The Australian Women's Register

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

Janet Powell stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Australian Democrats Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Rodney at the Victorian state election, which was held on 5 May 1979. She was a candidate again at the 1985 state election, when she stood for the Legislative Council province of Central Highlands.

She was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia in 1986 as a representative for Victoria. A member of the Australian Democrats and leader from 1990-1991, she resigned from the party in 1992. She served as an Independent until 1993.

In 2004 she joined the Australian Greens Party and stood as a candidate in the November 2006 Victorian State election for the Eastern Metropolitan Region in the Legislative Council.

After leaving Parliament, Ms Powell focused on volunteer leadership roles in health, women’s issues and services for the disadvantaged.

Powell passed away in September 2013, survived by four children and one grandchild.

Established in 1956, the annual Walkley Awards recognize excellence in Australian journalism across all mediums including print, television, radio, photographic and online media. The prestigious Gold Walkley is considered the pinnacle of journalistic achievement.

Lorraine Salmon was a successful businesswoman who worked in public relations and advertising after establishing a career as a script writer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission during the second world war. A longtime member of the Communist Party of Australia, she held the position of secretary of Actors’ Equity for some years. She travelled to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with her husband, journalist Malcolm Salmon, in the late 1950s. She freelanced and assisted local media outlets to establish a presence, working, for instance, with her husband for the English-language service of Radio Hanoi. On her return from North Vietnam she resumed a business career but continued to pursue her literary interests, regularly reviewing new theatre productions.

Helen Vatsikopoulos is an Australian journalist and news presenter for the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Vatsikopoulos hosted the Dateline current affairs program on SBS and is currently hosting the Asia Pacific Focus program which screens on the ABC and the Australia Network.

She has a B.A from Adelaide University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism for the then Adelaide College of Arts and Education.

Jane Singleton has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in broadcasting which has spanned public broadcasting and the commercial media in Australia (2GB, ABC and SBS). She has been a Walkley award judge and federal vice president of the Australian Journalists Association. She is currently the CEO of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance Canberra and a director of her own public affairs consultancy, Jane Singleton Public Affairs, Pty., Ltd.

Career highlights include coordinating Nelson Mandela’s visit to Australia before his election as President, being the inaugural compère of ABC TV’s 7.30 Report, and working on the Maritime Union’s communications during the Patrick waterfront dispute.

Linda Littlejohn was an ardent feminist who developed an international profile. A daughter of privilege, she began moving in philanthropic circles early, as a member of the Ascham School Old Girls’ Union. A well respected figure in the New South Wales women’s movement, in 1926 she became an executive-member of the National Council of Women of New South Wales and the Feminist Club. Two years later she launched the League of Women Voters to support female candidates for public office and to press for feminist reforms.

Littlejohn broadcast for the British Broadcasting Corporation and for 2UW and 2UE in Sydney. She reported for the Australian Women’s Weekly on the campaigns of the United Associations and the Australian Federation of Women Voters. She belonged to the New South Wales Institute of Journalists (1933-41) and the Business and Professional Women’s club of Sydney. In her novel Life and Lucille (1933) she dramatized the need for women in parliament, divorce reform and the introduction of adequate training to enable women to be economically independent of their fathers and husbands.

Michelle Grattan was the first woman to become editor of an Australian metropolitan daily newspaper. Specialising in political journalism, she has written and edited for many significant Australian newspapers. Her long and distinguished career in journalism began in 1970 at the Melbourne Age, where she enjoyed a stellar career as their political editor. She left that paper (for good!) in 2013. .

Marjorie McDonald was an Australian accredited war correspondent. After graduating from Melbourne University, Marjorie worked as a journalist for Radio Australia, The Sun, and other newspapers. She wrote from Berlin, Malaya, and London, where she continued to work for The Star (London) after WWII. Her final assignments were in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. She was a human rights activist, and campaigned against young women being sent to Pentridge Prison. She was married for a short time to WWII Commander Ian McDonald.

Valery Murphy stood as a candidate for the Human Rights Party in the Legislative Council at the New South Wales state election, which was held on 24 March 2007.

Denise McHugh stood as a candidate for the Country Labor Party in the seat of Tamworth in the Legislative Assembly at the New South Wales state election, which was held on 24 March 2007.

The daughter of inn-keepers, Jessie Grover dabbled in sericulture before turning to journalism. In 1873 Jessie and her friend Mrs Sara Florentia Bladen-Neill thought that the silk production industry would be a fit one for women, and so formed the Victorian Ladies’ Sericultural Co. Ltd, with Jessie as managing director. The company articles specified that ‘No person but a woman shall be eligible as a Director’. Prominent Melbourne women took up most of the £4 shares. The government made a grant of 600 acres (242.8 ha) of hilly land at Harcourt, near the Mount Alexander diggings, where bluestone buildings were erected and thousands of mulberry trees planted. The surveyor had fixed on the wrong location, however, and the enterprise collapsed after several years of intensive effort.

When her mother died in 1879 she left the bulk of her estate to her daughters. This meant that Jessie and her husband, Harry, were now able to buy a large house at St Kilda and live mainly from their investments. Harry contributed humorous items to Melbourne Punch. Jessie was social editor of the Melbourne Bulletin in 1880-86, and Australian correspondent for the Queen (London). She covered events at Government House, garden parties, charity bazaars and a few scandals in a human and personal style. She wrote under various pseudonyms such as ‘Gladys’, ‘Iris’, ‘Humming Bee’ and ‘Queen Bee’. Her son, Montague continued the journalist tradition she established.

Before she married W.A Holman in 1901, Ada Kidgell had established herself as an intelligent and energetic journalist. By 1896 she was publishing short stories, reviews and political and literary items, using her own name, ‘Marcus Malcolm’ and ‘Nardoo’. As ‘Myee’ she sent ‘Our Sydney letter’ to Melbourne Punch. She was a frequent contributor to the Sydney Mail, Sydney Morning Herald and the Freeman’s Journal. She edited and wrote most of the copy for the Co-operator, a trade journal for rural producers. She continued journalism after marriage, sometimes ghosting items which appeared under her husband’s name. The Labor Party benefited from her ability to place items sympathetic to its programme in the non-Labor press.

Ada Holman’s political views were well formed before her marriage to her New South Wales Labor politician husband. She was republican and a critic of the Constitution, of the South African War and of inequality, whether related to class or sex. She enjoyed writing on these topics, but found that once her husband was installed in the NSW cabinet in 1910, her output was restricted; her short stories continued to appear but little else.

Ada Holman resented both the limitations to her own work consequent on being married to a prominent politician, and the demands on women to conform to notions of middle class femininity that restricted women’s experience to that of only wife and mother. Women would be free, she wrote to Australian author Dowell O’Reilly, when motherhood affected woman’s life ‘only to the same degree as parenthood does a man’.

Alexina Wildman spent all of her short but successful career in journalism working as a columnist on the Bulletin. Her weekly column, written under the pseudonym of ‘Sappho Smith’ and headed by a Phil May cartoon, appeared from 28 April 1888 to 22 August 1896. It was Sydney’s first gossip column: an acerbic, heavily satirical and bitingly funny account of society’s comings and goings in the form of a letter from the fictitious Sappho to her ‘dear Moorabinda’. The segment became one of the most popular in the Bulletin and appeared without interruption for over eight years, ending only with the premature death of its author. Wildman died of nephritis in November 1896, aged 29.

Often referred to as ‘the incomparable Ina Wildman’, she was celebrated by her colleagues as a brilliant writer and a good comrade. Her brief, bright career was an encouragement to many women journalists.

Helen Garner is an award-winning Australian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. After graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1965 she worked as a high school teacher. While teaching, she contributed to journals and worked in theatre. Her first novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977. It was an instant success, winning a National Book Council award in 1978 and being filmed in 1982.

Garner has successfully written both fiction and non-fiction. Considerable controversy attended the 1995 publication of The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power, an examination of allegations of misconduct in a University college. In 1993, she won a Walkley award for her feature article on the sad death of a small child, Daniel Valerio.

Garner has written three scripts for Australian films: Monkey Grip (Cameron, 1982), Two Friends (Campion, 1986) and The Last Days Of Chez Nous (Armstrong, 1992). Along with her novels, short stories and journalism, these films have cast Garner as a central figure in the history of Australian film and literature.

She has written three true-crime books: first with The First Stone, about the aftermath of a sexual-harassment scandal at a university, followed by Joe Cinque’s Consolation, a journalistic novel about the court proceedings involving a young man who died at the hands of his girlfriend, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Book, and again in 2014 with This House of Grief, about Robert Farquharson, a man who drove his children into a dam.

Nance Haxton is a Walkley Award winning journalist who impressed the judges in 2001 with her coverage of the riots at the Woomera Detention Centre in outback South Australia. She has worked across a variety of media in both metropolitan and regional locations.

Daphne Freeman won a Walkley Award in 1987 for Best Story in a Rural Newspaper. Published in The Port Lincoln Times on March 3, 1987, the story was about the rural crisis on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.

The three headings that Patricia Rankin won her Walkley Award for in 1982 were:

‘Bob’s your uncle when it comes to fun’.

‘Bingo! Mr Price is right.’

‘Star in seventh heaven.’

Anne Lampe won a Walkley Award in 1991 for her coverage of the so-called ‘Westpac letters’. She has been a business journalist with V since 1983. Before that Anne was the London correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.She has written about property, banking, insurance, superannuation, tax, commercial litigation and fraud. Anne is particularly interested in focusing on consumer issues and how policy changes affect consumer interests.

Sue Neales won a Walkley Award in 1985 for the Best Story in a Rural Newspaper. She reported on the Mudginberri Abattoir Dispute for The National Farmer on July 25, 1985

Agnes Warren won a Walkley award for her reporting of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. She reported from the frontline in Serbia and from a Bosnian refugee centre. She was also sent to report on the treatment of Palestinians after the 1991 Gulf War as well as nationalist demonstrations in Northern Ireland. Prior to taking on her overseas postings, she was the ABCs Industrial Relations reporter.

A journalist with extensive experience in the print and electronic media Jill Singer has worked at all levels behind and in front of the camera and microphone across Australia for both commercial and public broadcasters. Jill has produced and presented radio programs from remote rural locations, and designed, produced and presented national television news and current affairs programs. As well as winning awards for television broadcasts on architectural and medical issues, Jill won the Walkley award in 1992 for best television investigative journalist and the Quill award for best television current affairs report in 1999.

Patricia Riggs became a cadet journalist on the Macleay Argus at the age of thirty-five. She went on to win two Walkley awards for provincial journalism and eventually became editor of the newspaper. She was a fighter for Aboriginal advancement long before the cause was a popular one.

After retiring as editor, she became a Shire Councillor in 1983, a position she held until 1991.

Born in New Zealand in 1910, Elizabeth Riddell was recruited as a journalist to work in Sydney straight from school. In 1939 she started work on The Sun newspaper, during World War Two she opened and ran the Daily Mirror’s New York bureau, and in the 1960s, she became senior interviewer and critic for the arts pages of The Australian. Several books of her poetry have been published over the years.

Shelley Gare has been an editor of both Good Weekend and Sunday Life, was a consultant editor on the start-up of WHO magazine, and was the first woman deputy editor appointed to The Australian newspaper, after working for The Sunday Times in London. At The Australian, she ran all the newspaper’s features area. She has been managing and motivating staff since she was appointed as editor of Cleo magazine in her early 20s.

As founding editor of The Australian’s Review of Books, she won a Walkley, and now writes regularly for The Weekend Australian, as well as a variety of overseas publications.

Marian Wilkinson won a Walkley Award in 1989 for Best TV Current Affairs reporting, while working for the program Four Corners. In True Believers she interviewed four Liberal Party MPs after the Andrew Peacock leadership ‘coup’ that removed John Howard from the Liberal leadership. The judges commented in 1989 that she provided a ‘new angle on the story…it was well presented…with unbelievable interviews. The impact of this programme is still being felt on the national political scene’.