there can be so such thing as an obnoxious woman (although Bronwyn Bishop puts that assertion to a severe test). It is an oxymoron. And so of course the creators of the current Obnoxious Ladies In The Australian Landscape exhibition at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space at Gorman House don't expect us to find any of the portrayed "ladies" truly obnoxious.

Our picture from the exhibition is a still from Alex Pye's 2015 film in which she seems to be being eaten alive by the terrible tedium of life in an anaesthetising NSW country town. No, this time it is not Wagga Wagga (although life there is said to have its challenges), but Cumnock. In the film Cumnock: The Musical (2015) the inaction opens with Ms Pye in her underwear watching TV infomercials, smoking a bong and cigarettes, and yearning for something, anything to interrupt the monotony of rural living.

Of Obnoxious Ladies In The Australian Landscape, curator Sabrina Baker explains that it "addresses an historical lack of female representation in exhibitions of Australian landscape art".

"Australian art frequently references male depictions of harsh and unforgiving lands to be conquered by Aussie heroes, or celebrated as a great untouchable beauty that leaves out women's experience altogether.

"This exhibition brings together Emma Beer, Jacqueline Bradley, Anna Davern, Lucy Forsberg, Alex Pye and Camille Serisier, who take a new approach through suburbs and sad country towns, making work that is both subversive and humorous; disrupting the usual story of landscape."

Obnoxious Ladies In The Australian Landscape continues, subversively, at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House, 55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon until next Saturday June 18.

But back to the church mice of the National Library and to the library's fund-seeking appeal.

Sharyn O'Brien is manager of Community Partnerships & Development at the NLA and is co-ordinating the campaign. She is calling this appeal one of the library's annual "tax-time" appeals because of course tax-time is approaching and donations to this appeal are tax-deductible.

She tells us that the library's suffrage collection is vitally important (it is already in use by scholars) because although today we take it for granted that women can vote this has only happened because of "a huge struggle, particularly in England, and wasn't the case 100 years ago".

One hundred years ago (and Bessie Rischbieth was in England in 1913 to see the suffragette's often militant and ferocious struggle first hand) no British women had the vote. It wasn't until 1928 that change-averse Britain enfranchised all women of 21 and beyond.

Now the library is raising funds to preserve and improve access to the papers of Bessie Rischbieth and to the related women's suffrage collection items. Digitising these items will make them accessible online through the wonder of Trove, thus giving national and international researchers easy access to this unique material. You, Prime Minister, and all Australians can donate to help enable this important process to come to pass.

You can donate online or phone the Library's Development Office on 6262 1336. Donations over $2 are tax-deductible.

*A ye olde expression referring to the fact that since there is never any food stored or provided in a church a church mouse is bound to be gaunt and struggling.