The Australian Women's Register

Clara Harrod and her sister Emma were among the first white women to settle in the Barrier Ranges district of New South Wales.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Trish White was elected as the Member for Taylor in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia at a by-election, which was held on 5 November 1994. She served as a Minister for three years in the Rann Government holding the portfolios of Education, Transport, Urban Development and Planning and Information Economy. She was re-elected in 1997, 2002 and 2006, but did not re-contest the 2010 election.

Described as ‘a tall, angular, brusque, energetic woman, prone to bad language’. Lilian Cooper completed her medical training, despite opposition from her parents, at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1890. She travelled to Australia in 1891, settling in Brisbane, Queensland, where she became the first female doctor registered in Queensland. Some years later, she travelled back to Europe, via the United States. She received a doctorate of medicine from the University of Durham in June 1912.

Cooper settled again in Brisbane after the end of the Great War and established a large and successful practice. In 1926 she bought a house called Old St Mary’s in Main Street, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane and settled there in semi-retirement, becoming a foundation fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1928. She retired in 1941 and died in her home on 18 August 1947.

Jean Devanny was a novelist and prominent member of the Communist Party of Australia with a particular interest in the position of women in Australian culture and society. A staunch labour activist, she was also an admirer of the work of birth control activist, Marion Piddington. Initially living in Sydney, she eventually moved to Queensland, where she was caught up in the 1935 canecutter’s strike. Her best known novel Sugar Heaven was based on these events.

Her energy was much admired by many of her contemporaries. Katherine Susannah Prichard, for instance, wrote that ‘Jean Devanny is wonderful. No one I know is so vital, magnetic, absolutely devoted and disinterested. She is a great woman…I wish I could give all my time to Party work as she does.’

The Workers’ Educational Association (W.E.A.) of Queensland was formed in Brisbane in 1913 after the visit of Albert Mansbridge, the founder of the Association in Great Britain. Its aim was to bring extra-mural university education to the working class. Of the first thirty-eight people that enrolled, fourteen of them were women, with feminist and socialist Emma Miller being one of them. Women soon outnumbered men in most of the classes, particularly those that were concerned with leisure activities.

The W.E.A. was disbanded by the state government in 1939 for allegedly supporting subversive activities, although its membership list indicates that most of the members were women who wanted to learn how to enhance their leisure time. Having said that, it did operate as a forum for the discussion and promotion of new ideas. For instance, Marion Piddington delivered a series of her innovative sex education lectures to the association in 1928.

Elvira Lyons was a founder of Sydney’s Catholic Welfare Bureau in 1941.

Barbara Blackman is an author, music-lover, essayist, librettist, letter writer and patron of the Arts. Former wife of Charles Blackman, she worked for many years as an artist’s model. She has conducted countless interviews for the National Library of Australia’s oral history program. In 2006, Blackman was presented with the Australian Contemporary Music 2006 Award for Patronage.

Jean Cullen was an illustrator and humorous artist who worked for Smith’s Weekly in the period 1941-1950. She also created the teenage cartoon character ‘Pam’ for the Brisbane Courier Mail , a character that Marie Horseman continued to develop after Cullen took her own life in 1950.

In 1945, Cullen published an adult illustrated book that was quickly banned called Hold that Halo, or, How to lose it in ten easy lessons. The comic narrated the trials and tribulations of a young woman during the second word war and was a stark commentary on the sexual double-standard as it applied to women.

Mary McConnel founded the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane.

While working as an author and journalist, Joice NanKivell Loch became a volunteer medical orderly with Quaker Famine Relief worldwide. In memory of her brother Geoff, who died in France during World War I, she wrote The Solitary Pedestrian. She reviewed books for the Sun-Herald in Melbourne, and worked as secretary to the Professor of Classics at Melbourne University. After the war, with her husband Sydney Loch, Joice travelled to London, then Dublin. Together they wrote Ireland in Travail. In later years, Joice and Sydney developed a strong connection with Greece, where they made their home. At the American Farm School near Thessaloniki, Joyce worked throughout the Greek refugee crisis following the massacre of Greeks at Smyrna.

Ellen Whitty, best known as Mother Vincent, joined the Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland in 1831. She was elected as Reverend Mother in 1849. Mother Vincent was invited with five Sisters to join the newly formed diocese of Queensland, and arrived there in 1861. She returned to Ireland in 1870 to recruit nuns and take up the position of assistant to the Queensland head of the Order.

In 1921 at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal, Gladys Moncrieff performed the role of Teresa in Maid of the Mountains to great popular acclaim. After travelling through America and Europe for further training, she returned to Australia to play the title role in Rio Rita. Moncrieff made numerous popular recordings and sang on radio. She was featured on the Macquarie broadcasting network in the ‘Gladys Moncrieff Show’.

Jo Mackerras was an entomologist and parasitologist who began research into fly-borne diseases in cattle and fatal epizootics in fresh-water fish in 1918, with the help of a Walter and Eliza Hall Fellowship. With her husband Ian Mackerras, she joined CSIR’s Division of Economic Entomology in Canberra in 1929. From 1943 she was at the Land Headquarters Medical Research Unit in Cairns, where she led pioneering research into malaria control. Post-war, Mackerras worked again at CSIR, this time at Yeerongpilly, as a parasitologist. The lungworm, A. Mackerrasae, was named after her, and she specialised in Australian cockroaches.

Margaret Gibson ran theCentral Queensland News for nearly twenty years in the 1960s and 70s. Established by her mother in 1937, who convinced some local businessmen that they should become shareholders and help her to purchase the Leichhardt Weekly (to be renamed the Central Queensland News), Gibson took over the running of the paper when her mother became ill in 1963. She was the first woman to be elected President and life member of the Queensland Country Press Association in 1978/79.

Daphne Mayo studied sculpture in Sydney and London before travelling through France and Italy as a Royal Academy travelling scholar. She returned to Brisbane in 1925 and carved the Brisbane City Hall tympanum (1927-30); the Queensland Women’s War Memorial, Anzac Square (1929-32); and relief panels for the chapel at Mt Thompson Crematorium (1934). With Vida Lahey she founded the Queensland Art Fund. In 1960 she was appointed the Queensland Art Gallery’s first woman trustee. Her last large commission was a statue of Sir William Glasgow (1961-64).

Margaret Macfarlan and her daughter, Carmel took over the running of the Gladstone (Queensland) Observer in 1947 when her husband (Carmel’s father), Colin Macfarlan, died. Colin had built the newspaper into an organ that reportedly ‘accomplished more for the advancement of the town than all the public bodies put together’. Margaret followed in the tradition established by her husband, a fact that was acknowledged when she was awarded an MBE for services to journalism and the community in 1970.

The papers was sold to News Limited in 1969.

Dr Eleanor Bourne was appointed first medical officer in the Department of Public Instruction in 1911. Her research on hookworm disease was used in the Rockefeller-financed hookworm survey of northern Queensland. During wartime, Dr Bourne served as a lieutenant of the Royal Army Medical Corps in London. She became medical officer to Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Marcella Cameron worked as secretary for Enoggera and Virginia Brick and Pipe Company in Brisbane before being transferred to Virginia, 13km from the city, to oversee the company’s brick and pipe works. The works flourished under her management, and in the 1920s she secured a City Council contract for 10,000 pounds worth of pipes for the sewerage of Brisbane. Cameron was able to devise a scheme to protect the jobs of Virginia Pipe Works employees during the depression, earning her legendary status in the local community.

Elise Barney was appointed to the position of postmistress at Brisbane, following the death of her husband Leiut. John Edward Barney.

Elizabeth Webb was an Australian household name in the 1940s. She began her career in journalism in Sydney in 1932 on radio station 2FC where she launched a series of talks entitled ‘The Women of the Outback’ and ‘Sidelights on Amateur Jackarooing.

Lala Fisher lived in London and worked as a journalist between 1897-1901. On her return to Australia she lived in Charters Towers and worked for various papers, including the radical New Eagle and Steele Rudd’s Magazine. Later, in Sydney, she became the owner/editor of Theatre Magazine from 1909 to 1918.

Fisher published several volumes of poetry. She was a founding member of the Society of Women Writers.

Winifred Moore was a prominent Brisbane journalist in the early twentieth century. She edited the women’s section of The Brisbane Courier (later Courier-Mail), from the early 1920s through to the 1940s, and remained with the newspaper as a columnist until the early 1950s. In addition to her literary and arts interests, Moore was a founding member of the National Parks Association of Queensland. Although generally politically conservative, she had a keen interest in women’s affairs and a range of social welfare issues of the day.

Nance Haxton is a Walkley Award winning journalist who impressed the judges in 2001 with her coverage of the riots at the Woomera Detention Centre in outback South Australia. She has worked across a variety of media in both metropolitan and regional locations.

Prior to her election to the House of Representatives as the member for Bennelong in 2007, Maxine McKew was an award-winning journalist with thirty years experience. She hosted a number of programmes on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television and radio, most recently Lateline and The 7.30 Report. In 2000 Maxine took up a position with the Bulletin Magazine as a regular contributor of feature interviews with prominent political business and arts/entertainment figures. She is the winner of both a Walkley and a Logie award and is the recipient of a Centenary Medal for services to broadcasting. She remained in the federal Parliament for only one term, as she was defeated at the 2010 election.

Zora Cross was, among other things, a poet and author of children’s verse. She wrote for the Brisbane Daily Mail as a freelance journalist, and was drama critic for the magazines Green Room and the Lone Hand.

Mary Hayter (known always more formally as Mrs. Hayter or, in wartime, as Lieutenant Hayter) was an active community worker and nursing sister who served with distinction in WWII.

Emily Bulcock was a poet and freelance journalist. She produced several volumes of verse and contributed regularly to major metropolitan newspapers in Australia.