The Australian Women's Register

Helen Caldicott has achieved an international reputation as a tireless campaigner against nuclear power and weapons. Trained as a medical practitioner, she is acutely aware of the effects of radiation on living beings and on the environment. While living in the United States of America from 1977 to 1986, she formed the organisation called ‘Physicians for Social Responsibility’, serving as its president from 1978 to 1983. In the belief that women had a special role to play in the peace movement, she established Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament in 1986 and became a full-time anti-nuclear activist. She addressed anti-nuclear and peace rallies in Australia and around the world and wrote a number of books on the topic of nuclear disarmament.

Originally a member of the Australia Party, Maureen Worsley was one of the first women to be elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory in September 1974. She resigned from the party in 1977 and intended to stand as an Independent in the 1977 election, but her marriage breakdown meant she had to find full-time work. As a result she did not contest the 1979 election. She died of emphysema in 2001.

Sotiria Liangis is the developer behind a number of commercial properties in Canberra. She was the first Telstra ACT Business Woman of the Year in 1995. In 1996 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for ‘for service to the Greek community, particularly the aged and through St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, Canberra’. She received the Centenary Medal in 2001, also for service to the Greek community.

With her husband and son, Sotiria Liangis had received a Real Estate Institute of the ACT award in 1994.

Patricia Blundell served in in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) in World War I at Lemnos (Gallipoli), in Egypt, on hospital transports, in military hospitals at Wimereux near Boulogne in France and at military hospitals in England. In 1918 the ship on which she was travelling back to Australia was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay. After being rescued by the British Navy she reached Melbourne safely on another ship. Before enlisting in 1915, she had gained military nursing experience as matron of Royal Military Hospital, Duntroon.

Gladys Elizabeth Clare Boon served in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) at Salonika, Greece from 1917 to 1919 and then briefly in England before returning to Australia. Trained at Orange Hospital, she nursed at Bathurst District Hospital and Wallsend Hospital before her marriage to Arthur Firkin in 1925.

Flora Gallagher served from 1915 to 1918 as a nurse in World War I in Egypt, England and France. She was one of three female Gallagher family members from Browns Flat, a farming settlement between Queanbeyan and Bungendore in New South Wales, which later became part of the ACT, who served overseas as nurses in World War I.

Janet Isobel Gallagher was one of three female members of the Gallagher family who served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I. She was a niece of Flora Gallagher and Evelyn Gallagher and like them was born at Browns Flat, a farming settlement near Burbong between Queanbeyan and Bungendore in New South Wales, now within the eastern border of the Australian Capital Territory. She enlisted in 1916 and spent most of the War nursing in India with service also in Egypt and England.

Evelyn Gallagher served from 1916 to 1919 with the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) in World War I in India, Egypt and England. She was one of three female Gallagher family members from Browns Flat, a farming settlement between Queanbeyan and Bungendore in New South Wales later part of the ACT, who served overseas as nurses in World War I. After the war she was matron of a private hospital at Nowra.

Gertrude Frances Lawlor served in 1918 with the Australian Army Nursing Service in India during the latter stages of World War I. She enlisted in 1917 after Canberra Hospital, where she was Matron, closed because of war restrictions. She resumed as Matron when the Hospital re-opened in 1921 and continued in the position until 1928.

Alma McKnight served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service in Egypt from 1917 to 1919. Before enlisting she had nursed briefly at Duntroon Military College Hospital Canberra after training at Dubbo Hospital.

Sybil Dale, aged 18, was left a widow with a young baby when her husband, Adjutant Charles Coning Dale, 21, was killed on Gallipoli on 7 August 1915. They had married in Melbourne on 10 November 1914, eight days after Dale graduated from Duntroon Military College, Canberra, and a week after he enlisted in the AIF as Lieutenant in C Squadron, 8th Light Horse. Their daughter, Valda Rita Dale, was born on 19 April 1915 at 595 Canning St, North Carlton. Sybil married again in 1924 and together her and her husband raised a family. She also went on to play cricket and hockey for Victoria.

Read a longer essay on Sybil Dale in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Ruby Lindsay is perhaps Australia’s first female graphic designer. During the early twentieth century, Ruby illustrated books and also hand drew posters and black-and-white illustrations for newspapers such as The Bulletin and Punch.

When her husband, Lt John Cecil Drury Reid, was killed near Messines on the Western Front on 10 June 1917, Jessie Beatrice Reid was left a widow with three young children. On 29 August 1917, she was granted £3-10-0 per fortnight widow’s pension, their son, Stanley Francis, nearly 4, received 20 shillings per fortnight; daughter Joan Innes, aged 2, 15 shillings per fortnight and Margaret Lyle, not yet one year old, 10 shillings per fortnight. Jessie, aged 43, devoted the next twenty years of her life to their upbringing and education.

Read a longer essay on Jessie Reid in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Lady Bridges was the initial president of the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, set up by her friend Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the Governor General, early in World War I to provide support for families of soldiers of the first AIF. The shock of the death of her husband, Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges, Commander of the first AIF, less than a month after the landing at Gallipoli and the prolonged and very public commemorative ceremonies associated with the return of his body to Australia and his reburial in Canberra, affected her health to the extent that the following year she retired from public life.

An adopted child, Edith’s life was punctuated by tragedy including the loss of her first-born son soon after birth, the drowning of one of her seven-year-old twin girls in a boating accident on Sydney Harbour and the death of a 17-year-old son at boarding school in England. During World War I in addition to the loss of her husband, she worried constantly about her son Major Noel Bridges DSO, who fought at Gallipoli and the Western Front and was wounded in Flanders in 1918. Born Edith Lillian Francis in 1862 near Moruya, Lady Bridges died in Melbourne in 1926, aged 64, and was buried in St John’s Churchyard, Canberra.

Read a longer essay on Lady Bridges in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Ruth Hennings was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) on Australia Day 2019 ‘for service to the Indigenous community, particularly to the 1967 Referendum Campaign’.

During World War I, Queanbeyan citizens, at a public meeting held soon after news that her husband, Private John Charles Mayo, had been killed in action at Bullecourt in 1917, decided to provide a home for Florence Mayo and her two young daughters. Raising money proved more difficult than expected and Florence, described as ‘a plucky woman’, partly financed her land and weatherboard cottage by taking out a mortgage. She lived in Queanbeyan for the rest of her life.

Read a longer essay on Florence Mayo in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Florence Eckersley, born on 25 April 1886 in Manchester, England, married Manchester-born Joseph Perry (birth name Rigby) in 1907 and had two children. The family arrived in Australia before World War I and Joseph Perry was employed as a groom at Duntroon Military College, Canberra. Immediately war was declared, he was recalled to England, embarking on 17 October 1914 to join his battalion in Manchester. Florence and her two children were left behind living in Sydney where, two years later, she heard that her husband had drowned on 18 November 1916 while on active service. She was left a widow with two children then aged four and three. She remarried in Sydney in 1919.

Read a longer essay on Florence Perry in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

On 27 April 1915, two days after the landing, Glenora Clara Love’s husband, Corporal Alfred Herbert Love, 14th Battalion AIF, was killed in action at Gallipoli. Glenora had had a troubled marriage but when she eventually received her husband’s diary, she read his last words to his ‘Dear Wife’. He wanted her to know, he wrote, that his ‘last thoughts were of her and of Essie my darling daughter’. Glenora’s marriage had been marked by two episodes when her husband had deserted her but once he began his diary on the day that he sailed from Australia he wrote only loving words of their relationship. The couple had a daughter, Esther, aged 8, and in 1912 had lost a son soon after birth. Glenora remarried two years after his death but the concerned letters she wrote to the Repatriation Department testify to her devotion to furthering her daughter Esther Love’s future.

Read a longer essay on Glenora Love in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Isabella McKean was widowed when her husband, Scottish-born David Thornton McKean, was killed in action while serving with the AIF on the Western Front on 14 November 1916. For a few years before World War I, McKean worked as a plasterer with the Department of Home Affairs. In 1913, Isabella moved to Canberra from Weddin, where she had been active in church and social events, to join her husband but had trouble finding accommodation. She was living in Berowra when her husband was killed. In 1919 she married a former AIF solider and partly supported herself keeping poultry.

Read a longer essay on Isabella McKean in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Alison Harcourt (nee Doig) is an inspiring pioneer in mathematics, statistics and computer science. As a woman in an almost exclusively male field, her groundbreaking work from the 1950s on was often overshadowed. In recent years, however, the importance of her contributions has begun to be acknowledged more widely.

She is perhaps best known for developing integer linear programming – a basis of efficient computer processing – in a paper published with Ailsa Land in 1960. About 3000 academic journal articles have cited the paper since. This technique became know as Branch and Bound method and has numerous practical and mathematical applications. Earlier, Alison had been among the first users of CSIRAC, Australia’s first digital computer.

As well as her significant academic achievements, Alison is a stalwart in community organisations. For over 30 years Alison has been a volunteer deliverer for the Kew (and later Boroondara) Meals-on Wheels service. She has also played an active role in many other community organisations, including the Melbourne Film Festival (which later became the Melbourne International Film Festival) (secretary, 1955 – 56); the Kew Primary School Parents’ Association (secretary, 1980 – 84); a Council of Adult Education book group leader (secretary, 1998 – 2015); and a study group at the Leo Baeck Centre for Progressive Judaism (coordinator, 1999 – 2014).

Sylvia Gelman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1981 ‘in recognition of service to education, youth and the Jewish community’. She was also appointed Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2003 ‘in recognition of service to the community, particularly through a range of organisations concerned with issues affecting women’. These organisations included The National Council of Jewish Women of Victoria and Australia, the Young Women’s Christian Association of Victoria, and both the national and Victorian branches of the National Council of Women.

Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Indigenous Strategy and Services, at Sydney University in September 2018.

Muriel Matters was an Australian born suffragist who is most well-known for her work on behalf of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) in the United Kingdom.

Isabel Ramsay was a pioneer Australian female journalist who wrote for both Australian and international newspapers. Isabel began her career with the Sunday Sun and for a period was editor of the journal’s women’s pages. She was also employed by Sydney’s Sunday Times.

Nina Bassat is a Holocaust survivor and former lawyer who was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2004 Australia Day Honours List ‘for service to the community as an executive member of a range of peak Jewish organisations and through the promotion of greater community understanding’. The first woman to be president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, she also served as president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry – the first Holocaust survivor and first woman lawyer to attain that position.