The Australian Women's Register

Trained mathematician Dorothy Dolling devoted much of her life to the work of the South Australian Country Women’s Association. During wartime she worked with the Allied Forces Information Bureau. Dolling also enjoyed a long career in journalism, writing for the Adelaide Advertiser from 1936.

Narelle Autio has received two Walkley Awards for photography: in 2000 for ‘The Seventh Wave’, and in 2002 for ‘School of Dance’, both published in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Denise Norton was the first female Olympian from South Australia.

The South Australian Women’s Amateur Sports Council was established with financial and administrative assistance from the National Fitness Council to promote the interests of sportswomen in South Australia, and to help formulate “a common policy on planning and development for women’s sport”. One of its most important initiatives, in cooperation with the National Fitness Council of South Australia, was the establishment of the Women’s Memorial Playing Fields on the corner of Shepherds Hill Road and Ayliffes Road, St. Marys.

The concept of a Women’s Memorial Playing Fields emanated from the concern from South Australia’s sporting women over the lack of playing areas available to them. Sports field for women had always been in short supply in Adelaide, but the situation was made worse by the rapid growth of women’s participation in sport in the post-war period.

This concern led to the formation of the South Australian Women’s Amateur Sports Council. With the help of the National Fitness Council they lobbied the government for resources and were eventually successful. In 1953 the Premier, the Hon. Tom Playford, granted the Council 20 acres of reserve land on the corner of Shepherds Hill Road and Ayliffes Road, St. Marys for a centre for women’s sport.

From 1953-55 the fields progressed and prospered. In 1956 to honour those who had died during war, a memorial drinking fountain was erected, and the grounds as a whole were dedicated to the South Australia Servicewomen who served in World Wars I and II. A ceremony remembering the nurses and other women in the services is held each February.

The work of early Trust members is commemorated in the naming of the Helen Black oval, the Gordon Brown oval and the May Mills Pavilion.

The Women’s Memorial Playing fields are the only dedicated women’s memorial of this type in Australia.

May Mills was played a prominent role in the development of women’s sport in South Australia. She was President of the South Australian Women’s Cricket Association and the Australian Women’s Cricket Council in the 1960s. Prior to that she was President of the South Australian Women’s Amateur Sports Council, the body that successfully lobbied the then Premier, Sir Thomas Playford, to secure access to playing fields for the dedicated use of women. Trained as a teacher, she taught at Unley High School for thirty years. She became the first female President of the South Australian Institute of Teachers in 1943.

Apart from her interest in women’s sport and teaching, Mills was active in a number of other spheres of public life. She was the first President of the South Australian Film and Television Council, a founding member of the Australian College of Education, a Life Vice-President of the National Council of Women and a Life Member of the Royal Commonwealth Society. She was the first women in South Australia to secure a license to drive a motor car.

May Mills contribution to women’s cricket was recognised in 1984/85 by the creation of the May Mills Trophy for the Under 18 national Championship. This competition ran until 1995/96.

Dianne Burge is the 1966 Commonwealth Games gold medallist in the 100 and 220 yard sprint. She was also a member of the winning 4×110 yard relay team.

The National Fitness Council of South Australia was a government advisory body established in 1939 that alerted individuals to the importance of gaining physical fitness, and encouraged community interest in open space and the “Quality of Environment.” In 1976 the Council was taken over by the Department of Tourism, Recreation and Sport.

Faith Thomas was the first Aboriginal woman to play international cricket for Australia; indeed, she was the first indigenous woman to be selected to play any sport for Australia. In 2004, she was still the only Aboriginal woman to represent Australia in cricket.

Thomas played cricket, along with hockey and squash, while training in Adelaide to be a nurse. (She was one of the first Aboriginal nurses to graduate from the Royal Adelaide Hospital; she went on to be the first to run a hospital.) Thomas was selected into the South Australian cricket team after playing only two grade games and was selected for the Australian team in 1958. She recalls receiving a fair deal of publicity at the time. ‘I was a bit of a curiosity,’ she said in an interview in 2004. ‘It was a “native nurse”, this. You know, I wasn’t a cricketer, I was a native nurse cricketer, You know?’

Thomas also played hockey for the Northern Territory and admits that hockey was always more important to her than cricket. She was a member of the Aboriginal Sports Foundation, patron of the Prime Minister’s XI versus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Chairman’s XI.

Dot Mansom left school at the age of 15 and worked for her father in his capacity as bookmaker at the Supreme Court Hotel. She attended the Hyde Park School of Music, and sang in minor roles for the South Australian Opera Company. She later toured with operas to Melbourne and Western Australia. On weekends she taught riding, and during the Depression years took work at the Port Adelaide Bacon Factory, before becoming a buyer and manageress for Miller Anderson Ltd.’s mantle department. Mansom become an investigating officer with the drapery section of the State branch of the Rationing Commission during World War II, gaining equal status with her male colleagues. She married Clarence Henry Gray in June 1950.

After the war, Mansom was secretary of the South Adelaide Riding Club (which she re-formed) and the Horse Riding Clubs’ Association. She bought a former racehorse, Antonym. In an attempt to popularise dressage, she established the Dressage Club of South Australia with Tom Roberts in 1949. The following year she won a blue ribbon in dressage events at the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia’s show. Mansom became a member of the executive of her local Light Horse Association, and helped to organise Australian Olympic Federation horse trials in South Australia. She predeceased her husband, and was buried in West Terrace cemetery, Adelaide.

Lois Quarrell covered women’s sport in Adelaide for The Advertiser for forty years and is credited with doing much to ‘educate public opinion in the value of various sports for girls and young women’. (The Advertiser October 1949). She joined the paper in 1932, at the age of seventeen, and four years later became their first woman sportswriter. In order to gather stories, she would ride her bike to venues, collect information and pedal back to the office to write it up.

Quarrell’s half page column, devoted entirely to women’s sports and the issues associated with them, commenced in 1936 and ran until her retirement in 1970. She used it to inform readers of the variety of women’s sporting achievements and comparing them to women’s efforts overseas in an effort to legitimize them. She also used her influence to encourage women to be involved in sport and to manage their own affairs. In particular, she argued for the inclusion of ‘games’ for girls in the standard school curriculum, against opposition groups who believed that girls playing sport would rob them of their femininity. Quarrell also encouraged debate on issues such as the suitability of rational dress and the early retirement of athletes due to motherhood.

According to her Sport Australia Hall of Fame citation, Evelyn Tazewell was the finest women’s hockey player of her time. She enjoyed a career in the sport as player, coach, umpire and administrator that spanned four decades to the 1960s. Among many important contributions to the sport, she was instrumental in the establishment of the Women’s Memorial Playing Fields at St Mary’s, Adelaide.

Shylie Katharine Rymill was a prominent member of Adelaide Society, a successful charity worker and a more than competent golfer, winning the South Australian Women’s Championship in 1913. She was a state commissioner for the Girl Guides in South Australia between 1938-1950.

The Panhellenic Women’s Movement was a broad-based, progressive women’s organisation established in 1977 in order to assist and represent Australian women of Greek heritage.