The Australian Women's Register

Leah Cameron is a Palawa woman from Tasmania and the Principal Solicitor and owner of Marrawah Law, a Supply Nation certified Indigenous legal practice. Her primary areas of practice are native title, cultural heritage, future acts and commercial law.

Louise Vardanega PSM is Chief Operating Officer of the Australian Government Solicitor (AGS), a role she has held since 2009.

Louise joined AGS (then known as the Deputy Crown Solicitor’s Office) in 1975, and with the exception of 6 months attending legal workshop and 3 months with the Justice and Family Law Division of the Attorney General’s Department in 1977, has been with AGS throughout her career.

Go to ‘Details’ below to read an essay written by Andrew Sikorski about Louise Vardanega for the Trailblazing Women and the Law Project.

Dr Rosalie Balkin is former Director of Legal Affairs and External Relations at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) (London). While she held this position she also served as Secretary of IMO’s Legal Committee and for a time also as IMO’s Assistant Secretary-General.

She was previously Assistant Secretary in the Office of International Law at the Federal Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra, Australia. She has held academic posts, including at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa; at the University of Melbourne and University of New South Wales in Australia; and at the University of Cambridge, UK.

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.

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.

Anna Rakoczy left a promising legal career behind to establish a business in the San Francisco area with ex-medical doctor, Chloe Chen. ‘Homemade’, a cooking program which focuses on making healthy food to lose weight, was launched in August 2013. It germinated as a project the pair worked on in a Stanford Business School class. After the class had ended, they continued developing the project.

Rakoczy originally travelled to the United States, courtesy of a Fulbright Scholarship she received in 2011 in order to complete a Master of Laws at Berkeley University. Her thesis made recommendations for enabling Aboriginal Australians to achieve improved economic participations levels, in terms of income and employment outcomes.

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 1989, Catherine Pirie became the first woman of Torres Strait Islander descent to be admitted as a solicitor. She achieved another first in 2000 when she was appointed Magistrate; once again, the first Torres Strait Islander to hold the position.

Her Honour Sarah Bradley was a judge of the District Court of Queensland, Australia since 25 March 1999. She was also a judge of the Children’s Court of Queensland. Described as ‘an inspiration to law students and young professionals’, she is known to be unstintingly generous with her time.

Her Honour’s approach to incarceration has been publicly scrutinised and criticised as she seeks alternatives to jail terms, believing that ‘imprisonment as the ultimate deterrent is a myth’.

Her Honour was the first Magistrate in Queensland to be appointed as a Judge of the District Court of Queensland.

Her Honour retired from the courts on 30 June 2016. On 1 July 2016 she took up an appointment as an adjunct professor at Griffith Criminology Institute.

She was honured with an Order of Australia (AO) on Australia Day in 2020 for distinguished service to the law, and to the judiciary, to women in the legal profession, and to the community.

Justice Michelle May is a judge of the Family Court of Australia, Appeal Division and President of the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration.

Justice May has managed to combine her stellar career in the law with raising three (triplets) children.

Mary Cass, who has been described as “a brilliant lawyer” who was “fit for high judicial office” , was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 18 October 1963. Earlier resident at Sancta Sofia College while studying full-time at the University of Sydney, she had graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1954. After serving articles with Beswick Heydon & Lochrin, she was admitted as a solicitor on 29 July 1955. She was in practice until being called to the Bar, where she demonstrated skill in all jurisdictions but came to specialise mainly in equity, as well as landlord and tenant. It has been said that she was nicknamed ‘The Winner’ because of the regular victories she achieved for her clients. Right up until her death in 1992, she had chambers at Wardell.

The third woman to actively practise at the New South Wales Bar, Ann Bernard (nee Davis) had a number of uncommon strings to her bow, including being a pilot and prize-winning shooter. Married to Lionel Bernard, a returned First World War serviceman, she lived in Fiji in the 1920s and ’30s and worked as a law clerk to the then governor, Sir Henry Scott. In 1938, she went to Oxford to study law. Considered to have a first-rate legal mind, on 25 June 1941 she was admitted to Middle Temple amid scenes of great destruction wrought by recent Second World War bombings of the Temple’s buildings. On 29 October 1941, she was called to the New South Wales Bar, whereupon she proceeded to be involved in some of that decade’s high-profile cases, including acting for suffragette, Adela Pankhurst Walsh. Bernard returned to Fiji in 1954, adopted a daughter, Angela, and established a wide practice for which she gained a reputation for taking on unpopular causes. In 1973, following her retirement to Concord, Sydney in the 1960s, she was tragically killed by a car while out walking one afternoon. Bernard’s portrait by Mary Edwards hangs in the New South Wales Bar Association’s Common Room.

Margarita Adam (nee Teddo) graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1966 and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 18 March of that year. She had not been at the Bar long before she took up legal reporting, for which she adopted the use of a pseudonym derived from her initial and surname. Adam, whose reports appeared in the New South Wales Reports, the Argus Reports and the Australian Law Reports, remained on the practising barristers’ list until the mid-1970s. She obtained work with Butterworths as an editor and indexer.

Pauline St George Barnes was the fifth woman to be appointed as a commissioner of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, a position she held from 1 July 1978 until her retirement in 1985. Although she had completed the Barristers’ Admission Board course, she did not practise as a barrister after she was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. Instead, she worked as an industrial officer in local government and shire organisations before becoming a research officer with the Association of Professional Engineers (Aust.). An involved member of the Women Lawyers’ Association of New South Wales, she was honorary secretary and also convenor of the Association’s Research Committee.

One of nine children of prominent NSW Labour politician Gregory McGirr, Beatrice Bateman was the moving force behind the establishment of the Women Lawyers’ Association of New South Wales in 1952. She attended the Loreto Convent in Kirribilli and graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938, a Master of Arts in 1940 (study undertaken after she was prevented by the Law School from sitting her final exams due to being pregnant with her first child), and finally, a Bachelor of Laws in 1942. Bateman was admitted to practise on 31 July 1942, but being mother to seven meant that her practice was intermittent. She was an active fundraiser for a host of causes and represented Australia at the first International Congress of the World Movement of Mothers in 1950. During her final two years of practice at the Bar, she succeeded in defending a woman charged with murder. Bateman died suddenly in 1960 at the age of 43 following an asthma attack. Her daughter, Beatrice Gray (nee Bateman), was admitted to the Bar on 9 February 1968. A portrait of Beatrice Bateman by Sylvia Davis was a finalist in the 1942 Archibald Prize.

Mary Helene Laurent Bleechmore (nee Williams) graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney in 1938. She then embarked upon a Bachelor of Laws degree which she interrupted to marry Sidney John Bleechmore, a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical and Electrical) graduate, on 21 December 1940. She graduated in 1941 and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 30 May 1941. For a short time she worked in the Office of the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor. Her husband a member of the Permanent Army, Bleechmore accompanied him to the places where he was stationed and worked when she could. After the Second World War, she lived in Japan where the then Lt-Col Sidney Bleechmore, commanding officer of the Royal Engineers (and mentioned in despatches in 1946), was serving with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF). Two of the couple’s three children were born in Japan: the birth of their second son, Ralph, on 21 September 1947 in Eta Jima, was significant for being the first birth of an Australian in the BCOF area. Their daughter, Antonia (Toni) Turnbull, born in Kure on 31 March 1950, became a doctor and activist. Their eldest child, John, was a noted defamation specialist at the Victorian Bar.

Nora Winifred Bonney, daughter of Mr Justice Reginald Schofield Bonney of the New South Wales Supreme Court and Lillian Bonney (nee Butler), attended Abbotsleigh Church of England School for Girls and then studied as an evening student at the University of Sydney where she excelled in History and French. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1945. In 1946, she was secretary of the Kuring-gai branch of the Australian Communist Party. She was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on Friday 8 February 1957 but did not practise as a barrister.

Lesley Roscoe Nield (later Bowles) graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1938. After undertaking articles with H. (Halse) Millett and R. C. (Robert Campbell) Cathels of Sydney, she was admitted as a solicitor on 21 November 1941. On 12 February 1954, the now Lesley Roscoe Bowles was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. She did not, however, practise as a barrister. For a number of years until his retirement in 1962, Bowles was clerk to her father, Mr Justice John Roscoe Nield of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. In 1969, Bowles graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Laws. She practised with the firms Greenwell & York and Hickson, Lakeman & Holcombe.

Lilian Jessie Craft (nee Goldsmith) has the distinction of having been the first woman in New South Wales to become a solicitor by undertaking the Solicitors’ Admission Board course. She was also the first woman solicitor to practise in the regional New South Wales city of Goulburn, when she was managing clerk to the city’s firm of Ian R. Duffy and Galland in 1947. The then Goldsmith attended Fort Street Girls’ High School. On 1 November 1933 a notice in The Sydney Morning Herald announced that she had been serving articles of clerkship with Keith Ewington Whitehead Solicitor of Sydney and of her intention to apply to be admitted as an attorney-solicitor and proctor. She was admitted on 17 November 1933. In 1938, she travelled overseas for a year. When she returned, she set up her own practice and also took on responsibility for the practice of Horace Archy Teakle, who went into the army. (She herself joined the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (W.R.A.N.S.), on 10 July 1945). In the late 1940s Goldsmith worked in the State Crown Solicitor’s Office. She married in 1949. With her retirement from practice as a solicitor in 1959, Craft transferred to the Bar roll as a non-practising barrister. She was appointed permanent convenor of the regular meetings of the informal Society of Women Lawyers, the forerunner to the Women Lawyers’ Association of New South Wales.

It was not until later in life that Daune Delano Davis made the decision to become a barrister. Furthermore, although her maternal uncle, John Roscoe Nield, had been a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and her cousin, Lesley Roscoe Nield (later Bowles), was a solicitor, it is Mary Gaudron, later the first woman judge to sit on the bench of the High Court of Australia, who is credited with having influenced Davis to go to the Bar. After leaving school, Davis attended East Sydney Technical College (now the National Arts School) and then embarked upon Arts at the University of Sydney. She did well but did not graduate with a degree. Turning to the law as an intellectual pursuit when her marriage failed, and with Gaudron’s assurance that she had what it took, she obtained the qualification of Diploma in Law through the Barristers’ Admission Board and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 14 June 1974. She went on to practise, predominantly in family law, using the Women Lawyers’ Room at Frederick Jordan Chambers until she succeeded in being able to have her own. Notable among her cases was what may have been the last breach of promise suit. In the mid-eighties she suffered a broken leg which restricted her labours. Davis later retired due to ill health.

Anna Frenkel (nee Ginsbourg) was born in Samara, in the Pale of Settlement for Jews in Czarist Russia. Owing to political unrest following the Bolshevik Revolution, Frenkel and her parents resettled in Harbin in Manchuria. It was here that Frenkel attended high school and also met Jacob Nahum Frenkel, a graduate in civil engineering and the man she would later marry. She earned a law degree from the Law School established in Harbin by expatriate Russian academics before settling in Shanghai to work as a journalist. Among her publications during this time was Shanghai, City of Refuge; she also co-edited a Russian-Jewish publication: Our Life. After marrying Frenkel in 1938, in 1939 she gave birth to a son: Robert; following the war, she also had a daughter: Emily. Frenkel was admitted to the Bar of New South Wales on 7 February 1964. She was a member of the Research Committee of the Women Lawyers’ Association of New South Wales. At the Bar, she specialised in family law, an area in which she became an authority. In 1971, her book entitled Your Family and the Law was published. Frenkel was awarded a PhD by Macquarie University for a thesis on Soviet Jewish emigration to Australia. In 1987 she travelled to Shanghai to participate in a short film, “Escape to the Rising Sun”, on wartime residents of Shanghai; she was also featured in the book Women of Ku-ring-gai, published by the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society in 1999. Frenkel died at the age of 90 in 2001.

Sally Joseph was one of the first solicitors to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern, Sydney. She graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1967, the same year in which she was appointed to the Commission of the Peace for the State of New South Wales. Although admitted to the New South Wales Bar, Joseph did not practise as a barrister, instead working briefly at the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s Office before being admitted as a solicitor on 11 February 1972. She practised at the Aboriginal Legal Service and later in the eastern Sydney suburb of Vaucluse.

Marie Sexton (nee Kinsella) co-drafted the constitution of the Women Lawyers’ Association of New South Wales and was the organisation’s first honorary secretary. The eldest of five children of Edward Parnell (Ted) Kinsella and his Belgian wife, Marie Louise Josephine Graff, the then Kinsella matriculated from Fort Street Girls’ High School and went on to earn three qualifications from the University of Sydney: a Bachelor of Arts in 1943; a Diploma in Education in 1944; and a Bachelor of Laws in 1949. (It was during a year-long stint as teaching assistant at Inverell High School in northern New South Wales that Kinsella decided that teaching was not for her, had her last day on 29 January 1945 and thence turned her sights to the study of law). She began working as an associate to her father, then Mr Justice Kinsella of the Industrial Commission of New South Wales. On 18 January 1950, Mr Justice Kinsella was elevated to the Supreme Court of New South Wales; Kinsella became clerk associate to her father and clerk of arraigns. Although admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 11 February 1949, Kinsella did not practise at the Bar. She later worked in the Department of Territories, Sydney, and the Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra, producing the respected Annotated Constitution. Kinsella retired in 1980.

Dorothy Jean Kitching (formerly Shearer, nee Asher) was an experienced public servant who served three terms as legislative draftsman for The Administration of Norfolk Island: the first was in 1984; the second in 1993; and the third in 2001. For a time she also carried out the role of deputy clerk for the Island. In the 1970s she had been a legal officer in the Office of the Legislative Draftsman, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. After resigning her initial post in Norfolk Island in 1987, she became assistant legislative counsel at the Australian Law Reform Commission in Sydney. She later worked in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel in Darwin. A 1946 law graduate of the University of Sydney, Kitching was admitted to the New South Wales Bar but remained on the list of non-practising barristers throughout her life.

Helen Knox (nee Upton) became a barrister after having worked as a journalist for more than two decades. She was educated by the Sisters of Mercy, Boorowa, in south-western New South Wales before winning a bursary to attend Our Lady of Mercy College in Goulburn. In 1927, she was enrolled in the Teachers’ College in the grounds of the University of Sydney; by 1931 she had graduated with an Arts degree. In 1937 Knox was appointed to a position on the staff of the ‘Sun’ newspaper in Sydney; she remained with the paper throughout the Second World War. Returning to the University in 1944, she undertook a Bachelor of Laws degree and graduated in 1950. By now she was writing for Consolidated Press. Knox was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 12 February 1960 and for a time shared chambers with Cecily Backhouse (later QC and judge of the NSW District Court). Her practice was chiefly in divorce.

Mary Helen Elizabeth Lidden (previously Appleby, nee Coleman) deserves credit for helping to increase the public’s knowledge and understanding of the law through a series of articles she wrote in the 1970s for The Australian Women’s Weekly, published under the name M.E. Lidden.

Mary Coleman, as she was then, graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1944. Admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 1 December 1950, the following month she was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Laws. By this time she was a widow – her husband, John Ambrose Mitchell Appleby, a student-at-law, had died on 28 April 1946 – and mother of a five-year-old daughter, Victoria.

She did not practise at the Bar and on 24 November 1967 she was admitted as a solicitor; she worked at a number of firms in Sydney. In 1976 she was appointed a legal officer in the Department of Labour and Industry where she remained until 25 August 1978. Lidden was author of a book on wills and probate and co-author of another on conveyancing. She also wrote a novel and a number of self-help books.

Kathleen McGarry was the fourth woman to be admitted to the New South Wales Bar. The third and youngest child of Patrick McGarry, a former member of the Legislative Assembly of Murrumbidgee in south-western New South Wales, and Mary McGarry (nee Myres), McGarry lived at Ardenclutha in Hunter’s Hill on Sydney’s North Shore and was educated by the Sisters of Charity at St Vincent’s College, Potts Point. She continued to be associated with the College after she had left, particularly through the Ex-Students’ Dramatic Society. At the University of Sydney she spent time at Sancta Sophia College and was a member of the University’s Catholic Women’s Society. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1928 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1935. On 6 March 1936 McGarry became the first Catholic woman to be admitted to the New South Wales Bar. She did not practise, however, and after an early stint at the Parliamentary Draftsman’s Office, appears to have abandoned the law and turned her attentions to the arts, producing plays and skits for the theatre and radio. McGarry had been an early student of the Independent Theatre School of Dramatic Art and impressed audiences with her prowess on the stage. She earned a number of prizes for her artistic abilities, including second prize in the Catholic broadcasting station 2SM’s ‘Search for Talent’ competition in 1935. As a member of the Catholic Women’s Association, with which she was deeply involved, she learned Braille and applied her knowledge to translate the Roman Missal. She was said to be fluent in French and German.