The Australian Women's Register

Kristine Kay Klugman attended The Friends’ School, Hobart, as her mother (Eileen Geddes Barnard, nee Laverty) was the Quaker school’s librarian. Kris qualified as a trained nurse at Royal Hobart Hospital, then volunteered at a Quaker refugee aid project on Ping Chau island in Hong Kong for half a year, before completing midwifery at Crown St Women’s Hospital in Sydney in 1963. She married Dr Richard Klugman (later MHR Prospect 1969-1990), and was herself a one-time unsuccessful candidate (NSW Legislative Assembly, Northcott, 1978), both seats near their Parramatta home.

They had three daughters, including Dr Jeni Klugman, who also ran for the NSW Legislative Assembly, Julie Klugman who managed Australian aid projects in eastern Indonesia for decades, and Kathy Klugman, whose DFAT service included High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The marriage ended in divorce.

When her daughters were very young, she attended Macquarie University and completed a BA in History and an MA in Community Studies, during which she undertook a community health study of western Sydney. At Macquarie U, she and a fellow student, John Faulkner (Senator NSW 1989 -2015, Special Minister of State, Minister of Defence), jointly founded the Macquarie University Labor Club.

Kris is a published economic historian (three-volume History of Burns Philp, the Australian Pacific trading company, co-authored with Prof Ken Buckley of Sydney University in the early 1980s), and has contributed widely and diversely to public and cultural life.

For example, she was appointed to The Australian Museum Trust 1978, and became Deputy President in 1984 and the first-ever female President 1984-88. She served on the NSW Legal Aid Commission and was a researcher for the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. In 1982, she was appointed for five years to the first female board member and Deputy President of the NSW Board of Fire Commissioners (the NSW Fire Brigades), where she successfully introduced female firefighters, promotion by merit rather than seniority, and improved education study options for firefighters. She enabled the subsequent permanent home of the NSW Fire Brigade Museum at Penrith by negotiating with the NSW Government for the land. In 1987 she was awarded national honours, an OAM for service to education and to the social welfare of the community.

Kris was a member of the Interim Council which scoped and planned the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney in the late-1980s for its opening in 1991. She lived in Melbourne for five years in the early 1990s, and undertook research for CIRCIT, a state-funded communications, telecommunications and IT body. After moving to a 15ha property near Tarago NSW in the mid-1990s, she undertook a PhD in Political Studies at the ANU in Canberra. In 2004-5 she co-curated with her then long-time partner Bill Rowlings (1945 – ) a Rotary Australia exhibition entitled A World without Polio at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, which also travelled to Sydney, Brisbane Melbourne and Perth.

Also with him, in 2003 she co-founded and became inaugural President of Civil Liberties Australia, a national organisation started in Canberra ACT but with later strong local representation in Tasmania, WA, and NT particularly where earlier local civil liberties groups had collapsed. She and Rowlings co-authored an online history, Civil Liberties in Australia, published progressively in 2018-20 on the website www.cla.asn.au Kris regards her work for civil liberties as the most important in her lifetime.