The Australian Women's Register

Sybil Dale, aged 18, was left a widow with a young baby when her husband, Adjutant Charles Coning Dale, 21, was killed on Gallipoli on 7 August 1915. They had married in Melbourne on 10 November 1914, eight days after Dale graduated from Duntroon Military College, Canberra, and a week after he enlisted in the AIF as Lieutenant in C Squadron, 8th Light Horse. Their daughter, Valda Rita Dale, was born on 19 April 1915 at 595 Canning St, North Carlton. Sybil married again in 1924 and together her and her husband raised a family. She also went on to play cricket and hockey for Victoria.

Read a longer essay on Sybil Dale in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Ruby Lindsay is perhaps Australia’s first female graphic designer. During the early twentieth century, Ruby illustrated books and also hand drew posters and black-and-white illustrations for newspapers such as The Bulletin and Punch.

Ruth Hennings was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) on Australia Day 2019 ‘for service to the Indigenous community, particularly to the 1967 Referendum Campaign’.

During World War I, Queanbeyan citizens, at a public meeting held soon after news that her husband, Private John Charles Mayo, had been killed in action at Bullecourt in 1917, decided to provide a home for Florence Mayo and her two young daughters. Raising money proved more difficult than expected and Florence, described as ‘a plucky woman’, partly financed her land and weatherboard cottage by taking out a mortgage. She lived in Queanbeyan for the rest of her life.

Read a longer essay on Florence Mayo in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Florence Eckersley, born on 25 April 1886 in Manchester, England, married Manchester-born Joseph Perry (birth name Rigby) in 1907 and had two children. The family arrived in Australia before World War I and Joseph Perry was employed as a groom at Duntroon Military College, Canberra. Immediately war was declared, he was recalled to England, embarking on 17 October 1914 to join his battalion in Manchester. Florence and her two children were left behind living in Sydney where, two years later, she heard that her husband had drowned on 18 November 1916 while on active service. She was left a widow with two children then aged four and three. She remarried in Sydney in 1919.

Read a longer essay on Florence Perry in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

On 27 April 1915, two days after the landing, Glenora Clara Love’s husband, Corporal Alfred Herbert Love, 14th Battalion AIF, was killed in action at Gallipoli. Glenora had had a troubled marriage but when she eventually received her husband’s diary, she read his last words to his ‘Dear Wife’. He wanted her to know, he wrote, that his ‘last thoughts were of her and of Essie my darling daughter’. Glenora’s marriage had been marked by two episodes when her husband had deserted her but once he began his diary on the day that he sailed from Australia he wrote only loving words of their relationship. The couple had a daughter, Esther, aged 8, and in 1912 had lost a son soon after birth. Glenora remarried two years after his death but the concerned letters she wrote to the Repatriation Department testify to her devotion to furthering her daughter Esther Love’s future.

Read a longer essay on Glenora Love in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Isabella McKean was widowed when her husband, Scottish-born David Thornton McKean, was killed in action while serving with the AIF on the Western Front on 14 November 1916. For a few years before World War I, McKean worked as a plasterer with the Department of Home Affairs. In 1913, Isabella moved to Canberra from Weddin, where she had been active in church and social events, to join her husband but had trouble finding accommodation. She was living in Berowra when her husband was killed. In 1919 she married a former AIF solider and partly supported herself keeping poultry.

Read a longer essay on Isabella McKean in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

When her husband, Lt John Cecil Drury Reid, was killed near Messines on the Western Front on 10 June 1917, Jessie Beatrice Reid was left a widow with three young children. On 29 August 1917, she was granted £3-10-0 per fortnight widow’s pension, their son, Stanley Francis, nearly 4, received 20 shillings per fortnight; daughter Joan Innes, aged 2, 15 shillings per fortnight and Margaret Lyle, not yet one year old, 10 shillings per fortnight. Jessie, aged 43, devoted the next twenty years of her life to their upbringing and education.

Read a longer essay on Jessie Reid in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Lady Bridges was the initial president of the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, set up by her friend Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the Governor General, early in World War I to provide support for families of soldiers of the first AIF. The shock of the death of her husband, Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges, Commander of the first AIF, less than a month after the landing at Gallipoli and the prolonged and very public commemorative ceremonies associated with the return of his body to Australia and his reburial in Canberra, affected her health to the extent that the following year she retired from public life.

An adopted child, Edith’s life was punctuated by tragedy including the loss of her first-born son soon after birth, the drowning of one of her seven-year-old twin girls in a boating accident on Sydney Harbour and the death of a 17-year-old son at boarding school in England. During World War I in addition to the loss of her husband, she worried constantly about her son Major Noel Bridges DSO, who fought at Gallipoli and the Western Front and was wounded in Flanders in 1918. Born Edith Lillian Francis in 1862 near Moruya, Lady Bridges died in Melbourne in 1926, aged 64, and was buried in St John’s Churchyard, Canberra.

Read a longer essay on Lady Bridges in the online exhibition War Widows of the ACT: A Forgotten Legacy of World War I.

Bonita Mabo was a prominent Indigenous and South Sea Islander activist. She was the wife of land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo.

Alison Harcourt (nee Doig) is an inspiring pioneer in mathematics, statistics and computer science. As a woman in an almost exclusively male field, her groundbreaking work from the 1950s on was often overshadowed. In recent years, however, the importance of her contributions has begun to be acknowledged more widely.

She is perhaps best known for developing integer linear programming – a basis of efficient computer processing – in a paper published with Ailsa Land in 1960. About 3000 academic journal articles have cited the paper since. This technique became know as Branch and Bound method and has numerous practical and mathematical applications. Earlier, Alison had been among the first users of CSIRAC, Australia’s first digital computer.

As well as her significant academic achievements, Alison is a stalwart in community organisations. For over 30 years Alison has been a volunteer deliverer for the Kew (and later Boroondara) Meals-on Wheels service. She has also played an active role in many other community organisations, including the Melbourne Film Festival (which later became the Melbourne International Film Festival) (secretary, 1955 – 56); the Kew Primary School Parents’ Association (secretary, 1980 – 84); a Council of Adult Education book group leader (secretary, 1998 – 2015); and a study group at the Leo Baeck Centre for Progressive Judaism (coordinator, 1999 – 2014).

Sylvia Gelman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1981 ‘in recognition of service to education, youth and the Jewish community’. She was also appointed Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2003 ‘in recognition of service to the community, particularly through a range of organisations concerned with issues affecting women’. These organisations included The National Council of Jewish Women of Victoria and Australia, the Young Women’s Christian Association of Victoria, and both the national and Victorian branches of the National Council of Women.

Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Indigenous Strategy and Services, at Sydney University in September 2018.

Muriel Matters was an Australian born suffragist who is most well-known for her work on behalf of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) in the United Kingdom.

Isabel Ramsay was a pioneer Australian female journalist who wrote for both Australian and international newspapers. Isabel began her career with the Sunday Sun and for a period was editor of the journal’s women’s pages. She was also employed by Sydney’s Sunday Times.

Nina Bassat is a Holocaust survivor and former lawyer who was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2004 Australia Day Honours List ‘for service to the community as an executive member of a range of peak Jewish organisations and through the promotion of greater community understanding’. The first woman to be president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, she also served as president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry – the first Holocaust survivor and first woman lawyer to attain that position.

Betty Marginson was a pioneer in many fields as a teacher, a student and community activist, local Councillor and advocate for citizens’ and women’s rights. Her academic career spanned the World War II years as an undergraduate student to 1985 when she took her Diploma in Public Policy at the age of 62. As well as raising four children with her husband Ray Marginson, she taught at various State Schools from 1943 to 1982. She was the founding President of the Hawthorn Chapter of the University of the Third Age, becoming President of the Victorian network in 1993. The first woman appointed Mayor of the City of Hawthorn from 1976 to 1977, she was a Council Member from 1972 to 1981. In the wider world, Betty Marginson was President of University College, University of Melbourne from 1986 to 1991, and was a voluntary worker in many fields, including at Heide Park and Art Gallery.

Lillian Holt was a member of the first generation of Aboriginal high school and university graduates and had an impressive track record of full time work, study and concomitant achievements. She traversed new terrain in order that younger ones might follow.

Lillian worked or studied full time since the age of 17. She worked as an educator in Aboriginal affairs and education “25 hours a day, eight days a week”! She was appointed as a University of Melbourne Fellow in 2003 -2005, prior to that she was Director of the Centre for Indigenous Education, University of Melbourne.

Lillian Holt passed away on her birthday in February 2020, at the age of 75.

Dilys Budd, the daughter of Mary Winter and an unnamed father, was placed in foster care in infancy and at the age of five was sent to the Catholic orphanage, Nazareth House, Cardiff. In 1947 she volunteered to migrate to Australia, arriving  in Fremantle with a group of other child migrants on the ship Asturias in September 1947. She was placed in St Joseph’s Girls Orphanage, Subiaco, run by the Sisters of Mercy, where she remained until she was 16 and sent out to work. She remained under the supervision of the Catholic Welfare authorities in Perth until she was 21.

Born in India to an Irish soldier, Eliza Tracey immigrated to Western Australia in 1859, where she was known to the citizens of Perth as a soap box orator. She spoke out against the legal profession, and her life was marked by constant dealings with the law.

Elsa was a famous soprano and was well-known in Australia, Europe and America. She gave herself the professional name Elsa Stralia in honour of her country of birth, Australia.

Joy Chambers was born in the Strathbogie ranges, into a faming family, and married a central Victorian farmer. After her retirement from teaching, and acting on her belief that the important role women played in agriculture should be recognised and encouraged, she took an active role in what became known collectively as the Women in Agriculture movement. She became a member of FarmAdvance, and was on the steering committee of the 1994 First International Women in Agriculture conference, working on publicity. After the conference, Joy was a founding member of the Central Victorian Women in Agriculture Group (CVWiA). She organised the workshops for the 1997 Bendigo Women on Farms Gathering, which the CVWiA organised, and instigated the Knickers Fund, which the group administered. Joy was active in the anti-GM (genetically modified foods) lobby, and the broadacre family farm has been granted organic accreditation.. 

After an early career in teaching, Laurene Dietrich moved into the area of community development, working on a number of projects which reflected her commitment to social justice and equity, particularly in regard to rural women. She was the first equal opportunity officer at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University, and was employed to work on the organisation of the First International Women in Agriculture Conference

Alice Rosman was an editor, journalist, novelist and writer. She is best known for her work as a novelist, under the pseudonym Alice Grant Rosman. She achieved success particularly in the United States of America and Canada during the 1920s and 1930s, where she was a best-seller for four consecutive years.

Grace Carmichael worked as a nurse and poet, and during her lifetime contributed many poems to newspapers and published her own book of verse in 1895. Grace is best known by her pen name Jennings Carmichael. The Australian poets Henry Lawson and Henry Tate have both written poems about her.