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.

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.

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.

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.

Kathleen O’Connor was born in New Zealand in 1876 to Charles Yelverton O’Connor and his wife Susan Laetitia. She was educated at Marsden School, Wellington, then taught privately after 1891, when the family moved to Perth, Western Australia, in order for her father to take up a post as a government civil engineer. Kathleen O’Connor then studied art at Perth Technical College, and later in London and Paris, where she relocated in 1910. There she attended night classes and immersed herself fully in the artistic and cultural milieu that Paris offered, attending galleries and lectures, and writing about her experiences for Perth newspapers.

O’Connor began exhibiting extensively – in the Salons d’ Automne (1911-32), des Independants, and de la Société des Artistes Français. She moved to London in 1914 and exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1915 and the National Portrait Society in 1916, before returning to Paris. In the early 1920s she began working in the decorative arts and fashion, as well as interior design and fabric painting. In 1926 she returned to Australia, working briefly for David Jones and Grace Brothers department stores, producing hand-painted plates and fabrics. After a solo exhibition in Perth, O’Connor returned to France in 1927. She kept working, and exhibiting regularly – in 1934 at la Société Internationale des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, and Exposition des Femmes Artistes d’Europe, Musée du Jeu de Paume and Galéries J. Allard in 1937. She left Paris in 1940 just as the Germans were arriving, and spent the remainder of World War II in Britain.

Returning to Paris after the War, she found her Paris studio expropriated. After exhibiting in Nice in 1948, she returned to Fremantle with 200 pictures, which were impounded, subject to 20% import tax. She was forced to destroy 150 pictures and pay the tax on the rest, despite being an Australian citizen and not liable. She exhibited in 1948 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and at Perth’s Claude Hotchin Gallery in 1949 and 1950. After another trip to Paris, she settled reluctantly in Western Australia in 1955. O’Connor won the Western Australian section of the Perth Prize Competition in 1958 and the B.P. prize, Commonwealth Games art competition in 1962, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia held a retrospective in 1967. O’Connor died in Perth in 1968. Since she had refused to be buried there, her ashes were scattered in the sea.

Miriam Stannage was born in Northam, Western Australia, in 1939, and was a painter, photographer and printmaker. She travelled to Europe and the USA in the early 1960s, returning to Perth influenced by ‘new developments in geographical abstraction’. Stannage studied with William Boissevain 1963-64, then with Henry Froudist 1965-68, as well as at Claremont Technical College, Perth. Extensive travels in the Australian bush are evident in her work, which also often uses text in order enhance her particular form of social commentary. Stannage’s first solo exhibition was in 1969 at the Old Fire Station Gallery, Perth, and she was exhibited in major galleries across Australia. Her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Her final exhibition ‘Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 – 2016’ was underway at the University of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the time of her death.

Carol Rudyard was born in England in 1922. She left Sheffield in 1947 with her husband, a doctor employed by the British Government, and lived on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (British Colonies in the Pacific). They arrived in Western Australia in 1950, and lived in Mullewa and Southern Cross, before settling in the Perth suburb of Leederville in 1956.

At this point Rudyard began designing textiles, quickly achieving both commercial and artistic successes. She also painted watercolours, and won the Festival of Perth Poster Prize for an untitled work in 1964. Rudyard enrolled in an Associate Diploma in Art at the West Australian Institute of Technology from 1968-1970. She won the Mundaring Art Prize in 1970, and began teaching at the West Australian Institute of Technology in 1971.

Rudyard travelled to Europe in 1972 and held her first solo exhibition in 1973. After completing a postgraduate diploma in visual art at Curtin University in 1981, Rudyard began to abandon painting for audio visual mediums, particularly video installations. Her ‘Langco’ (1986) is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Rudyard was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Curtin University in 1999, and made a Living Treasure of the State of Western Australia in 2004.

Lyn Johnson, in partnership with her husband Rob, was a dairy farmer in Gippsland in Victoria. Together they planned and led study tours for dairy farmers to the USA, Canada, the UK and Europe, starting the Tarago River Cheese Company on their return. The successful organisation and activism of American rural women inspired. Lyn’s own active commitment to the movement, and to women at the grass roots level in particular. Her work to have women’s role in agriculture acknowledged, and their voice heard, has included involvement in the organisation of the First International Women in Agriculture Conference, and the Women on Farms Gatherings.