The Australian Women's Register

In 2001 Anna Meares was awarded the Australian Junior Women’s Track Cyclist of the Year. Since then, she has added an enormous array of trophies to her cabinet.

Meares made an astonishing come back from a very bad cycling accident at the World Cup in January 2008 when she broke her neck. But she fought her way back and qualified for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, eventually winning a silver medal in the women’s sprint event.

In London in 2012, she rode a brilliant tactical race to win a gold medal in the sprint.

She was the flag-bearer and captain for the Australian team at the 2016 Summer Olympics, where she won a bronze medal in keirin. This made her the first Australian to win individual medals in four consecutive Olympics.

On 16 October 2016 Meares announced her official retirement from her competitive cycling career.

Linda McGill was one of the Olympic stars banned by the amateur swimming authorities as punishment for alleged misbehaviour in 1964 at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Five months after being suspended, she became the first Australian to swim the English Channel. In 1967, she set a women’s record for the swim of 9 hours 59 minutes and 57 seconds, a time that came very close to beating the men’s record (9 hours and 35 minutes) as well. Three months later, she became the first person to swim across Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Australia. She swam the twenty-five miles from Portarlington to Frankston in 13 hours.

Bronte Barratt began swimming when she was three years old. In 2009, she received a Medal of the Order of Australia for services to sport, having won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.

Fran Bailey was elected to the House of Representatives for the Liberal Party of Australia in the seat of McEwan, Victoria, in March 1990. She was defeated in 1993, but re-elected in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007. She retired at the 2010 election.

Lorraine Stumm wrote her name in the history books as the first Australian female to cover the Second World War in New Guinea. Her journey into the theatres of war was most unlike that of her contemporaries. While Stumm was an incredibly motivated woman, it was her desire to follow the man she loved – Harley Stumm – that took her from university in Brisbane to London, and ultimately to India. As a war correspondent and a soldier’s wife, Stumm’s writing provided a rich mixture of human interest stories and hard-line battle updates. She wrote for London’s Daily Mirror and Sydney’s Woman magazine.

Mary Hayter (known always more formally as Mrs. Hayter or, in wartime, as Lieutenant Hayter) was an active community worker and nursing sister who served with distinction in WWII.

Emily Bulcock was a poet and freelance journalist. She produced several volumes of verse and contributed regularly to major metropolitan newspapers in Australia.

Zora Cross was, among other things, a poet and author of children’s verse. She wrote for the Brisbane Daily Mail as a freelance journalist, and was drama critic for the magazines Green Room and the Lone Hand.

Prior to her election to the House of Representatives as the member for Bennelong in 2007, Maxine McKew was an award-winning journalist with thirty years experience. She hosted a number of programmes on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television and radio, including Lateline and The 7.30 Report. In 2000 Maxine took up a position with the Bulletin Magazine as a regular contributor of feature interviews with prominent political business and arts/entertainment figures. She is the winner of both a Walkley and a Logie award and is the recipient of a Centenary Medal for services to broadcasting. She remained in the federal Parliament for only one term, as she was defeated at the 2010 election.

A complete record of her parliamentary service, including a link to her first speech, can be found in the Parliamentary Handbook of the Commonwealth of Australia (see below).

Nance Haxton is a Walkley Award winning journalist who impressed the judges in 2001 with her coverage of the riots at the Woomera Detention Centre in outback South Australia. She has worked across a variety of media in both metropolitan and regional locations.

Lala Fisher lived in London and worked as a journalist between 1897-1901. On her return to Australia she lived in Charters Towers and worked for various papers, including the radical New Eagle and Steele Rudd’s Magazine. Later, in Sydney, she became the owner/editor of Theatre Magazine from 1909 to 1918.

Fisher published several volumes of poetry. She was a founding member of the Society of Women Writers.

Winifred Moore was a prominent Brisbane journalist in the early twentieth century. She edited the women’s section of The Brisbane Courier (later Courier-Mail), from the early 1920s through to the 1940s, and remained with the newspaper as a columnist until the early 1950s. In addition to her literary and arts interests, Moore was a founding member of the National Parks Association of Queensland. Although generally politically conservative, she had a keen interest in women’s affairs and a range of social welfare issues of the day.