The Australian Women's Register

Doris McKellar was an amateur photographer based in Melbourne, whose photographs documented university life and the social activities of a wealthy professional family in Melbourne in the first half of the twentieth century. Using a Kodak No.3A Folding Pocket camera, she captured many aspects of life at the University of Melbourne. The University of Melbourne holds McKellar’s archive.

Ester Baylis was a prize-winning Pictorialist photographer and an active member of the Adelaide Camera Club. Baylis’ focus was primarily architectural photography, having previously trained in architecture. Baylis initially used a Box Brownie camera, and with prize money purchased a Thornton Pickard enlarger and an Adams Minex camera. Baylis was the first woman photographer to be included in an Australian public collection.

Hedda Morrison was an ethnographic photographer who worked extensively in China, Borneo and later Australia, where she settled in 1967. She was influenced by Neue Sachlichkeit, or the ‘new realist’ style. Morrison’s photographs were widely disseminated in books, including the seminal Sarawak: Vanishing World, and Travels of a Photographer. Morrison was a resourceful photographer, using two car batteries to power her portable enlarger while without power for six years in Sarawak, and storing her negatives in an airtight chest using silica gel as a drying agent to overcome the perils of a tropical climate. Morrison worked largely in black and white, except for in the early 1950s.

Joyce Waterhouse was an amateur Pictorialist landscape photographer. She travelled widely, taking photographs in India, Indonesia, New Zealand and North Africa, as well as of locations throughout Australia. She enlarged and printed her own photographs and was able to support herself financially with the sale of her travel photography. She exhibited her work in South Australia and Victoria.

Laura Praeger was one of only two professional women photographers working in Sydney in the 1890s. Praeger opened four studios between 1890 and 1895. Praeger was known for her portraits of Sydney’s wealthy elite, as well as for her landscape and architectural photography. Praeger’s portraits were known for their striking side lighting and the characteristic ease of their subjects. She produced Bromide prints and worked on large-scale photographs at every processing stage.

Elizabeth Louisa How is the earliest known Australian female amateur photographer. The subjects of How’s portrait photography include members of her merchant family, friends, staff, and visitors to the How’s family residence at ‘Woodlands,’ North Sydney. How’s landscape photography recorded views of Sydney Cove, Government House, Campbell’s Wharf, and views around her house and garden. How’s salted paper prints were developed using half-plate glass negatives.

Margaret Michaelis was a professional photographer who specialised in documentary photography, portraiture and dance photography. She trained in Vienna before living in Prague, Berlin and then Spain, associating with anarchic and other left-wing groups. Many of Michaelis’ European photographs documented everyday life in order to encourage progressive social critique. Michaelis fled Europe on the cusp of WW2 and eventually made her home in Sydney, Australia. Her photography in Australia was mainly studio portraiture, with a clientele of Jewish émigrés and members of the art community. Michaelis made use of natural light and natural poses in order to explore the psychological states of her subjects.

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.

Emily O’Shannessy was a professional portrait photographer during the mid to late nineteenth century in Melbourne. In 1864 she went into partnership with Henry Johnstone, regarded as Melbourne’s best photographer of the time. The Johnstone and O’Shannessy Studio emphasised realism rather than artistic manipulation. Their commissions ranged from inexpensive ‘cartes-de-visite’ portraits to large-scale photographs, including one of Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. The studio specialised in coloured, plain, and mezzotint portraits. O’Shannessey’s ‘Cartes-de-visite’ photographs took the form of albumen prints mounted on cards.

Rose Simmonds was a Brisbane-based photographer who was the only female member of the Queensland Camera Club. She consistently won prizes in competitions run by the club and by the Australasian Photo-Review. She worked in the Pictorialist style from 1926-1932, using the bromoil process to achieve romantic effects, and in the Modernist style from 1933-1940.

Mina Moore was a successful photographer who worked initially in New Zealand and then in Sydney and Melbourne. Together with her sister the she specialised in portraits of prominent people and artists, including society/celebrity portraits, with some wedding and children’s portraits. Mina Moore later set up her own studio in Melbourne and utilised unconventional backdrops, such as untreated hessian.

Ada Driver was one of the most successful woman photographers working in Brisbane in the early twentieth century. She owned her own studio, producing high-class portraiture and illustrative work. Driver used the latest processes, adding artistic colouring to produce soft-toned photographs, as well as producing images for magic lantern slides and stereoscopic photographs.

Bernice Agar was a highly successful portrait photographer based in Sydney, whose work featured prominent Australian society figures. Agar was also an early fashion photographer. Widely published, her glamourous works were characterised by a strong preference for artificial light and crisp outlines. Her technique favoured strong frontal lighting. Few of her society portraits survive today.

Dr Helen Watchirs is President of the Australian Capital Territory Human Rights Commission, and Human Rights Commissioner since 2004. In 2010 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for service to the advancement of human rights particularly as the Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner of the Australian Capital Territory.

Nicole Watson is a member of the Birri-Gubba People and the Yugambeh language group. Nicole has a bachelor of laws from the University of Queensland and a master of laws from the Queensland, University of Technology.

Nicole was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1999. She has worked for Legal Aid Queensland, the National Native Title Tribunal and the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. Nicole is also a former editor of the Indigenous Law Bulletin.

Nicole’s first crime fiction novel, The Boundary, was released nationally in June 2011. Nicole is a lawyer and a researcher at Jumbanna Indigenous Learning Centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

Dominica Whelan was a Judge of the Federal Circuit Court, former Commissioner of Fair Work Australia, and former industrial officer, with lifelong commitments to feminism, labour law and equitable access to justice.

Ms Jeanette Sparks was admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1975.

Gae Pincus completed an LLB at the Australian National University. She went on to work in the Office of Women’s Affairs; as an Associate for High Court Justice Lionel Murphy in 1982. In 1983 she returned to the Public Service to work in a legislative capacity dealing with law reform within various government departments. She went on to establish and chair the National Food Authority before working for the international body Food and Agricultural Organization.

Jacqui Payne was the first Indigenous woman to be admitted as a solicitor in Queensland. She worked in criminal defence for fourteen years: for the ATSI Corporation Legal Service and later in her own successful private practice. Jacqui was appointed as a Magistrate in 1999 and has presided in both the Brisbane Magistrates Court and the Murri Court.

The late Lillian Lieder QC and Betty King QC (later Justice King, Supreme Court of Victoria) joined the Bar in the mid-1970s. In 1992, they were the first women barristers practising in criminal law to take silk.

Kate Jenkins was appointed to the position of Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner in February 2016 while she was serving as Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights commissioner, a position she had held since 2013. Jenkins was educated at Tintern Grammar and Geelong Grammar School, followed by the University of Melbourne where she studied arts and law and graduated with double honours degrees. Between 1993 and 2013, Jenkins was partner at Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills); her areas of specialisation included equal opportunity and diversity. She is a current board member (and former director) of the Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Carlton Football Club; for many years she also served on the board of Berry Street Victoria, a charity which helps disadvantaged children, young people and families. In her role as Victorian Equal Opportunity commissioner, Jenkins conducted an independent review into sex discrimination and sexual harassment, including predatory behaviour, among Victoria Police personnel. She also convened a Victorian chapter of the ‘Male Champions of Change’ group, an initiative of former Federal Sex Discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick which aims to advance gender equality and increase opportunities for women in the workplace by enlisting the assistance of men in positions of power in the workplace. In 2015, Jenkins was named in the Australian Financial Review and Westpac 100 Women of Influence Awards.

Marcelle Allayne Kiddle completed two years of medicine at the University of Melbourne before her career was interrupted by marriage.

After a stint as a dancer, including a contract with the BBC, she enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE) and graduated LLB (Hons) in 1956. Allayne or “Kiddle” (as she preferred to be known) read for the English Bar and was admitted to the Middle Temple in London, before returning to Melbourne. After signing the Bar Roll in 1959 (the sixth woman to do so), she read with Bill Kaye. She had hoped for a broad practice, but specialised in divorce.

During the 1960s, she returned to LSE to complete a Master of Laws. She appeared with Philip Opas QC at London’s Privy Council during the Ronald Ryan trial in the late 1960s.

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.

Barbara Cotterell was a Magistrate in the Victorian Magistrates Court for eighteen years before her appointment as an Acting Judge of the County Court in 2008.

Fay Daly signed the Victorian Bar Roll in 1970 and Eva Selig was her pupil. She was a stenographer before coming to the bar.

Gay Clarke (then Walker) was crowned Miss Queensland then Miss Australia in 1972. She went on to study law and was admitted as a Barrister of the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1982. She specialised in the area of Alternative Dispute Resolution and was a legal academic at the Queensland University of Technology for 20 years.

Rowena Armstrong AO QC is a consultant at Norton Rose Fulbright and focuses on government and parliamentary matters, interpretation of legislation and drafting of subordinate legislation. Before joining the Firm as a consultant, she was Chief Parliamentary Counsel for Victoria for 15 years.