The Australian Women's Register

Marie Coleman was the first woman to head a Commonwealth Government statutory agency, and the first woman to hold the powers of Permanent Head under the Public Service Act. She was founding Secretary of the National Foundation for Australian Women, one of the NFAW Board of Directors who worked to establish the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP), and remains active in community organisations and public life in her retirement. She was awarded the Public Service Medal in 1989 for contributions to public administration. In 2001 she was awarded the Centenary Medal. In 2011 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia.

Ruth Medd has served on the Board of Directors for the National Foundation for Australian Women since 1997. Her ongoing interest in the advancement of women is focused on increasing women’s representation on Boards of Management and educating women about investment. She has been a senior manager in the telecommunications field.

Emily Creaghe was the only woman member of Ernest Favenc’s exploring party across Northern Australia in 1883.

Harriet Scott was educated by her father, A.W. Scott, and acquired a considerable knowledge of Australian plants, animals and insects. Her paintings earned high praise from the Entomological Society and she was elected, like her sister Helena, as an honorary member.

Georgiana Molloy emigrated to Western Australia from England in 1830 and settled in Augusta. She collected and despatched seeds of local native plants to J. Mangles FRS who passed them to collectors in the UK. She was known for her detailed botanical descriptions.

Caroline Atkinson was home-educated in New South Wales, a keen student of natural history and an accomplished botanical illustrator. She was also a populariser of science and published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Horticultural Magazine.

In February 1890, Dr Constance Stone became the first woman to be registered with the Medical Board of Victoria, paving the way for medical women in Melbourne, Australia, Working mainly with women and children in free clinics, she gave low-income women the opportunity to be treated in private, free from the embarrassment of examination in front of male medical students. She founded the Victorian Medical Women’s Society and was a member of a number of women’s organisations, including the Victorian Women’s Franchise League. Her major achievement was the foundation of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital.

A self-taught anthropologist, Daisy Bates conducted fieldwork amongst several Indigenous nations in western and southern Australia. She supported herself largely by writing articles for urban newspapers on such topics as ‘native cannibalism’ and the ‘doomed’ fate of Indigenous peoples. Bates also published her work on Indigenous kinship systems, marriage laws, language and religion in books and articles. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Aboriginal welfare work in 1934.

Bates’ birth year was changed from 1863 to 1859 on 16 January 2018 after consulting the references in Bob Reece’s work Daisy Bates: Grand dame of the desert and Susanna De Vries’ book Desert Queen: The many lives and loves of Daisy Bates.

Ida Lee (later Marriott) approached geography historically, and reconstructed the exploration of Australia by the British through the study of logbooks, journals and lost charts found in British repositories, notably the Admiralty.

Jane Fletcher published a number of books on nature and nature study, and broadcast on 7ZL Hobart and 3LO Melbourne. In 1934 she became the first woman to lecture to the Royal Society of Tasmania. She was an outstanding bird observer with a particular interest in crakes and rails.

Teacher, kindergarten activist, and philanthropist, Ada Mary a’Beckett was born in Adelaide in 1872. Throughout her career she worked as a demonstrator and lecturer in biology at the University of Melbourne as well as teaching at various schools throughout Victoria. She was very closely involved in the kindergarten movement, helping to establish the Kindergarten Training College in Kew. Ada was appointed as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 3 June 1935, and had a kindergarten named after her the following year. She died in 1948 in Melbourne.

Elizabeth Kenny developed a new treatment for infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis). Guided by Dr Aeneas McDonnell of Toowoomba, she developed a thorough knowledge of human musculature. [1]

Although Kenny never completed any nursing training or registered as a nurse, she opened a hospital at Clifton, near Toowoomba, in 1913. In 1915 she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) and completed 12 round sea voyages between England and Australia with the returning wounded. During this time she earned her promotion to Sister, a title she used all her life. [2]

During the 1930s she established clinics in Brisbane with the backing of the State government, but with opposition from the medical profession. In 1940 she moved to the United States of America where her methods were widely acclaimed and gradually accepted world wide. Kenny returned to Queensland in 1951 and died in Toowoomba on 30 November 1952.

[1] 200 Australian Women p. 124
[2] ibid

Amy Rivett was a medical practitioner who specialised in gynaecology. She was a disciple of Marie Stopes and advocated birth control. During WWI she worked in several hospitals in Brisbane. After the war she moved into private practice, first on her own and then, from 1946, with her brother Edward in Sydney. She was a founding member of the Queensland Medical Women’s Society.

Mary Rivett was trained as a psychologist and lectured briefly at the University of Sydney. With her sister Elsie she formed the free Children’s Library and Crafts Club in 1922. In 1934 they formed the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement which after their death became the Creative Leisure Movement.

Jean Macnamara, born in 1899 at Beechworth, Victoria, and a graduate of the University of Melbourne, was a physician at the Children’s Hospital Melbourne in 1922 and 1923, a consultant and medical officer to the Poliomyelitis Committee of Victoria 1925-1931, and medical officer, Yooralla Hospital School for Crippled Children 1928-1951. During 1931-1933 she held the Rockefeller Foundation travelling scholarship, furthering her studies on poliomyelitis. While in America she learnt about the virus myxomatosis and it was largely due to her efforts that the Australian Government held field trials testing the virus as a means to eradicating Australia’s rabbit problem. She was on the part-time staff of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research 1933-1937. As Mrs Annie Jean Connor (she married Dr Ivan Connor in 1934), she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to the welfare of children in 1935, and was known as Dame Jean Macnamara.

Dorothy Hill was the first female Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1956); the first Australian woman elected to the Royal Society (1965); the first female President of the Australian Academy of Science (1970); and the first woman in an Australian university to be president of her university’s professorial board (1971-1972).

Clarke, a scientist with the Plant Cell Biology Research Centre at the University of Melbourne from 1982, received a Personal Chair in Botany at the University of Melbourne in 1985 and became Lieutenant Governor of Victoria in 1997.

Clarke was the first female Chairperson of the CSIRO, a position which she held from 1991 until 1996.

Suzanne Cory (AC FAA FRS) is an Australian molecular biologist of international renown. She has worked on the genetics of the immune system and cancer and has lobbied her country to invest in science.

She was Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research between 1996 and 2009, after spending eight years as Joint Head of the Molecular Biology Unit with her husband, Jerry Adams, before her appointment as Director.

In 1998 she received the Australia Prize, in 2001 the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, followed by the Royal medal in 2002 and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize in 2009. She was the first elected female President of the Australian Academy of Science and took office on 7 May 2010 for a four-year term. In 2011 the Suzanne Cory High School, a public high school that caters to 800 students from years 9-12, opened in Cory’s honour in 2011.

Dame Margaret Guilfoyle was the first woman to be appointed to federal Cabinet with portfolio, when, in 1975 she became Education and then Social Security Minister in the Fraser Liberal Government. In 1980 she became the first woman to hold an economic portfolio when she became Minister for Finance. On 31 December 1979 Margaret Guilfoyle was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (Dames Commander) for her services to public and parliamentary service. She left parliament in 1987.

Hanna Neumann was Professor and Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics, School of General Studies, Australian National University from 1964-71. Previously she worked as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Hull and University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1946-63.

Neumann became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1969.

Margaret Farmer was a social worker and psychotherapist. She was a foundation member of a group of child care centres established in the 1970s in Caulfield, Victoria. She was a volunteer visitor for 17 years of the Anti-Cancer Council Breast Cancer Support Service.

Elizabeth Tindle was president of the Australian Women’s Weight Lifting Association, Adelaide 1964. She was a researcher at the UNESCO Charles Darwin Research Station, Galapagos Islands Ecuador, where she studied flamingos and flightless cormorants in 1976. She completed her doctoral thesis on Foetal Alcohol Syndrome and effects, and alcohol-related disabilities.

Helen O’Connell was the first Australian woman to complete urology training. Her work on female genital anatomy, published in 1998, was pathbreaking. In particular, her research on the anatomy of the clitoris drew worldwide attention.

Alice Henry was a feminist journalist and union activist who became a prominent and respected figure in the American women’s and trade union movements in the early twentieth century.

Julie has had a long involvement with Zonta, a worldwide organization of executives in business and the professions working together to advance the status of women. She is currently President of the Zonta Sydney Breakfast Club, Director of the National Foundation for Australian Women and Founder, Alumni Association of Social Ecologists.

Diana Graham was a member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) Rape Law Reform Action Group from 1976, and co-convenor of the WEL Family Law Action Group from 1977.

Jennie Scott Griffiths was a champion of women’s rights and a campaigner in many labour and socialist groups in Australia, Fiji and the United States. She served with Kate Dwyer on the Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee and with Vida Goldstein in the Women’s Peace Army, and also belonged to the Social Democratic League and the Feminist Club.

Jennie contributed to and edited a number of papers and magazines in Australia and the Pacific, including the Australian Woman’s Weekly (editor, 1913-1916), from which she was sacked in 1916 for opposing conscription. Jennie even replaced Dame Mary Gilmore sometimes, as editor of the women’s page of the Australian Worker.