The Australian Women's Register

Mary Mackillop was appointed head of the Penola Catholic School in 1866. In March of that year she was formally committed into the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. In 1871, almost half the members of the Institute were dismissed by Bishop Sheil, and Mackillop was excommunicated for alleged insubordination. The excommunication was lifted as early as February 1872, when she was reinstated as superior of the Institute. She was elected superior general under the new Roman Constitutions in 1875. Mackillop founded a teacher training centre for the Institute in Sydney in 1888, enabling it to become a leader in Catholic education.

In 1923, following the death of her father James, Nell Martyn took over as managing director of the Steel Company of Australia. The company specialised in manganese and chrome steel, and employed over 100 workers. Martyn was a popular employer and a regular speaker at YWCA gatherings. When she died of cancer at the age of 39, over 1000 mourners attended her funeral.

Ethel McLennan was awarded her Doctor of Science degree in 1921 for a study of the endophytic fungus associated with the seed of the grass Lolium. She was awarded a fellowship by the International Federation of University Women in 1926, and became a central figure in the Botany Department at the University of Melbourne. She became associate professor in 1931, and enjoyed an excellent reputation nationwide as a leading plant pathologist and mycologist.

May Maxwell began her professional life as an actor but switched to journalism in 1907 when she discovered that it was a more stable career option than the theatre.

Louisa Meredith sailed for Sydney with her husband Charles in 1839. A keen naturalist, she collected plant, insect and seaweed specimens in Tasmania and was a member of the Tasmania Royal Society. She published several volumes of poetry as well as her accounts of colonial life, and often illustrated these works herself.

After winning a Bulletin prize in 1913 for a sonnet about Canberra, Nina Murdoch published a book of verse, Songs of the Open Air. She was one of the first women general reporters at the Sydney Sun, and from 1922 was working in Melbourne at the Sun News-Pictorial using the pen-name ‘Manin’. She was the first woman permitted to cover Senate debates. In 1930, Murdoch published Seventh Heaven, a Joyous Discovery of Europe, based on her own travels. Another book, She Travelled Alone in Spain, followed five years later. Her last book, Portrait in Youth of Sir John Longstaff, was published in 1948.

Nettie Palmer became involved in the suffrage movement and the socialist movement while she was completing her tertiary studies in London. It was there that she met her husband, Vance Palmer, and by 1917 the couple had returned to Australia with their first daughter, Aileen. A second daughter, Helen, was born that year. The family lived at Emerald, Victoria. Both Vance and Nettie were opponents of censorship and conscription, and Nettie had a regular column in the Argus. She also wrote for the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail and the Bulletin Red Page. Her essay on Modern Australian Literature 1900-1923 was published in 1924. Nettie Palmer became editor of the anti-fascist journal for women, Women Today, and edited memoirs, published short stories and poetry anthologies, made translations, and lectured to young writers.

Ethel Richardson was educated at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne, and the Royal Conservatorium at Leipzig. As Henry Handel Richardson, she became one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved novelists, finding fame with Maurice Guest (1908) and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (published in three parts between 1917 and 1929).

Kathleen Robinson trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. With Lewis Casson and Dame Sybil Thorndike’s Australian tour, she played minor parts in Media, St Joan, Madame Plays Nap and Macbeth. From 1932-35, Robinson ran the Westminster Theatre in London with Osmond Daltry. In 1940 she returned to Australia and formed Whitehall Productions at the Minerva Theatre in Kings Cross, Sydney. She opened an academy for dramatic art in 1944.

Brettena was a mature woman of 43 when she became involved in politics – by then a widow, a business owner, and the mother of several children. In 1888 she formed the Australian Women’s Suffrage Society, later enveloped by the Victorian Women’s Franchise League. A freethinker, Smyth was opposed to orthodox religion and strongly advocated the use of birth control. In 1893 she published The Limitation of Offspring, and she sold rubber pessaries at her grocery shop. Smyth was a competent public speaker and a respected Melbourne identity in the 1890s.

Martha Webster came to Australia to assist her brother, Henry Gyles Turner, in his role as a leading member of the Melbourne Unitarian Church. She was herself elected a regular minister in October 1873. In May 1884, Webster was present at the meeting which resolved to form the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, and she became active in the Australian Women’s Suffrage Society in later years.

Joan Rosanove completed her legal studies at the University of Melbourne, and was admitted to practice as a barrister and solicitor in June 1919. In 1923 she became the first woman in Victoria to sign the Victorian Bar roll. The bulk of her work was in criminal and matrimonial cases. Rosanove was appointed Q.C. in 1965, and took silk in New South Wales two years later. She made a significant contribution to legal reform, particularly as it concerned the status of women.

Mary Penfold founded and ran the business that became Penfolds Wines in South Australia.

Jane Sutherland arrived in Sydney with her family in 1864. She studied at the National Gallery School of Design, and held a number of exhibitions from 1878. Sutherland was a leader in the movement away from the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art, and toward the plein-air style, sketching directly from nature.

A talented pianist, Louise Hanson-Dyer founded the music publishing company, Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, in Paris in 1928. With her first husband, James Dyer, she donated £10,000 to establish a permanent orchestra in Melbourne. Upon her death, she bequeathed over £200,000 to the University of Melbourne. The Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library at the University is named in her honour.

Caroline Wilson has been chief football writer for The Age newspaper since 1999. She was the first woman to cover Australian Rules football on a full-time basis and is a multiple winner of Australian Football Media Association awards, including most outstanding football writer and most outstanding feature writer (2000, 2003, 2005). Wilson was also voted the AFL Players’ Association’s football writer of the year in 1999.

Betty Paterson and her sister Esther were prodigies born into the elite of Melbourne’s bohemian set. Father (Hugh) and uncle (John Ford) were both artists and her first playmates were her neighbours, the children of Frederick McCubbin.

Art impinged upon every facet of her life throughout its entire course. Her Art Deco cartoons were published regularly in magazines such as The Bulletin and Aussie. Her illustrated interpretations of ‘permissive’ 1920s society resonated with those she depicted – she became artist-by-appointment to the flappers.

Betty Paterson married twice, and had one child, a daughter, Barbara.

Florence Johnson, a teacher and active unionist, stood as an Independent Labor candidate in the Legislative Assembly seat of St Kilda at the Victorian state election, which was held on 9 April 1927.

Virginia Haussegger is an award-winning television journalist, writer and commentator, whose extensive media career spans more than 25 years. She began work as a cadet journalist with the ABC in 1986 andbegan presenting ABC Canberra News in 2001. She won the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize for her coverage of Indigenous Affairs in 1996.

In late 2016 Virginia was appointed to head a new gender equality initiative, the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, at the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA), where she is an Adjunct Professor. With a singular focus on improving the representation of women in leadership and key decision making roles across all levels of government and public administration, the Foundation is the first of its kind in Australia.

In 2014 Virginia was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to the community, as an advocate for women’s rights and gender equity, and to the media.

Mollie Horseman worked professionally as a cartoonist and illustrator for over forty years. In 1963 Everybody’s Magazine called her ‘Australia’s only woman cartoonist’. While this was obviously not the case, she was probably the most visible woman working in the field. At their annual ball in 1956, her colleagues in the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club ‘smocked’ her (presented her with an artist’s smock decorated by fellow members) and she was later voted Sydney Savage Club ‘Cartoonist of the Year’. In 1964 she was the only woman in a group photograph of forty-three professional cartoonists and one of nine women among 140 cartoonists in the survey exhibition Fifty Years of Australian Cartooning.

Although she was always able to draw, she was propelled forwards when she came to the attention of Norman Lindsay . Rose and Norman employed the teenage Mollie to be their children’s governess. So impressed was he, recommended her to the National Art School. For financial reasons, she did not complete the course, but it was enough to sharpen her skills to ensure that she received regular employment. She worked regularly for Smith’s Weekly and the Bulletin and her humorous cartoons made her a household name in the 1930s. Perhaps her best known characters were ‘The Tipple Twins’ two secretaries who regularly created office havoc in the pages of the Rydge’s Business Journal, for which she freelanced in the 1940s. Many of her drawings may be found in the Mitchell Library, at the State Library of New South Wales.

Claudia Wright was a trailblazer for talkback radio in Melbourne, Victoria, in the 1970s. A committed feminist and fighter for social justice, she worked in print, radio and television journalism throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s until she was affected by the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Even when ill, she allowed herself to be the subject of documentaries that brought attention to the impact of the disease on patients and their carers.

Janice Bateman served as a councillor for the City of Berwick, Victoria from 1971-84 and was its first woman mayor from 1980-81. In an attempt to move into the state parliament, she stood as a candidate for the Australian Democrats Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Dandenong at the Victorian state election, which was held on 5 May 1979. She was a candidate for the Liberal Party in the Legislative Council Province of Eumemmering at the 1988 election.

She made a constructive contribution to the Australian Local Government Women’s Association in her capacity as president of the Victorian branch from 1975-77 and as national president from 1976-78. In 1985 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to the community and to local government.

Anna Stewart, as Industrial Advocate for the Federated Furnishing Trades Society, successfully led the first Australian blue collar union campaign for maternity leave award provisions in 1975. She was a founding member of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Women’s Committee from 1977, representing the Vehicle Builders Employees’ Federation and then the Municipal Officers’ Association from 1982, and contributing to the ACTU’s Working Women’s Charter and the Maternity Leave Test Case. She also stood as a candidate for the Australian Labor Party in the Legislative Assembly seat of Frankston at the Victorian state election, which was held on 5 May 1979.

Marlene Kairouz, a member of the Australian Labor Party, was elected as the Member for Kororoit in the Legislative Assembly of the Parliament of Victoria at the by-election, which was held in June 2008. She was re-elected in November 2010 and again in 2014. She currently holds the position of Cabinet secretary in the Labor government.

Before her election to the Victorian Parliament she served as a Councillor in the City of Darebin from September 1998 until June 2008 and as Mayor from 2001-02 and 2006-07.

Jean Daley was the first woman in Victoria to stand for Federal parliament as an endorsed Labor candidate when she stood for the seat of Kooyong in 1922. As woman organiser for the Australian Labor Party, she established the Labor Women’s Interstate Executive in 1929.

Mary Rogers became the first woman councillor in Victoria when she was elected to the Richmond City Council in 1920. She was appointed as organiser for the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party.