The Australian Women's Register

Agnes Warren won a Walkley award for her reporting of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. She reported from the frontline in Serbia and from a Bosnian refugee centre. She was also sent to report on the treatment of Palestinians after the 1991 Gulf War as well as nationalist demonstrations in Northern Ireland. Prior to taking on her overseas postings, she was the ABCs Industrial Relations reporter.

A journalist with extensive experience in the print and electronic media Jill Singer has worked at all levels behind and in front of the camera and microphone across Australia for both commercial and public broadcasters. Jill has produced and presented radio programs from remote rural locations, and designed, produced and presented national television news and current affairs programs. As well as winning awards for television broadcasts on architectural and medical issues, Jill won the Walkley award in 1992 for best television investigative journalist and the Quill award for best television current affairs report in 1999.

Helen Garner is an award-winning Australian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. After graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1965 she worked as a high school teacher. While teaching, she contributed to journals and worked in theatre. Her first novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977. It was an instant success, winning a National Book Council award in 1978 and being filmed in 1982.

Garner has successfully written both fiction and non-fiction. Considerable controversy attended the 1995 publication of The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power, an examination of allegations of misconduct in a University college. In 1993, she won a Walkley award for her feature article on the sad death of a small child, Daniel Valerio.

Garner has written three scripts for Australian films: Monkey Grip (Cameron, 1982), Two Friends (Campion, 1986) and The Last Days Of Chez Nous (Armstrong, 1992). Along with her novels, short stories and journalism, these films have cast Garner as a central figure in the history of Australian film and literature.

She has written three true-crime books: first with The First Stone, about the aftermath of a sexual-harassment scandal at a university, followed by Joe Cinque’s Consolation, a journalistic novel about the court proceedings involving a young man who died at the hands of his girlfriend, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Book, and again in 2014 with This House of Grief, about Robert Farquharson, a man who drove his children into a dam.

For over fifty years from the 1850s, Mary Fortune worked as a journalist and author of serialised fiction. The vast majority of her work was published in the popular magazine, the Australian Journal, under the pseudonym of ‘W.W.’ or ‘Waif Wander’. Fortune’s particular interest was in writing crime stories, and, over the course of her writing career, she produced no less than 500. According to New Zealand-born writer and academic Lucy Sussex, no other woman, with the exception of the American Anna Katharine Green, wrote so much crime fiction in the nineteenth century. What is more, Fortune was the first woman to write crime fiction centred on the detective as ‘the narrator and hero of her stories’: ‘In this aspect, as in many others such as her realism, her reliance on police procedures and almost forensic depiction of violence, she anticipates much of the later crime fiction produced in the nineteenth century’.

Sarah Henderson was elected Member for Corangamite representing the Liberal Party in the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament at the September 2013 election.

Before her election to Parliament she worked as a broadcast journalist and lawyer.

Janet Mitchell was born in Melbourne and grew up in Victoria. She studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London during WWI, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of London in 1922. After returning to Australia, she held a senior position in the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) from 1924-1926.

She began working for the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales in 1926, where she worked until 1931. She was the first woman to hold an executive position in a big Australian bank. Later, as a journalist in Mukden, she witnessed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, an experience which inspired her only novel, Tempest in Paradise written in 1935. In 1933 she was acting Principal of University Women’s College (Sydney) and then spent the years 1934 to 1940 in England. During this six year period Mitchell spent time working as a journalist She also published her autobiography, Spoils of Opportunity.

Kerry Kenihan worked as a primary school teacher before turning to journalism, a career she has followed for over thirty years. She was at one time women’s editor of the Melbourne Sunday Observer and chief sub-editor of New Idea. In the 1970s Kenihan was a prolific writer of short stories, many of them romances, which she published under various pseudonyms. Since then she has worked freelance, writing both general news and features on topics including medicine, food and wine, and women’s issues.

Her second son, Quentin, was born in 1975 with severe osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), which meant that his bones were as brittle as eggshell. With her husband Kenihan founded the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation to assist families afflicted with this condition. Their experiences in caring for Quentin and helping him to overcome the difficulties resulting from his OI led her to write the bookHow to be the Parents of a Handicapped Child – and Survive (1981), and in 1985 when Quentin was ten she wrote his story.

Agnes G. Murphy was a journalist and one of the founders of the Austral Salon of Music, Literature and the Arts in Melbourne, Victoria, an organisation founded in 1890 by a small group of women journalists as a club for women writers. It developed into a club for artistic and intellectual women interested in any of the fine arts and provided an important entrée for many aspiring women musicians. Murphy was also social editor of Melbourne Punch for some time during the 1890s.

Ennis Josephine Honey was a freelance writer, music teacher and journalist. She was a sub-editor for Australian Women’s Weekly from 1965 to 1975, and contributed to several Australian newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Mirror, New Idea, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Kate Veitch was born in Adelaide in 1955. She left home and school at fifteen and has published, along the way, a non-fiction exploration of parenting, as well as journalism and book reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald and Vogue amongst others. She also produced ‘Their Brilliant Careers’, a series of programs on women writers for Radio National. Kate is based in Melbourne, where her brothers and adult son live, but spends half the year in New York with her partner. Listen, her first novel, was published in 2007

Annie Osborn was a dutiful, Christian wife and daughter and the mother of eight children. As a journalist in Australia she edited the woman’s pages of the Age and the Leader : a weekly journal of news, politics, literature, and art in Melbourne, Victoria. She also edited the children’s page of the Leader using the pseudonym of ‘Cinderella’. Osborn also wrote regularly for the Presbyterian journal, The Messenger, and for the Australian Christian World. Her column in The Messenger was written under the pseudonym of ‘The Minister’s Wife’ and greatly advanced religious journalism in Australia.

Osborn wrote children’s readers that became so popular they were adopted in Australian schools and adapted for radio broadcasts. She left Australia in 1927 when her husband decided to peruse clerical opportunities in North America. While in the United States, Annie Osborn was President of the Mount Vernon Federation of Christian Women.

The daughter of inn-keepers, Jessie Grover dabbled in sericulture before turning to journalism. In 1873 Jessie and her friend Mrs Sara Florentia Bladen-Neill thought that the silk production industry would be a fit one for women, and so formed the Victorian Ladies’ Sericultural Co. Ltd, with Jessie as managing director. The company articles specified that ‘No person but a woman shall be eligible as a Director’. Prominent Melbourne women took up most of the £4 shares. The government made a grant of 600 acres (242.8 ha) of hilly land at Harcourt, near the Mount Alexander diggings, where bluestone buildings were erected and thousands of mulberry trees planted. The surveyor had fixed on the wrong location, however, and the enterprise collapsed after several years of intensive effort.

When her mother died in 1879 she left the bulk of her estate to her daughters. This meant that Jessie and her husband, Harry, were now able to buy a large house at St Kilda and live mainly from their investments. Harry contributed humorous items to Melbourne Punch. Jessie was social editor of the Melbourne Bulletin in 1880-86, and Australian correspondent for the Queen (London). She covered events at Government House, garden parties, charity bazaars and a few scandals in a human and personal style. She wrote under various pseudonyms such as ‘Gladys’, ‘Iris’, ‘Humming Bee’ and ‘Queen Bee’. Her son, Montague continued the journalist tradition she established.

Before she married W.A Holman in 1901, Ada Kidgell had established herself as an intelligent and energetic journalist. By 1896 she was publishing short stories, reviews and political and literary items, using her own name, ‘Marcus Malcolm’ and ‘Nardoo’. As ‘Myee’ she sent ‘Our Sydney letter’ to Melbourne Punch. She was a frequent contributor to the Sydney Mail, Sydney Morning Herald and the Freeman’s Journal. She edited and wrote most of the copy for the Co-operator, a trade journal for rural producers. She continued journalism after marriage, sometimes ghosting items which appeared under her husband’s name. The Labor Party benefited from her ability to place items sympathetic to its programme in the non-Labor press.

Ada Holman’s political views were well formed before her marriage to her New South Wales Labor politician husband. She was republican and a critic of the Constitution, of the South African War and of inequality, whether related to class or sex. She enjoyed writing on these topics, but found that once her husband was installed in the NSW cabinet in 1910, her output was restricted; her short stories continued to appear but little else.

Ada Holman resented both the limitations to her own work consequent on being married to a prominent politician, and the demands on women to conform to notions of middle class femininity that restricted women’s experience to that of only wife and mother. Women would be free, she wrote to Australian author Dowell O’Reilly, when motherhood affected woman’s life ‘only to the same degree as parenthood does a man’.

Educated at the University of Sydney, (she received her B.A. in 1891) Theodosia Wallace tried teaching before she swiftly moved into journalism. Coming from a family of journalists, perhaps this was hardly surprising.

At the age of 20 she wrote a social column for the Melbourne Argus and Australasian as ‘Biddy B.A.’ She also contributed to the Sydney Morning Herald and later joined its staff, writing mainly on temperance and feminist subjects, such as the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, free kindergartens and changes to the laws on prostitution. The Herald started a weekly feature, ‘A Page for Women’, in September 1905 and Theodosia was appointed editor for the page.

Theodosia Wallace also established a presence in regional newspapers. She wrote syndicated letters for the Orange Leader and a Dubbo newspaper. In the Newcastle Herald, under the pseudonym ‘INO’, her weekly column ‘An Idle Woman’s Diary’ ran from 1920. She was the first head of the Country Press Association’s press-cutting service, working there for about thirty years. She was a founding member of the Society of Women Writers.

Michelle Grattan was the first woman to become editor of an Australian metropolitan daily newspaper. Specialising in political journalism, she has written and edited for many significant Australian newspapers. Her long and distinguished career in journalism began in 1970 at the Melbourne Age, where she enjoyed a stellar career as their political editor. She left that paper (for good!) in 2013. .

Joan Child was the first female member of the Australian Labor Party to be elected to the federal Parliament in the House of Representatives as Member for the seat of Henty in 1974. She lost her seat in the 1975 general election, but regained it in 1980. She became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1986, holding the position until she resigned in 1989. She remained the only female speaker of the house until October 2012, when Anna Burke was appointed to the position.

Joan Child retired from parliament in 1990 when the seat of Henty was abolished in an electoral redistribution. She was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in June 1990.

She died on 23 February 2013 at the age of 91. In a statement from Prime Minister Julia Gillard, on the occasion of her death, Joan Child was remembered as a pioneer and an inspiration. ‘As a confirmed true believer, Joan never forgot who had put her into politics or why. She was a powerful voice for the needs and rights of women, especially working women and women doing it tough.’

Jean Melzer served as an Australian Labor Party Senator for Victoria in the Federal Parliament from 18 May 1974 until 30 June 1981. She was defeated at the 1980 election. In 1984 she stood unsuccessfully for the Senate as a representative of the Nuclear Disarmament Party.

Helen Mayer was elected to the House of Representatives of the Federal Parliament of Australia as the Member for Chisholm in Victoria in 1983. A member of the Australian Labor Party she served until 1987 when she was defeated at the General election. She died in 2008.

Olive Zakharov was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia in 1983 as a representative for Victoria. A member of the Australian Labor Party, she served until her death in 1995.

Janet Powell stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Australian Democrats Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Rodney at the Victorian state election, which was held on 5 May 1979. She was a candidate again at the 1985 state election, when she stood for the Legislative Council province of Central Highlands.

She was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia in 1986 as a representative for Victoria. A member of the Australian Democrats and leader from 1990-1991, she resigned from the party in 1992. She served as an Independent until 1993.

In 2004 she joined the Australian Greens Party and stood as a candidate in the November 2006 Victorian State election for the Eastern Metropolitan Region in the Legislative Council.

After leaving Parliament, Ms Powell focused on volunteer leadership roles in health, women’s issues and services for the disadvantaged.

Powell passed away in September 2013, survived by four children and one grandchild.

Karen Synon served as a Senator for Victoria in the Parliament of Australia from 13 May 1997 until 30 June 1999. A member of the Liberal Party of Australia, she was defeated at the 1998 federal election.

Sophie Mirabella was elected to the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Australia in 2001 as the Member for Indi. A member of the Liberal party of Australia, she was re-elected at the 2004, 2007 and 2010 federal elections. Before her election to Parliament she was a delegate to the Australian Constitutional Convention in 1998 and argued strongly against the proposal for Australia to become a republic. She was defeated at the 2013 election.

Catherine King was elected to the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Australia as the Member for Ballarat in 2001. A member of the Australian Labor Party, she was re-elected at the 2004, 2007, 2010 and 2013 federal elections. She held the ministerial portfolios of Regional Australia, Local Government and Territories before the defeat of the Rudd Labor Government in 2013.

Lorraine Salmon was a successful businesswoman who worked in public relations and advertising after establishing a career as a script writer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission during the second world war. A longtime member of the Communist Party of Australia, she held the position of secretary of Actors’ Equity for some years. She travelled to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with her husband, journalist Malcolm Salmon, in the late 1950s. She freelanced and assisted local media outlets to establish a presence, working, for instance, with her husband for the English-language service of Radio Hanoi. On her return from North Vietnam she resumed a business career but continued to pursue her literary interests, regularly reviewing new theatre productions.

An accomplished journalist and local historian, Betty Osborn (then Betty Roberts) was known as the ‘girl reporter’ of the Argus newspaper in the 1950s.

In 1958, Pat Jarrett celebrated 25 years of continuous service with the Herald and Weekly Times. She was the only woman alongside seventeen men on the staff to have served so long.

Alicia Katz was the first female candidate to stand for the Parliament of Victoria. She stood for Barwon as a Labor candidate at the Legislative Assembly election of 26 June 1924, and gained 3,046 votes. She was defeated by the Liberal party candidate, E. Morley, on 6,954 votes.