Women in White Australia

MAT TRINCA: Good afternoon. My name is Mat Trinca and I am the Acting Director of the National Museum of Australia. Firstly. I would like to acknowledge the Ngambri-Ngunnawal peoples of Canberra on whose land we meet today and pay respect to their elders past and present.

Welcome all of you to today’s lecture, which is part of a series that we are holding in conjunction with our major exhibition Glorious Days: Australia 1913. A special welcome, if indeed they are connected, to those of you in the Windsor area outside Sydney. I can see people manning technology here avidly so I trust that they are connected to us. Welcome to you. They are watching online via the Hawkesbury digital hub.

Glorious Days is a fascinating study of what Australia was like in the year that this city Canberra was founded. The exhibition is full itself - and I hope I am not saying this with too much personal pride- of a great sense of pride and hope that characterised the first decade or so of this great experiment, the Australian nation. I say ‘experiment’ because in many respects much of the thinking of that first decade or so was about the possibility and promise of this infant nation. What could Australia be? What kind of society might we construct here?

Our speaker today will be examining those questions in terms of the history of first wave feminism and Australia’s role in that international movement. Australia after all granted adult suffrage to women in 1901, although importantly restrictions on Aboriginal women and men would remain and be finally lifted in 1962.

But 1913 was also a year when Australia was on the brink, without really knowing it, of a calamitous, bloody war that would change the course of history, and of course the war also had an effect on the suffrage movement of the time. To speak on these and related issues, we are lucky to have with us today Professor Rae Frances, a distinguished professor of history and dean of arts at Monash University. Professor Frances has a wide range of research interests. She has published on the history of work, on women’s history, on the history of contact between first and settler peoples in Australia, and on religious and community history, and she has coedited several collections of essays on the history of Australia and New Zealand.

Professor Frances has also served on a wide variety of boards and organisations, having been president of the University of New South Wales branch of the National Tertiary Education Union, a member of that university’s governing council, a board member of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences - those titles couldn’t get any longer. She is also importantly a member of the Council of the National Museum of Australia, so in some respects she is my boss. Could I ask that you please give a warm welcome to Professor Rae Frances whose lecture today is entitled ‘Women in white Australia’. [applause]

Prof. RAE FRANCES: Thanks, Mat. I will remind myself that in some sense I am his boss from time to time. Good afternoon everyone. It’s a great pleasure to be with you here today on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. I would also like to take the opportunity to pay my respects to their elders past and present.

In my talk this afternoon I will be introducing you to some of the women of early twentieth century Australia and the issues that preoccupied them, and those issues are surprisingly relevant to us today over 100 years later. Some of the women that I will be introducing you to will be familiar, I think, to many of you, but others will not.

I am going to begin with one of the more obscure women whose story nonetheless provides us with a window into women’s lives in pre-war Australia. Our story begins not in Melbourne or Sydney where most of the women in Australia lived in the early twentieth century but in the remote gold mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.

[image shown] As summer drew to a close in March 1907, a beautiful young French woman Desiree Ernestine Adrienne Lesire, alias Violet Debreuil, disappeared from the Kalgoorlie brothel where she had been working for a wealthy French madam Blanche D’Arville - probably also not her name either. She left behind a note explaining that she was to marry a man called Gool Mahomet, an Afghan camel contractor from the nearby town of Coolgardie. [image shown]

She was, she said, tired of this life, so tired. It’s not surprising that she was tired. Quite apart from the demands of brothel work in an outback mining town, in the years prior to her decision to leave the sex industry, Desiree had travelled the world in search of better business opportunities. She had come from France with D’Arville some time prior to 1906 probably when that madam returned from a trip to Paris to recruit new ‘girls’, as they were called, in 1900.

During her time working in the Brookman Street brothels, Desiree became the madam’s favourite. When D’Arville decided to tour America and Europe in 1906, she took the younger woman with her. When they came back to Kalgoorlie, she left Desiree in charge of one of her houses and departed again for a holiday in France.

Gool Mahomet’s life was equally itinerant. [image shown] He was born in the village of Smilikhenderra near Kabul in Afghanistan and came to Australia some time in 1887. He landed at Fremantle in Western Australia and then moved on to Parachina in South Australia where he worked on the railhead. He then started in the camel business carrying loads across the outback of Australia from Mt Morgan in Queensland to the copper mining areas of northern South Australia, and finally to the eastern goldfields of Western Australia where he met his future bride. You have to remember this is in the days before the railway, before sealed roads. Horses weren’t much use in most of the terrain they had to cover, so the camel trains were really the lifeblood of communications at that time in central Australia. [image shown] Those lines show you some of the tracks that they covered.

Mobility remained a feature of the couple’s early married life. [image shown] First, they bought a market garden at Leonora, north of Kalgoorlie, but this venture did not succeed and they soon relocated to South Australia. [image shown] The rest of Desiree’s life was spent in the close confines of the so-called Ghan towns around Maree and Farina where she had six children, some of them possibly amongst this group [image shown]. I am not entirely sure of that, but they are pretty cute kids anyway. Now known as Miriam Bebe, Desiree would have spent her days in the company of the other wives in these marginal townships, some Aboriginal, some European. [image shown]

Like these wives, she was expected to observe Islamic patterns of interaction with members of the opposite sex who were not her immediate family. Farina was hardly Kalgoorlie, let alone Paris. Conditions were pretty primitive and there wasn’t much excitement. Her husband Gool Mahomet assumed the role of respected elder and leader in the Ghan towns of Central Australia and in old age was the mullah of the Adelaide mosque - a beautiful mosque if anyone hasn’t seen it. It’s still there. [image shown]

Can you imagine what this transition must have been like for Desiree Lesire as she became Miriam Bebe, from Paris to the outback of Australia – extraordinary! It was a huge step to take not least because it involved crossing the colour line. In the notes she left behind at the brothel in Kalgoorlie, she explained how she reconciled herself to her decision: ‘He I am to marry is black skinned but he has a white heart and a good heart.’ But she was also acutely aware that this in making this choice she was cutting herself off from her former life and associates: ‘Farewell it must be, I go, farewell’ - I think she liked a bit of drama as well.

Desiree’s story might seem exceptional, but her life alerts us to some important themes that preoccupied women in the young Commonwealth. As we have seen, before deciding to marry and settle down, she had led a highly mobile life travelling the world in search of better opportunities in the sex industry. She was one of many such women who took advantage of the fast steamships and the new routes opened up by the Suez Canal to move between Europe and Asia and the so-called new worlds of the Southern Hemisphere. The fact that so many women were making these journeys didn’t go unnoticed. They gave rise to fears that there was in fact a traffic in young, white women, referred to sensationally at the time as ‘white slaves’. Particularly concerning to many social reformers was the possibility that these young women were destined to service the lusts of so-called ‘coloured’ men. Desiree’s union with Gool Mahomet would have scandalised most contemporaries and fuelled the fears that many white Australians had of racial mixing.

[image shown ‘The inside of the white slave traffic’] This 1913 poster is for an American movie but the concern it expressed was a worldwide phenomenon before the First World War. Women were prominent in the campaigns to put an end to this alleged traffic and participated in international conventions to find ways to achieve their aim. Prostitution and the so-called ‘white slave traffic’ was high on the list of concerns of these delegates [image shown] at the Seventh International Woman Suffrage Congress in Budapest in June 1913. According to the Australian delegate at this congress:

She was to be disappointed, one fears.

Another feature of the 1913 Women’s Convention was the tension between the view of some women that only by separate organising would women achieve any real gains, as opposed to those women who argued that the only hope for women was to form strong alliances with men and the increasingly entrenched political parties and industrial unions. The convention itself was originally conceived as a broad-based convention of organisations interested in women’s wages and welfare, including the Liberal Party, the Anti-Sweating League and the Women’s Political Association, but the Trades Hall Council refused to lend its support to an event which involved ‘cooperating with our political opponents on the question of equal pay for equal work’. That, again, was a sad forewarning of what was to happen to a united cross-party alliance of women seeking improvements in women’s conditions.

While equal pay, sweated labour and restricted job opportunities preoccupied activists in Australia’s populist coastal cities, other women with different passions were active on Australia’s remote frontiers. In the far north on the islands of the Torres Strait, Florence Buchanan might also have believed in Emma Miller’s motto: ‘The world is my country. To do good is my religion’, although her mission took a very different form. These are a couple of books produced about her life [images shown].

As we can see from these images, she was a slightly-built woman with close-cropped hair, most unusual at a time when women sported the generous coiffeurs like the one we saw on Vida. Nor was it just her haircut that made Florence so unusual. Orphaned as a young child, she was always frail and suffered from near blindness. As if these were not burdens enough, when she was 17 years old she had a horse-riding accident that left her crippled for life.

Her interest in missionary work probably began when she migrated with her brothers to Queensland in 1888. They bought a large cane farm near Bundaberg, and Florence devoted her energies to teaching the Melanesian workers English and Bible stories. Before long, she was in charge of the South Seas Evangelical Mission and moved to Thursday Island where she sought to convert the multiracial community of divers and traders to Christianity. The rest of her life was spent in various kinds of missionary work in Singapore and the Torres Strait where she was particularly interested in the Pacific Islanders who were deported from mainland Queensland after the White Australia policy came into effect in the early decade of the century, and she died there of tuberculosis in 1913.

Florence exemplifies a different kind of new woman of the turn of the century, one who saw a better future not in feminist politics but through Christian proselytising. But it was not all about the converted. In the same year that she died, she addressed the annual Congress of the Church of England in Brisbane on the subject of ‘The mission field as a vocation for women’. Christianity provided careers for women as well as salvation for the colonised peoples of the British Empire.

While Florence’s path was hardly mainstream, she wasn’t alone in her adventurous approach. On the other side of the continent, the young Daisy Bates was engaged in welfare work amongst the sick and elderly Aboriginal people exiled on the islands of Bernier and Dorre off the Western Australian coast near Carnarvon, and I am sure you have all heard of Daisy Bates. [image shown] I was just talking to one of our Museum staff who was telling me about the collection of Daisy Bates material we have in the Museum, which one day we will put on display (Collection highlight on the Daisy Bates collection http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/highlights/daisy_bates_collection).

The men, women and children sent to these islands came from all over the north-west of the state of Western Australia. They were rounded up by government officials who suspected them of suffering from a venereal disease or from leprosy. The sad part is that they actually had no accurate way of diagnosing these things. Daisy Bates was struck by the plight of these people, who had been taken away from the people and places they loved and dumped on these barren islands amongst strangers. They became the subjects of medical experimentation. Bates described these islands as ‘the tombs of the living dead’.

But what was Daisy Bates doing on these islands in the first place? Unlike the spinster Florence Buchanan, Daisy had had a very romantic life. She was a serial bigamist, and by the time we encountered her on the lock islands in 1911, she had already been married three times, including once to the notorious Breaker Morant. Like the other women we have met today Daisy led a highly mobile life, migrating as a young woman from Ireland to Queensland, then returning to London after her marriages to work as a journalist for five years before setting off again to Australia. She went particularly to the north-west in pursuit of a story about atrocities committed on Aborigines.

Her time in the north-west saw her develop an interest in Aboriginal society and culture. It was this combination of amateur anthropology and journalism that was to sustain her subsequent career and to make her such a well-known figure both then and now. When she visited the lock islands in 1911, she had been invited by the WA government to join an expedition led by the famous anthropologist [Alfred] Radcliffe-Brown.

The following year she was on the move again. This time, she pitched her tent amongst the Mirning people on the southern coast of Australia near the border between South Australia and WA at Eucla. [image shown] Has anyone here crossed the Nullarbor? A few of you have. Anyone crossed it before the sealed road? It’s not much fun, is it? You will know just what a remote spot Eucla is. It seems like the back of beyond, and before sealed roads it was even more remote than it is today.

When Daisy decided to leave Eucla in 1914 to go east to attend a conference, she had to cross over 400 kilometres of desert in a small cart pulled by camels. She was very intrepid indeed. Most of the rest of her life was spent in remote Aboriginal communities like Yalata and Ooldea where she acted as a self-appointed intermediary between white society and what she regarded as the dying race of local Aboriginal people. [image shown]

While Daisy Bates wasn’t involved in the organised women’s movement, she’s a great example of how individual women fought for their own independence and equality. When it was clear that none of her husbands were going to provide for her as she expected, she made a career for herself as a journalist and then as an anthropologist, although she had no formal training in either. She later tried to convince the Northern Territory government to give her a paid job as the protector of Aborigines but was reportedly considered unsuitable on account of her sex. Undaunted, she managed to make an independent life for herself surviving on her savings and the proceeds of her journalism. That’s probably where she has become something of a controversial character because, in order to sell as many of her stories as possible, she made up a whole lot of stories about Aboriginal cannibalism, which as you can imagine really upset the local Aboriginal people when they eventually got to read the stories that she was writing about them.

Her intrepid example, however, no doubt helped change views of what was possible for modern women to achieve. Daisy’s life reminds us that, while this extraordinary white woman could carve out a role for herself in early twentieth century Australia, the options for non-white women were much more limited. Here she is with a group of local Aboriginal women [image shown]. She wasn’t the only one who thought Aborigines were dying out. The federal government had policies which were not aimed at reversing the Aboriginal population decline. On the contrary, Australia became famous for the introduction in 1912 of a baby bonus, a £5 payment to the mother on the birth of each live child. To qualify, the mother had to be Australian born, but the legislation didn’t distinguish between those who were married or not married and was payable to rich and poor alike. It did, however, specifically exclude Asiatics or Aboriginal natives of Australia, Papua or the islands of the Pacific. The legislation was passed by the Fisher Labor government concerned about both the quality and quantity of the white race at a time when all political parties supported the ideal of white Australia as a harmonious prosperous society free of racial tensions in which so-called coloured aliens would be excluded and the Indigenous population would eventually die out.

The government hoped that the bonus would encourage white couples to have children and perhaps, more importantly, reduce white infant and maternal mortality by allowing mothers to employ a midwife or doctor to assist at the birth. It is very significant that the payment was available to unmarried mothers as well as wives. This was again one of the ways in which the feminists had had an impact on federal policy. As that Australian delegate that we met earlier explained to the seventh International Women’s Suffrage Congress in Budapest in 1913, the inclusion of unmarried mothers was indicative of the more inclusive approach of modern feminists who drew no distinction between the respectable and the so-called fallen woman:

But very rarely did this solidarity stretch to non-white women or, if it did, was unlikely to have had any impact on government policy at that time. While many Australian feminists were determinedly internationalist in their outlook, I wouldn’t want to suggest this was a universal or even a majority point of view in the pre-war period. There were at least as many women interested in women’s issues who were also avowedly patriotic and imperialistic. One of these was Julian Barbara Waugh, a Sydney woman who was for several years the lady mayoress of Parramatta. An active member of the Women’s Liberal Reform League of New South Wales, in 1909 she seconded a resolution to support the effort ‘to contribute to a dreadnought for the mother country’. The motion was carried and the women all sprang to their feet displaying the utmost enthusiasm.

From 1913 to 1918 Waugh was president of the Women’s Liberal Reform League which she believed voiced the women’s point of view on legislation affecting women and children. Mrs Waugh’s enthusiasm for all matters military and imperial alerts us to the factors that brought an end to those glorious days of pre-war women’s activism.

During the First World War, Australian feminists, like their sisters elsewhere, were split by the conflict into those who wholeheartedly supported the war effort and conscription, and those who opposed militarism, especially conscription. While Julian Waugh spent the war years raising funds for the war effort and speaking out in public in support of military conscription, Vida Goldstein established the Women’s Peace Army. The war divided the women’s movement, as it did the Labor Party, and 1913 marked the end of the high optimism that surrounded the winning of female suffrage.

At the same time, as the lines of the two major political parties became clearer, there was less space for separate feminist activism. When Vida stood for parliament as an Independent woman candidate for the last time in 1917, she secured so few votes that she lost her deposit. As Jenny Scott Griffiths told an International Congress of Working Women in 1920 just after the war, ‘The suffrage promised women a good deal more than it actually gave them.’ Less than a decade after 1913, the vision of women as a great force in politics had blurred, if not completely receded.

Let us reflect on where this lecture has taken us today. Geographically we have covered pretty much the length and breadth of Australia and ventured across the globe. Politically, we have seen women from across the political spectrum with a broad range of ideologies and allegiances. And intellectually we are left with a challenge: What did the women of 1913 achieve? Were their dreams just illusions? A century later, are their causes still relevant? I leave you to be the judge. Thank you. [applause]

MAT TRINCA: Thanks, Rae, for that very stimulating and extraordinarily wide range across the experiences of women in pre-World War I Australia. I would now like to throw the session open for questions.

QUESTION: I was reminded of fronting the chairman of ICI in the 1950s trying to gain equal pay for the job that I was doing. In light of the history, what do you consider the greatest issue at the moment that is confronting women?

Prof. RAE FRANCES: So many issues, how to prioritise them, I guess? I think some of the biggest challenges that face women are also challenges that face humanity as a whole. A lot of those are to do with how to re-prioritise our civil and political life so that we value peaceful and harmonious culture as much as we value material wealth. I think if we could do that - I am clearly a person out of 1913, a dreamer - that would lead to a lot of benefits in terms of the way we negotiate our international relations. Some of the women in the world who are suffering the most are actually not women like us white women in Australia, but they are women in developing countries and women in war-torn countries. To help those women is the biggest issue that I could see - if we could find solutions to those problems. But again huge questions, and I don’t have the answers.

QUESTION: Thanks for your talk. You mentioned towards the end of your speech the ideas about women participating in World War I and the conscription debate. I was reminded of pamphlets like the blood vote and the propaganda materials that were raised by women and by women’s movements throughout that campaign. How do you think stereotypical gender identities like women as mothers that were seen throughout the blood vote in which the idea of a woman protecting their child and protecting against all kinds of war shackled women’s feminist sentiments throughout that period? Were they able to separate themselves from what they were traditionally conceived to have their main role as mothers and as caring feminine identities or were they more able to break out of those roles? Does that question make sense?

Prof. RAE FRANCES: That perfectly makes sense. It’s a really good question. It’s a dilemma that I think women face today, as then. It’s the question of what kind of rhetoric you use in order to persuade people to your point of view. The first wave feminists were caught up in that dilemma. They knew that by appealing to the essentially feminine and maternal role of women they would probably win a lot of votes. But at the same time, as you point out, that’s potentially limiting for women because it casts women always in the role of mothers. What is the value put on women who are not mothers, women like Vida Goldstein? Maybe that’s why Vida got so few votes at the end of the war, because a single woman didn’t have as much traction when you have all this propaganda, on both sides. It wasn’t just the anti-war vote that mobilised the idea of women as mothers, you had the pro-conscription people harking back to the mothers of Sparta and saying, ‘You must be like the mothers of Sparta and sacrifice your sons for the good of the country.’ I think it was very limiting on the women’s movement on both sides. It was a tactical decision that they made. Who is to say whether it was a right decision or not; whether they would have been as successful if they hadn’t pushed that line so strongly.

QUESTION: I was just wondering if you could jump to the present and give us some comment on the state of feminist studies and feminist history at Monash and other Australian universities now and in the immediate prospect. And in a lighter vein, would Julia have done better if she had worn a big hat?

Prof. RAE FRANCES: I wouldn’t like to think what kind of hat Julia would have chosen. There is enormous interest still in these issues at Monash. I can’t comment on other universities. I see one of my colleagues here from the ANU. It depends how you pitch it to this generation. Most people will see the logic of an issue if it’s put in a broad context. If you come in and declare at the outset that you are pushing a very strong feminist agenda and if you are very one-eyed about it, then you are going to alienate your audience - and for good reason: They come to university to learn, to understand, to see the evidence, to make the judgments for themselves. If it’s presented that way and if it’s presented in an historical context, then these are all intelligent people - some of them young; some of them not so young - and they engage with those issues and they make up their own minds.

But it is something that people are interested in learning about still. We still have a women’s and gender studies program at Monash. It gets a lot of students - I have to say most of them are women. But outside that specific program, throughout the curriculum certainly in the arts faculty, whether you are talking about history, politics, international relations, sociology and so on, it’s a theme that people address as part of the curriculum just as they deal with other issues that are of interest to people - issues of power, inequality and so on.

QUESTION: I hadn’t realised that equal pay in some areas came in so early. Did it affect males who were in those industries because the male basic minimum wage was supposed to cover the woman and the children of the household?

Prof. RAE FRANCES: Well, of course, that was the main argument against providing women with the same wage as men because the argument was that they didn’t have dependants. There is some fantastic evidence in the arbitration court transcripts of the women’s advocates in the cases were put particularly in the 1920s. I am most familiar with Muriel Heagney’s cases that she put on this point. She gathered evidence about the number of dependants that women had as workers. It wasn’t as cut and dried as people thought.

A lot of the early cases for equal pay were actually successful, I have to say, because of a cynical tactic on the part of men because they concluded that, if employers had to pay women the same as men, they wouldn’t employ women. That was actually quite effective in some occupations like cutters in the tailoring industry. There were very few women employed as cutters once they got equal pay.

MAT TRINCA: It’s really related to that relationship between Australia and Britain. It seems counter-intuitive for many people of this country to imagine that at the time it was actually the province that was informing a debate in the metropolitan centre. I would just ask you to comment on that, but specifically I am interested to know how the Australian women were received in London aside from those people in the suffrage movement. Were they derided in the press, for instance? How were they regarded?

Prof. RAE FRANCES: I confess I haven’t done as much research in the British press as I would like to, and I will do that now. My reading of it is that they were celebrated by a fairly wide spectrum of people as ‘exotic’. People like Vida Goldstein, Mrs Fisher and Mrs McGowen weren’t what people expected of antipodeans - maybe Muriel Matters because she was so daring and outrageous fulfilled what they thought a colonial would be more - they were quite surprised at how elegant, educated and articulate the colonial women were. They were taken seriously because of what they were saying. It was very threatening to the establishment in Britain to have these women coming and saying, ‘Look we have got the vote. We are not monsters. We are not the shrieking sisterhood.’ And also to come with resolutions from the Australian parliament saying that the sky didn’t fall down.

QUESTION: I was surprised that you didn’t take a broader look at the issue and emphasise the fact that South Australian women had the vote before Federation. In my reading of the Constitution they would have voted in the first election because the Constitution said that the state rolls would be used. Nor did you emphasise the fact that the Poms didn’t get women’s suffrage until well after the First World War. This places the work of these people in this era in a much different context worldwide that I felt hadn’t been emphasised quite enough. And also I thought it was child endowment that we first had for women, not a bonus.

Prof. RAE FRANCES: Thank you for making that point more strongly. You are absolutely right: they did have the vote in South Australia from 1894 and also the New Zealand women of course. I guess I was focusing on 1913 and the new Commonwealth as my emphasis. That’s why they were so celebrated internationally because they didn’t have the vote in Britain or the United States until well after the First World War. It’s difficult to know where to put the emphasis, and I am pleased that you have reminded me of that. It was the baby bonus. Child endowment was the Second World War.

MAT TRINCA: We can both take courage as Western Australians of origin, Rae, that in Western Australia women had the vote in 1898 or just before the referendum on the Commonwealth was held.

Prof. RAE FRANCES: It’s hard to do everything in a 40-minute lecture. In fact, there were women who had the vote in Melbourne council accidentally in the 1860s, and then they realised that prostitutes could have the vote so they quickly undid that.

MAT TRINCA: Thank you. Sadly, we have run out of time. Could I ask that you thank Professor Frances for what’s been an enlightening and stimulating journey into the place of women in Australia in 1913. [applause]

It was a lecture that had a sense of surprise but also of challenge, especially when we start to think about which of those issues continue to play so strongly today.

Could I also suggest you take time to visit the Glorious Days exhibition and also to visit our bookshop where you can find, in a shameless plug, this wonderful companion volume called Glorious Days: Australia 1913, which is a snip at $44.95. I encourage you to go in and pick up a copy.

I will also remind you that the final lecture in this series will be presented on Tuesday, 8 October by Dr Guy Hansen. He will be speaking on the topic of ‘adulation, fame and money - sport and celebrity in 1913’ - again a topic apposite for today. Finally, thank you all for attending either in person or virtually and we look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thanks. [applause]