In The Girls, Zoe Davis and Linde Ivimey, there’s a small sled, topped with 555 bones, woven into an intricate pattern. Each bone is from the base of the cerebral cortex of a chicken. She’s knowledgeable about anatomy, both animal and human.

“I’ve also studied taxidermy, pulling things apart and putting them back together is kind of fun to do,” Ivimey says.

Which is what she, and nine other women artists, have done for So Fine: Contemporary women artists make Australian history: reimagined and reinvented, reworked our nation’s history, pulled apart the traditional male-dominated past and put it back together in a different light.

Angus Trumble, director the National Portrait Gallery, said it was vital that women’s versions of history were heard.

“The telling of history has undergone an extraordinary evolution,” he said.

“Some 50 years ago the discipline was largely focussed on events concerning men, told by men, and drawing on male sources.

“Now there's great interest in micro history, in social history, in the untold episodes of history that shed a different light on events we thought were familiar.”

And that is exactly what So Fine does. Bern Emmerich’s obsessively detailed paintings, inspired by the convict women who sailed to Van Diemen’s Land on the Rajah in 1841, tell the individual stories of 180 women: Ellen Holden (Stole two sovereigns and five shillings, 10 years, six times in prison for drunkenness, aged 23.)

Fiona McMonagle’s large-scale banners show young children preparing to board ship as they head to Australia as part of the Child Migration Scheme.

Carol McGregor has painted possum skins and feathered pencils and woven hair and wire baskets to evoke stories of indigenous people whose personal histories have been ignored.

Other artists represented are senior Gija artist Shirley Purdie, Leah King-Smith, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Nicola Dickson and Xue Mei-Leng.

Gallery curators Sarah Engledow and Christine Clark developed the exhibition to enrich the contemporary narrative around Australia’s history and biography.

“So Fine reflects a fresh vision of history as ambivalent, comprising fragmentary, contradictory, marginal or many-layered stories, told from many different perspectives and by, or about, figures whose voices were long muffled because of their gender, social position, cultural practice or ethnic inheritance,” says Engledow.

Clark said aside from gender, their common attributes were a habit of serious thinking and a meticulous approach to creation.

“Their combined works are intricate, refined and affecting objects that will provide unique interpretations of history and biography in this strikingly beautiful exhibition,” Clark said.

For Ivimey, that sense of biography goes a long way back.

“I remember my first sculpture,” she says.

“I don't think anyone else would have thought of it as a sculpture, I might not have until now. It was the first moment of making something with meaning.

“I’m the youngest of four kids and bathtime at my house was a cup full of Dettol before the two little ones got in and the soap was all squishy.

“My mum had a macaw, she'd taken charge of it from a woman whose boyfriend had smuggled it over in the war.  The macaw had lived a good life and it was time to die, it died during a heatwave, and my brother plucked some of the feathers from it.

“One day I squished up the soap from the bath and took some of the coloured feathers and bound them all up and hurled it over the neighbour’s fence.

“I just thought, wow, you can make things fly even when they don't have life, give them new life.”

And So Fine does that too. Gives new life to our nation's history.

So Fine: Contemporary women artists make Australian history is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, from 29 June 2018 until 1 October 2018. Tickets are priced at $10 for adults and $8 concession. Children under 18 are free.

Several artists featured in the exhibition will contribute to a panel discussion on Saturday, June 30,  as part of the Writing lives, revealing lives: portraiture and personhood forum. The forum is a partnership between the National Portrait Gallery and Australian National University.