The Australian Women's Register

Edith Anderson was the wife of New South Wales Governor, Sir David Murray Anderson, who held office for only a short time before he died in October 1936. Edith assumed many official duties on her husband’s behalf because of his continuing illness. She was appointed to The Order of the British Empire – Dames Commander on 11 May 1937 for public service in New South Wales.

Judith Anderson was the first Australian-born actress to be conferred with the title of Dame. On 01 January 1960 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire – Dames Commander, for services as an actress.

Jacobena Angliss was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (Dames Commander) on 1 January 1975 for community and welfare services. She had previously been awarded a CBE on 9 June 1949 for her work as President of the Victorian Child Welfare Association.

Mary Austin contributed to the community through her involvement in the Red Cross Society and the Liberal Party. She was Superintendent Regional Commandant of the Red Cross in the Victorian Division. She was appointed to The Order of the British Empire – Dames Commander on 16 June 1979 for Community and welfare services.

Alice Berry understood the problems of living in rural Australia and was committed to finding ways to improve the lives of women and children in rural areas. Through her work in the Country Women’s Association in Queensland, and in the Associated Country Women of the World, she made a lasting contribution to the provision of services in country areas. She was appointed to The Order of the British Empire – Dames Commander on 01 January 1960 for Service to country women.

Helen Blaxland spent much of her life working for charitable institutions, particularly the Australian Red Cross Society, for which she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1967. Her other interests included flower arrangement, on which she published two books. She was appointed as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 14 June 1975 for service to the community in recognition of her contribution to the National Trust (New South Wales) and the Parramatta Properties Committee.

Jill Bolte was appointed a Dame (Order of the British Empire – Dames Commander) on 01 January 1973 for public service to Victoria. She was associated with many community organisations, and participated in official duties, while her husband, Sir Henry Bolte, was premier of Victoria for 17 years.

Sister Philippa, as she preferred to be known, took the religious name of Sister Mary Philippa at her Religious Profession to the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy on 10th January 1918. After graduating from the Teachers’ Training College at Ascot Vale, she became a teacher in several Victorian Schools. In 1928 she transferred from teaching to nursing, completing her training at Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Brisbane. In 1935 she became foundation matron at the Mercy Private Hospital, where she introduced general nurse training.
From 1954 to 1959 she was appointed Provincial of the Sisters of Mercy in Victoria and Tasmania, after which she returned to the Mercy Private Hospital.
In 1979 Sister Philippa was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for outstanding service to the people of Victoria and beyond, especially in the Health Care Field.
Two years later, on the 1 August, the University of Melbourne awarded Sister the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws in recognition of her services to women and family life. She was the first nun to receive the award from the University.

Joyce Stevens was a prominent member of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Movement, a socialist feminist member of the Communist Party of Australia, and a historian of the women’s movement.

Jan Marsh is a significant member of the trade union movement in Australia, arguing many of the Australian Council of Trade Union’s submissions in national wage and industry cases. Throughout her career she has advocated not only for the improvement of women’s opportunities in the labour movement, but also for more equal representation within Australia’s trade unions themselves.

Lesley Hall was a feminist and disability advocate who worked throughout her life to empower low income and indigenous people, and people with disabilities, to attain and assert their human rights. She dramatically increased the policy involvement of people with disabilities in Australian and international disability issues. On behalf of the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations (AFDO) she represented and involved people with disabilities in the consultation, lobbying and campaign to successfully achieve the National Disability Strategy and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Lesley Hall is well known for a radical form of activism in 1981, when she and other activists stormed the stage of the St Kilda Town Hall during the Miss Australia Quest. The act has been described as ‘the first public act to place disability as a feminist issue on the agenda’.

Lily Beaurepaire was one of Australia’s first women Olympians, when she competed at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics in swimming and diving. She was the first Australian woman to compete in diving but was unplaced.

The only woman in Australia’s small team, she joined her brother Frank and they were the first sibling Olympians. Frank, (later Sir Frank Beaurepaire), was already an Olympian from the 1908 Games. During WW1, the 1920s and into the 1930s, Lily, Frank, and May Cox, the Education Department of Victoria’s Supervisor of Swimming and Lifesaving, promoted swimming and diving at exhibitions which raised patriotic funds and supported the Victorian community through charity events.

A strong swimmer, over short and long distances, Lily competed in the sea, surf and swimming baths, was a fearless high diver and leapt off bridges into rivers. In 1910, Lily was one of the first people to be qualified as a lifesaver when she gained the Bronze Medallion for Lifesaving awarded by the Royal Australian Lifesaving Association. For a decade she was sometimes the only lifesaver at Lorne surf beach.

In 1933, aged in her forties, she won fame for a dangerous lifesaving rescue of three men in rough seas. In 1967, Lorne’s Lilian Beaurepaire Memorial Swimming Pool was opened.

Ivy Verna Peace Bennett, who trained with the London Institute, was the first ‘lay’ psychoanalyst in Australia. She practiced In Australia from 1952 to 1958.

Elizabeth Govan was recognised by her peers as having ‘played a big part in the expansion of the social studies courses and social welfare work in Australia’ from her time in Australia (1939-1946) at the New South Wales Board of Social Study and Training in Sydney and later Sydney University. (Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 1945)

Edith Morgan was the first social worker appointed by the Collingwood Council (1972), and worked to improve services such as childcare, community health and housing. She received the Order of Australia medal for service to the community in 1989 and was later recognised for her service as an advocate for social justice, women and the disadvantaged.

Elsie Rose Beatrice Bolam (MBE), born in St Kilda, Victoria in 1880, was awarded an Order of the British Empire – Member in January 1960, for services to the community of Marysville, Victoria. She was particularly honoured for her work as an unpaid community nurse, but was also highly valued for her role in promoting tourism to the Marysville district in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. She described herself as ‘Marysville’s best advertisement,’ because she came to the town with the intention of staying for only a year, but instead ‘stayed for a generation’.

Sister Bolam lived most of her adult life in Marysville, working as an ‘honorary doctor’, a tourism officer and a guesthouse proprietor. She loved the native flora and fauna of the district and, in1922, donated a parcel of land along the Steavenson River to the community for the purpose of fencing it off to create a koala reserve.

Elsie Bolam passed away in September 1965. She never married and lived most of her life in the Marysville house she bought in partnership with her dear friend, Lesley McGowan. She was dubbed ‘Marysville’s Florence Nightingale’.

Grace Elizabeth Brebner (QPM) achieved many ‘firsts’ during her policing career, which began in 1942. She was the first police woman to pass her police driving test, the first female detective in Australia, and, in 1973, the first police woman in Victoria to be awarded the Queen’s Police Medal (QPM).

Brebner was Officer in Charge of Women Police from 1956 until she retired in 1974. ‘Policing is not a glamour job,’ she said when she retired, and you ‘need to be able to put things out of your mind after work’, to do it well. But for any drawbacks encountered, she assured that there were many, many rewards. ‘I can’t imagine anything in the way of a job that would have been more satisfying and interesting over the years’.

Florrie Hodges was only a teenager when her heroics at the mill settlement near Powelltown, Victoria, captured the national imagination. On Sunday February 14, 1926, she was at home with members of her family when they felt the full impact of the catastophic bushfires that surrounded them.

Instructed by her mother to take the children to safety, she walked for miles with her three younger siblings, finally lying down on a train track and shielding them with her own body when there was nothing to do except allow the fire to burn over the top of them. They all survived, but Florrie received horrific burns to her legs and back. She was hospitalised for several months and left disabled and disfigured.

Stories of the heroics of ‘the little bush girl of Powelltown’ emerged quickly after the fires were put out and Florrie Hodges became something of a celebrity. Her bravery was recognised far and wide and she was awarded a Royal Humane Society medal.

Sue Chilly is a staunch member of the Aboriginal rights movement, progressing reform both as an activist of groups such as the Australian Black Panthers, and as a field officer of the Department of Aboriginal and Island Affairs.

Marlene Cummins is one of Australia’s foremost blues musicians, a lifelong Aboriginal rights activist and the subject of Rachel Perkin’s 2014 documentary Black Panther Woman .

At a General Meeting on 9 July 1959, a motion was passed to change the name of the Sydney University Women Graduates’ Association to the the N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates. The change of name was not reflected in the Sydney University Calendar until 1961.

According to the 1961 Calendar, the ‘N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates exist[ed]… to co-operate, through the Australian Federation of University Women, with the International Federation of University Women’ as well as to ‘further such interests as university women in N.S.W. have in common and to encourage women graduates to take an active interest in the universities in N.S.W.’

At the General Meeting on 28 June 1974, a decision was made to change the name of the Association to the Australian Federation of University Women – New South Wales.

In mid-1974 the N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates was renamed the Australian Federation of University Women – N.S.W.

Presumably, the New South Wales branch of the Australian Federation of University Women changed its name in 2009, at the same time the national body became the Australian Federation of Graduate Women (AFGW).

Janet Cosh was the only child of Dr John and Louise Cosh (née Calvert). Janet attended the University of Sydney, where she studied English, History and the Classics. She moved to the Southern Highlands in 1934, where she took a keen interest in local history and the natural environment. In her late sixties, Janet devoted her life to the study of the native flora of the Southern Highlands, New South Wales and became a highly respected amateur botanist. After Janet’s death, her bequest to the University of Wollongong provided funds and botanical resources which were used to establish the Janet Cosh Herbarium.

Born Charlotte Waring in London in 1796, Charlotte sailed for Sydney in 1826 employed to teach the children of Hannibal Macarthur. On the voyage she became engaged to James Atkinson who was returning to his property at Oldbury, Sutton Forest; they married on 29 September 1827 and had four children. When the youngest, Louisa, was only two months old James Atkinson died aged 34, leaving Charlotte to manage a large holding, run far-flung outstations and control convict labour in a district beset by bushranging gangs. In need of male protection, she married the Oldbury superintendent, George Bruce Barton, who turned out to be violent, unpredictable, a drunkard and mentally disturbed, from whom she made a daring escape with her children. Fiercely independent, Charlotte succeeded in challenging the male-dominated legal system and retaining custody of her children. In 1841 while receiving no money from the Atkinson estate, she wrote A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, the first children’s book published in Australia. Charlotte died at Oldbury on 10 October 1867.

In 1920 the Women’s Council was renamed the Sydney University Women Graduates’ Association. The newly-renamed Association became part of the Australian Federation of University Women, which was affiliated with the International Federation of University Women.

According to the University of Sydney Calendar of 1920, the ‘Association exists to further such interests as University women have in common, and to encourage its members to take an active interest in the University, and in such national and international affairs as may be considered of special important to all University women.’

The name of the Sydney University Women Graduates’ Assocation was changed to the N.S.W. Association of University Women Graduates in 1959.

Vera Addison was awarded the British Empire Medal for her services to the community of Kangaroo Ground, in Eltham, Victoria, in 1968. She served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) worker in England during the First World War and was a volunteer and later Honorary General Secretary of the Victoria League of Victoria for 25 years.

The Sydney University Women’s Association was founded in May 1892 by Louisa MacDonald. The aim of the Association was to bring ‘all women Graduates and Undergraduates together from time to time for social and intellectual purposes, and of taking cognizance of all matters affecting their well-being.’