The Australian Women's Register

Annie Golding was the eldest daughter of Joseph Golding, a gold-miner from Galway, Ireland, and his wife Ann (nee Fraser). She began teaching near Bathurst, New South Wales, and gained further experience at a number of Catholic schools in Newtown and Sydney, as well as at the Asylum for Destitute Children in Randwick. Golding was mistress in charge at West Leichhardt (Orange Grove) Public School from 1900, retiring in 1915. Throughout her teaching career, she was active in the Teachers’ Association of New South Wales, the Public School Teachers’ Institute and the New South Wales Public School Teachers’ Association.

With her sisters, Belle Golding and Kate Dwyer, Annie was a member of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales before her Newtown branch was expelled for defiance of the central council in Woollahra. With friends and fellow Labor supporters, Annie and her sisters formed the Women’s Progressive Association with Annie as president from 1904. The Association lobbied for equal pay and the equality of women before the law, with a particular focus on education and employment conditions for women. Annie Golding became a member of the State Children Relief Board in 1911.

Golding was a powerful orator. Speaking to the Australasian Catholic Congress in 1909, she announced that ‘the industrial, social, and moral development of a nation may be judged by the position of its women. In all decadent nations women are in a state of bondage or intellectual atrophy; regarded as slave or puppet.’ She strongly endorsed the philosophy of equal pay for equal work.