The Australian Women's Register

Mary Kingston, known as “Molly”, arrived at the Victorian Bar in 1962, having first practised successfully in Western Australia – where, together with Sheila McClemans, she previously set up WA’s first all-women law firm in the 1930s. Molly specialised in family law and was highly regarded by colleagues and judges alike.

Jill Crossley is regarded equally as a commercial and an artistic photographer. In addition to freelance advertising photography, Crossley has taken photographs in collaboration with ABC productions, the Craft Council of Victoria, and an Australian archaeological team in Pompeii. Crossley’s style has been described as an interplay of realism and abstraction. Her early camera was a 116 folding camera, and in 1959 she used a Mamiyaflex and a Fujica camera. In recent years Crossley has worked with a small digital camera with a zoom lens.

Mavis Walley was a Ballardong Noongar Indigenous woman who lived in the southern parts of Western Australia. An amateur photographer, Walley documented the lives of the Aboriginal people with whom she lived on a reserve in Goomalling, taking thousands of photographs between the 1950s to 1970s. These images offer a significant and rare perspective within the historical archive – a view of Aboriginal life from an Aboriginal person that is neither anthropological nor ethnographic in style. Walley used a Box Brownie camera.

As well as for her photography, Amelia Bunbury was noted for her hand carved furniture and for her work as a horse breeder. Bunbury’s amateur photographs document life on a remote station in Western Australia; her photography includes images of Aboriginal people living in the area that echo the conventions of anthropological photography of the time. She exhibited her work in Melbourne and was published in a number of Western Australian newspapers.

Born into a wealthy, artistically inclined Western Australian family, Constance Birmingham studied painting before training as a photographer In London, with some of the leading photographers there at the time. Birmingham became a respected professional photographer specialising in portraiture, specialising in the photography of mothers and children. She died at the age of 80 in Perth.

Dorothy St John was an amateur photographer who was trained by her father, a street photographer. Her photographs record the everyday life in rural Western Australia.

Helen Mackay worked at a photography studio in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where she specialised in portraiture.

Jan Kennedy was best known for her photography of children, as well as for photographing society people, and for her cinematic work with Stuart Gore.

Joy Falls was a commercial photographer whose professional work was primarily based in Sydney. Falls was the earliest woman photographer to have worked with colour processing in Australia.

Caroline Andrews came to public notice in 1900, when she took her husband to court in Albany, Western Australia, and won a judicial separation with maintenance for their children. The case was heard under an 1896 act which provided that judicial separation was summarily available to a woman whose husband had been convicted of assault against her. A close reading of the court records suggests that she provoked her husband’s assault in order to win the judicial separation. Her aim was to prevent him from returning to England with the profits of their joint business ventures, without making provision for his children.

Recent biographical projects have tended to focus on leading women whose activities had some impact on politics or society. Caroline Edwards’ work was always within the frame of family, whether in family businesses or in care for her 13 children. The wealth of online resources now available for family history research makes it possible to tell the stories of women like Caroline Edwards whose victories and defeats were mostly private.

Susan Jennifer Watkins was a prominent Western Australian photographer. Watkins is said to be the first Western Australian woman to work on photography autonomously. She was highly regarded for her stylish portraiture.

Anne Harrison spent the duration of her professional life in the medical library of the University of Melbourne. She joined the staff as Assistant Librarian in 1948 and was promoted to Librarian in Charge the following year. She completed her librarianship studies in 1966.

At a time when most library staff were employed as ‘general staff’, Anne’s staff record notes that she was a ‘Senior Librarian (Lecturer Status)’.

Anne planned and executed the Central Medical Library Organization, which won her national acclaim. She also helped pioneer Medline in Australia and was a foundation member of the Australian Medical Librarians Group.

Fanny Balbuk was a prominent Noongar woman and an informant on Noongar culture and history to anthropologist Daisy Bates. She is renowned for protesting at Government House about the occupation of her traditional land around Perth.

The information which Fanny Balbuk passed on to Daisy Bates played an important role in the native title claim of 19 September 2006, whereby Justice Wilcox of the Federal Court of Australia found that Noongar people held native title rights over parts of the Perth area.

After completing a Master of Arts at Cambridge University, Judith Rodriguez taught English at La Trobe University from 1969 until 1985. In 1986 she was writer-in-residence at Rollins College, Florida. Judith took up a lectureship in writing at Victoria College in 1989 (which became part of Deakin University in 1993) where she continued to teach until her retirement in 2003.

Judith published her first poetry collection in 1962 as part of Four Poets, with the others being David Malouf, Rodney Hall and Don Maynard. In 1973 she published her first solo collection, Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red: and other poems.

Water Life (1976) won the inaugural South Australian Biennial Literature Prize in 1978, while one of Rodriguez’s most highly-regarded collections, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s (1980) received both the Sydney PEN Golden Jubilee Award for Poetry and the Artlook/Shell Literary Award in 1981.

Judith is also known for her poems about women’s experiences; the title poem of Witch Heart (1982), published by the feminist press Sisters, records a visit to Robyn Archer’s play about the often disastrous lives of famous women performers.

In 1994 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia, for services to literature, and also received the FAW Christopher Brennan Award.

Myrtle Rose White was an author who published a small number of works, including No Roads Go By, which was an account of life at Lake Elder, South Australia.

Myrtle produced two sequels to her debut publication; Beyond the Western Rivers in 1955 and From That Day To This in 1961.

Although she also wrote three novels, only For Those That Love It (1933) was published.

Romola studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1953 to 1955, followed by a year of study at the University of Western Australia where she became a medical artist. Romola held her first solo exhibition at the age of twenty-one, at Perth’s Skinner Galleries, in 1959.

Romola won the Claude Hotchin Prize and also the Helen Rubinstein Portrait Prize (1960). She was the former director and art consultant of Molongolo Press.

Alexandra Manly won a gold medal in the 4000m Team Pursuit at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

Lynne Seymour won a gold medal in the Lawn Bowls Mixed B2/B3 Pairs at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

Brianna Throssell won a gold medal in the 4 x 200m Freestyle Relay at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

Journalist Sally Baker Clinch worked as a feature writer for the Sunday Sun and also as an assistant editor for Women’s Day.

Margaret Anne Feilman was Perth’s first female town planner and a founding member of the Western Australia (WA) Town Planning Institute in 1950. Throughout her career, Margaret helped to establish the WA State Trust, was an inaugural Commissioner of the Australian Heritage Commission and was Chairman of the WA Town Planning Board. She was also a pioneer in heritage conservation techniques. On 13 June 13 1981, Margaret was awarded an Order of the British Empire medal ‘in recognition of service to architecture and conservation’.

Sister May Bartlett joined the Australian Army Nursing Service on 12 June 1915. In 1919 she was awarded the Royal Red Cross, 2nd Class. She worked at Perth Hospital for many years.

Ivy Verna Peace Bennett, who trained with the London Institute, was the first ‘lay’ psychoanalyst in Australia. She practiced In Australia from 1952 to 1958.

Florence Cardell-Oliver became the first woman in Australia to be appointed to a cabinet or ministry when made Western Australian Minister for Health, Supply and Shipping in 1949.

Ruby Litchfield was appointed as a Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 13 June 1981 for service to the performing arts and the community. She had earlier been appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Civil), on 1 January 1959, for social welfare.