The Australian Women's Register

Cheryl McKinna was elected President of the University of Melbourne Sports Union in 1978 and then selected as Director of Sport and Physical Recreation in 1980. Having completed a Diploma in Physical Education and being actively engaged in sport at the university, she was concerned about issues of equity and regarded her step into sporting administration as part of an on-going process. She wanted people of all abilities to include sport in their experience of university life and hoped to encourage women to use the sporting facilities more regularly. ‘There is still the attitude that it is unfeminine for women to participate in sport and to sweat,’ she observed in 1978. The first woman to take on the role, she was more qualified in sports administration than any of the previous five holders of the office.

Val Allpress was appointed secretary of the University of Melbourne Australian football club, University Blues, in 1983. Her husband was an umpire and in 1982, after coming home from umpiring a grand final in which the Blues had been beaten again, she remarked that ‘What they need is a good woman to organise them’. Shortly afterwards, she was asked to accept the job as secretary.

Lyn Allison was elected to the Senate for Victoria in 1996 and 2001, becoming Leader of the Australian Democrats in 2004. She was an outspoken campaigner on health, education, environment, nuclear and women’s issues. She was defeated at the November 2007 election and left the Senate on 30 June 2008.

Jacinta Collins was chosen to represent Victoria for the Australian Labor Party in the Senate in 1995. She was elected to the same position in 1998, but defeated at the general elections in 2004. She was re-appointed in May 2008 on the resignation of Senator Robert Ray, but she had been re-elected at the 2007 general election and took her seat in the Senate for a term of six years on 1 July 2008. She held the portfolio of Health and Ageing for a short period before the 2013 election, when she was re-elected and the Labor Government was defeated.

Anna Burke, a member of the Australian Labor Party, was elected to the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Australia representing Chisholm, Victoria,between 1998 and 2016. After the 2007 election, she was elected as Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives and in 2012 assumed the Speaker’s role until August 2013.

On 16 January 2017, Burke was appointed as a full-time Member of the General, Freedom of Information, and Veterans’ Appeals Divisions of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, with her term to end on 15 January 2024.

In the 2019 Australia Day Honours Burke was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for “distinguished service to the Parliament of Australia, particularly as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and to the community”.

Ann Corcoran was elected to the House of Representatives for Isaacs, Victoria, representing the Australian Labor Party, at a by-election in August 2000. She was re-elected in 2001 and 2004. She retired before the 2007 election.

Before entering the Federal Parliament she stood for the Legislative Assembly seat of Sandringham at the Victorian state election, which was held on 2 March 1985.

Judith Graley was elected as Member of the Legislative Assembly for Narre Warren South in November 2006, representing the Australian Labor Party. In 2002 she stood as a candidate for the Australian Labor Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Mornington, but was unsuccessful on that occasion. She was re-elected to Narre Warren in November 2010 and in November 2014. She held the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy premier in the Labor Government, which came to power in November 2014.

Graley did not seek re-election at the 2018 state election, and retired from parliament in October 2018.

Before her entry into state Parliament, Judith Graley served as a local government councillor for the Mornington Peninsula Shire Council from 1997-2003 and was its mayor from 2000-2001.

Fiona Richardson was an Australian politician, who joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1991. She was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly for Northcote in the Parliament of Victoria in November 2006, was re-elected in November 2010 and again in November 2014. She served as Minister for Women and Minister for Prevention of Family Violence in the Labor Government after they were elected in November 2014. She oversaw the establishment of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence in 2015, which tabled its report to Parliament in 2016.

Richardson passed away at the far too young age of 50, from breast cancer.

Heidi Victoria was elected Member for Bayswater, in the Legislative Assembly of the Parliament of Victoria in November 2006, representing the Liberal Party. She was re-elected at the election which was held on 27 November 2010 and again in November 2014, when the Labor Party returned to power.

In March 2013, after serving as Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts and Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier of Victoria she was appointed Minister for the Arts, Consumer Affairs and Women’s Affairs.
On the defeat of the Liberal Government in November 2014, she currently holds the Shadow Portfolios of Major Events; Arts and Culture and Aboriginal Affairs.

Ms Victoria was born in Melbourne, Victoria. She has been involved in community work for over 30 years with not-for profit organisations including SCOPE and the Make-A-Wish Foundation . She also served on the Australian board of the National Council of Women as company secretary.

Passionate about fighting injustice Minister Victoria’s move into politics in 2006 was a logical one.

As the mother of a young daughter, she became involved in a community lobbying campaign to save her local primary school’s English/German language immersion program- which had been recognised as one the State’s leading bilingual education success stories for nearly three decades — from closure.

Ms Victoria has a BA in Fine Arts (Photography) and spent several years running her own photographic business, specialising in portrait and event photography.

Mary Wooldridge was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly for Doncaster in November 2006, representing the Liberal Party. She was Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Drug Abuse and Aged Care. She was re- elected in November 2010 and was a Minister in the Liberal Government, holding the portfolios of Mental Health, Women’s Affairs and Community Service. Her seat was abolished in a redistribution for the 2014 election, and she was subsequently elected to the Victorian Legislative Council for Eastern Metropolitan Region in November’s state election. She held the Shadow portfolio of Health and was Leader of the Opposition and of the Liberal Party in the Legislative Council.

Wooldridge announced her intention to retire from state politics on 8 December 2019, using the moment to call on the Liberal Party to consider gender quotas as a way of increasing female representation in the Victorian Parliament.

Colleen Hartland was elected Member for the Legislative Council for the Western Metropolitan Region in November 2006, representing the Australian Greens. She was re-elected in 2010 and again in 2014. Before her election to the state parliament, she stood as an Independent candidate in the Legislative Assembly seat of Footscray at the Victorian state election, which was held on 3 October 1992.

Jan Kronberg was elected MLC for the Eastern Metropolitan Region in November 2006, representing the Liberal Party in the Victorian parliament. She was re-elected in 2010 as a member of the Liberal Government, but retired at the November 2014 election.

Sue Pennicuik was elected Member of the Legislative Council for the Southern Metropolitan Region in November 2006, representing the Australian Greens (Victoria). She was re-elected at both the 2010 and 2014 elections. She has held the position of Victorian Greens Whip in the Legislative Council since 2006.

Donna Petrovich was elected Member for the Legislative Council for Northern Victoria in November 2006, representing the Liberal Party. She resigned from state parliament on 1 July 2013 in order to stand as a candidate for the seat of McEwen at the 2013 federal election, but was unsuccessful.

Jaala Pulford was elected Member for the Legislative Council for Western Victoria in November 2006, representing the Australian Labor Party. She was re-elected in 2010 and in 2014. She is currently serving as Minister for Agriculture, Regional Development and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council in the Labor Government, which returned to power in 2014 after its defeat in 2010.

Freelance journalist Ros Bower wrote for the Sun, the Argus, and Woman’s Day. She worked in television production and was employed as a consultant by the Australian Council for the Arts.

Marien Dreyer wrote numerous scripts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s, and was author of the popular New Idea column ‘This Week with Marien Dreyer’ from 1955 to 1962.

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.