An Everywoman Named Joan : JOAN MAKES HISTORY<i> by Kate Grenville (British American Publishing $17.95; 272 pp.) : </i>

Much of the new writing coming out of Australia is by women, novelists such as Elizabeth Jolley, Jessica Anderson, Blanche d’Alpuget, Thea Astley and Kate Grenville--strong characters who live in solitariness on an island-continent. Within its vastness, with its odd animals and seasons, Australians have so much room to be different.

What Kate Grenville has chosen to do in “Joan Makes History,” her third novel, is to tell stories about Australia’s history by creating an Everywoman named Joan--who is really 12 different women, present at various historical moments, who give accounts of their lives at those times.

These are stories within a larger, main story. The 12 historical tales are really the imaginings of a 20th-Century woman named Joan, who has believed herself capable of doing something great, making history in some way, but instead watches her life take on more ordinary dimensions. In between chapters revealing her life are accounts of the “other” Joans, the historical Joans whose tales she imagines: Joan as an explorer (wife of Captain Cook) and prisoner of the Crown (thief banished to new penal colony), hairdresser and frontier tree-chopper, washerwoman, lady of leisure, half-breed and bareback rider, photographer’s assistant, mother and wife of the mayor.

Modern Joan is conceived in the hold of a boat by parents emigrating from Transylvania, just as the boat arrives in Sydney. She is raised by these dark foreign parents who do not speak the language of the new land and therefore don’t know enough to say “Fine weather for ducks” when folks say, “Wet enough for you?”

Taunted as a “filthy Hun” during the war, Joan’s father changes their name. No longer Joan Radulescu, she watches her father cross out her old name in her school books and write in her new one: Joan Redman. It is an act of deceptively violent obliteration.

In her private fantasies, Joan imagines herself becoming someone important. But instead, during her first years at college, she makes love in the Botanical Gardens one night, becomes pregnant by Duncan, sees her life set on an irreversible course that does not include making history so much as making babies and perfect scones.

If this sounds like an ordinary story, it is and it isn’t. Things take a very quirky turn. When Duncan and Joan come in from the country to attend the annual big livestock show, she decides to abandon him and hides behind bottles of pickled peas in the Agricultural Hall until she’s sure she’s given him the slip.

Traveling to another town, and now on her own, she works menial jobs. She also decides to become a man, that is to cross-dress for a period of time, exploring the feeling of power that comes from such a disguise, until she wearies of it and longs for Duncan.

In the end, this Joan does not “make history.” She returns to Duncan, becomes the forgiven wife and settles into a life of domesticity and child-rearing. Recognizing he is a very good man, she is “filled with the love that has no choice.”

This is really more a collection of stories connected by the idea that we are reading history from the perspective of the women who never make the history books, the ones who cooked dinner, washed socks, and swept floors, those “who will melt away like mud when they die,” the people who do “things that would look silly in a book. Nobody would make a statue out of them.” She is talking about “every new generation dancing in the shadow of history’s grief,” precisely because the grief is forgotten.

If this sounds slightly confusing, it is, initially at least, and yet, once the structure of the book is comprehended, these are delightful stories of women’s adventures and conquests.

The history of the world is the male version. It seems perfect that Grenville has made Joan not an individual but an archetype of the “whole tribe of humanity keeping the generations flowing along,” the women and the workers.

Joan the servant--and half-aboriginal woman--is introduced this way: “In the 1870s Australians prided themselves that trains would truly open this country where only kangaroos had hopped or Cobb’s horse-drawn coaches rattled through. I, Joan, was an adventurous woman this time and set out to sample as many modes of transport as the country could offer.”

It’s a runaway-slave story, and also a runaway woman story--a sort of Huck Finn-ish sampling of many different “modes of transport,” a tale of the road and of frontier life.

It has its roots not only in these exploration myths of leaving and travel and experience--archetypes that are common in all countries--but it has roots also in the stories these cultures told themselves--the literature of exploits, ranging from “The Decameron” and “Tales of the Arabian Nights” to “Moll Flanders,” “Tom Jones,” “Madame Bovary,” “Prester John,” “The Red and the Black,” “Anna Karenina,” “Sister Carrie” and on and on, powerful exploration-journey myths that are found even in fairy tales such as “Peter Rabbit.”

The New York Times noted of Grenville’s first book, “Lilian’s Story,” that its “feminist politics are entirely subsumed by art.” The same can be said of “Joan Makes History.” This is not as much a book about women making history as it is about women retelling history. Instead of facts about power, we have 12 human-accomplishment tales, and as with “Lilian’s Story” (the fictionalized account of a real-life Sydney bag lady named Bea Miles, who in the ‘30s and ‘40s was a familiar sight on the city’s streets, reciting Shakespeare, stopping passers-by with her oration), a woman is at the center.