The Australian Women's Register

Based in Canberra from 1911 to 1916 while her husband was an instructor at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, Nina Macartney was a committee member of the Federal Territory War Fund from August 1914.

Marie Florence Whitlock enlisted in 1917 for service overseas in the Australian Army Nursing Service in World War I. She spent the next two years nursing casualties in Egypt. In 1916 she had spent a short time nursing at Duntroon Military College, Canberra.

Ruth Allardyce Steel enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1917 for service in World War I and was sent with a group of Australian nurses to Salonika. She became ill almost immediately with malaria and in 1918 returned to Australia. She had trained at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Sydney and was a nursing sister there both before and after her enlistment in the military.

In November 1915 Tommy Cunningham sailed with her mother to Cairo to be near her fiancé, Major Charles ‘Stewart’ Davies (1880-1946), who sailed for Cairo on 10 November 1915 on the HMAT Ascanius with the 8th Infantry Brigade. After her marriage in Cairo and her husband’s deployment to the Western Front in France Tommy visited wounded soldiers in military hospitals and learned to drive an ambulance.

In 1915 Mary Paule Cunningham travelled to England where she trained with the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and thereafter worked in military hospitals in southern England.

Susan Hollingsworth was a widow with three of her eleven children and six grandchildren living at home in Hall, a small village in the north of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT – now the ACT) when World War One broke out. When two of her sons-in-law enlisted with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) she offered safe haven to her daughters and their children who moved back to Hall. Her son Clyde died in France in 1917 aged 23 years. Susan was well-known as a supporter of the Red Cross in their fundraising ventures.

Hilda McIntosh was the Canberra postmistress throughout World War I, managing the flow of mail to and from the battlefronts.

Jane Miller lived in Canberra from 1913 after her husband Colonel David Miller was appointed the first administrator of the Federal Capital Territory (as the ACT was called until 1938) in 1912. Early in World War I, she founded and became President of the Federal Territory War Food Fund. She also organised collections of clothes for Belgian babies and oversaw the organisation of many fundraising concerts. Her son, Selwyn Miller, served with the British Army in Palestine from 1917, returning to Australia in 1919.

Catherine ‘Katie’ Sheaffe represented the Tharwa community on the Federal Capital Territory War Food Fund committee during World War I.

The Honourable Justice Annabelle Bennett AO was appointed a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia in 2003. She is also an additional judge of the Supreme Court of the ACT. Prior to joining the bench of the Federal Court, she was a barrister and then Senior Counsel specialising in intellectual property law. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2005. In July 2011 her Honour was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of the University by the ANU.

Justice Bennett completed her BSc (Hons) and PhD in Biochemistry (the latter in the Faculty of Vet Science) at Sydney University and later obtained her law degree at the University of New South Wales. Her interest in biological sciences has led to membership of the Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee, the Biotechnology Task Force, the Pharmacy Board of New South Wales and the Eastern Sydney Area Health Service. She is a member of several other boards and tribunals.

The Victorian Ombudsman, Deborah Glass, left Monash University Law School in the early 1980s, never imagining that thirty years later she would be honoured with an OBE for her services to law and order. A law graduate who hasn’t practised since 1984, with the benefit of hindsight she nevertheless saw the legal training she received as a valuable foundation for supporting the various twists and turns her career has taken over the last thirty years.

After graduating in 1982, Deborah Glass began her professional career as a lawyer based in Melbourne, but relocated to Switzerland to work for Citicorp, a US Investment Bank. She then transferred into the financial regulation sector, pursuing a career with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. Returning to Europe, she was appointed Chief Executive of the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation in 1998. Under her stewardship it was successfully subsumed into the London based Financial Services Authority. She also worked as an Independent custody visitor, someone who visits people who are detained in police stations in the United Kingdom to ensure that they are being treated properly, between 1999 and 2005.

Between 2001 and 2004 she was a member of the Police Complaints Authority, and it was from here that she was appointed to the Independent Police Complaints Commission in London. At the IPCC she was responsible, among other things, for many high profile criminal and misconduct investigations and decisions involving the police. These included decisions in relation to the police response to the phone-hacking affair and the decision to launch an independent investigation into the aftermath of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster.

She was awarded an OBE for services to the IPCC in 2012. She left the IPCC in March 2014, having completed a ten year term with the organization and returned to Melbourne to take up the position of Victorian Ombudsman. She is the first woman to ever hold the position

Go to ‘Details’ below to read a reflective essay written by Deborah Glass for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project.

Read more about Myra Willard in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Margy Windeyer in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Philippa Jane Walsh in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Elizabeth Webby in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Jenny Catherine Weber in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.q

Paulette, Phyllis and Isobel were the eldest of seven children of John Michael McDonagh, the surgeon to J.C. Williamson’s theatrical companies, and his wife Annie.

These three remarkable sisters made history by becoming the first Australian women to own and run a film production company.

Read more about the McDonagh Sisters in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Barbara Elizabeth Thiering in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Fiona Juliet Stanley in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Cate Shortland in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Wendy Hope Solling in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Ellen (Ella) Stack in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Ida Standley in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Jill Roe was a distinguished Australian historian and academic who wrote an important biography of the Australian writer Miles Franklin. She published her memoir, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush, about her childhood on the Eyre Peninsula in 2016.

Read more about Jill Roe in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Camille Agnes Becker Paul in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Ros Louise Pesman in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

Read more about Stella Edith Lottie Pines in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.