The Australian Women's Register

Zora Cross was, among other things, a poet and author of children’s verse. She wrote for the Brisbane Daily Mail as a freelance journalist, and was drama critic for the magazines Green Room and the Lone Hand.

Helen Corcoran won a Walkley Award in 1983 for Best story in a Provincial Newspaper for a series published in the Tamworth Northern Daily Leader. The series ran for four months and led to a New South Wales state government investigation into the ownership and financial management of Tamworth’s Evergreen Memorial Park Cemetery.

Glenda Adams was a Sydney-born and educated novelist and short-story writer. She studied journalism at Columbia University in New York, where she subsequently taught creative writing. During the 1980s she was writer-in-residence at a number of Australian universities before returning to Australia in 1990 to teach creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her MA writing program there became the model for successful postgraduate writing programs across Australia. Her novels Dancing on Coral (1987) and Longleg (1990) won a number of major Australian literary prizes. She died in Sydney in 2007.

Dorothy Cottrell moved from New South Wales to Ballarat, Victoria, with her parents while still an infant. She contracted infantile paralysis and was confined to a wheelchair from the age of 5. Cottrell’s parents separated and she was raised by her grandmother, her aunt and her uncles, in various parts of New South Wales. She was educated by governesses and attended the Royal Art Society of New South Wales.

From 1920, Cottrell lived at Ularunda, Queensland, where she was active in hunting, swimming, rowing and driving. In 1922 she married Walter Mackenzie Cottrell, and the newlyweds eloped to Dunk Island. They later moved to Sydney and travelled around New South Wales before returning to Ularunda, where Dorothy began to write fiction. Her novel The Singing Gold was published in London and Boston in 1929 after appearing as a serial in the American Ladies’ Home Journal and later, the Sydney Mail and the English Women’s Journal.

The Cottrell’s moved to California in 1928, and two years later Dorothy published Earth Battle. In 1942 they moved to Florida, where Dorothy worked as a journalist and writer of short stories. In 1953 she published The Silent Reefs – the story was serialised in the Saturday Evening Post and made into a film.

Dorothy died of heart disease in June 1957, survived by her husband and adopted son.

Angela Burger won a Walkley Award in 1978 for a series of articles run over a week in the Queensland Times. The series ‘What is wrong with our school system?’ took a long look at the problems confronting the Queensland state school system. It run the week beginning July 17 1978.

Mary Binks won a Walkley Award in 1987 for Best Story in a Provincial Newspaper. The Burnie Advocate ran a series of articles about the Tasmanian logging industry between October 22 1986 and February 2, 1987.

Binks has gone on to play an important role in local government in Tasmania. She served as Mayor of the Devonport council in 2000.

Pat Grimshaw has enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career. Having completed postgraduate studies in New Zealand, she joined the Department of History at the University of Melbourne in 1977. Pat is a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities, and Deputy Editor of the UK journal Women’s History Review. She has been a member of the editorial committees of Australian Feminist Studies, Gender and History, Journal of Women’s History and Pacific Historical Review, and has supervised over 50 PhDs to completion. In her various roles as supervisor, mentor, lecturer, professor, Head of Department, Deputy Dean, and member of multiple academic and professional associations, she has made an extraordinary contribution to women’s history, to the history profession, and to the wider community.

Her extraordinary (and continuing) contribution was recognised in 2017 when she was awarded an Order of Australia for ‘distinguished service to the social sciences and to the humanities through researching, documenting and preserving Australian history, and the roles of women in society’.

Merran Martin has taught English to migrants and refugees in Canberra since 1985. From 1973-75 she worked in the Department of Immigration teaching English in a migrant hostel, as a shipboard education officer, and in its Migrant Education Section in Canberra. Fluent in French and German from childhood she also taught English in Europe in the early 1970s. She is currently Education, Placement and Referral Officer, Special Preparatory Program Manager and Home Tutor Scheme Coordinator in the Adult Migrant English Program at the Canberra Institute of Technology.

Michelle Ronksley-Pavia is one of Australia’s emerging scientific artists. Born in England, she has lived in various parts of the United Kingdom and Europe. She studied for eight years in Belgium, where she attended the State-operated Ecole des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Whilst in Europe she was greatly influenced by the works of the Impressionists and the Belgian Surrealist painter, Rene Magritte.

Ronksley-Pavia emigrated and took up Australian Citizenship in 1992. She attended the University of Western Sydney and continued with postgraduate study in Visual Arts. Here she was drawn to the work of artists like James Gleeson and Brett Whiteley. Ronksley-Pavia exhibited widely and joined the National Association for the Visual Arts. The influence of the Association saw her career begin to flourish.

Professor Christine Phillips is a general practitioner and health services researcher with interest and expertise in the health and health care of marginalised persons and populations, quality in health care and refugee and migrant health. She leads the Social Foundations of Medicine group at the ANU Medical School, where she instituted a curriculum integrating the social sciences across all four years and of medical education.

Phillips is Medical Director of Companion House Medical Service, the ACT’s refugee health care service, and has over twenty-five years of clinical experience working in primary care in the context of deep urban poverty, working in settings including drug and alcohol medicine, elder care, and prison health.

Associate Professor Wendy Bacon is a widely-acclaimed investigative journalist. Her articles in the National Times on the attempted bribe and murder of Detective Michael Drury in the 1980s formed the basis of the ABC television series, Blue Murder. Bacon received a Walkley Award in 1984 for her exposure of official corruption in New South Wales. She has worked for Channel 9 (Sunday Program and Sixty Minutes), John Fairfax and Sons (National Times and Sun Herald), and SBS (Dateline).

From 1991 to August 2012 Bacon was an academic at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she taught journalism at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ). She continues to write as a freelance investigative journalist.

Bruna Romano migrated to Australia from Italy with her family in 1956. In 1967 she was awarded a Council of Legal Education Certificate from the Legal Education Committee of Victoria and was admitted as a solicitor and barrister of the Supreme Court of Victoria in May 1968. In mid-1968 she became the first woman to establish a law practice in the ACT, and remained head of the firm Romano & Co. until 2003. She was active in a number of community organisations in Canberra until the 1990s and continued to practise as a family law consultant.

Helen McCue is best known as a co-founder of Rural Australians for Refugees (2001). A trained nurse educator she worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Middle East in 1981, was then seconded to the United Nations Relief and Works Organisation (UNRWA) in Lebanon, and subsequently worked as a volunteer in refugee camps in Beirut 1982-83. In 1984 she co-founded the trade union aid body Australian People for Health Education and Development Abroad (APHEDA), and was its first Executive Director and regional adviser in South Africa and the Middle East until early 1994. She founded the Women Refugee Education Network (1996) and the Wingecarribee Community Foundation (2001), and was involved in the establishment of Wingecarribee Reconciliation Group (1997).

Van Huynh was born and began school in Binh Duong, near Saigon, Vietnam. At seven she moved with her family to Saigon where she completed her education despite her family’s financial and housing difficulties. She and her husband Thiet worked in the Electricity Authority until April 1979 when they fled Vietnam by boat with their two small sons Thach and Kim. After almost five months in the United Nations-run refugee camp in Pulau Bidong, Malaysia, she and her family were accepted as refugees by Australia and were helped to settle successfully in Canberra by the Ainslie Church of Christ.

Jill Reichstein is Chair of the Reichstein Foundation and an advocate of social change philanthropy. Mentor to many Australian women philanthropists, she is a member of the Committee of Management for Changemakers Australia and has served on the boards of the Melbourne Community Foundation, the Foundation for Young Australians, the Community Support Fund Community Advisory Council, the Trust for Young Australians, the Mietta Foundation, the Koori Heritage Trust, and Philanthropy Australia.

Kathleen Le Messurier played tennis for Methodist Ladies College, Semaphore and East Torrens Tennis Clubs, represented South Australia from 1919 and was the State’s best woman player for many years. She ranked in the top 10 women players in the Commonwealth and in 1930 played at Wimbledon. She was a runner up in the Australian Open, to Coral Buttsworth, in 1932.

Adelaide Hockey Club was formed in late 1981, after ten years of sharing of playing fields and change rooms became formalised by the amalgamation of the Sturt (men’s) Aroha (women’s) and Sturt (men’s) clubs . It is one of the largest and most successful hockey Clubs in South Australia with over 300 members playing both the Junior and Senior competition.

Cheryl McKinna was elected President of the University of Melbourne Sports Union in 1978 and then selected as Director of Sport and Physical Recreation in 1980. Having completed a Diploma in Physical Education and being actively engaged in sport at the university, she was concerned about issues of equity and regarded her step into sporting administration as part of an on-going process. She wanted people of all abilities to include sport in their experience of university life and hoped to encourage women to use the sporting facilities more regularly. ‘There is still the attitude that it is unfeminine for women to participate in sport and to sweat,’ she observed in 1978. The first woman to take on the role, she was more qualified in sports administration than any of the previous five holders of the office.

Catholic social worker Eileen Davidson worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s child search operation, and for the International Refugee Organisation, after the Second World War. She raised ₤70,000 for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.

Betty Wilson was the first test cricketer, male or female, to complete the match double of 100 runs and ten wickets in a test match.

In the 1950s Dorothy Green wrote to a friend, ‘I am now rising forty two and looking back on my life, I find have spent the greater proportion of it doing things I didn’t want to do at all.’ Nearly thirty years later she felt ‘nothing has changed’. Yet during the course of her long life, Dorothy Green produced poetry, literary criticism and journalism and taught and shaped the lives of many students. With a Bachelor of Arts in English, French and Philosophy and an Master of Arts with Honours in English, she worked as a journalist in New South Wales and Queensland, was the principal of a girls’ private school, before moving in to tertiary education, holding positions at Monash University in Melbourne and the Australian National University and Australian Defence Forces Academy in Canberra. Married to Henry Green, journalist, librarian and literary historian, with whom she had two children, she was also politically active, especially later in her life, when she was a founding member of Writers Against Nuclear Arms and an ardent environmentalist. She wrote a study of the work of Henry Handel Richardson as well as updating her husband’s History of Australian Literature and publishing several books of poetry and numerous works of literary criticism.

The 1956 Australian Netball was the first team to ever beat England on home soil. The team revolutionised the way the sport was played and the tour was important to the establishment of an internationally consistent set of rules.

Ann Mitchell has been associated with women’s cricket as a player (state and national level), manager, coach, journalist, and administrator for nearly fifty years. She contributes regularly to cricket journals and has provided commentary for Sydney radio and ABC television.

She has also had a long association with women’s university sport, once again as a player and administrator. Most recently, as Executive Director of Sydney University Women’s Sport and Deputy Director Sydney University Sport, Mitchell has made a significant contribution to the status of women in sport, particularly by promoting gender equity in university sport. Over her lengthy career as a volunteer and employee in the sport industry, she has been instrumental in developing opportunities for women in university sports as well as non-playing roles including administration, coaching and sports medicine.

Through her representation on numerous sports boards including Women’s Cricket Australia, International Women’s Cricket Council and Australian University Sport, Ms Mitchell has raised the profile of women’s sport in the community.

In April 2010, Mitchell was made an Honorary Fellow of Sydney University in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, in recognition of her ‘extraordinary contribution to the University, to cricket and to Australian women’s sport for nearly five decades.’

Netball is said to be the largest participant sport for girls and women in Australia, with four hundred thousand players registered with the All Australia Netball Association by the late 1990s, and an estimated further three hundred and fifty thousand not registered. It was a foundation sport of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in 1981. Ian Jobling and Pamela Barham suggest that the popularity of netball among women can be attributed to its versatility (it can be played on all surfaces at all age and skill levels), and its organisation by women for women.

Invented in Chicago in 1887 and derived from the game of baseball, softball was introduced to Australia in 1939 when Canadian Gordon Young became director of physical education in New South Wales and promoted the game in schools. The game found its way to Victoria during the Second World War, when U.S. Army Sergeant William Duvernet organised softball as a recreational activity for U.S. nurses stationed there. Another American, Mack Gilley, brought the game to Queensland in 1946.

In 1990, the Australian Bowls Council (now Bowls Australia Inc.), the national administrative body for men’s bowling, was affiliated with 2,225 clubs. The Australian Women’s Bowling Council was parallel, with 2,185 affiliated clubs. By the late 1990s, Australia could boast 43% of the world’s bowling population.