The Australian Women's Register

Lynne Seymour won a gold medal in the Lawn Bowls Mixed B2/B3 Pairs at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

Romola studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1953 to 1955, followed by a year of study at the University of Western Australia where she became a medical artist. Romola held her first solo exhibition at the age of twenty-one, at Perth’s Skinner Galleries, in 1959.

Romola has won the Claude Hotchin Prize and also the Helen Rubinstein Portrait Prize (1960). She is the former director and art consultant of Molongolo Press.

Myrtle Rose White was an author who published a small number of works, including No Roads Go By, which was an account of life at Lake Elder, South Australia.

Myrtle produced two sequels to her debut publication; Beyond the Western Rivers in 1955 and From That Day To This in 1961.

Although she also wrote three novels, only For Those That Love It (1933) was published.

After completing a Master of Arts at Cambridge University, Judith Rodriguez taught English at La Trobe University from 1969 until 1985. In 1986 she was writer-in-residence at Rollins College, Florida. Judith took up a lectureship in writing at Victoria College in 1989 (which became part of Deakin University in 1993) where she continued to teach until her retirement in 2003.

Judith published her first poetry collection in 1962 as part of Four Poets, with the others being David Malouf, Rodney Hall and Don Maynard. In 1973 she published her first solo collection, Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red: and other poems.

Water Life (1976) won the inaugural South Australian Biennial Literature Prize in 1978, while one of Rodriguez’s most highly-regarded collections, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s (1980) received both the Sydney PEN Golden Jubilee Award for Poetry and the Artlook/Shell Literary Award in 1981.

Judith is also known for her poems about women’s experiences; the title poem of Witch Heart (1982), published by the feminist press Sisters, records a visit to Robyn Archer’s play about the often disastrous lives of famous women performers.

In 1994 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia, for services to literature, and also received the FAW Christopher Brennan Award.

Fanny Balbuk was a prominent Noongar woman and an informant on Noongar culture and history to anthropologist Daisy Bates. She is renowned for protesting at Government House about the occupation of her traditional land around Perth.

The information which Fanny Balbuk passed on to Daisy Bates played an important role in the native title claim of 19 September 2006, whereby Justice Wilcox of the Federal Court of Australia found that Noongar people held native title rights over parts of the Perth area.

Susan Jennifer Watkins was a prominent Western Australian photographer. Watkins is said to be the first Western Australian woman to work on photography autonomously. She was highly regarded for her stylish portraiture.

Caroline Andrews came to public notice in 1900, when she took her husband to court in Albany, Western Australia, and won a judicial separation with maintenance for their children. The case was heard under an 1896 act which provided that judicial separation was summarily available to a woman whose husband had been convicted of assault against her. A close reading of the court records suggests that she provoked her husband’s assault in order to win the judicial separation. Her aim was to prevent him from returning to England with the profits of their joint business ventures, without making provision for his children.

Recent biographical projects have tended to focus on leading women whose activities had some impact on politics or society. Caroline Edwards’ work was always within the frame of family, whether in family businesses or in care for her 13 children. The wealth of online resources now available for family history research makes it possible to tell the stories of women like Caroline Edwards whose victories and defeats were mostly private.

Helen Mackay worked at a photography studio in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where she specialised in portraiture.

Jan Kennedy was best known for her photography of children, as well as for photographing society people, and for her cinematic work with Stuart Gore.

Joy Falls was a commercial photographer whose professional work was primarily based in Sydney. Falls was the earliest woman photographer to have worked with colour processing in Australia.

As well as for her photography, Amelia Bunbury was noted for her hand carved furniture and for her work as a horse breeder. Bunbury’s amateur photographs document life on a remote station in Western Australia; her photography includes images of Aboriginal people living in the area that echo the conventions of anthropological photography of the time. She exhibited her work in Melbourne and was published in a number of Western Australian newspapers.

Born into a wealthy, artistically inclined Western Australian family, Constance Birmingham studied painting before training as a photographer In London, with some of the leading photographers there at the time. Birmingham became a respected professional photographer specialising in portraiture, specialising in the photography of mothers and children. She died at the age of 80 in Perth.

Dorothy St John was an amateur photographer who was trained by her father, a street photographer. Her photographs record the everyday life in rural Western Australia.

Jill Crossley is regarded equally as a commercial and an artistic photographer. In addition to freelance advertising photography, Crossley has taken photographs in collaboration with ABC productions, the Craft Council of Victoria, and an Australian archaeological team in Pompeii. Crossley’s style has been described as an interplay of realism and abstraction. Her early camera was a 116 folding camera, and in 1959 she used a Mamiyaflex and a Fujica camera. In recent years Crossley has worked with a small digital camera with a zoom lens.

Mavis Walley was a Ballardong Noongar Indigenous woman who lived in the southern parts of Western Australia. An amateur photographer, Walley documented the lives of the Aboriginal people with whom she lived on a reserve in Goomalling, taking thousands of photographs between the 1950s to 1970s. These images offer a significant and rare perspective within the historical archive – a view of Aboriginal life from an Aboriginal person that is neither anthropological nor ethnographic in style. Walley used a Box Brownie camera.

Established in 1861, the Supreme Court is the highest court in Western Australia, with responsibility for both criminal and civil matters. Additionally, it is the State’s main appeal court. The Supreme Court is divided into two divisions – the General Division and the Court of Appeal. The Court comprises the Chief Justice, 20 Judges, one Master, the Principal Registrar and eight Registrars.

The Court of Appeal Division of the Supreme Court was established on 1 February 2005 following the proclamation of the Acts Amendment (Court of Appeal) Act 2004. The Court hears appeals from decisions of a single judge of the Supreme Court and from judges of the District Court as well as various other courts and tribunals. It also hears criminal appeals against sentences, such as the length of imprisonment, and appeals against conviction.

The Children’s Court of Western Australia deals with offences alleged to have been committed by young people aged 10 to 17 years. The Court began as the Perth Children’s Court under the State Children’s Act 1907 and operated within the City of Perth. Following amendments to the Act, the Court was permitted to sit in the metropolitan area. With the passing of the Children’s Court of WA Act 1988, it became known as the Children’s Court of WA.

The Hon. Michelle Gordon is a justice of the High Court of Australia. She was appointed to the Court in June 2015 while serving as a judge of the Federal Court of Australia, an appointment she had held since April 2007. Gordon attended Perth’s St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School and the Presbyterian Girls’ College. After graduating from the University of Western Australia with bachelor degrees in jurisprudence and laws, she was admitted to practice in 1987. She served articles with Robinson Cox before joining Arthur Robinson & Hedderwicks as a solicitor (1988-1992), later becoming a senior associate (1992). Called to the Victorian Bar in 1992, Gordon took silk in 2003. Her practice – in state and federal courts – was predominantly in the areas of commercial, equity, taxation and general civil matters. Between 1998 and 2007, she served as a sessional member of the Victorian Administrative and Administrative Appeals Tribunal; she was also a member of the Law Council of Australia’s Taxation Committee, Business Law Section (2003-2007). In July 2015 she was appointed a Professorial Fellow of the Law School, University of Melbourne. Gordon is married to the Hon. Kenneth Hayne AC QC, himself a former justice of the High Court. They have a son.

Dr Sue Gordon AM has achieved many ‘firsts’ during her career. In 1986, she was the first Aboriginal person to head a government department in Western Australia, as Commissioner for Aboriginal Planning; in 1988 she was WA’s first Aboriginal magistrate and first full-time children’s court magistrate; and in 1990 she was one of five commissioners appointed by federal Labor minister Gerry Hand to the first board of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).

Gordon has been appointed by state and federal governments, on both sides of politics, to various positions. In 2002 she was appointed by the Premier of Western Australia, Geoff Gallop, to head an inquiry into family violence and child abuse in Western Australian Aboriginal communities. One outcome of the Gordon Inquiry was closure of the controversial Swan Valley Noongar Camp. In 2004, she was appointed Chair of the new National Indigenous Council, an advisory body to the Federal Government, following the winding down of ATSIC. She chaired the Northern Territory Emergency Response Taskforce from June 2007 to June 2008 before retiring from the bench in September 2008.

In retirement, Gordon has remained very active in a variety of organisations. Currently (2016) president of the Graham (Polly) Farmer Foundation and the Police and Community Youth Centres Federation of WA (PCYC) Board, to name only a couple of her appointments, her special long term project is Sister Kate’s Aged Persons Project, supported by the Indigenous Land Corporation and Aboriginal Hostels Limited.

Gordon received the Order of Australia award in 1993 as acknowledgement of her work with Aboriginal people and community affairs. In 2003 she received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters (Hon. DLitt) from the University of Western Australia, the same year she was awarded the ‘Centenary Medal’ for service to the community, particularly the Aboriginal community.

Sue Gordon was interviewed by Nikki Henningham for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Oral History Project. For details of the interview see the National Library of AustraliaCATALOGUE RECORD.

Dr Hannah McGlade is a Nyungar human rights lawyer and academic who has published widely on many aspects of Aboriginal legal issues, especially those affecting the lives of Aboriginal women and children. Winner of the West Australian NAIDOC Student of the Year Award in 1996 (she followed this up in 2008 with the NAIDOC Outstanding Achievement Award), she was the first Aboriginal person to graduate from Murdoch University; she was also the first Aboriginal woman to graduate from a Western Australian law school when she graduated LLB (Murdoch) in 1995. She was admitted as a Solicitor and Barrister of the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 1996. In July 2016 she was appointed as a Senior Indigenous Research Fellow at Curtin University. In 2016, she has been a Senior Indigenous Fellow at the United Nations Office of the High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, attending and assisting The Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP).

As well as publishing prolifically, McGlade has served on many tribunals, boards and committees throughout her career, including the board of the Healing Foundation, a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisation with a focus on building culturally strong, community led healing solutions to Australian Indigenous people by reconnecting them back to their culture, philosophy and spirit. She played a leading role in the return of historically significant lands, being the former Sister Kate’s Children Home, where she had been a child resident, to the local community and also in the establishment of the Noongar Radio station serving as the Managing Director of Noongar Media Enterprises in 2008.

Her tireless advocacy on behalf of Aboriginal women led in 2013 to the establishment of the first ever service in Perth for Aboriginal victims of domestic violence. Named Djinda, a Noongar word meaning stars and in memory of the women whose lives have been lost to violence, the service is delivered in conjunction with the Women’s Law Centre and provides support to victims of family violence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities of metropolitan Perth. In 2016 McGlade remain an adviser to the service.

Hannah McGlade was interviewed by Nikki Henningham for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Oral History Project. For details of the interview see the National Library of AustraliaCATALOGUE RECORD.

Jean Malor has the distinction of having been the first female student to graduate from the University of Sydney with first-class honours in Law. Although admitted to practise in 1937, Malor rejected going to the New South Wales Bar in favour of a career with the Law Book Company of Australasia Pty Ltd. (This may have been because her brother, Ronald, soon to be killed in the Second World War, was already a promising junior at the Bar). With the outbreak of war, she became honorary secretary of the Law School Comforts Fund. Malor remained at the Law Book Company until she was 60, rising to become senior legal advisor and senior editor and highly regarded for her knowledge and proficiency. In 1973, she was appointed chairwoman of the Commonwealth Computerisation of Legal Data Committee, one of a number of committees and professional organisations to which she gave much of her time and expertise over many years. Retained by Butterworths Pty Ltd in 1977, she was editor responsible for The Australian Current Law Digest and Commonwealth Statutes Annotations. She continued to work until she was in her 80s. On 3 June 1978, Malor’s prodigious legal knowledge and lifelong dedication as an editor were recognised when she was awarded an OBE for her services to the legal profession.

Auvergne Doherty, from Western Australia, was one of the first nine women admitted as barristers in England. She was admitted to Middle Temple in 1920 and called in 1922. Doherty did not practise and returned to Australia where she became the manager of a cattle station; her father was a wool broker.

Rabia Siddique is a criminal and human rights lawyer, a retired British Army officer, a former terrorism and war crimes prosecutor, a professional speaker, trainer, MC, facilitator and published author.

In 2006 she was awarded a Queen’s commendation for her human rights work in Iraq and in 2009 was the Runner Up for Australian Woman of the Year UK.

More recently Rabia was named as one of the 2014 Telstra Business Women’s Award Finalists and one of the 100 most influential women in Australia by Westpac and the Australian Financial Review. She was also announced as a finalist for the 2016 Australian of the Year Awards.

After starting life as a criminal defence lawyer and youngest ever Federal prosecutor in Western Australia, Rabia moved to the UK in 1998 where she eventually commissioned as a Legal Officer in the British Army in 2001.

In a terrifying ordeal that garnered worldwide attention, along with a male colleague, Rabia assisted with the rescue of two Special Forces soldiers from Iraqi insurgents in Basra. Her male colleague received a Military Cross for outstanding bravery, while Rabia’s part in the incident was covered up by the British Army and Government. In a fight for justice she brought a landmark discrimination case against the UK Ministry of Defence, and won. She went on to become a Crown Advocate in the British Counter Terrorism Division, which saw her prosecuting Al Qaeda terrorists, hate crimes and advising on war crimes prosecutions in The Hague.

Please click on ‘Details’ below to read an essay written by Rabia Siddique for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project.

In 1933, probably for the first time in the history of Australian Criminal Court practice, Patricia Hackett became the first woman barrister to appear in the defence of a man charged with murder.

After a short career in the law, Hackett went on to open theatre company, the Torch. She went on to appear in, direct and produce many plays in Adelaide.