The Australian Women's Register

Australian women, who struggled for the franchise on a colony by colony basis, were amongst the first in the world to win the right to vote. South Australia women were enfranchised in 1894, a year after the women of New Zealand won the honour of being the first in the world to gain the right to vote. Their success was followed by victories in Western Australia in 1899, New South Wales in 1902, Tasmania in 1903, Queensland in 1904 and Victoria, finally, in 1908. The federal franchise was extended to all white women over the age of twenty-one in 1902, due in no small part to the success of the campaigns in South and Western Australia. The framers of the federal constitution agreed that it would be wrong to prevent women who already had the right to vote in state elections from doing so at a federal level. It was hoped that adherence to this principle would lead to consistency across the nation and that the remaining state legislatures would automatically confer woman suffrage for their own parliaments. This was the case for the women of New South Wales and Tasmania, although the women of Queensland and Victoria were required to struggle for longer. By the time they could vote in state elections, in 1908, the white women of Victoria has already voted in two federal elections.

It is important to recognise that the Commonwealth Franchise Act did not enfranchise Indigenous women. At the same time federal suffrage was extended to white women it was specifically denied to Aboriginal Australians in those states where they had not previously been eligible to vote. In fact, although some states had granted these men and women the vote prior to 1902, full voting rights were not granted to Indigenous Australians until 1962, when the Commonwealth Electoral Act was amended to enfranchise Aboriginal Australians, men and women.