The Australian Women's Register

The Forgotten Immigrants and Australians exhibition, held in the Old Parliament House, Adelaide in October 1988, showcased photographic images of immigrants from the late 1940’s. Dzidra Knoch’s, a woman of Latvian heritage, felt that it was important at this time to document the lives of immigrants who arrived in Australia directly after the end of the war. ‘My reason,’ she wrote, ‘was that Australians are paying more attention to present day immigrants and appear to have forgotten the first non English speaking migrants who arrived in the late 1940s’.

Knochs’ challenge was collating the material as at that time in Australia, immigrant workers had little time or resources to record their lives. Knochs consequently sourced what she believed to be essential information from the era, in order to provide a record to second and third generation immigrant families and other Australians. The final selection of 236 photographs depicted immigrants and Australians and their way of life in the late 1940’s.

Margaret Barbalet is an award-winning children’s author, a novelist, poet and short-story writer, a public servant and a historian

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Suzanne Edgar is a Canberra-based writer of fiction, feature articles, poetry and reviews.

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Jennifer Gardiner was elected to the NSW Legislative Council on 25 May 1991 representing the Nationals. She served until 2015 and was Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Legislative Council from 2003..

Edna Roper was an ALP member of the New South Wales Legislative Council for over twenty years. She was elected in 1957 and then re-elected in 1970. She served as Deputy Leader of the Opposition between 3/12/1973 -13/5/1976 (2 years 5 months 11 days) and was Deputy Leader of Government between 14/5/1976 – 17/10/1978 (2 years 5 months 4 days). She was a delegate to the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico in 1975.

Jane Ward is a well known local and conservationist activist with a passion for social justice and community action. As an Independent candidate she contested the following elections:
Leichhardt Municipal Council, 1987
New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Balmain, 1988
House of Representatives, Sydney, 2004
City of Sydney council elections, 2004

Sheila Lawless migrated to Australia with her husband Lawrence and first child in 1955, one family among the hundreds of thousands of “ten pound poms” who travelled to Australia after the Second World War under the government assisted passage scheme.

A lifelong political and social activist, Evelyn Barron served a full 12-year term in the Legislative Council of New South Wales (1964-76) as a member of the ALP. Prior to this she had unsuccessfully run as an ALP candidate for Collaroy in 1953.

Annie Coulthard (Yadandhanha), of Adnyamathanha descent, grew up at Wertaloona station where her father worked. There she was employed as a housemaid until about 1924, when she married her cousin Samuel Coulthard.

Annie and Samuel moved to Balcanoona where they worked for Ray Thomas, carting stones and sand for the new ‘Government House’, now headquarters of the Gammon Ranges National Park. After the birth of their first child in 1926, the family moved to the Adnyamathanha camp at Ram Paddock Gate on Patsy Springs, where they struggled to survive in a land ravaged by stock and drought. They moved to the Nepabunna run in 1930, when Thomas gave it to the Adnyamathanha. In the early 1940s, the Coulthards drove sheep between Balcanoona and Copley, and lived and worked on Idninha. In the early 1950s they moved to Wooltana and then to Nepabunna where, in 1973, Sam Coulthard died.

The last five years of her life Annie Coulthard dedicated to passing on traditional knowledge. She died in 1986 and was buried at Nepabunna beside her husband.

A member of the Liberal Party of Australia, Wendy Smith served as the Member for Silvan Province in the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Victoria from 1996-2002.
Her earlier community service included a period as a Councillor for the City of Kew from 1983-88. She was a candidate in the Legislative Assembly seat of Albert Park at the state election, which was held in 3 October 1992.

Alice Warrika Oldfield, of Kuyani descent, was born on Callanna station in South Australia. She grew up on Millers Creek station where her parents worked. As a very small child, she was attacked and nearly killed there by the station geese. Though she was badly injured, it was the geese who were all mysteriously found dead the next morning.

Alice married Sandy Dinta Oldfield, the famous last Ngamini rainmaker. They lived and worked on stations on the Strzelecki and the Birdsville Track, mainly Etadunna. In the 1950s they retired to Marree, where Sandy died in 1964.

Alice was devoted to traditions and was a rainmaker in her own right, though this was ignored by people who came to visit Sandy. She kept traditions alive by organising the Wandji-Wandji corroboree at Stuart Creek in the early 1930s; she knew the karlapa, the Arabana women’s dance; and she made rain at a ceremony she organised in 1969, when she was almost totally blind. She was a speaker of Arabana, and most of what has been preserved of the Kuyani language is due to her.

Dorothy Leila Rankine, of Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna descent, grew up at Raukkan (Point McLeay) on Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. Her lifelong involvement with music and singing began with her family and the local Salvation Army church. She later became a soldier of the Salvation Army. After completing only primary education she moved to Adelaide in 1965, where she joined the Aboriginal Women’s Council and later the Port Adelaide Aboriginal Friendship Club.

In 1972 Rankine became a founding member of the Adelaide Aboriginal Orchestra, which later developed into the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM), of which she was chairperson until her retirement in 1986. She acted as counsellor, liaising with the local Aboriginal community and organising annual camps and concerts. She edited and contributed poems to the journal Tjungaringanyi; was elected chairperson of the urban committee; and was an active singer, trombonist and speaker. She appeared in the films Sister, If You Only Knew (1975) and Wrong Side of the Road (1980).

Dorothy Leila Rankine served on the boards of the Aboriginal Community College, the Aboriginal Community Centre, and the Aboriginal Sobriety Group. She was a member of the Australia Council, the Aboriginal Artists Agency in Sydney, and the Aborigines Advancement League of South Australia, and was a life board member of Warriappendi Alternative School. She contributed to Aboriginal education curriculum materials for South Australian schools, told Ngarrindjeri stories on ABC television, and was one of the founders of Camp Coorong, a Ngarrindjeri cultural centre.

Judy Trew Thandripilinha (‘Poisonous Snake’), of Yarluyandi descent, was born in c.1865, probably on Goyder Lagoon in South Australia. She took the name ‘Trew’ from one of the early station people. Her first husband was Kuranta (‘Sticknest Rat’), also called ‘Lagoon Charlie’, and her second husband was the highly respected old Wangkangurru man, Yarinjili Todd.

Judy lived and worked on old Clifton Hills and The Bluff, remaining in or close to her own country. She had an excellent knowledge of the bush, and taught her grandchildren about sites and stories, including her own main tradition, the Song Cycle of the Swan. Nearly all the sites recorded on the Diamantina in South Australia are based on her traditions. In c.1936 she organised the last expedition, by camel, to collect pituri from the traditional site west of the Mulligan.

Maggy Pinkie Mack (Katipelvild), of Ngarrindjeri descent, was born on the lower Murray River in South Australia, probably around 1867. At the age of 16, she was given in marriage to an up-river man, John Mack (Telwara). She took part in ceremonies and learnt new songs and stories. After he died, she went back to her own country, and her second husband.

Pinkie Mack was a song-woman, and she recorded some of her songs on an Edison wax cylinder. She was nostalgic about the past and her people. After the death of Albert Karloan, she was the only remaining fluent Yaraldi speaker.

In later years, Mack lived in a small cottage near the river and not far from Tailem Bend, where she sometimes sold freshly caught fish to a local shop. Children, grandchildren and various relatives called in to see her on the way to other places.

Vim Wlehelm was named after the Vickers Vimy, a reconditioned WWI fighter bomber that flew from London to Australia and landed on the day she was born. Her father, Roy Klopper, was an early enthusiast of flying and had built his own aeroplane as a young man. Her mother, Jessie Sullivan, was a midwife and matron of the local hospital at Crystal Brook, north of Adelaide, South Australia. They named their daughter Eileen Vimy but she was nearly always Vim. Jessie died when Vim was ten, and Vim left school at the age of twelve to look after her four siblings. She picked up her formal education again at the age of seventeen when she went to Royal Adelaide Hospital to be a nurse. In 1943 she married a young doctor, Don Wilhelm (with whom she had two children), and graduated top of the state in 1944.

Once graduated, Vimy trained as a family planning nurse at the Marie Stopes Centre in London and learned to appreciate the worth of volunteering. Returning to Australia in 1960 and with some encouragement from Ruby Rich of the Racial Hygiene Association, Vimy joined the Family Planning Association of Australia (FPAA), where she eventually served as president and chief executive officer, on a full-time, volunteer basis. “She ran the organisation as efficiently as she appears to have done everything else in her life,” notes a friend. “She turned it from an organisation that had virtually no profile at all, into one that was respected by the medical community and by the community at large.” She was later appointed Patron of the Australian Federation of Family Planning Associations (AFFPA), and in 1976 was awarded the Order of Australia in recognition of her pioneering work in family planning. Between 1976 and 1997, Vimy held the Presidency of the NSW Committee of UNICEF and was elected a Life Member in 1994.

After leaving UNICEF in 1997, Vim, at the age of 78, immediately offered her services to the University of New South Wales alumni association as a volunteer.

Dora Hunter was raised by two missionaries, Miss Hyde and Miss Butler, firstly at Quorn and then at Eden Hills, South Australia. She started working as a servant in a private home, and later got a job in a kindergarten. Following that, she worked as a Child Care Worker at the Central Methodist Mission in Adelaide for nine years. She did two years’ training in the Aboriginal Task Force at the Institute of Technology in Adelaide, and worked in a Government position as an Aboriginal Community Worker. She has been involved with the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship and the Young People’s Branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She enjoys playing music, and has often played in old people’s homes and children’s homes as well as at church meetings.

Maude Tongerie was born in 1927 at Anna Creek, about 80 miles west of Oodnadatta in South Australia. She lived with her people (Arabunna) until the age of nine, when she was taken to the Finke River Mission for an eye treatment. She then went to live with an aunt in Oodnadatta so that she could learn English, and from there she went to Colebrook Home, a non-Government Aboriginal mission, in Quorn. At the age of 15 she started to work as a domestic with a family near Adelaide. She married George Tongerie, a young Aboriginal man who served in the Air Force during the war. In the early 1970s Maude became involved with the Department for Community Welfare, and has worked as a Social Worker with Aboriginal families, particularly in the Juvenile Courts.

In 1973, the first national conference on Sexism in Education was convened by the Women’s Liberation Movement, fuelled by concern for the position of women and girls in society and Women’s Studies courses were established at Flinders and Adelaide Universities. Teachers and Students quickly became aware of a shortage of materials in this area and a group of women educators began meeting in 1974 to redress this. In July 1975 the Women’s Studies Resource Centre was established at Wattle Park Teachers College funded by a grant from the Australian National Advisory Committee for International Women’s Year. After moving several times the WSRC relocated to its present address in the suburb of North Adelaide.

Initiated by women already in the art world, the Women’s Art Movement (hereinafter named W.A.M.) was part of an international trend somewhat belated in Australia, which lead women artists to look at their position as women in society and to analyse their position as artists through a feminist frame. The W.A.M offered women artists support within an alternative group structure. The group began with the aim of supporting and promoting women artists, educating members on the problem of discrimination and working with one another to overcome sexism in the arts and society. Fifty women ranging in age from 18 to 65 attended the first meeting. As attendance numbers grew, funding was required. Such monetary resources were obtained from the South Australia Arts Grant Advisory Committee (A.G.A.C), the Community Arts Board (C.A.B), and the Visual Arts Board (V.A.B) for salary and administrative costs, workshops and the publication of the book Women’s Art Movement 1978-1979, Adelaide, South Australia, respectively.

The Zonta Club of Adelaide was officially chartered on April 17, 1969. Allthea Tebbutt was elected as the first president of the Club, alongside Board Members Irene Jeffries, Dr Catherine Ellis, Geraldine Little, Joyce Cupples, Brenda Coulter and Judith Hay.

The social activism of quite young women is graphically captured in the activities of the Girls Social and Political Union, which flourished between 1914 and 1917. It was a discussion group formed by Ellinor Walker in 1914, when she was just 18, with a friend, and around 20 other young women. The aims of the group were to promote mutual awareness of matters South Australian, Australian, Imperial and international to make the most effective use of their voting rights.

They discussed a wide range of social, political and economic topics, some of which bear currency today—’large pensions being granted to Government servants at the present time of so-called economy’; sweated labour; the wheat scheme, land values taxation.

The Save Our Sons Movement was formed in 1965 to seek the reappeal of the National Service act and disbanded in 1975. In an effort to bring back servicemen stationed in Vietnam, the Save Our Sons movement made public protests against the conduct of the war in Vietnam, aided those who had been jailed after refusing to be conscripted, spoke on behalf of conscientious objectors at rallies, passed out leaflets, attended vigils and supported in court those who were charged with resisting conscription.
The Save Our Sons movement was just one of the many groups opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Although there were male members, women held all office-holder positions.

The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL.) first formed in Victoria, 1972. Conducted on a voluntary, non-profit basis, the W.E.L is a political pressure group that seeks to remove the economic and social disadvantages of women in Australia, to end discrimination against women and to promote equal opportunity. The W.E.L was constituted with a double purpose – to carry to the elected representatives of the community the views and requirements of female electors and to inform those female electors about their representatives’ standard of consciousness of women’s issues.

One of a series, the Third Women and Labour Conference intended to encourage research and experience sharing which furthered women’s understanding of their participation in the workforce and Australian society. More than 100 sessions were conducted with papers and workshops covering topics such as women and work, technological change and its impact upon women’s employment, women and the family, the programs to assist women to take up “non-traditional” employment, migrant women, women’s studies, feminist theory and practice, lesbianism, women and ageing, women and the media, women and art, work and unions, feminist literary criticisms and the strategies for women in the 80s (discussed by guest speakers Deborah McCulloch and Bettina Cass). The conference aimed to ensure the participation of a wide range of women and to promote contributions on important topics.

Barbara Hanrahan was an artist, printmaker and writer. She was born in Adelaide in 1939 and lived there until her death in December 1991. Hanrahan spent three years at the South Australian School of Art before leaving for London in 1966 to continue her art studies. In England she taught at the Falmouth College of Art, Cornwall, (1966-67) and Portsmouth College of Art (1967-70). From 1964 Hanrahan held a number of exhibitions principally in Adelaide and Sydney, but also in Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, London and Florence. Hanrahan’s novels include The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973), The Peach Groves (1980), The Frangipani Gardens (1988) and Flawless Jade (1989).

Katie Langloh Parker grew up on her father’s property, Marra Station, northern New South Wales. Married at the age of 18, she led an exciting social life in Australian colonial capitals until 1875, when she moved to her husband’s property, Bangate Station, near Angledool, New South Wales. There, she started collecting stories and vocabularies from the local branch of Yularoi people, which she subsequently published in several collections between 1896 and 1930. In 1905, she published her only purely ethnographic work The Euahlayi Tribe, an account of her life at Bangate. Her second marriage to Percy Randolph Stow marked the end of her outback life.

Margaret Edith Atkins grew up at Kensington Park where she attended kindergarten and small private schools despite the cerebral palsy and received regular physiotherapy and speech pathology. After leaving school she enrolled in a playgroup course at the Kindergarten Training College and commenced voluntary work in kindergartens. She later worked as an equipment maker for the Kindergarten Union and designed and made toys. Atkins decided to return to study social work at university but was initially refused entry to the course at Adelaide University. She completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours majoring in psychology. Atkins gained a full-time teaching position with the Education Department as a teacher of intellectually handicapped children and was also supervised by the Department’s psychologist to allow her to gain membership of the Australian Psychological Society. She was employed at the Woodville Special School where she developed innovative teaching methods and designed equipment. During her career Atkins held positions as Deputy Head at Strathmont Centre for Intellectually Retarded Children, Head of Barton Terrace and Kings Park special schools, and then in 1975 the Ashford Special School. She retired on the grounds of invalidity in 1977 and become a resident at the Julia Farr Centre. Here she was funded by the Centre to undertake research into leisure activities for the residents and was able to travel overseas. After her health improved Atkins felt that she needed to return to a more home-like environment and was able to move to an aged care facility. She then became very active in community activities and events, WEA and University of the Third Age. Margaret Atkins was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for her service to education in special education on 26 January 1982.