The Australian Women's Register

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.

Lillian Holt was a member of the first generation of Aboriginal high school and university graduates and had an impressive track record of full time work, study and concomitant achievements. She traversed new terrain in order that younger ones might follow.

Lillian worked or studied full time since the age of 17. She worked as an educator in Aboriginal affairs and education “25 hours a day, eight days a week”! She was appointed as a University of Melbourne Fellow in 2003 -2005, prior to that she was Director of the Centre for Indigenous Education, University of Melbourne.

Lillian Holt passed away on her birthday in February 2020, at the age of 75.

Dilys Budd, the daughter of Mary Winter and an unnamed father, was placed in foster care in infancy and at the age of five was sent to the Catholic orphanage, Nazareth House, Cardiff. In 1947 she volunteered to migrate to Australia, arriving  in Fremantle with a group of other child migrants on the ship Asturias in September 1947. She was placed in St Joseph’s Girls Orphanage, Subiaco, run by the Sisters of Mercy, where she remained until she was 16 and sent out to work. She remained under the supervision of the Catholic Welfare authorities in Perth until she was 21.

Born in India to an Irish soldier, Eliza Tracey immigrated to Western Australia in 1859, where she was known to the citizens of Perth as a soap box orator. She spoke out against the legal profession, and her life was marked by constant dealings with the law.

Elsa was a famous soprano and was well-known in Australia, Europe and America. She gave herself the professional name Elsa Stralia in honour of her country of birth, Australia.

Kathleen O’Connor was born in New Zealand in 1876 to Charles Yelverton O’Connor and his wife Susan Laetitia. She was educated at Marsden School, Wellington, then taught privately after 1891, when the family moved to Perth, Western Australia, in order for her father to take up a post as a government civil engineer. Kathleen O’Connor then studied art at Perth Technical College, and later in London and Paris, where she relocated in 1910. There she attended night classes and immersed herself fully in the artistic and cultural milieu that Paris offered, attending galleries and lectures, and writing about her experiences for Perth newspapers.

O’Connor began exhibiting extensively – in the Salons d’ Automne (1911-32), des Independants, and de la Société des Artistes Français. She moved to London in 1914 and exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1915 and the National Portrait Society in 1916, before returning to Paris. In the early 1920s she began working in the decorative arts and fashion, as well as interior design and fabric painting. In 1926 she returned to Australia, working briefly for David Jones and Grace Brothers department stores, producing hand-painted plates and fabrics. After a solo exhibition in Perth, O’Connor returned to France in 1927. She kept working, and exhibiting regularly – in 1934 at la Société Internationale des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, and Exposition des Femmes Artistes d’Europe, Musée du Jeu de Paume and Galéries J. Allard in 1937. She left Paris in 1940 just as the Germans were arriving, and spent the remainder of World War II in Britain.

Returning to Paris after the War, she found her Paris studio expropriated. After exhibiting in Nice in 1948, she returned to Fremantle with 200 pictures, which were impounded, subject to 20% import tax. She was forced to destroy 150 pictures and pay the tax on the rest, despite being an Australian citizen and not liable. She exhibited in 1948 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and at Perth’s Claude Hotchin Gallery in 1949 and 1950. After another trip to Paris, she settled reluctantly in Western Australia in 1955. O’Connor won the Western Australian section of the Perth Prize Competition in 1958 and the B.P. prize, Commonwealth Games art competition in 1962, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia held a retrospective in 1967. O’Connor died in Perth in 1968. Since she had refused to be buried there, her ashes were scattered in the sea.

Miriam Stannage was born in Northam, Western Australia, in 1939, and was a painter, photographer and printmaker. She travelled to Europe and the USA in the early 1960s, returning to Perth influenced by ‘new developments in geographical abstraction’. Stannage studied with William Boissevain 1963-64, then with Henry Froudist 1965-68, as well as at Claremont Technical College, Perth. Extensive travels in the Australian bush are evident in her work, which also often uses text in order enhance her particular form of social commentary. Stannage’s first solo exhibition was in 1969 at the Old Fire Station Gallery, Perth, and she was exhibited in major galleries across Australia. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Her final exhibition ‘Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 – 2016’ was underway at the University of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the time of her death.

Carol Rudyard was born in England in 1922. She left Sheffield in 1947 with her husband, a doctor employed by the British Government, and lived on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (British Colonies in the Pacific). They arrived in Western Australia in 1950, and lived in Mullewa and Southern Cross, before settling in the Perth suburb of Leederville in 1956.

At this point Rudyard began designing textiles, quickly achieving both commercial and artistic successes. She also painted watercolours, and won the Festival of Perth Poster Prize for an untitled work in 1964. Rudyard enrolled in an Associate Diploma in Art at the West Australian Institute of Technology from 1968-1970. She won the Mundaring Art Prize in 1970, and began teaching at the West Australian Institute of Technology in 1971.

Rudyard travelled to Europe in 1972 and held her first solo exhibition in 1973. After completing a postgraduate diploma in visual art at Curtin University in 1981, Rudyard began to abandon painting for audio visual mediums, particularly video installations. Her ‘Langco’ (1986) is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Rudyard was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Curtin University in 1999, and made a Living Treasure of the State of Western Australia in 2004.

Lyn Johnson, in partnership with her husband Rob, was a dairy farmer in Gippsland in Victoria. Together they planned and led study tours for dairy farmers to the USA, Canada, the UK and Europe, starting the Tarago River Cheese Company on their return. The successful organisation and activism of American rural women inspired. Lyn’s own active commitment to the movement, and to women at the grass roots level in particular. Her work to have women’s role in agriculture acknowledged, and their voice heard, has included involvement in the organisation of the First International Women in Agriculture Conference, and the Women on Farms Gatherings.

Dorothy Dunn lost her husband in the 1979 Streatham, Victoria bushfires. She decided to continue to run their farm on her own, and quickly realised that farming in Australia was seen as a male profession. The contribution of women was invisible, and they had little influence in decision making at any level. In 1992 she attended a meeting of similar minded women in Ballarat, Victoria, convened by Liz Hogan, a Project Officer with the Rural Women’s Network. Out of the meeting, the peak body Australian Women in Agriculture was formed, with Dorothy as inaugural president. Her presidency and long history of work as an advocate for the role of women in agricultural policy making was recognised with an AO in 1999.

Joy Chambers was born in the Strathbogie ranges, into a faming family, and married a central Victorian farmer. After her retirement from teaching, and acting on her belief that the important role women played in agriculture should be recognised and encouraged, she took an active role in what became known collectively as the Women in Agriculture movement. She became a member of FarmAdvance, and was on the steering committee of the 1994 First International Women in Agriculture conference, working on publicity. After the conference, Joy was a founding member of the Central Victorian Women in Agriculture Group (CVWiA). She organised the workshops for the 1997 Bendigo Women on Farms Gathering, which the CVWiA organised, and instigated the Knickers Fund, which the group administered. Joy was active in the anti-GM (genetically modified foods) lobby, and the broadacre family farm has been granted organic accreditation.. 

After an early career in teaching, Laurene Dietrich moved into the area of community development, working on a number of projects which reflected her commitment to social justice and equity, particularly in regard to rural women. She was the first equal opportunity officer at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University, and was employed to work on the organisation of the First International Women in Agriculture Conference

Alice Rosman was an editor, journalist, novelist and writer. She is best known for her work as a novelist, under the pseudonym Alice Grant Rosman. She achieved success particularly in the United States of America and Canada during the 1920s and 1930s, where she was a best-seller for four consecutive years.

Grace Carmichael worked as a nurse and poet, and during her lifetime contributed many poems to newspapers and published her own book of verse in 1895. Grace is best known by her pen name Jennings Carmichael. The Australian poets Henry Lawson and Henry Tate have both written poems about her.

Zoe McHenry was the great -grand-daughter of Brunswick, Victoria, pioneers Luisa and Thomas Wilkinson, and the grand-daughter of Victoria’s first woman pharmacist, Sarah George. A pianist and music teacher, Zoe Henry was employed in 1943, its inaugural year, by the ABC’s  Kindergarten of the Air, as a pianist.  Recognising the dearth of appropriate music for children’s activities,  Zoe  began to compose for the program.  She continued to do so after leaving the program in order to care for her father, who was ill.  She published several books of music and songs for kindergarten,  travelling to London in 1962 to record.  Her music is still recorded and used today, including on the ABC’s ‘Play School’.

Marie Wood graduated in Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1967, taught at McKinnon High School, Melbourne, and trained briefly as a graduate nurse at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. In late 1969 she joined the New South Wales Department of Child and Welfare Services as a teacher at Bidura, Glebe, a temporary receiving home for children removed from their families before allocation to foster homes or other institutions. From February to July 1970, she taught girls convicted of ‘exposure to moral danger’ and similar offences at the Department’s Ormond Training School for Girls, Thornleigh, Sydney.

Elyne Mitchell is an Australian writer who is best known for the Silver Brumby series of children’s books.

Sarah Ann George was the daughter of Thomas Wilkinson, the ‘father of Brunswick’, and Louisa Wilkinson. In 1856, at Geelong, at the age of seventeen, Sarah Ann married Joseph George, a pharmacist. Joseph had established a pharmacy in Sydney Road, Brunswick, in 1853, and Sarah worked with him as his assistant, eventually becoming registered as a pharmacist herself. She is believed to have been Victoria’s first lady pharmacist, and one of the first to be registered. Sarah first registered in 1882, stating that she had been in business in Victoria before the required registration date of 1876. At this time, she was 43 years old, and her nine surviving children ranged in age from five to twenty-five years. Like her husband, who was a member of council and Mayor of Brunswick from 1884-5, Sarah was active in the Church of England, and interested herself in philanthropic work. She was President of the Boarding Out Committee in Brunswick for thirty years, and also of the Australian Women’s National League both in Brunswick, and in Portland, where she instigated the branch.

Hilda Dow (nee Grey) was the daughter of police magistrate Charles Grey, and sister of Royal Melbourne Hospital Lady Superintendent Helene Grey, OBE. Hilda Grey became a student of the Victorian College of Pharmacy in 1919. In 1929, she was working at Poynton’s pharmacy in Morwell, when she purchased the pharmacy at Chiltern in Victoria. She was elected to the Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria as a member in 1930 Hilda apprenticed her husband, Roy Dow, and the two ran the pharmacy in Chiltern until 1968, when they closed the doors. In 1988 Mrs Dow donated the pharmacy, which had been operating on the site since 1859, intact to the National Trust, and it is now a museum. Hilda Dow was a foundation member of the North East branch of the National Trust, a member of the hospital committee and board, of the Infant Welfare Centre and the Red Cross, and a member and office bearer of the Chiltern Branch of the County Women’s Association.

Dianne Airey (Liberal Party of Australia) was a member of the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Western Australia between February and May 1993, when Parliament did not sit. She was not sworn in.

Valma Ferguson (Australian Labor Party) was a Member of the Legislative Council of Western Australia between 1993 and 1997.

Margaret Annie Bignell was the seventh daughter of William and Elizabeth Blyth, of Hobart. She became Victoria’s first registered female pharmacist, and one of the first women pharmacists to conduct her own business in the state, carrying on her husband’s pharmacy in Lygon Street, Carlton, after his death in 1897. She was known for apprenticing women, and was an activist for the recognition of women pharmacists. Two of her daughters entered the profession. She was a subscribing member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria, and a founding member of the Women Pharmacists’ Association, formed in 1905 to promote the interests of women pharmacists.

Annie Hitchcock, daughter of Wesleyan John Lowe, and wife and mother of Geelong businessmen and philanthropists George and Howard Hitchcock respectively, was a prominent, successful, and influential philanthropist and community worker in her own right.  She was Victoria’s foremost Methodist fundraiser, and led the Geelong and Western District Ladies’ Benevolent Association for forty one years, a period when it  became the leading organisation of its kind in regional Victoria.

Caroline Elizabeth Newcomb ran the early Port Phillip properties Boronggoop, then Coryule, in partnership with Ann Drysdale, from 1840 until after Ann’s death in 1853.  In 1855 she founded and became the inaugural president of the Geelong Ladies Benevolent Society, now Geelong and Western District Ladies Benevolent Society. In 1861 she married the Rev James Dodgson.

Anne Drysdale was a farmer in her own right in Scotland when she migrated to Australia for health reasons. She arrived in Melbourne on the Indus in 1840, and travelled down to Geelong, where she met her future partner Caroline Newcomb at the residence of Dr Alexander Thomson. In October 1840, the two women took up a 10,000 acre lease on the Barwon, known as ‘Boronggoop’, later extending it to Leep Leep. Their sheep run was a success, and in 1843 they obtained the Coryule run at Indented Head, purchasing the freehold in 1848, and subsequently disposing of Boronggoop. Anne Drysdale died at Coryule in 1853, aged 60. The township of Drysdale in Victoria is named for her

Clare Bishop graduated in catering and hotel management before joining the Department of Immigration in Canberra in 1970, serving in London 1971-74, Edinburgh in 1975-77 and New York 1977-80. After helping organize the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Melbourne in 1981, she was sent to Cologne to process refugees from Poland, and to the Philippines to process spouse applications. From 1984-86 she was First Secretary in the Australian Embassy in Vietnam, then Consul in New York to 1990. From 1993 until her retirement in 2000, she was responsible for overhauling all the Department’s forms.