The Australian Women's Register

Lynnette Schiftan was the ninth woman to sign the Victorian Bar Roll (1967) and the second Victorian woman to take silk (1983). In 1985 she was appointed a Judge of the County Court of Victoria – the first woman to be appointed to a Victorian State Court.

A Victorian Bar News article published at the time of Schiftan’s appointment to the bench quoted her reflections on the early days of her legal career:

‘I experienced a great deal of prejudice as a female barrister, from the community generally, from solicitors and from the Bench. However, I suffered no such prejudice from other members of the Bar, who formed a protective barrier around me, which I remember with great affection.’

She was also treated well by the majority of her ‘brother judges’, several of whom ‘were accepting and helpful particularly as it was a Court in which I had never practiced. I had three judges come to me separately unbeknownst to the other two and say, “you haven’t done much crime like this, have you. Okay how about you come at 7:30 in the morning and I’ll help you.” All offered a list of things to consider.’

When Schiftan resigned from the bench in 1988, she was still the only female member of the Victorian State Judiciary. In March 1988 she joined Coles Myer as General Manager Legislative Affairs, a role requiring her to monitor the company’s compliance with relevant legislation and to represent the company in an advocacy role as necessary.

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

Laetisha Scanlan won gold medals at both the Delhi (2010) and Glasgow (2014) Commonwealth Games.

Iola Mathews was one of the ten women who founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in February 1972. She was a journalist at The Age for many years, writing mainly on Education and Women’s Issues. In 1983-4 she helped establish the Action Plan for Women in the Victorian Public Service, and in 1984 was appointed Coordinator of the Action Program for Women Workers at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).

In 1988 Mathews became an ACTU Industrial Officer and Advocate in national test cases to improve wages and conditions for women workers, including the Parental Leave test case. In 1996 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to women’s employment. She has published numerous books and articles and in 2006 established Glenfern writers’ studios in Melbourne.

Barbara Hocking graduated in Arts/Law at Melbourne University in 1962 and quickly demonstrated her life-long commitment to social justice issues, particularly Indigenous land rights. She completed her LL M degree at Monash University in 1970 focusing on this topic. Barbara was admitted to practice in Victoria in November 1975 and in the ACT in December 1975. She signed the Victorian Bar Roll in March 1976 and read with Leonard Ostrowski, later QC and a Judge of the County Court.

In 1982 Barbara Hocking became the first barrister briefed in the Mabo case which would finally right the legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’ and recognise native title in common law. She was a long-standing and active member of the Australian Labor Party and maintained her political commitments until her death. In 1986 Barbara became a Senior Member of the Commonwealth Veterans Review Tribunal and Chairperson of the Medicare Participation Review Committee, and in 2004 she was appointed to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.

Go to ‘Details’ below to read a reflective essay written by Barbara Ann Hocking and Jenny Hocking about their mother for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project.

Carolyn Evans was born in 1970. She grew up in the outer suburb of Greensborough with father Terry, a printer, and mother Tess (then a primary school teacher, in more recent years a novelist) and younger brothers Tim and Julian. She attended St Mary’s Primary School Greensborough and Catholic Ladies’ College Eltham. At secondary school, she was particularly involved in public speaking competitions competing in several national and state level competitions.

She commenced at Melbourne University in 1989 and graduated with an LLB (hons) and BA. While at university, Evans was involved in debating and was Vice-President of the Melbourne University Debating Society. She participated in a wide range of mooting competitions, winning the Australasian Law Students Society Mooting Competition (at which she was also awarded Best Speaker), coming runner up in the International Final of the Jessup Mooting Competition (including winning best speaker in the international final), and winning the Governor-General’s Mooting Competition.

After graduating, Evans commenced Articles at Blake Dawson Waldron (as it then was) in 1994 and was admitted to practice in the following year. She worked across Banking and Finance, Property and Government law as an articled clerk and then solicitor in 1994-95.

Evans was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for Victoria for 1995 and read for a DPhil in Law at Exeter College, Oxford. Her doctoral work on religious freedom was published as ‘Religious Freedom Under the European Convention on Human Rights’ by Oxford University Press in 2001. During her time at Oxford, Evans was appointed to a Stipendiary Lectureship in Law at Exeter College for two years.

In 2000, Evans returned to Australia and took up sessional work at Melbourne Law School where she was later appointed to a Senior Lectureship. She was promoted to Professor at age thirty-eight on the basis of her internationally recognized expertise in human rights law, particularly religious freedom and institutional protections of human rights. She was shortlisted by the United Nations for the position of Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief in 2010. In the same year, Evans was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to allow her to travel as a Visiting Fellow at American and Emory Universities to examine questions of comparative religious freedom.

Evans is the author of ‘Religious Freedom under the European Court of Human Rights’ (OUP 2001) and ‘The Legal Protection of Religious Freedom in Australia’ (Federation Press: 2012). She is co-author of ‘Australian Bills of Rights: The Law of the Victorian Charter and the ACT Human Rights Act’ (LexisNexis 2008). She is co-editor of ‘Religion and International Law’ (1999, Kluwer); ‘Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women’s Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region’ (2006 Martinus Nijhoff) and ‘Law and Religion in Historical and Theoretical Perspective’ (CUP 2008). She is an internationally recognised expert on religious freedom and the relationship between law and religion and has spoken on these topics in the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Greece, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Malaysia, Nepal and Australia.

In 2011, Evans was appointed as the first female Dean of Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this she had held administrative roles including Associate Dean Research and Deputy Director, Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. During her time as Dean, she has overseen the final years of the LLB and the growth of the Juris Doctor program. She led the development of a clinical and experiential set of subjects through the Public Interest Law Initiative and oversaw a major Campaign that raised millions of dollars for the Law School, including a funded chair in Human Rights.

Evans is married to Dr Stephen Donaghue Q.C. and they have two children, Caitlin and Michael Donaghue-Evans.

Genevieve Bolton was born in Bendigo Victoria but spent most of her childhood growing up in Brisbane. After graduating from Mount Saint Michael’s College in Ashgrove, Brisbane she undertook her Bachelor of Law Degree at the Queensland University of Technology graduating in 1994.

She then spent a year in Melbourne undertaking a social justice volunteer placement run by the Jesuits and Sisters of Mercy where she was placed with the then Refugee and Advice Casework Service now Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre (RILC). In that role, she provided legal assistance to onshore asylum seekers and people seeking to sponsor relatives from refugee situations abroad.

She quickly learnt that she wanted to pursue a career in the community legal sector. In 1995, she completed her legal practical training at the Leo Cussen Institute in Melbourne and was admitted as a Solicitor and Barrister in Victoria and obtained her first paid legal job with then the Victorian Immigration Advice and Rights Centre now known as RILC. Genevieve has also been admitted as a Solicitor in Queensland and the ACT and is on the High Court roll.

Genevieve Bolton is currently (2015) the Co-ordinator/Principal Solicitor at Canberra Community Law which provides free legal services to disadvantaged and vulnerable people.

Judy Hogg has had a lifelong concern for the socially disadvantaged leading to her interest in law and political reform, and her involvement in the women’s movement in Victoria where she was a founding Member of the Kew Women’s Liberation Group. She returned to university after having children and was fortunate to graduate from Law School as the Family Law Act came into operation in 1976. As she had written a thesis on this legislation, she was placed in a strong position for entering the work force in that jurisdiction.

After working for several law firms, both large and small, and for Legal Aid, Hogg started her own firm in 1985. She invited her friend Janet Reid to join her and they formed Hogg and Reid (which amalgamated as Carew Counsel incorporating Hogg and Reid in 2013). The prime focus was Family Law which was dealt with in a non-sexist manner. Her philosophy was to ensure that the law was available to redress imbalances of power.

Hogg has always contributed beyond her professional role, and has served in a voluntary capacity on many committees and boards of management, including those of

• Fitzroy Legal Service
• Parents anonymous
• Twin Care
• Domestic Violence Committee, Rotary

Go to ‘Details’ below to read an essay written by Judy Hogg for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project.

Ina Higgins was amongst the first wave of feminists and one of the first professional landscape gardeners in Australia. It is due to her lobbying that women were admitted to the Burnley School of Horticulture in 1899. Later graduates such as Olive Mellor, Edna Walling and Emily Gibson were able to follow her footsteps because she paved the way. Higgins became involved in the garden at the Royal Talbot Epileptic Colony, Clayton (now Monash University), Heronswood at Dromana and she was invited by the New South Wales Murrumbidgee Irrigation Trust to assist on the planting plans of the New South Wales towns Leeton and Griffin, designed by Walter Burley Griffin. One of her most ambitious projects was with her friends Vida Goldstein and Cecilia Anne John in establishing the Rural Women’s Industries Co-operative women’s farm in Mordialloc. In 1891 she signed the Women’s Suffrage Petition and in 1894 became honorary secretary of the United Council for Woman Suffrage. She was a member of the Women’s Political Association and when World War One broke out she became a member of the Women’s Peace Army. In 1934 The Centenary Gift Book celebrated the contribution that pioneer women made to settling Victoria; Higgins contributed an article promoting horticulture as a career for women.

In 1917 Ethel Macfie volunteered for overseas duty with the Australian Army Nursing Service in World War I. She nursed in British hospitals in Salonika until after the end of the war. Before enlisting she had nursed briefly at Canberra Hospital. Ethel Macfie was born in Birmingham, England and migrated to Australia with her family in 1885.

Australian-born Daisy Schoeffel, with her German-born but naturalised British husband and their two British born children, were deported from Fiji to Australia in November 1917 and interned in harsh conditions as enemy aliens first in the Bourke Concentration Camp, New South Wales and then moved to the Molonglo Concentration Camp at Fyshwick in the then Federal Capital Territory (now the Australian Capital Territory). Finally released in May 1919, Daisy wrote to a Western Australian Member of Parliament – Hon. Henry Gregory – expressing her anger and humiliation at the injustice of their treatment, the shame of their status and the depth and breadth of the suffering they experienced in the camps and pleaded against the forced deportation to Germany of her family. This letter provides the basis of this entry with relation to her imprisonment during World War One.

Frances Alice Robinson served in Egypt, France and England and on hospital transports nursing soldiers being repatriated to Australia during her service with the Australian Army Nursing Service in World War I. Before enlisting she had been matron at Jerilderie and Queanbeyan hospitals in NSW and at Duntroon Military Hospital, ACT.

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.

Ida Parnell lived in the Canberra region during 1914-1920 while her husband (then Colonel) John William Parnell was Commandant of the Royal Military College (RMC), Duntroon. She was present at the founding meeting of the Federal Territory War Food Fund in Canberra and was a regular presence at Red Cross fundraising events at Duntroon.

Ariel Couchman is a lawyer and women’s rights activist who works in the not for profit sector. She is (2015) the director of the Young People’s Legal Rights Centre (Youthlaw).

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

Read more about Meriel Antoinette Winchester Wilmot-Wright in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

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

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

Read more about Gertrude Mary Zichy-Woinarski in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

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

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

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

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

Read more about Kathleen Alice Syme in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

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

Read more about Reist Melinda Tankard in our sister publication The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.

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