The Australian Women's Register

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Lea Stevens was elected as the Member for Elizabeth in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia at a by-election, which was held on 9 April 1994. The name of the seat was changed to Little Para in March 2006 after a redistribution. She held the portfolio of Minister for Health from 2002-05. She was re-elected in 2006.

Robyn Geraghty was elected as the Member for Torrens at a by-election for the seat in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia in May 1994. She was re-elected at the elections of 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2010. She holds the position of Government Whip.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Frances Bedford was elected to the seat of Florey in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia at the election, which was held on 11 October 1997. She was re-elected in 2002, 2006 and 2010.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Lyn Breuer was elected as the Member for Giles in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia at the election, which was held on 11 October 1997. She was re-elected in 2002, 2006 and 2010.

A member of the Australian Labor Party and former Mayor of Norwood, Vini Ciccarello was elected as the Member for Norwood in the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia at the election, which was held on 11 October 1997. She was re-elected in 2002 and 2006, but suffered defeat at the 2010 election.

Nydia Edes was the first female Alderman on the Broken Hill City Council and a recipient of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal who worked tirelessly throughout her life for the improvement of women’s conditions.

Internationally acclaimed soprano opera singer June Bronhill chose her stage name in recognition of her birthplace, Broken Hill.

Katie Maxwell arrived in Broken Hill, New South Wales, in 1961. She is the owner of a small business, Irene’s South Drapery, and was named Broken Hill Businesswoman of the Year in 2003. Katie is an active member of the Australian Red Cross and the Broken Hill Migrant Heritage Committee.

Barbara De Franceschi was awarded the OAM for services to the Broken Hill migrant community. She has two published poetry anthologies.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Barbara Wiese was elected to the Legislative Council of the Parliament of South Australia in 1979. She was the first female to hold ministerial office for her party. In August 1985 she became Minister of Tourism and Local Government. After the December 1985 election she retained the Tourism portfolio combined with Youth Affairs and Minister assisting the Minister of the Arts.

A member of the Australian Democrats, Heather Southcott was the first female member of that party to be elected to the South Australian Parliament. She was elected as Member for the district of Mitcham in the House of Assembly at the by-election, which was held in early 1982. Unfortunately she was defeated later in the year at the general election, which was held in November.

Heather Southcott passed away in November, 2014. For more information about her important life, please see her entry in The Encyclopedia Women and Leadership in Twentieth Century Australia that is linked to this page.

A member of the Australian Labor Party, Carolyn Pickles was elected to the Legislative Council of the Parliament of South Australia at the election, which was held on 7 December 1985. She was Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council in 2001, but was not a candidate in the election, which was held in 2002.

Mary Coutts Michie was the wife of George McCulloch, who masterminded the syndicate behind the BHP Company in Broken Hill, New South Wales.

The Militant Women’s Movement was the preferred name of the Central Women’s department of the Communist Party of Australia. It’s official publication was the newsletter/journal The Working Woman. was first published in 1928.

The Movement’s activities included: organising women’s conferences in Sydney and Melbourne; organising demonstrations and disrupting public meetings convened by bourgeois women’s organisations; activity in the Women’s Unemployed Worker’s Movement and the Militant Minority Movement and running candidates for municipal and State elections. They organised the first Australian International Women’s Day rally in Sydney on March 25, 1928.

Membership included such women as Jean Thompson, Joy Higgins, Edna Ryan, Hetty Weitzel (Ross), Mary Lamm (Wright), Edna Cavanagh and Alice McConville.

Mary Wright was a labour activist and feminist with a long history of militantly supporting the rights of Australian women and workers. She was a founding member in the 1920s of the Militant Women’s Movement – the central women’s department of the Communist Party of Australia. Her husband, Tom, was an important figure in Australian labour history.

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.’

A member of the Liberal and Country League, Jessie Cooper was the first woman to be elected to the Parliament of South Australia in the Legislative Council in 1959 and served until her retirement in 1979.

Margarethe Von Puttkamer was the first nurse at Broken Hill, New South Wales.

Phyllis Gibb was the first teacher at the School of the Air in Broken Hill, New South Wales.

Tess Alfonsi was the first woman miner in Broken Hill, New South Wales.

Pat Reville was Electorate Secretary in Broken Hill for the former New South Wales State Member of Parliament, Bill Beckrodge, and later served as secretary for the Mayor of Broken Hill.

Nesta Griffiths wrote Point Piper: Past and Present in 1947, followed by Some Houses and People of New South Wales in 1949 and Some Southern Homes of New South Wales in 1952. The stories of various well established families recounted in each publication were partly informed by society gossip, and partly by research conducted by Griffiths in Sydney’s Mitchell Library.

Irene Read was active in many women’s associations and charities in the first half of the twentieth century. During World War 2 she was very active in the Women’s Australian National Services, an organisation she helped to found of which she was Executive Chairwoman from 1942 until the demise of the organization in 1948.

Inaugurated on October 10th, 1957, the Canberra Women’s Bowling Club was the first all women’s bowling club in Canberra. Prior to its formation, only the wives or sisters of Canberra City Bowling Club members could play the sport, so one aim of the women’s club was to open it to more participants.

Located on Wentworth Avenue, in the Canberra suburb of Kingston, the first green was installed in 1958 and the second in 1969. The clubhouse was officially opened on 25th February 1961. Until the opening of the Kingston green and clubhouse, members played on the Parliament House green, at the Canberra Bowling Club and on the private green at the Victoria Hotel in Queanbeyan.

The Canberra Women’s Bowling Club’s closure in 1992 was occasioned by dwindling membership and inflation. Membership peaked during the 1960s at about 136 and later dropped to 46.

The ANU Women’s History Group operated from 1982 to 1987. The Group held regular meetings and talks on various aspects of Women’s History. It also sent out monthly newsletters which kept members in touch with other activities, for instance, the Feminism Year at the Humanities Research Centre of the ANU in 1986.

Marion Piddington was a significant figure in early twentieth century eugenic debate in Australia. She took an interest in a wide range of sexual and reproductive concerns, and in the growth of sex education and contraceptive information, and was involved in the establishment of Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales in 1926. After falling out with that organisation, she formed a rival organization, the Institute of Family Relations, in 1931.

Profoundly influenced by the work of Marie Stopes, she argued for a lifting of the stigma from unmarried motherhood in her 1923 pamphlet The Unmarried Mother and Her Child. In the early 1920s she was involved in the Workers’ Educational Association eugenics circle, and delivered sex education lectures encouraging parents to be frank with their children on matters sexual. She believed in the right of women to sexual fulfilment in the context of marriage.

Piddignton belonged to that branch of eugenic thought which came to support birth control, as a means of controlling human reproduction and thus achieving human betterment. She wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s for Smith’s Weekly and such journals as Herself and Health and Physical Culture on sex education and sexual morality, as well as on the need to sterilize the mentally deficient, a classic eugenist concern.

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.