The Australian Women's Register

Darriea Turley is chair of the National Rural Women’s Coalition and a member of the Premier’s Council for Women. Darriea was the first HIV/AIDS worker in the Broken Hill region. Elected to local government in 1995, she has served on numerous local and state government boards and ran for mayor in Broken Hill in 2004. In 2008, she was nominated for New South Wales Woman of the Year. Darriea currently works as Community Engagement Manager for the Greater Western Area Health Service.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Jeannette McHugh was elected to the House of Representatives in the Australian Parliament as the Member for Phillip, New South Wales in 1983. When the seat of Phillip was abolished, she was elected to the seat of Grayndler at the 1993 election. She retired at the 1996 election. During her parliamentary career she held the Ministerial portfolio of Consumer Affairs from 1992 to 1996.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Carolyn Jakobsen was elected to the seat of Cowan, Western Australia in the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament in 1984. She held the seat until she was defeated at the 1993 election. In 1990 she was elected chair of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (caucus), the first woman to occupy this position.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Mary Crawford was elected to the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament as the Member for Forde, Queensland, at the 1987 federal election. In 1994 she was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Regional Development in the Keating Government and held that position until her defeat at the 1996 election.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Annette Ellis was elected to the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Australia as the Member for Namadji, Australian Capital Territory, in 1996. Following an electoral redistribution in 1997, she stood as a candidate for the seat of Canberra, Australian Capital Territory at the 1998 election and was successful. She was re-elected in 2001, 2004 and 2007. She did not recontest her seat at the 2010 election. Before her entry into the Federal Parliament she was a member of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly from 1992 until her defeat in 1995.

A member of the National Party, Flo Bjelke-Petersen was elected Senator for Queensland in the Senate of the Australian Parliament in 1980. She held the position of Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate from 1985 until 1990 and retired from parliament in 1993. She was married to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who served as Premier of Queensland from 1968-87.

A member of the Liberal Party of Australia, Susan Knowles was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia as a Senator for Western Australia in 1984. In 1987 she was elected Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate, a position she retained until 1993. She remained in Parliament until 30 June 2005, having served for more than twenty years.

A member of the Australian Democrats, Jean Jenkins was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia in 1987 as a representative for Western Australia. She served as Deputy Leader of the Australian Democrats from April 1990 until her defeat at the July 1990 general election.

On the September 5, 2008, Quentin Bryce assumed the office of Governor-General of Australia, the twenty-fifth person to hold the office, but the first and only woman.

The appointment was the latest in a long line of ‘firsts’ for Bryce. A graduate from the University of Queensland with degrees in arts and law, she was one of the first Queensland women to be admitted to the Queensland Bar. In 1968 she became the first woman to be a faculty member of the Law school where she had studied. In 1984 she was appointed inaugural Director of the Queensland Women’s Information Service, Office of the Status of Women, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In the period 1993 to 1996, she was founding Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the National Childcare Accreditation Council. In 2003, she became the second woman to be appointed to the position of Governor of Queensland. She has also served as Queensland director of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In 1989 she became the Sex Discrimination Commissioner on the commission. And she was one of the first women to serve on the National Women’s Advisory Council, established by the commonwealth government in 1978.

From country stock, raised in a series of small towns scattered around central-west Queensland, Bryce was home schooled by her mother before being packed off to board at Brisbane’s Moreton Bay College, attending the University of Queensland subsequently. At university she reacquainted herself with an architecture student, Michael Bryce, whom she had first met as a nine-year- old. They started dating and married in 1964. They now have two daughters, three sons and five grandchildren.

Of his decision to recommend Quentin Bryce to the role of Governor-General, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 said:

It’s obvious that we needed to have a governor-general for Australia who captures the spirit of modern Australia, and the spirit of modern Australia is many things. Giving proper voice to people from the bush and the regions, giving proper voice to the rights of women, giving proper voice to the proper place of women in modern Australia and proper place to someone committed to the lives of, improving the lives for Indigenous Australians. These are all considerations in shaping my recommendation to her Majesty the Queen.

Of her own appointment as Governor-General, Quentin Bryce has remarked:

I grew up in a little bush town in Queensland of 200 people and what this day says to Australian women and to Australian girls is that you can do anything, you can be anything, and it makes my heart sing to see women in so many diverse roles across our country and Australia.

Linda Lavarch was the first female lawyer elected to the Parliament of Queensland, Australia. In July 2005 she was appointed Minister for Justice and Attorney-General – the first woman to be Attorney-General in Queensland. As Attorney-General she oversaw the introduction of permanent drug courts in Queensland and the creation of the offence of identity theft. Retiring from state politics in 2009, Lavarch became involved in medical research and the not-for-profit sector, chairing the Not-For-Profit Sector Reform Council. Lavarch stood as the Labor candidate for the Queensland seat of Dickson in the 2016 Australian federal election.

Linda Lavarch was interviewed by Kim Rubenstein for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Oral History Project. For details of the interview see the National Library of Australia CATALOGUE RECORD.

Although a nursing service commenced in Oodnadatta in 1907, a hospital wasn’t opened there until 1911. It came under the gamete of Australian Inland Mission activities and was the organisation’s first bush hospital. The first nursing sisters to serve there were also both Deaconesses trained at the Presbyterian training institute in Melbourne

Only five foot tall and seven stone (45 kg) wringing wet, ‘Little Sister’ Mary Ann ‘Latto’ Bett arrived in Oodnadatta in March of 1910. Her arrival was keenly awaited by the local doctor, who had a number of sick men in outback communities to attend to. Known as ‘The little angel of the north’, she worked there for four years, as a nurse, preacher, teacher and Sunday School mistress. Perhaps her greatest attribute was her ability to relate with ease to the rough and ready people she encountered in the outback.

She left Oodnadatta to serve as an Army nurse in the Great War. She was discharged from the service in 1918 upon marriage to Lieutenant William Paul Boland in London. They returned to Australia to settle in Seymour and later lived in Melbourne. She died in Ulverstone, Tasmania in 1968.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Carryn Sullivan was elected to the Parliament of Queensland as Member for Pumicestone in 2001. She was re-elected in 2004, 2006 and 2009. Before her entry into the state parliament, she served as a councillor for the Shire of Caboolture from 1991-94.

Vanessa Goodwin is the Tasmanian Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Minister for Corrections, Minister for the Arts and Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council. She was elected to the Legislative Council as the Member for Pembroke in August 2009 and was the Shadow Attorney General and Shadow Minister for Corrections from September 2009 until the State Election in March 2014, after which she was appointed to her current roles.

Elizabeth Macquarie, the wife of New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, was an active supporter of her husband’s plan to transform the penal settlement at Sydney into a thriving settler colony. She is said to have taken a an interest in the welfare of women convicts and the local Aboriginal people. Her significant role in the establishment of the colony is memorialised in many landmarks in and around Sydney, New South Wales, including Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, Campbelltown and the various Elizabeth Streets that pepper the map of Sydney.

She and another prominent Elizabeth (Macarthur) the wife of prominent colonial pastoralist John Macarthur, helped to introduce haymaking to New South Wales.

A lawyer by training, Eve Mahlab is a successful businesswoman who has worked to improve the lives of women in Australia. A member of the Co-ordinating committee of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Victoria from 1972-1976, and again after 1980, she was a member of the Victorian Government Committee of Inquiry into the Status of Women from 1975-76. She was an active member of the Liberal Party, having stood for pre-selection unsuccessfully on a number of occasions. She was named Businesswoman of the Year in 1982 and in 1998 was awarded an Order of Australia in the Officer category for ‘service to government, business and the community, particularly to women’. In 2001 she was awarded a Centenary Medal ‘for service to the community through business and commerce’.

Eve Mahlab was interviewed by Kim Rubenstein for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Oral History Project. For details of the interview see the National Library of Australia CATALOGUE RECORD.

Jamie Tarabay is an Australian born journalist who has spent most of her professional life reporting on matters in the middle east. Since September 2000 she has worked as a foreign correspondent for Associated Press (AP) and American National Public Radio (NPR), covering wars in Palestine and Iraq. She is one of very few western women who have made a career as a war reporter. In January 2007, Tarabay was part of the NPR News team that won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq.

Lebanese by heritage, Tarabay grew up in Sydney, Berlin and Beirut. She has a BA in Government and French from the University of Sydney and can speak Arabic and French.

In 1845, Ursula Frayne, along with five other Sisters of Mercy and one postulant, sailed for Western Australia with the goal, among other things, of establishing the first Mercy school in Australia. This they did on 2 February, 1846, with planks, bricks and packing cases as furniture. Instead of the 4,000 children they were promised when they left Ireland, only one child turned up for school on the day it opened. By August, however, enrolments stood at 100.

In 1849 she opened the first secondary school in Western Australia, a ‘select’ fee-paying school catering for an almost exclusively non-Catholic clientele. Its success determined the pattern of future Mercy expansion, which was to establish, almost simultaneously and often within the same building, three separate schools: a ‘select’ fee-paying school, a primary school and an infants’ school. By 1856 the schools of the Sisters of Mercy in Western Australia were flourishing.

Her reputation as an educator spread to other colonies and in 1857 she accepted an invitation from Bishop James Gould to found a school in Victoria. There she established the Sisters of Mercy as the first teaching nuns in Victoria. She oversaw the development of a boarding and day school for girls, together with two primary schools and a domestic training school for orphans. She founded the St Vincent de Paul’s Orphanage at South Melbourne and managed it until the Christian Brothers took over the boys’ section, leaving the girls under the care of her Sisters. She established a country foundation at Kilmore in 1875.

In 1994 Muriel Dick was 73 years old and running a farm in Southern Victoria. Her husband had died some fourteen years earlier and she was managing things herself.

Elizabeth Bleazby served as a local government councillor for Brighton from 1929-1946. Daughter of a former Brighton councillor and premier of Victoria, Sir Thomas Bent, she was imbued with politics from an early age. She stood for election to the local council three times before she succeeded.

Lily Addison competed in the All England Tennis Championships at Wimbledon in 1919. She served with the Australian Army Nursing Service 1917-19 in Greece and England.

Lillian Lever was nominated for the ABC Rural Woman of the Year Award in 1995, for the Queensland district of Capricornia. She and her husband, John, established the first privately run crocodile farm in Australia, in Rockhampton, in 1980. Given that, at the time, Lillian was a C.S.I.R.O. librarian, one might say that it was an interesting career move for her! But John had become fascinated by crocodiles in Papua New Guinea when he ran wildlife research stations there in the 1970s. He offered Lillian what she describes as a package deal; marriage and the chance to move from Melbourne to start a new business in Rockhampton. Koorana Crocodile farm opened in November 1981 stocked with captured crocodiles from the wild that were proving to be a danger to people.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Gai Brodtmann was elected to the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament as the Member for Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, at the 2010 federal election, and served in that role until 2019.

Kate Howarde, born Catherine Clarissa Jones in England and migrating to New Zealand as a child, was the first woman to direct a feature film in Australia.

She married the musician William Henry de Saxe in April 1884 and their only child, Florence Adrienne, was born not long after on 5 December 1884. William Henry de Saxe left soon after Florence was born and died c.1899.

Catherine de Saxe adopted the stage name Kate Howarde in the 1890s. By the late 1890s, her theatre production company, the Kate Howarde Company was based in Australia and was reported to be extensively touring through New Zealand and all Australian States. In addition to managing the tours, Howarde controlled all finances, wrote and directed many of the performances, songs and pantomimes and performed herself.

Her biggest success was the comedy Possum Paddock (1919). Written, produced and presented by Howarde, the play told the story of the financial and romantic problems of a bush family. The success of the play convinced Howarde to turn the play into a film which she starred in, produced, co-scripted and co-directed with Charles Villiers. This made her the first woman in Australia to direct a feature film. Australian censors removed a scene from the film in which an unmarried mother imagines drowning her baby. The film was released in Sydney on 29 January 1921 and was well received throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Jocelyn Moorhouse has worked in both the Australian television and film industry. After the success of her debut feature film, Proof (1991), Moorhouse produced and directed big budget Hollywood films.

Moorhouse was born in September 1960, in Victoria, Australia. After she completed her Higher School Certificate at Vermont High School in 1978, Moorhouse enrolled in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS).

In 1983, while studying, Moorhouse wrote and directed her first short film, Pavane. She graduated from AFTRS in 1984 and began work as a television script editor.

Moorhouse worked on such television shows as The Flying Doctors (1990-1991),Out of the Blue (1991), A Place to Call Home (1990), The Humpty Dumpty Man (1986).

Her short film The Siege of Barton’s Bathroom (1986) was developed into a book and a twelve part television series.

In 1991, she released her feature film debut Proof. Moorhouse wrote and directed the film which was funded entirely by Government sources. Proof is now recognised as a key contemporary Australian film.

In 1994, she produced the Australian classic,Muriel’s Wedding, directed by her husband, P.J. Hogan.

Her next two films were big budget Hollywood productions. Both films received mixed reviews and did not achieve the acclaim ofProof. In 1995, Moorhouse directed How to Make an American Quilt. The film focused upon a group of woman who share their stories and family histories through flashback while sewing a wedding quilt. In 1997, Moorhouse directed A Thousand Acres, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jane Smiley. Based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, the film explored the relationship between a father and his three daughters in the face of tragedy.

In 2002, Moorhouse wrote and Produced Unconditional Love (P.J. Hogan). In 2003, she was executive producer of Peter Pan (P.J. Hogan).

Mona Donaldson is an important figure in early Australian film production and worked as film editor on numerous quintessentially Australian films.

In February 1915, at the age of 15, Mona Donaldson began work for Australasian Films in Sydney as a film examiner. In 1917, she moved to Paramount and worked first as a film examiner and then a booking clerk. In 1921, Donaldson left work to take care of her mother. Once she could return to work, her previous work experience again allowed her a job with Australasian Films.

Donaldson soon became known for her competence and perfectionism. This was said to have led to a reputation of being formal and distant.

Many of Donaldson’s early editing is uncredited. In an interview with Andree Wright and Stuart Young in the 1980s, Donaldson described cutting for Whyte’s Painted Daughters (1925), Webb’s Tall Timber (1926) and The Grey Glove (1928) and Longford’s Hills of Hate (1926) and The Pioneers (1926).

Donaldson’s first clear onscreen recognition for editing was in For the Term of His Natural Life (Dawn, 1927). The silent film was based on a novel by Marcus Clarke of the same name and tells the story of an English aristocrat who is transported for life as a convict to Van Dieman’s Land for a crime he did not commit.

Donaldson again worked with director Norman Dawn on his film The Adorable Outcast (1927). The film was based on the romantic adventure novel, Conn of the Coral Seas by Beatrice Grimshaw.

In 1928, Lacey Percival, a colleague from Australasian Films, left and started Automatic Films. He invited Donaldson to join him. Donaldson used this job offer to attempt to get a pay raise from Australasian Films, however they refused and she began work for Automatic Films.

While working at Automatic Films, Donaldson was ‘loaned out’ to work on other feature films. She re-edited Chauvel’s Heritage (1935), which then won the Australian Film Award in 1935. She worked again with Chauvel on Uncivilised (1936). Donaldson also co-edited Badger’s Rangle River (1936). In 1937, Donaldson edited Chauvel’s documentary about how screen tests were conducted, Screen Test.

In 1946, after working for Automatic Films for eighteen years, Donaldson fell ill and was hospitalised for seven months. During this time, Donaldson was denied sick leave and she was fired. Both Cinesound and Commonwealth Film Laboratories offered her employment, however she decided to leave the film industry completely.

Upon retirement from the Australian film industry, Donaldson bought a shop in Chatswood and became a successful milliner.

Romaine Rutnam was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1947. She immigrated to Australia in 1969, where she has made a significant contribution to Australian public and community life.

Romaine Rutnam enjoyed a career in the public service that extended across three decades and three states and territories, in Sydney, Canberra, Wollongong and Melbourne. She has also been active in the trade union movement on behalf of her public sector colleagues. She contributed to the formation of the Wollongong Workers’ Research Centre.

Since establishing a small charitable foundation, The Romaine Rutnam Serendipity Endowment within The Perpetual Foundation Endowment Fund, in 2002, Romaine has been able to assist a variety of organisations. These include Australia21, the Community Environment Network, National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Association (NAISDA)and, most recently, the International Women’s Development Agency and the Central Coast Conservatorium – the latter to establish a scholarship for music tuition for an Aboriginal student.