The Australian Women's Register

Barbara Blackman is an author, music-lover, essayist, librettist, letter writer and patron of the Arts. Former wife of Charles Blackman, she worked for many years as an artist’s model. She has conducted countless interviews for the National Library of Australia’s oral history program. In 2006, Blackman was presented with the Australian Contemporary Music 2006 Award for Patronage.

Mary Swanton was an staunch labour activist who was particularly concerned about the conditions endured by working women. Born in Melbourne, she moved to Perth, Western Australia, in 1889 where she worked as a tailoress. She was a member of the Australian Native’s Association, a strong supporter of women’s suffrage and a founding member (secretary) of the Perth branch of the Australian Women’s Association.

In 1900 she became the foundation president of the Perth Tailoresses’ Union until its amalgamation with the Tailors’ Union in 1905. She was elected to the presidency of the combined union in 1910. Swanton was also a foundation member of the Karrakatta Club, and a friend and associate of reformist women such as Katharine Susannah Prichard.

A lifelong commitment to the cause of labour did not limit her criticism of the movement when it ignored women’s working conditions.

In 1912, Eliza Hall used her inheritance to establish the Walter and Eliza Hall Trust. Funds were distributed in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. A significant proportion of Victoria’s share went toward the establishment of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne.

A member of the Liberal and Country League, Joyce Steele was the first woman to be elected to the House of Assembly in the South Australian Parliament in 1959. She stood in the seat of Burnside. She was the first woman in the South Australian Parliament to achieve Cabinet rank as Minister for Education in the Hall Government from 1968-69, then moved to the Social Welfare Ministry in 1969. After major electoral reform in 1968, Steele stood for the new seat of Davenport at the 1970 state election and won convincingly. She retired before the 1973 election.

A devout Catholic, Annie Golding was president of the Women’s Progressive Association in Sydney from 1904. She lobbied for equal pay for women, and equal opportunity in the work force.

With her sisters, Annie Golding and Kate Dwyer, Belle Golding was a member of the Women’s Progressive Association in New South Wales. Like Annie, Belle began work in the public schools, but in May 1900 became the first female inspector under the Early Closing Act of 1899. In December 1913 she was transferred to the inspectorate under the Factories and Shops Act as senior (women) inspector, and retired in 1926. Doubtless Annie Golding drew upon the knowledge and experience of her sister in her campaigns for equal pay for women, and equality in the workplace.

Shirley Stott Despoja was the first woman to be employed in the general news room at the Adelaide Advertiser. She was that paper’s first ever Arts Editor, appointed at a time when the arts were of enormous political and economic significance in South Australia. She brought the arts to the front pages of the newspaper in a manner that had not been achieved before.

In 2010, Shirley Stott Despoja was the inaugural winner of the Mary MacKillop Award at the twentieth annual Catholic Archbishop’s Media Citations. She was nominated for her regular column, The Third Age, published in The Adelaide Review.

According to Archbishop Wilson who presented the award, it was a pleasure to honour such an esteemed writer and champion of equality and social justice.

“Mary MacKillop herself was a great correspondent and also challenged the social norms of the day,” he said.

“Ms Stott Despoja’s efforts to break the stereotypes of ageing and challenge her peers to be feisty and opinionated would undoubtedly be applauded by Mary.”

Stott Despoja also won a United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award in 2010 for the same column, for excellence in the promotion of positive images of the older person.

Shirley Stott Despoja was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the May 2013 South Australian Media Awards, honoured by her peers for an outstanding contribution to the South Australian media. In 2017 she was awarded on Australia Day with an OAM, ‘for services as a journalist to print media’, a citation to bury the lede, if ever there was one. In November 2018 she was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.

Shirley Stott Despoja is variously described as ‘an inspiration’, ‘a pioneer’, ‘gutsy’, ‘an arts editor who changed the city’ (Adelaide) and ‘a great lady of a great age of print’. But above all, Stott Despoja is best known as a journalist for being ‘principled’.

Diana Silvester stood as a candidate for the Country Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Portland at the Victorian state election, which was held on 19 May 1973.

Mollie Horseman worked professionally as a cartoonist and illustrator for over forty years. In 1963 Everybody’s Magazine called her ‘Australia’s only woman cartoonist’. While this was obviously not the case, she was probably the most visible woman working in the field. At their annual ball in 1956, her colleagues in the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club ‘smocked’ her (presented her with an artist’s smock decorated by fellow members) and she was later voted Sydney Savage Club ‘Cartoonist of the Year’. In 1964 she was the only woman in a group photograph of forty-three professional cartoonists and one of nine women among 140 cartoonists in the survey exhibition Fifty Years of Australian Cartooning.

Although she was always able to draw, she was propelled forwards when she came to the attention of Norman Lindsay . Rose and Norman employed the teenage Mollie to be their children’s governess. So impressed was he, recommended her to the National Art School. For financial reasons, she did not complete the course, but it was enough to sharpen her skills to ensure that she received regular employment. She worked regularly for Smith’s Weekly and the Bulletin and her humorous cartoons made her a household name in the 1930s. Perhaps her best known characters were ‘The Tipple Twins’ two secretaries who regularly created office havoc in the pages of the Rydge’s Business Journal, for which she freelanced in the 1940s. Many of her drawings may be found in the Mitchell Library, at the State Library of New South Wales.

Claudia Wright was a trailblazer for talkback radio in Melbourne, Victoria, in the 1970s. A committed feminist and fighter for social justice, she worked in print, radio and television journalism throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s until she was affected by the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Even when ill, she allowed herself to be the subject of documentaries that brought attention to the impact of the disease on patients and their carers.

Helene Chung is an Australian Chinese, fourth generation Tasmanian who, in 1974, became the first non-white reporter on Australian television. A former Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Beijing correspondent, she was also the first female posted abroad by the ABC.

Misha Schubert’s career in journalism began in 1998 at the Australian as a general news reporter, going on to become its Victorian political reporter. In 2001-02 she moved to New York, acquiring a masters degree from Columbia University’s journalism school to complement her BA from RMIT. She moved to Canberra in 2002 where she covered indigenous affairs and health for two years before joining The Age as a federal political correspondent. On parliamentary sitting days, she writes a political gossip column, House on the Hill. She is also a regular panellist on ABC television’s Insiders program.

Misha has also developed a profile in the community sector. She was a founding chairperson of Girlstorey, a drop-in centre for young women in Melbourne, and is a life member and former president of YWCA Victoria. She was a republican delegate at the 1998 Constitutional Convention in Canberra.

From September 2012 until August 2015 Misha was the Director of Communications for Recognise, the movement to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution. In September 2015, Misha took up the position of Director of Strategic Communications for Universities Australia.

In light of her future career as a journalist and literary editor, Pat Rappolt’s early education was somewhat remarkable. Living in the Cooktown region in Far Northern Queensland in the early twentieth century limited one’s options – she never received a formal education and was home schooled with her brother and two sisters by her parents. This did not stop her from enjoying a lengthy career in journalism, one which extended across four decades and four states and territories in Australia. Pat’s first journalist posting was on a Queensland provincial paper; her last was as the literary editor for the Canberra Times. Her importance in this role was acknowledged when a prize for young short story writers was named in her honour – The Canberra Times Pat Rappolt Literary Award.

Jane Sutherland arrived in Sydney with her family in 1864. She studied at the National Gallery School of Design, and held a number of exhibitions from 1878. Sutherland was a leader in the movement away from the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art, and toward the plein-air style, sketching directly from nature.

A talented pianist, Louise Hanson-Dyer founded the music publishing company, Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, in Paris in 1928. With her first husband, James Dyer, she donated £10,000 to establish a permanent orchestra in Melbourne. Upon her death, she bequeathed over £200,000 to the University of Melbourne. The Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library at the University is named in her honour.

As a young woman, Kylie Tennant worked as an assistant producer for ABC radio before returning to study at Sydney University. She cut short her studies to travel and write, and in 1932 married a former fellow-student, Lewis Rodd. They had two children.

Tennant’s journalistic career began with several articles and short stories published in Smith’s Weekly and The Bulletin. She worked variously as a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, critic, biographer and historian. Two of her novels were made into television mini-series.

Kylie Tennant’s bibliography is extensive. A selection of publications are listed below.

For more information, see also http://www.burnetsbooks.com.au/bibliographies/tennant.htm

The Women’s Suffrage Petition (or Monster Petition) is a collection of close to 30,000 signatures collected from Victorian women in 1891 in an effort to gain the right to vote. 260 metres long and 200 millimetres wide, it is made of paper pasted to a fabric backing and rolled onto a cardboard spindle. It takes three people three hours to unroll the petition from one spool to another.

The Monster Petition was addressed to the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly of the Colony of Victoria, and was tabled in Parliament in September 1891 with the support of the then Premier, James Munro.

The petition contained the following statements:

That Government of the People by the People, and for the People should mean all the People, and not one half.

That Taxation and Representation should go together without regard to the sex of the Taxed.

That all Adult Persons should have a voice in Making the Laws which they are required to obey.

That, in short, Women should Vote on Equal Terms with Men.

Barbara James was born in Nebraska, USA, in 1943, and came to Australia in 1966. She began her working life in the Northern Territory in 1967 as a journalist, an occupation which later led to her work as an author, historian and research consultant. Her particular interests and areas of research were women and history/heritage issues.

Jean Cullen was an illustrator and humorous artist who worked for Smith’s Weekly in the period 1941-1950. She also created the teenage cartoon character ‘Pam’ for the Brisbane Courier Mail , a character that Marie Horseman continued to develop after Cullen took her own life in 1950.

In 1945, Cullen published an adult illustrated book that was quickly banned called Hold that Halo, or, How to lose it in ten easy lessons. The comic narrated the trials and tribulations of a young woman during the second word war and was a stark commentary on the sexual double-standard as it applied to women.

Betty Paterson and her sister Esther were prodigies born into the elite of Melbourne’s bohemian set. Father (Hugh) and uncle (John Ford) were both artists and her first playmates were her neighbours, the children of Frederick McCubbin.

Art impinged upon every facet of her life throughout its entire course. Her Art Deco cartoons were published regularly in magazines such as The Bulletin and Aussie. Her illustrated interpretations of ‘permissive’ 1920s society resonated with those she depicted – she became artist-by-appointment to the flappers.

Betty Paterson married twice, and had one child, a daughter, Barbara.

Florence Johnson, a teacher and active unionist, stood as an Independent Labor candidate in the Legislative Assembly seat of St Kilda at the Victorian state election, which was held on 9 April 1927.

Mrs Waterworth arrived in Tasmania with her husband at the age of 30. She became actively involved in the women’s movement in her forties, after the birth of three sons. Waterworth stood for parliament twice (though unsuccessfully) and was active in the National Council of Women, the Child Welfare Association, the Free Kindergarten Association, and the Board of Censors of Moving Pictures, among other groups.

After a short teaching career, Christina Stead travelled to Paris for study, then to London. She returned to Australia in 1969 after many years abroad to take up a fellowship at the Australian National University. In 1974 she returned to live in Australia permanently.

With her friend Nora Weston, Eirene Mort set up a graphic design studio in Sydney in 1906 where lessons were offered in craft, drawing, design, wood carving, metalwork and book-binding. The emphasis was upon Australian subject matter in design.

Mildred Muscio’s association with the New South Wales National Council of Women began in 1922. She became press secretary of the Council before serving as president from 1927-38, including a term as federal president.

Lucy Osburn was appointed lady superintendent of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary in 1868. After years of conflict and sectarianism among the staff and board members of the Infirmary, she resigned in 1884 and returned to London.