The Australian Women's Register

Maggy Pinkie Mack (Katipelvild), of Ngarrindjeri descent, was born on the lower Murray River in South Australia, probably around 1867. At the age of 16, she was given in marriage to an up-river man, John Mack (Telwara). She took part in ceremonies and learnt new songs and stories. After he died, she went back to her own country, and her second husband.

Pinkie Mack was a song-woman, and she recorded some of her songs on an Edison wax cylinder. She was nostalgic about the past and her people. After the death of Albert Karloan, she was the only remaining fluent Yaraldi speaker.

In later years, Mack lived in a small cottage near the river and not far from Tailem Bend, where she sometimes sold freshly caught fish to a local shop. Children, grandchildren and various relatives called in to see her on the way to other places.

Judy Trew Thandripilinha (‘Poisonous Snake’), of Yarluyandi descent, was born in c.1865, probably on Goyder Lagoon in South Australia. She took the name ‘Trew’ from one of the early station people. Her first husband was Kuranta (‘Sticknest Rat’), also called ‘Lagoon Charlie’, and her second husband was the highly respected old Wangkangurru man, Yarinjili Todd.

Judy lived and worked on old Clifton Hills and The Bluff, remaining in or close to her own country. She had an excellent knowledge of the bush, and taught her grandchildren about sites and stories, including her own main tradition, the Song Cycle of the Swan. Nearly all the sites recorded on the Diamantina in South Australia are based on her traditions. In c.1936 she organised the last expedition, by camel, to collect pituri from the traditional site west of the Mulligan.

Maudie Naylon was the last fluent speaker of the Ngamini and Yarluyandi languages.

Alice Warrika Oldfield, of Kuyani descent, was born on Callanna station in South Australia. She grew up on Millers Creek station where her parents worked. As a very small child, she was attacked and nearly killed there by the station geese. Though she was badly injured, it was the geese who were all mysteriously found dead the next morning.

Alice married Sandy Dinta Oldfield, the famous last Ngamini rainmaker. They lived and worked on stations on the Strzelecki and the Birdsville Track, mainly Etadunna. In the 1950s they retired to Marree, where Sandy died in 1964.

Alice was devoted to traditions and was a rainmaker in her own right, though this was ignored by people who came to visit Sandy. She kept traditions alive by organising the Wandji-Wandji corroboree at Stuart Creek in the early 1930s; she knew the karlapa, the Arabana women’s dance; and she made rain at a ceremony she organised in 1969, when she was almost totally blind. She was a speaker of Arabana, and most of what has been preserved of the Kuyani language is due to her.

Dorothy Leila Rankine, of Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna descent, grew up at Raukkan (Point McLeay) on Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. Her lifelong involvement with music and singing began with her family and the local Salvation Army church. She later became a soldier of the Salvation Army. After completing only primary education she moved to Adelaide in 1965, where she joined the Aboriginal Women’s Council and later the Port Adelaide Aboriginal Friendship Club.

In 1972 Rankine became a founding member of the Adelaide Aboriginal Orchestra, which later developed into the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM), of which she was chairperson until her retirement in 1986. She acted as counsellor, liaising with the local Aboriginal community and organising annual camps and concerts. She edited and contributed poems to the journal Tjungaringanyi; was elected chairperson of the urban committee; and was an active singer, trombonist and speaker. She appeared in the films Sister, If You Only Knew (1975) and Wrong Side of the Road (1980).

Dorothy Leila Rankine served on the boards of the Aboriginal Community College, the Aboriginal Community Centre, and the Aboriginal Sobriety Group. She was a member of the Australia Council, the Aboriginal Artists Agency in Sydney, and the Aborigines Advancement League of South Australia, and was a life board member of Warriappendi Alternative School. She contributed to Aboriginal education curriculum materials for South Australian schools, told Ngarrindjeri stories on ABC television, and was one of the founders of Camp Coorong, a Ngarrindjeri cultural centre.

Annie Coulthard (Yadandhanha), of Adnyamathanha descent, grew up at Wertaloona station where her father worked. There she was employed as a housemaid until about 1924, when she married her cousin Samuel Coulthard.

Annie and Samuel moved to Balcanoona where they worked for Ray Thomas, carting stones and sand for the new ‘Government House’, now headquarters of the Gammon Ranges National Park. After the birth of their first child in 1926, the family moved to the Adnyamathanha camp at Ram Paddock Gate on Patsy Springs, where they struggled to survive in a land ravaged by stock and drought. They moved to the Nepabunna run in 1930, when Thomas gave it to the Adnyamathanha. In the early 1940s, the Coulthards drove sheep between Balcanoona and Copley, and lived and worked on Idninha. In the early 1950s they moved to Wooltana and then to Nepabunna where, in 1973, Sam Coulthard died.

The last five years of her life Annie Coulthard dedicated to passing on traditional knowledge. She died in 1986 and was buried at Nepabunna beside her husband.

A member of the Liberal Party of Australia, Wendy Smith served as the Member for Silvan Province in the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Victoria from 1996-2002.
Her earlier community service included a period as a Councillor for the City of Kew from 1983-88. She was a candidate in the Legislative Assembly seat of Albert Park at the state election, which was held in 3 October 1992.

A lifelong political and social activist, Evelyn Barron served a full 12-year term in the Legislative Council of New South Wales (1964-76) as a member of the ALP. Prior to this she had unsuccessfully run as an ALP candidate for Collaroy in 1953.

Janice Knight ran for election only once. That was in 1991 as an ALP candidate for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for Northern Tablelands.

Sheila Lawless migrated to Australia with her husband Lawrence and first child in 1955, one family among the hundreds of thousands of “ten pound poms” who travelled to Australia after the Second World War under the government assisted passage scheme.

Jane Ward is a well known local and conservationist activist with a passion for social justice and community action. As an Independent candidate she contested the following elections:
Leichhardt Municipal Council, 1987
New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Balmain, 1988
House of Representatives, Sydney, 2004
City of Sydney council elections, 2004

Edna Roper was an ALP member of the New South Wales Legislative Council for over twenty years. She was elected in 1957 and then re-elected in 1970. She served as Deputy Leader of the Opposition between 3/12/1973 -13/5/1976 (2 years 5 months 11 days) and was Deputy Leader of Government between 14/5/1976 – 17/10/1978 (2 years 5 months 4 days). She was a delegate to the International Women’s Year conference in Mexico in 1975.

Jennifer Gardiner was elected to the NSW Legislative Council on 25 May 1991 representing the Nationals. She served until 2015 and was Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Legislative Council from 2003..

Margaret Barbalet is an award-winning children’s author, a novelist, poet and short-story writer, a public servant and a historian

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Suzanne Edgar is a Canberra-based writer of fiction, feature articles, poetry and reviews.

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

According to her Sport Australia Hall of Fame citation, Evelyn Tazewell was the finest women’s hockey player of her time. She enjoyed a career in the sport as player, coach, umpire and administrator that spanned four decades to the 1960s. Among many important contributions to the sport, she was instrumental in the establishment of the Women’s Memorial Playing Fields at St Mary’s, Adelaide.

Shylie Katharine Rymill was a prominent member of Adelaide Society, a successful charity worker and a more than competent golfer, winning the South Australian Women’s Championship in 1913. She was a state commissioner for the Girl Guides in South Australia between 1938-1950.

Lois Quarrell covered women’s sport in Adelaide for The Advertiser for forty years and is credited with doing much to ‘educate public opinion in the value of various sports for girls and young women’. (The Advertiser October 1949). She joined the paper in 1932, at the age of seventeen, and four years later became their first woman sportswriter. In order to gather stories, she would ride her bike to venues, collect information and pedal back to the office to write it up.

Quarrell’s half page column, devoted entirely to women’s sports and the issues associated with them, commenced in 1936 and ran until her retirement in 1970. She used it to inform readers of the variety of women’s sporting achievements and comparing them to women’s efforts overseas in an effort to legitimize them. She also used her influence to encourage women to be involved in sport and to manage their own affairs. In particular, she argued for the inclusion of ‘games’ for girls in the standard school curriculum, against opposition groups who believed that girls playing sport would rob them of their femininity. Quarrell also encouraged debate on issues such as the suitability of rational dress and the early retirement of athletes due to motherhood.

Dot Mansom left school at the age of 15 and worked for her father in his capacity as bookmaker at the Supreme Court Hotel. She attended the Hyde Park School of Music, and sang in minor roles for the South Australian Opera Company. She later toured with operas to Melbourne and Western Australia. On weekends she taught riding, and during the Depression years took work at the Port Adelaide Bacon Factory, before becoming a buyer and manageress for Miller Anderson Ltd.’s mantle department. Mansom become an investigating officer with the drapery section of the State branch of the Rationing Commission during World War II, gaining equal status with her male colleagues. She married Clarence Henry Gray in June 1950.

After the war, Mansom was secretary of the South Adelaide Riding Club (which she re-formed) and the Horse Riding Clubs’ Association. She bought a former racehorse, Antonym. In an attempt to popularise dressage, she established the Dressage Club of South Australia with Tom Roberts in 1949. The following year she won a blue ribbon in dressage events at the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia’s show. Mansom became a member of the executive of her local Light Horse Association, and helped to organise Australian Olympic Federation horse trials in South Australia. She predeceased her husband, and was buried in West Terrace cemetery, Adelaide.

Faith Thomas was the first Aboriginal woman to play international cricket for Australia; indeed, she was the first indigenous woman to be selected to play any sport for Australia. In 2004, she was still the only Aboriginal woman to represent Australia in cricket.

Thomas played cricket, along with hockey and squash, while training in Adelaide to be a nurse. (She was one of the first Aboriginal nurses to graduate from the Royal Adelaide Hospital; she went on to be the first to run a hospital.) Thomas was selected into the South Australian cricket team after playing only two grade games and was selected for the Australian team in 1958. She recalls receiving a fair deal of publicity at the time. ‘I was a bit of a curiosity,’ she said in an interview in 2004. ‘It was a “native nurse”, this. You know, I wasn’t a cricketer, I was a native nurse cricketer, You know?’

Thomas also played hockey for the Northern Territory and admits that hockey was always more important to her than cricket. She was a member of the Aboriginal Sports Foundation, patron of the Prime Minister’s XI versus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Chairman’s XI.

Dianne Burge was the 1966 Commonwealth Games gold medallist in the 100 and 220 yard sprint. She was also a member of the winning 4×110 yard relay team.

Betty Fisher (nee Dawson) was born 8 September 1925 in Yorkshire, England arriving in South Australia in 1927 on the ‘SS Benalla’. A feminist and advocate for Aboriginal rights and conservation, Betty was International Women’s Day president for eight years and the first female president of the Conservation Council of South Australia.

Betty Fisher received a Flinders University medal for services to women, was a 1988 Bicentenary medallist and served on the SA State Schools Organisations State Council. She was a member of the National Fitness Council of Australia. She was also a key witness at the Hindmarsh Island Royal Commission, where she produced notes and tape recordings from the 1960s which confirmed the site was of significant cultural importance to Aboriginal women.

May Mills was played a prominent role in the development of women’s sport in South Australia. She was President of the South Australian Women’s Cricket Association and the Australian Women’s Cricket Council in the 1960s. Prior to that she was President of the South Australian Women’s Amateur Sports Council, the body that successfully lobbied the then Premier, Sir Thomas Playford, to secure access to playing fields for the dedicated use of women. Trained as a teacher, she taught at Unley High School for thirty years. She became the first female President of the South Australian Institute of Teachers in 1943.

Apart from her interest in women’s sport and teaching, Mills was active in a number of other spheres of public life. She was the first President of the South Australian Film and Television Council, a founding member of the Australian College of Education, a Life Vice-President of the National Council of Women and a Life Member of the Royal Commonwealth Society. She was the first women in South Australia to secure a license to drive a motor car.

May Mills contribution to women’s cricket was recognised in 1984/85 by the creation of the May Mills Trophy for the Under 18 national Championship. This competition ran until 1995/96.

Gillian Rolton was Australia’s first female equestrian gold-medallist. She won or was placed at the Olympic Games, the World Championships, the Trans-Tasman’s and international competitions in Europe and Australia.