The Australian Women's Register

Nettie Palmer became involved in the suffrage movement and the socialist movement while she was completing her tertiary studies in London. It was there that she met her husband, Vance Palmer, and by 1917 the couple had returned to Australia with their first daughter, Aileen. A second daughter, Helen, was born that year. The family lived at Emerald, Victoria. Both Vance and Nettie were opponents of censorship and conscription, and Nettie had a regular column in the Argus. She also wrote for the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail and the Bulletin Red Page. Her essay on Modern Australian Literature 1900-1923 was published in 1924. Nettie Palmer became editor of the anti-fascist journal for women, Women Today, and edited memoirs, published short stories and poetry anthologies, made translations, and lectured to young writers.

Ethel Richardson was educated at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne, and the Royal Conservatorium at Leipzig. As Henry Handel Richardson, she became one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved novelists, finding fame with Maurice Guest (1908) and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (published in three parts between 1917 and 1929).

Daphne Mayo studied sculpture in Sydney and London before travelling through France and Italy as a Royal Academy travelling scholar. She returned to Brisbane in 1925 and carved the Brisbane City Hall tympanum (1927-30); the Queensland Women’s War Memorial, Anzac Square (1929-32); and relief panels for the chapel at Mt Thompson Crematorium (1934). With Vida Lahey she founded the Queensland Art Fund. In 1960 she was appointed the Queensland Art Gallery’s first woman trustee. Her last large commission was a statue of Sir William Glasgow (1961-64).

Moving around parts of the Northern Territory while her husband worked in the diamond mines, Jessie Litchfield raised her family and worked as a journalist. She published Far North Memories in 1930. After the death of her husband, she worked as editor of the Northern Territory Times and Government Gazette. In 1955 she became the first woman in the Territory to be appointed a justice of the peace.

Daughter of the Swiss born Elise Lehmann, Louise Lovely began her stage career at the age of eight, playing Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Lyceum in Sydney. She subsequently appeared in many stage and screen productions. In 1912, Louise moved to Hollywood with her husband Wilton Welch and became a star, cast in at least 24 films for Universal Studios and nearly a dozen western films for Fox Studios. She returned to Australia in 1924.

Mary Fullerton was involved with the Victorian Socialist Party and Women’s Political Association, and was active in the suffrage movement in Australia. She wrote stories and poems for newspapers, sometimes using the pseudonyms of Alpenstock and Austeal. In 1922 she moved to England, where she developed a strong friendship with the author Miles Franklin. Over the course of her life, Fullerton published several novels and volumes of poetry. Her novel Two Women (written under a pseudonym) won a prize when it was published in 1923. Her childhood memoir, Bark House Days, was published in 1921, and reprinted twice.

In 1939, Bessie Guthrie established Viking Press, publishing anti-war material and poetry, mainly by women. She completed the artwork and block designs herself. During wartime, she worked as a publicity officer for the YWCA, overseeing press and radio news reports. Guthrie became a champion for young women in need. She joined the Women’s Liberation movement from 1970, and became a founder of Elsie Women’s Refuge. She was a committed feminist for the whole of her life.

May Holman was the first Labor Party woman parliamentarian in Australia. Representing the Legislative Assembly seat of Forrest, she was also the first Labor woman MP to serve more than ten years in parliament.

Dorothy Gordon Jenner was an Australian actress, scriptwriter, newspaper columnist and controversial radio personality.

Biographical accounts of the early acting career of Dorothy Gordon are laden with contradictions. Due to a lack surviving archival material, what we do know about Gordon comes from her own memoirs which are criticised for being inconsistent and exaggerated. It does appear, however, that she did have a career in film, in Australia and abroad, which finished sometime in 1927. She then turned her hand to journalism.

After two unsuccessful marriages, Dorothy Jenner travelled to London in 1927, where she began a column for the Sydney Sun under the name of ‘Andrea’. Hers was a gossip column, keeping Australian audiences updated on celebrity comings and goings in London and New York. After 1940, she toured south-east Asia as a war correspondent. She was captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong and spent nearly four years in Stanley prisoner of war camp. From 1951, Jenner was writing for the Mirror. She later switched to broadcasting, working for 2UE, and pioneering talk-back radio on 2GB.

Margaret Kiddle graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA (1937), a Diploma of Education (1938), and an MA (1947). She joined the History Department at the University as a tutor and lecturer during wartime, and remained there until her death in 1958.

Winifred Kiek moved to Adelaide with her family in 1920. She became the first woman to graduate BD from Melbourne College of Divinity in 1923, and began lecturing at Parkin College from 1930. In 1927 she was ordained as a minister of the Congregational Church, making her the first woman to be ordained to the ministry of any church in Australia.

Margaret Catchpole was sentenced to transport for life, and arrived in Sydney in December 1801. She worked as a cook in the house of the commissary, John Palmer, and later as a midwife and nurse. She was granted an absolute pardon in 1814.

Irene Crespin was a micropalaeontologist. After graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1919, she worked for the Geological Survey of Victoria, describing macro and micro-fossils found in sediment on the Mornington Peninsula. In 1927 she was appointed assistant palaeontologist to Frederick Chapman in the Geological Branch of the Department of Home Affairs. In 1936 she succeeded him as Commonwealth palaeontologist at half his salary and was located in Canberra.

Eleanor Dark wrote for the Australian Women’s Mirror and the Bulletin under the pseudonym of ‘P.O’R’: Pixie O’Reilly or Patricia O’Rane. Under her married name, she published Slow Dawning (1932), Prelude to Christopher (1934), Return to Coolami (1936), Sun Across the Sky (1937), Waterway (1938), The Timeless Land (1941), The Little Company (1945), Storm of Time (1948) and No Barrier (1953).

Eliza Dunlop arrived in Sydney with her family in 1838. She studied local Aboriginal language and song, and published poetry in The Australian, the Maitland Mercury and the Sydney Gazette. Dunlop’s play, The Cousins of Aledo, is held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Born and educated in New Zealand, Stella Allan came to Australia in 1903 when her husband was invited to join the staff of the Melbourne Argus. An intelligent, well spoken woman with a keen interest in women’s affairs, she was a very important figure in the establishment and management of a number of women’s organisations.

In 1907 the Argus commissioned her to write a series of articles on the first Australian Women’s Work Exhibition held in October. They aroused much interest and next year the Argus invited her to join its full-time staff and begin a weekly section on the particular interests of women. She adopted the nom de plume ‘Vesta’ and called the column ‘Women to Women’. Her work was unique in an Australian daily paper at that time. Her pages extended to cover every aspect of women’s affairs, children’s interests and community welfare, and ‘Vesta’ became a household word for authoritative information and advice on such matters. In 1910 she was one of three women foundation members of the Australian Journalists’ Association.

Alice Anderson established the all-female business, Miss Anderson’s Motor Service, in Kew in 1918. The garage offered driving tuition, mechanical check-ups, hire cars, motor tours and chauffeuring.

Author and committee member Maybanke Anderson was a vociferous advocate for women. She founded and edited the fortnightly paper, Woman’s Voice.

Barbara Baynton was one of the first Australian short story writers to receive literary recognition abroad. She drew inspiration from her early existence in the harsh Australian bush.

Baynton published Bush Studies in 1902; Human Toll in 1907; and Cobbers in 1917.

Born in Sydney in 1846, Mary Jane O’Brien moved with her family to South Australia when she was two years old. In February 1868, taking the name Sister Ignatius of Jesus, she entered the Order of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, the Catholic order founded at Penola two years earlier by Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison-Woods.

Caught up in a scandal which enveloped the order, but in which she was subsequently proven to be blameless, Sister Ignatius left the order in July 1872, only four months after she had taken final vows, and returned to Sydney. There she became known as Mrs Gertrude or ‘Mother’ Abbott.

She leased a house in the Sydney suburb of Surrey Hills and gathered about her a group of pious women. They lived by dressmaking and adopted the rule of contemplative congregation, hoping that the Roman Catholic Church would give the group the status of a religious order. After Tenison-Woods’s death in her care in 1889, she inherited his estate of £609.

It is reputed that in 1893 Mrs Abbott took in and cared for a pregnant girl brought to her by a policeman, an event that led to her establishing the St Margaret’s Maternity Home at 561 Elizabeth Street, in the area known as Strawberry Hills. She ran what would become St Margaret’s Hospital for Women, the third largest obstetric hospital in Sydney, for the next forty years.

Upon her death in 1934, she passed the Hospital into the hands of the Sisters of St Joseph.

Launched in 1933, the Australian Women’s Weekly is the most widely read magazine in the history of Australian publishing. The brainchild of George Warnecke, who was editor-in-chief of the magazine 1933-1938, the Weekly was originally owned and operated by Douglas Frank Hewson Packer, entrepreneur and newspaper proprietor, and Edward Granville (Ted) Theodore, former Federal Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister in the Scullin Government. As a ‘women’s interests’ publication, the Weekly offers feature articles on lifestyle, home decoration, cooking, fashion and beauty, parenthood, health and wellbeing, and current affairs. Today it enjoys a readership of 2.5 million, including well over half a million men, and it forms an important part of the Australian Consolidated Press holdings.

Freda Irving began her career in journalism in Melbourne in 1925, working with the Sun News Pictorial in various guises until about 1949 when she joined the Argus. She also edited Woman’s Day and the Australian Women’s Weekly for short periods of time. In 1978-79, she was president of the Melbourne Press Club.

During the war she joined the Australian Women’s Army Service as a private but before long she became Amenities Officer with the rank of captain for the three women’s services ­ Army, Air Force and Navy.

She was awarded an MBE for services to Journalism in 1981.

Following a visit to a farm in Gippsland during a period of rehabilitation, Audrey Drechsler developed a lifetime love of farming. Audrey was heavily involved in the CWA as a regional president, but was also a leader in the movement for recognition and support for women’s hands-on involvement in farming, through farmers’ organisations, and the women in agriculture movement. She was a member of the steering committee which organised the 1994 First International Women in Agriculture Conference, and an organiser of the 1997 and 2010 Women on Farms Gatherings. Sharing the movements’ commitment to sustainable agriculture, Audrey has been active in land conservation, occupying, amongst other positions, that of first woman president of the Grassland Society of Victoria. She still farms at Sedgwick, south of Bendigo.

As Audrey Walsh, she stood as a candidate for the Democratic Labor Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Evelyn at the Victorian state election, which was held in 1967.

Jean Downing stood as a candidate for the Australian Labor Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Doncaster at the Victorian state election, which was held on 5 May 1979. She was also a candidate in the 1977 Federal election for the seat of Diamond Valley. In 1978 she was elected as a councillor to the Eltham Shire Council and served a three year term.

Downing embarked on her political career after having made a significant and enduring contribution to the discipline of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. over many decades. In 2016 she was awarded the University of Melbourne’s Hyslop Medal, an award that recognises alumni or staff whose outstanding contributions have been integral to the success of social work at the University.

Helen Ester is a media scholar and media professional who teachers Journalism and Communication at Central Queensland University. She has enjoyed a long and varied career as a teacher and journalist that has spanned more than thirty years.

Freda Glynn is co-founder of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association Group of Companies (CAAMA).

In 1958, Pat Jarrett celebrated 25 years of continuous service with the Herald and Weekly Times. She was the only woman alongside seventeen men on the staff to have served so long.